"By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job."

I wrote that on April 15, 2014, and I'm digging through my archive this morning, looking for Janet Reno, because I see that Janet Reno has died. She was 78 and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease since 1995, when she was the Attorney General of the United States. Her name is associated with 2 painful events in the Bill Clinton administration, Waco and Elian Gonzales. Reno was also the person under the now-defunct Ethics in Government law who determined when an independent counsel would be appointed and when that person should be removed for misconduct, so she was connected to the Bill Clinton impeachment, since she caused the independent Whitewater investigation to begin and she allowed Kenneth Starr to complete his mission.

From the NYT obituary:

Mr. Clinton, committed to naming a woman as attorney general, settled on Ms. Reno after his first choices — the corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and the federal judge Kimba Wood — withdrew their names in the face of criticism after it was revealed that they had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies....

Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, the Branch Davidians.

The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, as well as about 75 others, dead, one-third of whom were children....

Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the F.B.I. might have started the fire that destroyed the compound....

... Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat... became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

Ms. Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.

Ms. Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint.....

Waco was the subject of that 2014 post of mine, quoted above. That old post was titled "Dick Morris says Bill Clinton 'hated' Janet Reno but wouldn't oust her because he feared 'she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.'"

"Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down."

"Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn't want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco... And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.

"Now, to be fair, that's my supposition. I don't know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I'm going to talk about Waco."

Morris was on TV to discuss the Cliven Bundy incident. What bad luck for Hillary: It has people needing to talk about Waco again....

By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job. What is Morris saying? First, the point seems to be that Reno convinced Clinton that to oust her would give rise to inferences that he believed his administration had done something wrong in Waco. Then Morris adds his inference of what he "knew" it "mean": that there was some "truth" that had been suppressed that would come out.

But Reno's argument didn't require that there be anything more to tell, and Morris knows that, because he goes right to his "to be fair" remark. He doesn't know. And if there was some suppressed truth Reno could tell, why hasn't she told it yet? One answer is that she doesn't want to tell on herself, but that would have been true at the point when she was begging and pleading to keep her job.

Perhaps she left a note. More likely, we will never know.

Here are the names and ages of the 76 people who died at Waco, including Startle Summers, Hollywood Sylvia, Chanel Andrade, and Paiges Gent, who were only 1 year old. They would be 23 years old if they had lived. There were also four 2-year-olds, including one with the sad name Little One Jones.

As for Elian Gonzalez. He's 22, and he just graduated from University of Matanzas with a degree in  industrial engineering. He spoke at his graduation ceremony, promising Fidel Castro that he and the whole class would "fight from whatever trench the revolution demands."

"The frustration of the people built up to cause this. It’s really no different than the Occupy Movement or a sit-in at a college."

Said B.J. Soper, 39 — who lives near the taken-over federal wildlife refuge —quoted in a WaPo article titled "In Oregon, frustration over federal land rights has been building for years."

“What people in Western states are dealing with is the destruction of their way of life,” said Soper, a father of four who was once a professional rodeo rider. “When frustration builds up, people lash out.... True wealth comes from the land. If they can’t feed their cows, there’s not going to be beef in the supermarket,” he said. “People are no longer [able] to make a living.” Federal agencies, he said, "are taking food out of people’s mouths."

"White Americans, their activities and ideas seem always to stem from a font of principled and committed individuals."

"As such, group suspicion and presumed guilt are readily perceived and described as unjust, unreasonable and unethical," writes Janell Ross, a WaPo race-and-gender reporter, in a column titled "Why aren’t we calling the Oregon occupiers 'terrorists?'"

You will note that while the group gathered in Oregon is almost assuredly all or nearly all white, that has scarcely been mentioned in any story.

Maybe because it's damned awkward to write "almost assuredly all or nearly all white." Isn't it a problem to just guess they must be white people?

You will note that nothing even close to similar can be said about coverage of events in Missouri, Maryland, Illinois or any other place where questions about policing have given way to protests or actual riots.

