Headline for an unread column.

"What It Means That No Republican Is Acting on the Pete Hegseth Allegations."

The piece is by Bret Stephens, and I did not read it. I think the answer is obvious, I'm pretty sure Stephens will not give the obvious answer, and I am not bound by protocol to sit through this sermon.

"A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat."

A good headline for a new column by Bret Stephens (in the NYT).

[L]iberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself.... [T]his style of opposition led Democrats... into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact....

Yeah, I wanted Democrats to campaign on the substantive merits. Maybe they'll change their ways now that this over-the-top attack on the man, Trump, failed so badly. But for that, they'll need to come up with some good substantive merits. They'd better get to work.

"I also think it’s important to acknowledge that, as much as I detest Trump the man, there are sides of the MAGA movement that deserve respect."

"I don’t think of it as a collection of unadulterated bigots. Most Trump voters I know are decent people who don’t like being condescended to by a morally smug and self-serving elite that fails to see the many ways in which the federal government fails ordinary people. I also think Trump’s voters see things that too easily escape the notice of Trump’s haters, whether it was the farce of many of the Covid rules and restrictions or the double standards by which Trump’s opponents claim to be defending democracy while using every trick in the book to put him in prison."

Said Bret Stephens, in "A Second Trump Term? Three Conservative Columnists Unpack What Could Happen" (NYT). The other 2 columnists are Ross Douthat and David French.

Douthat invites French to say something nice about MAGA. French says:

"I fear that Harris is every bit as vacuous behind the scenes as she seems to be on the public stage."

"I fear she will be tested early by a foreign adversary and stumble badly, whether it’s in stopping Iran from building a nuclear weapon or China from blockading Taiwan or Russia from seizing a portion of a Baltic country. I fear she will capitulate too easily to her party’s left flank, especially when it comes to identity politics, economic policy or polarizing cultural issues. I fear she’ll have no domestic policy ideas that don’t involve mindlessly expanding the role of government. I fear she’ll surround herself with mediocre advisers, like her embarrassingly bad veep pick. I fear she won’t muster the political will to curb mass migration. And I fear that a failed Harris presidency will do more to turbocharge the far right in this country than to diminish it."

Said Bret Stephens, endorsing Kamala Harris, in "Kamala Harris Has an Unexpected Ally" (NYT).

Vague, vacuous, and not flustered... 2 looks at that Kamala Harris interview.

"Kamala Harris didn’t hurt herself in her interview this week with CNN’s Dana Bash. She didn’t particularly help herself, either."

Writes Bret Stephens in a NYT piece with a meaner headline: "A Vague, Vacuous TV Interview Didn’t Help Kamala Harris."

But really, absorbing that meanness, isn't vague and vacuous what they were aiming for? I'm saying "they" not because I'm rejecting the she/her pronouns Harris has announced but because I presume her performance was developed by a team.

Stephens identifies pluses and minuses. On the plus side, "she came across as warm, relatable." (Did she?) 

On the minus side, we see the basis for that headline:

She’s vague to the point of vacuous. She struggled to give straight answers to her shifting positions on fracking and border security other than to say, “my values have not changed.” Fine, but she evaded the question of why it took the Biden administration more than three years to gain better control of the border, which it ultimately did through an executive order that could have been in place years earlier. It also doesn’t answer the question of why she reversed her former policy positions — or whether she has higher values other than political expediency.

We can infer the answer easily enough. What's she supposed to do, come right out and own it? 

The Stephens reaction is paired with a reaction from another NYT opinion writer, Michelle Cottle, who says, "I think that went pretty well, don’t you?"

Since you asked, I'll answer. Yes. Expectations were low, and there's no mistake for her enemies to feast on today. There were no big silences and no memorable passsage-of-time inanities.

Cottle gives Harris credit for not "ducking" questions or "getting flustered."

Flustered! To quote something I said in 2013: "That's a word that people have traditionally used — this is my observation — to portray a woman as incapable of standing her ground and dealing with emotional turmoil."

Why are you waiting to see if a woman gets "flustered"? It feels as though you're expecting her to prove her worth by not seeming like a stereotype of a woman. 

And Cottle continues with this "flustered" business:

The not getting flustered part was as important as the answers themselves. She absolutely needed to avoid giving any opening for the MAGA trolls — who are obsessed with machismo and performative toughness — to accuse her of being overly emotional or weak or easy to rattle. Amusingly, Bash looked more flustered than Harris did for most of the interview....

