I see that Senator Ben Sasse called out the "weirdos"... but who are the weirdos?

It sounds so childish, calling other people "weird." I'm writing this, still not knowing what the reference is. I decided to blog this based on the headline — "Sen. Ben Sasse calls out ‘weirdos’ dividing country in fiery Reagan Foundation speech" (Yahoo) — and beginning to read this quote: 

"This is a government of the weirdos, by the weirdos and for the weirdos,” Sasse said Thursday night in California. “Politicians who spend their days shouting in Congress so they can spend their nights shouting on cable, are peddling crack — mostly to the already addicted, but also with glittery hopes of finding a new angry octogenarian out there."

Octogenarian! What kind of ageist bullshit is this? And isn't he exemplifying the problem he's attempting to state — which seems to be something like mindlessly emoting about politics. 

"President Trump was reportedly 'delighted' by the mayhem he had unleashed, because it was preventing Congress from affirming his election loss."

"This dereliction of duty—this failure to take charge of a decisive security response and to quell the riotous mob— persisted late into the day. In fact, when Congressional leaders begged President Trump to send help, or to urge his supporters to stand down, he instead renewed his attacks on the Vice President and focused on lobbying Senators to challenge the election results. Only hours after his mob first breached the Capitol did President Trump release a video statement calling for peace—and even then, he told the insurrectionists (who were at that very moment rampaging through the Capitol) 'we love you' and 'you’re very special.' President Trump then doubled down at 6:01pm, issuing a tweet that blamed Congress for not surrendering to his demand that the election results be overturned: 'These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!'" 

From the trial memorandum of the House Managers — PDF. 

It's this stage of the event — what Trump did after we know he knew the crowd had breached the Capitol — that has the most power to convince me that he deserves to be convicted. I can't see the evidence that there was an advance plan to storm the Capitol, and that, if there was, Trump knew about it, and, therefore, that we should read the language of his rally speech in that light. But at some point, we can see that Trump knew the mayhem was in progress, and clearly he ought to have done what he could to stop what his supporters were doing in his name. 

"The Trump faithful also accused us of trying to get rich on our Never Trump status. Yes, the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project are now taking in lots of donations..."

"... but that was after burning personal and financial bridges to the Republican Party that sustained them and built their handsome homes over the years. (For the record, I have received zero compensation for my association with the Lincoln Project, but I hope the owners of the organization get plenty rich. They’ve earned it.) For most of us, media appearances came only with a ride to the studio and free coffee. (At 30 Rock in New York, at least it was Starbucks.)... If we’d been in it for our own enrichment, we’d have made the smart play and signed on with Trump, because that’s where the money was right from the start.... Now that it looks like Trump is headed for defeat, some Republicans feel safe to criticize him again. But courage exercised only when the coast is clear is not courage; it is opportunism...." 

From "My Never Trump Elegy/Courage exercised only when the coast is clear is not courage; it is opportunism" by  Tom Nichols (The Atlantic).

How is it that NYC is supposed to be the greatest city in the world, but people there say "at least it was Starbucks"? In Madison, you'd never say that. It would be more like "The other cafés were closed so I was stuck going to Starbucks. Sorry. Had to do it...."

As for the Never Trumpers... did they do it for their own self-interest? 

"Blood bath."

I'm reading "Has Trump Drawn the Water for a ‘Republican Blood Bath’?/And if he has, what should Biden do with his first term?" (NYT), a conversation between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, which ends:

Bret: Oh, and speaking of the Senate: Did you hear Nebraska’s Ben Sasse tear into Trump during that phone call with his constituents? Too little, too late, in my view, though it’s always nice to hear what Republicans really think of their favorite president. 

Gail: Yeah, thanks to Sasse we can point to a sitting senator from his own party who accused him of screwing up the coronavirus crisis, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists and drawing the water for a “Republican blood bath.” Can’t get much better than that. Catch you again next week, Bret. God knows what will have happened by then.

I'm thinking — do you draw water for a blood bath? Just taking the metaphor seriously — and I'll put to the side the violence of the imagery — isn't the liquid for a blood bath blood? 

A "blood bath" is, in its oldest figurative meaning, according to the OED, "A battle or fight at which much blood is spilt; a wholesale slaughter, a massacre." Figurative in the sense of "bath." The blood is real blood. That goes back to 1843. The fully figurative meaning — "A dramatic loss or heavy defeat" — with both the bath and the blood as metaphor — is traced back only to 1967. 