Close to similar to what? When reporters were directly seeing activities, they were put in a different position, where they would have had to censor part of the facts they themselves witnessed. But more important, the people engaged in the activities were themselves calling attention to race and specifically wanted to be seen as black and they framed what they were protesting in terms of race. We were told "Black Lives Matter" and criticized if we tried to race-neutralize it with "All Lives Matter." These protesters were regarded by many as "principled and committed" — principled and committed about racial issues. The press presented them in the terms they used, so that was in fact very similar to the coverage of the Oregon occupiers.

And, by the way, it's pretty absurd to say "White Americans, their activities and ideas seem always to stem from a font of principled and committed individuals." I mean, I believe that it seems that way to some people, but it's my observation that white Americans are often portrayed as stupid, ignorant, greedy, and bigoted.

"We're planning on staying here for years, absolutely. This is not a decision we've made at the last minute." Said Ammon Bundy.

Here = the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which, in Bundy's words, "has been the tool to do all the tyranny that has been placed upon the Hammonds."

Ryan Bundy said: "The best possible outcome is that the ranchers that have been kicked out of the area, then they will come back and reclaim their land, and the wildlife refuge will be shut down forever and the federal government will relinquish such control. What we're doing is not rebellious. What we're doing is in accordance with the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land."

There's also Ryan Payne,  U.S. Army veteran, who "has claimed to have helped organize militia snipers to target federal agents in a standoff last year in Nevada. He told one news organization the federal agents would have been killed had they made the wrong move." But his "agenda" is: "to uphold the Constitution. That's all."

The Las Vegas murderers covered their victims with a Gadsden flag and one shouted: "This is the start of a revolution."

The couple — a married male and female — began this "revolution" in a pizza joint and continued it across the street at a Wal-Mart where they soon enough killed themselves. Police say they found swastikas and white supremacy material at their apartment.

One neighbor said called them "weird," thought they used meth, and connected them to the Cliven Bundy protests. He said the man "often rambled about conspiracy theories" and "often wore camouflage or dressed as Peter Pan to work as a Fremont Street Experience street performer."


(Photo of Freemont Street by Jean-Christophe Benoist.)

How bad was Joel McHale, the (official) comedian at last night's White House Correspondents Dinner?

At last night's White House Correspondents Dinner, the official comedian — insert typical joke about how they're all comedians — was Joel McHale, whose comic gimmick seemed to be reading bad jokes off cards and then ad-libbing about how that was a poor joke. For example:

I am a big fan of President Obama. I think he’s one of the all-time great presidents, definitely in the top 50. Please explain that to Jessica Simpson. You’re right, that was low.

That came early on and was followed by what might have been his only rough treatment of Obama:

All right, how about the president’s performance tonight, everyone? Sir, it’s amazing that you can still bring it with fresh, hilarious material. My favorite bit of yours was when you said you would close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. That was a classic. That was hilarious, hilarious. Still going.

Detainee Obamedy. Obama laughed and laughed. I think he mouthed something like "I'm still workin' on it."

"This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist."

That's the title of an interesting essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic.

The idea is, roughly, that Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling are so crudely racist that we look at them, easily see that they are quite awful, deserving condemnation, and — this is the bad part — not at all like me and everyone I know. If those two are to be America's stereotypical "racists," it's going to get even harder to see the subtle, below-board, pervasive forms of racism that Coates and others have been urging us to perceive. We will self-indulgently feel smug that: 1. We've ostracized the racists, and 2. We are nothing like the racists.

If you're wondering what "Town" needs a "Better Class of Racist," I assume the town is Gotham, that is, that Coates means to evoke The Joker:



But it's this whole country Coates thinks needs a "better class of racist." He wants us to have to confront and mentally anguish over individuals who: 1. Are nice and normal enough that we identify with and cannot distance ourselves from, and 2. We're somehow compelled to perceive as racist.

I wonder what Coates would be willing to do to smoke out some high-class racists like that? And what would it take — especially after the harsh treatment of Bundy and Sterling — for Americans to respond to invitations to see nice-enough fellow citizens as racists?