Yeah, why was that amusing... to Cottle? I'd have to guess that Cottle wanted Harris to win, and Bash's terror counted toward the Harris win. How presidential Harris was! She intimidated Bash. As if that means Putin and other dictators will be intimidated by Harris. But that inference is entirely unjustified. Bash was chosen because she was thought to be most inclined to help Harris. And Bash had the complex task of helping while seeming to be tough and properly journalistic.

Cottle projects her own worries about womanly inadequacies onto "MAGA trolls." Of course, they are out there, looking for material that can be used to attack Harris: They are "are obsessed with machismo and performative toughness — to accuse her of being overly emotional or weak or easy to rattle." But that doesn't mean Harris's own supporters are free of their own doubts and sexist stereotypes.

"Kinda worried the Democrats are so thrilled with the sudden transformation from Biden to Harris they won’t be as obsessed as they ought to be."

Said Gail Collins in this week's "Conversation" with Bret Stephens.

The next thing Bret Stephens said is "Tim Walz’s football analogy about Democrats having the ball and driving down the field while they’re down by a field goal was a good metaphor." How is that a good analogy? Didn't Walz intend us to think of a game with only a few seconds left?

In any case, in politics both teams have to worry about offense and defense at the same time. You can do either or both whenever you want. But this convention felt like a big sugar high. That's the metaphor that comes to mind for me. A big spike of energy, but then what? That's what Collins is "kinda worried" about. We need some substance, and the "sudden transformation" people are adamantly denying us substance... and I'm getting hangry.

Ah, I see Bret Stephens comes in with another metaphor... about that insipid "joy" theme:

But as our colleague Patrick Healy pointed out in an astute essay, “Joy is not a strategy.” Actually, it’s more like a helium balloon that rises and rises — until it deflates and crumples....

"If the Democrats’ goal is to stay true to their brand of identity politics, then Harris is the clear choice. But if the goal is to stop Donald Trump..."

"... then she’s almost the worst one, with the arguable exception of Gavin Newsom, the much-too-slick governor of California."

Says Bret Stephens, in the new episode of his weekly conversation with Gail Collins (NYT).

Stephens continues: "Betting Trump’s nickname for him will be Governor Nuisance."

Nice revelation that you don't take in Trump rally speeches. He already has a nickname for Newsom. It's "New Scum."

Back to Stephens: "[Kamala Harris] is wildly unpopular.... She’s won only one truly competitive election in her career. Fairly or unfairly, she’s associated with the immigration issue, which Americans see as the administration’s single greatest policy fiasco. She ran a dreadful primary campaign in 2020. And I don’t think she has much appeal with the swing voters who are going to decide this election. There’s a Hillary Clinton vibe to her...."

Is there going to be "a Hillary Clinton vibe" to every woman who gets close to becoming President or does "a Hillary Clinton vibe" mean something more specific? What are the similarities between the 2 women? I'd say: 1. An instinct to laugh inanely over nothing, 2. Vaulted to the front of the line through sexual alliance with a powerful man, 3. ...

"Vance isn’t good looking enough for Trump. He looks like a forgotten Civil War brigadier."

Said Bret Stephens, in "Which V.P. Pick Will Help Trump Win? Four Columnists Rate the Field" (NYT).

There's also this, from Michelle Goldberg: "[J.D. Vance is] a completely amoral sycophant without an independent political base, which I think is what Trump is probably looking for."

I guess it will be Vance, then, don't you think? 

Since Trump, upon election, will be a lame duck, I think his prime concern should be who will be best able to carry Trumpism forward into the 2028 election and beyond. In that light, isn't Vance the right pick?

Do you realize that J.D. Vance is only 39?

"Joe Biden desperately needs some wins — real, not cosmetic, ones. Who in his administration is thinking about how to get him some?"

"The Gaza cease-fire isn’t it. It merely punts a problem that needs to be solved.... Ukraine could be another win for Biden, an easier one.... Why does Ukraine always need to come to the verge of defeat before the president finally relents and gives it the weapons it needs?... But the biggest win Biden will need will be domestic. It won’t be his executive order all but banning asylum for migrants: That only confirmed that he had failed to use every option at his disposal to tackle the crisis. It won’t be low unemployment: No magic wand will erase 2022’s inflation or today’s high interest rates. It won’t be Trump’s legal travails, which seem to have galvanized his supporters.... And it won’t be finding a way to offload Kamala Harris from the ticket.... It all leaves the president with one option that can be a win for America and, ultimately, his place in history. He can still choose not to run, to cede the field to a Democrat who can win.... There’s still time, if only just. It would be a courageous, honorable and transformative legacy."