Strangely enough, there is a nonmetaphorical meaning that predates all that — "A bath in warm blood taken as a tonic or form of medical treatment"! 

1834 London Med. Gaz. 22 Feb. 813 (heading) On blood-baths... According to a dark tradition,..the ancient kings of Egypt used to bathe in human blood when they were seized with leprosy. 

1895 Cincinnati Med. Jrnl. May 380/2 Although French doctors do not often prescribe these forms of treatment, ‘blood baths’ are not infrequently used....

I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can take a blood bath to cure the coronavirus. You know? If you could? And maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Again, I say maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor. Have you ever heard of that? 

"Nearly half [of Americans] say they sometimes or always feel alone or 'left out.' Thirteen percent of Americans say that zero people know them well."

Writes Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Instituted in "How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart/When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics" (NYT)(citing a "large-scale survey from the health-care provider Cigna). Much of this op-ed column is drawn from the book "Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal" by Senator Ben Sasse.

A précis of Mr. Sasse’s recommendations to America... might be this: Go where you get that hometown-gym-on-a-Friday-night feeling, put down roots and make plans to fertilize the soil.

fertilize the soil = have a cemetery plot.

That can be a tricky proposition for many of us... I have no Fremont [Nebraska, like Sasse] — not even Seattle, my hometown, which is a perfectly nice place, but one I unsentimentally left behind 35 years ago....  Is a thick community and the happiness it brings out of reach for rootless cosmopolitans like us?

He asked Sasse, who told him all he needed was "to intentionally invest in the places where we actually live." Easy for him to say! He's got Fremont, Nebraska. But Brooks accepts the facile prescription and ends:

Each of us can be happier, and America will start to heal, when we become the kind neighbors and generous friends we wish we had.

Yeah, do that.

"Adults — they wear shorts everywhere, and they have cereal for dinner, and they treat comic books like they're literature."

Said Bill Maher at the beginning of that famous interview he did Friday with Senator Ben Sasse. Maher began the interview by offering to "bond" with Sasse, whose book — "The Vanishing American Adult" — is, according to Maher, "so right about how we have lost the thread about what adults are anymore in this country." Then Maher, with his trademark sneering contempt, launched the line I put in the post title. I loved that he began his image of the problem with what is my trademark peeve, shorts.

The reason I only have 1 post up today (until this one) is that I stopped to watch Bill Maher's show (which I had recorded).

I'd seen that he was the latest target in the game of Destroy a Comedian, and I wasn't interested in playing the game. We need our comedians, and if they're any good, they're going to offend us now and then. Maher does his show live, and he's got to jump at jibes when he sees them, and often he's childish or edgy or low.

I needed to watch the whole thing, and that took a while, because I have a sort of real-live, in-the-room, blogger-and-commenter thing happening here, and it takes a long time to watch the whole show. There's pausing and conversation and rewinding and innumerable points to be made — and not just about Maher's "Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigger" response to Ben Sasse's invitation to come out to Nebraska and "work in the fields with us."

Meade and I weren't just talking about that, but about the entire interview with Ben Sasse, who was there to talk about his book — "The Vanishing American Adult" (which I've blogged about before). Sasse was doing a great job holding his ground and seeming like a smart, attractive, independent politician, and it will be a shame if people only want to talk about Maher's zinger with the bad word, but that's what we do these days. Because Sasse is right, adulthood is eroding.

Ooh! Maher said a bad word, Mommy. Punish him! 

And then there was a panel discussion, a completely unbalanced panel with what seemed to be 3 hopped-up Trump haters: Eliot Spitzer — isn't he supposed to be in prison? — Rebecca Traister — author of that NY Magazine Hillary hype, "Hillary Clinton Is Furious. And Resigned. And Funny. And Worried." — and Jim VandeHei — a co-founder of that new media effort Axios, which aspires to fix what's wrong with media, but might be bad. These 3 jiggled and fidgeted and spluttered. The best part was when Traister, effusing, made a reference to Hillary Clinton redirecting her fundraising "hose." Maher — with almost nothing but facial expression — called attention to the pun, and Traister tsked at him. Meanwhile, sitting between Traister and Maher was Spitzer — Client 9 — but Maher resisted the edgy joke there. He didn't say "Eliot, you know about hos" or anything like that. The panel stumbled on.

