"American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it. There are large numbers of men wandering lost, in some personal wasteland..."

"... of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why. There's a lot of hurtin' cowboys out there." 

Said Ed Honnold, "the mild-mannered federal lawyer and founder of the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals of dancing and roaring, hugging and weeping," quoted in "MEN'S MOVEMENT STALKS THE WILD SIDE," a WaPo column by Phil McCombs, published on February 3, 1991 — 30 years ago. 

I'm reading that this morning because the news about Trump at the Atlanta baseball game doing the tomahawk chop — blogged here — jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?

Here's the part about drum circles from that 1991 article:

"What do you think happens to the political sensibilities of young people watching a political discourse like that?'

It's 1992 and Bill Moyers asking his his intellectual panel about the remix video made from George H.W. Bush's "Read my lips: No new taxes." You can watch the video, followed — beginning at 2:11 — by the egg-headed discussion:



I got that over at Reason.com, where Jesse Walker writes:

The publisher of The Hotline replies that the video "debases the process"; the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication calls it an "invitation to cynicism that I think is very unhealthy." And they both go on from there, condemning in advance the entire media landscape of 2017. I'm not sure 1992 has ever felt as distant as it does while I'm watching this.

A NYT headline: "Kenneth Starr, Who Tried to Bury Bill Clinton, Now Only Praises Him."

Bury... Only...?

Okay, I will read this for you....

The presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, increasingly seems to be trying to relitigate the scandals that Mr. Starr investigated, dredging up allegations of sexual transgressions by Mr. Clinton to accuse Hillary Clinton — the likely Democratic nominee — of having aided and enabled her husband at the expense of Mr. Clinton’s female accusers.

"Sexual transgressions" makes what Bill Clinton did sound merely naughty and therefore forgivable. Submerged is the lying under oath, the sexual harassment in the workplace, and — as Donald Trump says (in what is definitely not relitigation) — the allegation of rape.

But Mr. Starr expressed regret last week that so much of Mr. Clinton’s legacy remains viewed through the lens of what Mr. Starr demurely termed “the unpleasantness.”

His remarks seemed almost to absolve Mr. Clinton, if not to exonerate him.

“There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament,” Mr. Starr said in a panel discussion on the presidency at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Starr was on a panel promoting a book about the Presidents, to which he contributed a chapter. His chapter is on Ronald Reagan. Somebody else wrote the Clinton chapter. Starr chose to minimize himself on the subject of Clinton, it seems.

For some time, Mr. Starr, a Christian who is now the president and chancellor of Baylor University, a private Baptist school in Waco, Tex., has sought to put his years as a political combatant behind him....

Mr. Starr now is contending with criticism of his own leadership over Baylor’s handling of sexual assault charges leveled against several of its football players....

The Times article goes on to discuss Starr's invocation of the reliable old topic of civility in political discourse. On that subject, Starr quoted LBJ, because what better exemplar of civility is there than LBJ? "Come, let us reason together." That's the quote. As if the take-away from the LBJ years is reasoning together.

But what about that Baylor football problem? The Times does give us a link. It goes to The Dallas Morning News. Excerpt:

And as the sex-assault scandal has grown to encompass at least eight alleged attacks involving football players, two of whom have been convicted in criminal court here, [Starr's] oddly timed written statements have grown more legalistic.

Even at this conservative and sports-mad college, students say they are frustrated by the muted response of the Baylor administration, which the 69-year-old Starr has led for the past six years....

As for that LBJ quote, if you Google it, the first hit is from the Lord:

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

LBJ was quoting God, and quoting him out of context, for which he was criticized by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. God wasn't inviting the people of Sodom and Gomorrah to have a civil conversation with him:

"Wisconsin's 'Deep State' hasn’t given up on Scott Walker."

"This is just a spoiling attack to try to keep him out of action for 2016," says Instapundit, linking to my post today on the document release showing that prosecutors in the John Doe investigation were working on the theory that Scott Walker was at the center of a "criminal scheme" interacting with groups that supported him in the recall election.

That prompts Ace to look into this term "deep state":

Searching the web for "The Deep State," I find Bill Moyers discussing it in an American context. (Turkey and Egypt are also said to have "deep states.")

He of course claims that it's a conservative-tilting permanent state forever thwarting the aspirations of "the People."

Here's the Wikipedia article on "deep state."

ADDED: Looking around at some local Madison sites and at some less-local lefty sites, I see a scary love of prosecutorial aggression and overreach. The slavering enthusiasm is so off-putting, so much at odds with the liberal values I believe in, that I feel pushed away onto the side of conservatives with whom I have little reason to affiliate. 

Lawprof Ian Haney Lopez talks to Bill Moyers about "dog whistle" politics.

Via FireDogLake which teases with the usual What's-the-Matter-With-Kansas cant: "Author and legal scholar Ian Haney López tells Bill that dog whistle politics is 'the dark magic; by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests."

Ian Haney Lopez's book is "Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class." (Ian Haney Lopez was a lawprof at the University of Wisconsin Law School years ago.)

"What's the Matter with Kansas?" is a stock term — nicked from Thomas Frank's 2005 book "What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" — to refer to a favorite proposition of liberals and lefties, that non-affluent conservative voters have been duped.

"Supreme Court to Decide Whether Corporations Can Pray."

Snarky headline at the Bill Moyers website on an article about the pending Supreme Court case dealing with whether religious persons who have set up their business using the corporate form can be compelled by the government to provide their employees with health insurance that covers drugs that they believe murder human beings.

The case isn't about praying. It's about money and what it means to be compelled to contribute your money to something that you sincerely believe God requires you to fight to the end. I think it's close to the same problem that individuals face when they pay their taxes and believe that something the government is using the money for is deeply wrong. For example: war.

But the Bill Moyers operation thinks mocking religious people is a good move. I say it's prime jackassery... except to the extent that it's old-school, left-wing hatred of corporations. Let's see how they feel if Hobby Lobby loses its case — as I think it will — and its owners dissolve the entire operation to maintain religious purity — would they? — and throw 13,000 employees out of work. I suspect the the Bill Moyers folk would double down on their contempt for religion.