Writes Bret Stephens, in "The Most Courageous Thing That Joe Biden Can Do" (NYT).

"Commit great poems to heart, starting with those by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Recite them aloud on solitary walks."

"Recite them aloud on solitary walks. Compose dirty limericks in your head. Read more for pleasure, less for purpose. Read, immediately, Marguerite Yourcenar’s 'Memoirs of Hadrian.' Imitate the writers or artists you most admire; you’ll find your own voice and style in all the ways your imitation falls short. Don’t post self-indulgent glam shots of yourself on Instagram, and please stop photographing your damn meals... Make only enough money so that you don’t have to think about it much.... Never join a cause if you aren’t fully familiar with the argument against it. Heed the words of Rabbi Hillel: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' Or woman...."

Says Bret Stephens, recounting what he said in a commencement address, in a conversation with Gail Collins, in the NYT.

Collins reacts: "That’s pretty damn good.... But I’m not going to go so far as to suggest student protesting is a bad or silly idea." Yeah, I guess students are never fully familiar with the argument against their cause.

"What really worries me about this case is that, if Trump isn’t convicted, it is going to turbocharge his campaign."

"Trump will be able to say, with some credibility, that the Deep State really was out to get him."

Says Bret Stephens, in a conversation with Gail Collins, titled "Some Concrete Reasons Not to Be Totally Panicked" (NYT).

The Deep State should have thought about that before going out to get him.

Also, if you think it's credible that the Deep State is out to get him and that's a reason for you to hope he's convicted, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

"Why is the political right so hostile to Ukraine?"

"It seems like the kind of freedom-fighting, Western-tilting country they’re supposed to adore."

Asks Gail Collins, in "The Conversation" at the NYT.

Her interlocutor, Bret Stephens, answers:

Our colleague David French offered what I think is the smartest answer to your question in a recent column. It comes down to this: general nuttiness connected to sundry Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden conspiracy theories, plus a belief that Putin (a former K.G.B. agent) somehow represents manly Christian values in the face of effeminate wokeness, plus a kind of George Costanza 'do the opposite' mentality in which whatever Biden is for, they must be against."

"I don’t quite understand all of these Democrats who say Trump is an existential threat to decency, democracy and maybe life on the planet and then..."

"... insist they’re sticking with Biden instead of another candidate. It’s like refusing to seek better medical care for a desperately sick child because the family doctor is a nice old man whose feelings might get hurt if you left his practice."

Said Bret Stephens, in "The Conversation," with Gail Collins, in "The Election No One Seems to Want Is Coming Right at Us" (NYT).

Collins responds that "he’s done a good job" and his speech on Friday showed "he’s going to campaign against Trump very, very, very hard."

That gets Stephens to blithely/deviously quip: "Well, let’s hope it doesn’t kill him.

"A struggle ensued, with the crocodile attempting to pull Deveraux into the billabong, while Deveraux in turn, he said, tried to kick the creature..."

"... with his left foot. He was pulled deeper into the water and onto his knees. Then, in a move he described as 'half-accidental,' his teeth caught on the animal's leathery eyelid. 'I managed to have a bite,' he said, adding: 'I jerked back on his eyelid and he let go.'"

From "Crocodile Bites Man. Man Bites Back. A surprising tale of Northern Territory chutzpah" (NYT).

I'm reading that because it comes up in the dialogue between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, a regular Monday morning feature in the NYT. Collins brings up the crocodile story because it reminds her of the GOP presidential candidates who are stuck fighting Donald Trump. 

Collins, like a lot of people in elite media these days, are pushing the idea of Nikki Haley as the one who ought to take on Donald Trump. But why? 

The Collins/Stephens dialogue begins with Stephens saying he's been "devoted almost entirely to outrages and tragedies in the Middle East: 

But I couldn’t help smiling for a second when Nikki Haley called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” at last week’s G.O.P. debate, after he raised the subject of her daughter’s use of TikTok.

"Moderate and sane, but also cutting and sharp, particularly when it came to her vivisection of Vivek Ramaswamy’s neo-isolationist, Putin-kowtowing foreign policy."

Such violent imagery from Bret Stephens, describing Nikki Haley, in "Vivek Ramaswamy Is Suddenly Part of Our Political Life," the regular "conversation" at the NYT between Stephens and Gail Collins. I assume the conversation is in writing, because no one could speak spontaneously like that.