In the middle of the panel, there was the most substantive, intelligent part of the show, a little interview with a man named Tristan Harris, whose bottom-of-the-screen identification read: "Former design ethicist, Google." He had a lot to say about the great power of manipulation possessed by Google and Facebook and Apple and the ethical problems of the attention-manufacturing business. But that set up a question Maher threw to Traister and Traister seized the opportunity to chatter manically and we never got back to Harris.

The morning was getting late and the cool breeze in real-life world wasn't going to last. I got out for a long walk. But now I'm back and I see that Maher has apologized:

"Friday nights are always my worst night of sleep because I’m up reflecting on the things I should or shouldn’t have said on my live show. Last night was a particularly long night as I regret the word I used in the banter of a live moment. The word was offensive and I regret saying it and am very sorry."

If it were up to me, I'd say fine. The word wasn't directed at anybody (other than at Maher himself). It was mostly just laughing at the idea of Bill Maher working in a field. Worse that the "n-word" itself, in my view — if you want to take racial matters seriously — is that he used slavery in a lighthearted way.

For a different perspective, here's what Malcolm X said about the "field Negro" and the "house Negro" (via "Five (Other) Times Bill Maher Was Racist, Islamophobic, or Sexist"):

"President Trump appeared to acknowledge Tuesday that he revealed highly classified information to Russia — a stunning confirmation of a Washington Post story..."

"... and a move that contradicted his own White House team after it scrambled to deny the report," WaPo reports.

“As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety,” Trump wrote Tuesday morning. “Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”...

Trump's tweets undercut his administration's frantic effort Monday night to contain the damaging report. The White House trotted out three senior administration officials — National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — to attack the reports.

The president's admission also follows a familiar pattern. Last week, after firing FBI director James B. Comey, the White House originally claimed that the president was acting in response to a memo provided by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.

It looks like they're not merely lying, they're incompetently lying, failing to get their story straight before they start talking. That's the simplest explanation of what we are seeing. Or do you think it's some "genius" move and I'm just failing to see the brilliance?

I wonder how McMaster, Powell, and Tillerson feel about the way they were used. Did Trump exploit them and then immediately blindside them? If so, would they resign and talk about it?

ADDED: Ben Sasse explains it: McMaster didn't really say what the media were saying he said:

“When I look at McMaster’s quote, it’s a pretty technical quote,” Mr. Sasse said. “I think it’s actually something quite different from a full rebuttal of the story.”

Incredibly, the NYT article where I got the Sasse quote, doesn't have the verbatim "pretty technical quote" from McMaster that Sasse is talking about. It only says: "General McMaster told reporters on Monday that The Post’s account “as reported” was 'false'...". I had to google it! Here:

The story that came out tonight as reported is false. The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation. At no time, at no time, [were] intelligen[ce] sources or methods discussed. And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known. Two other senior officials who were present, including the Secretary of the State, remember the meeting the same way and have said so. [They're] on the record accounts should outweigh anonymous sources. I was in the room. It didn't happen.

Ben Sasse impresses me. He seems pretty intelligent and articulate.

He's got a book, "The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance."

From the "Face the Nation" transcript, about the book:

Yes, so this book is 100 percent not about politics, and it's 99 percent not about policy. It's about this new category of perpetual adolescence. And, first, let's just say that, over the last two millennia or so, the emergence of a category called adolescence is a pretty special gift. We believe that, when our kids become biological adults, when they hit puberty, they don't have to be fully formed, morally, emotionally, economically, educationally, in terms of household structure. They don't have to go out and be fully adult immediately. They don't have to go off to war, and they don't have to become economically self-sufficient. That's glorious, to have that protected space between childhood and adulthood. But it's only glorious if you understand that it's a transitional state, it's a means to an end. Peter Pan's Neverland is a hell. It's a dystopia. And we don't want to be -- have our kids caught at a place where they're not learning how to be adults. And, right now, we're not tending to the habit formation aspects of a republic.

I boldfaced the sentence that jumped out at me. It's funny, I was just listening to a 2011 "Fresh Air" interview with the children's book author, Maurice Sendak, and he said that when he was a boy, he couldn't imagine growing up, but...

I mean, being a child was being a child - was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child. I remember how much - when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of "Peter Pan." I detested it. I mean the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy, I don't - I couldn't have thought it out then, but I did later, certainly, that this was a conceit that could only occur in the mind of a very sentimental writer, that any child would want to remain in childhood. It's not possible. The wish is to get out.

"The Drudge Report and National Review both deserve a share of the credit for Republican Ben Sasse’s victory in Tuesday’s Nebraska Senate primary."

Proclaims Politico.