"Donald Sterling and the Neverending Fantasy of ‘Democrat’ Racism/Oh, how eager the conservative press is to call Donald Sterling a Democrat!"

"It’s all part of their larger fantasy narrative about conservatism and race," says Michael Tomasky (at The Daily Beast).

It must be so annoying to Democrats that this idiot .1%-er Donald Sterling stepped on the Cliven Bundy, Republican racist fantasy story.

But Tomasky is right, I think, to say Sterling sure wasn't much of a Democrat.

"The unsettling thing about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s ugly rant on the Virgin River on Saturday..."

"... was that there was no negative reaction from the semicircle of gun-toting and conspiracy-minded supporters who had gathered round to hear it."

It's not that there's an old guy out there somewhere in American saying things like that, it's that people had gathered 'round. He wasn't some old grandad with a family who loves him and lets him talk and lets it go. He was (is?) a folk hero, and anybody who gets into hero-promoting activities has an obligation to exercise vigilance and stand ready to speak up and talk back. But those who are susceptible to the belief that they have found a hero may have linked vices like passivity, an uncritical mind, a tendency to merge with the group, and taste for the ecstasy of proximity to the object of worship.

Hero worshipers of the world, disunite.

Cloven Bundy.

Are people deliberately making devil jokes or is this a case of the unconscious machinery of spellchecking spitting out wit?

"Given his grand claims regarding what American freedom means, it is inadequate to call him historically illiterate or misinformed about the conditions of slavery..."

"... the constant, brutal violence that reinforced it and the way it robbed people of the ability to make the most basic choices about their lives...."

He talks about freedom and “ancestral” rights, but grazes his cattle on public land—our land, not his homestead—without paying his share.... Too many conservatives have been charmed by the notion of a cowboy singing the anthem on horseback and threatening to turn guns on bureaucrats. They can’t just proclaim themselves stunned here....

Dick Morris says Bill Clinton "hated" Janet Reno but wouldn't oust her because he feared "she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco."

"Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down."

"Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn't want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco... And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.

"Now, to be fair, that's my supposition. I don't know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I'm going to talk about Waco."

Morris was on TV to discuss the Cliven Bundy incident. What bad luck for Hillary: It has people needing to talk about Waco again.

Which we were already getting back to Waco because of that Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker, "Sacred and Profane: How not to negotiate with believers." But that Gladwell article doesn't mention Bill Clinton or even Janet Reno, and certainly not Hillary.

By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job. What is Morris saying? First, the point seems to be that Reno convinced Clinton that to oust her would give rise to inferences that he believed his administration had done something wrong in Waco. Then Morris adds his inference of what he "knew" it "mean": that there was some "truth" that had been suppressed that would come out.

But Reno's argument didn't require that there be anything more to tell, and Morris knows that, because he goes right to his "to be fair" remark. He doesn't know. And if there was some suppressed truth Reno could tell, why hasn't she told it yet? One answer is that she doesn't want to tell on herself, but that would have been true at the point when she was begging and pleading to keep her job.

"We were actually strategizing to put all the women up at the front... If they are going to start shooting..."

"... it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers."

"As the movement grew by the day, and demonstrators rallied together, bonding by campfires at night..."

At the Cliven Bundy standoff...

I'd like to hear more details of the bonding by campfires. I'm not commenting on the underlying dispute between rancher and the Bureau of Land Management, but I'm interested in the culture that develops within a protest movement because I observed, first hand, during the Wisconsin protests of 2011, how anti-government ideation swirls within an insular protest group that is camped out together around the clock.

I also see a similarity between the Bundy standoff and the Wisconsin protests in the government decision to back off, seemingly to avoid exacerbating the intense emotions and giving the protesters more to protest about.

ADDED: Meade, proofreading for me, laughs when he gets to the line "I'd like to hear more details of the bonding by campfires." He says: "I don't know if you meant that to be funny." And I say: "Yeah, in a way, I did. I mean, I'm thinking of campfire songs and ghost stories... but about the government."

The Wisconsin protesters had their songs...