The "vivisection" play on the name Vivek must have seemed too delightful to pass up. And yet I would feel compelled to edit out metaphorical violence aimed at a particular individual. Does Nikki Haley even want to be portrayed as a woman who cuts up men?

Collins says: "Wow, is he irritating. Not many people I can think of who I’d rather have over for dinner less than Donald Trump, but this guy’s one of them."

"[I]f we were able to more-or-less end teenage cigarette smoking over the last 20 years, it shouldn’t be out of the question to try to do the same with social-media use."

Says Bret Stephens, a NYT conservative columnist, in conversation with Gail Collins, a NYT liberaI columnist. 

Collins agrees and says she's "happy to insist" that Apple prevent the download of social-media apps to phones known to be used by teenagers.

Stephens asserts that "most teenagers" would "welcome" this exclusion from social media.

It’s hard enough being 14 or 15 without needing to panic about some embarrassing Instagram pic or discovering too late that something stupid or awful you wrote on Facebook or Twitter at 16 comes back to haunt you at 20.... We owe it to the kids to shield them from creating public records of their own indiscretions and idiocies. Life will come roaring at them soon enough. I say no social media till they’re old enough to vote, smoke and maybe even buy a drink. Full-frontal stupidity should be left to the grown-ups — like us!

You can see he thinks he's cute... just delightful. So blithely depriving teenagers of freedom of speech. Not even a word about freedom, just safety and protection, and no insight whatsoever into what you are teaching young people these days or awareness of what they will think of you and your repression of them and the values you crudely imposed.

Speaking of wearing blinders... in another part of this rambling but short conversation, they talk about the accomplishments of Jimmy Carter, and Stephens says, "Made air travel affordable to middle-class America for the first time," then barrels on to the next subject. I know this column is supposed to be jaunty, moving swiftly from one topic to the next, but it made me stop and think of the topic the good-thinkers always think about except when they don't: Global warming.

Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change? 

"Last week, in a conversation with colleague Gail Collins, [Bret] Stephens argued that a couple with a combined income of $400,000 a year doesn’t necessarily have a lifestyle we’d describe as 'rich.'"

"'They’re scrimping to send their kids to college, driving a Camry, if they have a car at all, and wondering why eggs have gotten so damned expensive.' 'Granted,' said Collins, which was the most fascinating part of this exchange.... How have liberals gotten so comfortable with the idea that $400,000 a year — more than what 98 percent of the population makes — is really just a middle-class income?..."

Writes Megan McArdle in "The $400K conundrum: Why America’s urban rich don’t feel that way" (WaPo).

"I’ve always maintained that, with Trump, there are no deep, dark secrets: His absolute awfulness always stares you squarely in the face, like a baboon’s backside."

Said Bret Stephens in his conversation with Gail Collins, printed in the NYT.

Just before that riposte, they were talking about the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago, and he'd said:

Donald Trump has only a vague idea of what’s in all of these documents. The notion that he read through boxes and boxes containing hundreds of documents with classification markings and chose to take these particular items strikes me as … unlikely.... 

Know thyself?

That's a cute little BBC animation that I found after that Bret Stephens column — blogged here — made me think about the old aphorism "Know thyself." Stephens was talking about the "self-satisfied elite" who didn't understand the point of view of the non-elite. It made me think: How dare these people regard themselves as elite if they are self-satisfied? They are not educated if they haven't looked into the functioning of their own mind, especially if they satisfy themselves with contempt for others.

Here's Wikipedia on "Know thyself":

The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" (Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν, transliterated: gnōthi seauton...) is the first of three Delphic maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.... The two maxims that follow "know thyself" were "nothing to excess" and "certainty brings insanity." In Latin the phrase, "know thyself", is given as nosce te ipsum or temet nosce.

"Certainty brings insanity" is the least well-known of those aphorisms. It explains a lot!

Much more at that Wikipedia link, but — here — I'll just show  you this cool painting from the 1600s, inscribed with the Latin phrase:

"The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit... was... 'If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.'"

Says Bret Stephens — in "I Was Wrong About Trump Voters" (NYT) — about the first thing he ever wrote about Trump. That was in August 2015, and he went on to write "dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself."

He now regrets attacking the Trump voters. Because it wasn't effective?

Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.What were they seeing that I wasn’t?... What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo. I was blind to this....

He was part of that "self-satisfied elite." Does he genuinely take responsibility for his failure to see from the viewpoint of the non-elite? Or is this a repositioning in the hope of regaining power over the deplorables?