"I particularly like the line where you said Trumpism is seeking 'to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, science...'"

"'... and the pursuit of justice, and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego and appetite.' There’s some very good stuff here. But I’ll tell you where I take issue with you. You talked about a miasma of passivity that seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that you’ve seen this ['No Kings'] movement grow. I think that what is making things difficult is, in our history, I think it’s fair to say that we have never confronted a government that was willing to break the law as freely — not just break norms, which they haven’t cared about for a long time, but break the law as freely."

Said E.J. Dionne to David Brooks in "Trump Has a Religion. What Do Democrats Have? Mamdani might be working in Democrats’ favor. But what about 'No Kings'?" (NYT)(video of the whole conversation here, on YouTube) .

""Look at what they’ve done to their own people. They’re destroying family, national identity, they are abusing their children."

"Even pedophilia is announced as a normal thing in the West.... And they’re recognizing same-sex marriages.... That’s fine that they’re adults. They’ve got the right to live their life. And we always, we’re very tolerant about this in Russia. Nobody is trying to enter private lives of people, and we’re not going to do this.... However, we need to tell them, but look at the scriptures of any religion in the world. Everything is said in there. And one of the things is that family is a union of a man and a woman.... Anglican Church is planning to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God.... What can you say here? Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to spiritual destruction."

Said Vladimir Putin, in a speech, quoted by E.J. Dionne Jr., in "Putin pitches the American right with an ungodly invocation of God" (WaPo).

"Harry Truman-style, Biden should press Republicans about what benefits they propose to deny to Americans who need them."

Writes E.J. Dionne in "Biden needs a reboot. Fighting for democracy is the key" (WaPo).

That got me wondering what "Harry Truman style" actually looked like, so I watched this:

Here's the text of the full speech (from September 1948). Here's part that's in the video: 

It does my heart good to see the grain fields of the Nation again. They are a wonderful sight. The record-breaking harvests you have been getting in recent years have been a blessing. Millions of people have been saved from starvation by the food you have produced. The whole world has reason to be everlastingly grateful to the farmers of the United States. In a very real sense, the abundant harvests of this country are helping to save the world from communism. Communism thrives on human misery. And the crops you are producing are driving back the tide of misery in many lands. Your farms are a vital element in America's foreign policy. Keep that in mind, that is of vital importance to us and to the world.

Divided government is "a ticket to obstruction and the very sort of partisan brawling that moderate voters can’t stand."

Argues E.J. Dionne in "The destructive myth about divided government."

I am a moderate voter — a voter who abstained this year — and I believe that divided government is a safeguard against extremism. I eagerly clicked on the column because of the title. I'm perfectly ready to have my belief challenged. 

The Dionne column is very short. His main point is that the GOP leadership is "committed to preventing a Democratic president from governing successfully — even when that president is willing and eager to compromise."

But what is the "myth" that Dionne is supposedly debunking? I had to go back and search for the word "myth." 

Here: "The belief that divided government guarantees moderate outcomes might once have been true when there was a solid moderate bloc in the Republican Party. But it should now be clear that it’s a destructive myth." The word "guarantees" makes Dionne's "myth" a strawman. Who believes in a guarantee like that?! Divided government can be a safeguard whether it's a perfect safeguard or not. The question is whether it's better than the alternative. Which risk would you rather take? 

The assertion I put in the post title uses a similar absolutism: "a ticket to obstruction and the very sort of partisan brawling that moderate voters can’t stand." If you want to know something this moderate voter can't stand, it's writing like that. 

That last post finally pushed me over the line to create a tag I've been thinking about for a while...

... "the attack on individualism."

The pressure was building after yesterday's post about Seattle's effort to teach its employees about their own "Internalized Racial Superiority," which is "defined by" — among other things — "individualism."

What pushed me over the line into new tag creation this morning was a criticism of women who fall into the "trap" of talking about their individual struggle with motherhood.

I went back into the archive and added the tag to a few old things:

June 19, 2020 — This is a quote from a review of the book "White Fragility": "'I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,' DiAngelo explains. 'I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.' It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. 'White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,' DiAngelo writes, a system 'we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.'"

November 29, 2015 — I quoted the Tom Wolfe essay, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening":

"And no rule of civility demands the confirmation of justices who would leave an abusive president unchecked and use raw judicial power to roll back a century’s worth of social progress."

"There is nothing civil about rushing a nominee to replace Kennedy before the midterm elections."

Well, that's the perfect embodiment of what I mean by my tag "civility bullshit."

It's from E.J. Dionne Jr., "Don’t want a right-wing Supreme Court? Do everything you can to stop it" (WaPo). Everything?!

All the recent talk about civility should not stop opponents of a right-wing court from doing everything in their power to keep the judiciary from being packed with ideologues who behave as partisans.

It seems to me Trump won the election and he has the appointment power. He made Supreme Court appointments an issue and was strikingly clear about who he would appoint. I understand the motivation to oppose and obstruct him, but I don't think opposing him or going down without a fight has anything to do with civility. If those who want Trump's nominee confirmed are talking about civility, then they are the one's doing civility bullshit, and Dionne is just calling them on it.

But Dionne is doing a little something more: "There is nothing civil about rushing... no rule of civility demands confirmation...." He's gesturing (weakly) at the idea that there is something uncivil about rushing and that there is a rule of civility that demands that the Senate wait. The thing gestured at is hard to defend, so why not dribble out statements about what is not and avoid the trouble of making the difficult point? I'll say that too is a kind of civility bullshit.

But most of Dionne's civility bullshit is out and proud: He doesn't care about civility when it holds his side back. Because the other side is so awful it doesn't deserve the niceties that developed in the mythical past when good people amicably jousted over differences.

"This is the first time that I've suspected that a WaPo editorial was driven by the interests of its owner and it's own business model rather than a stance on the merits."

A comment at the Washington Post editorial "Let’s take a deep breath about Facebook’s ‘breach of trust.'" (The editorial ends: "Facebook and others are under enormous pressure to behave more as publishers responsible for their content than as neutral platforms. They should not resist. Facebook faces a related set of questions about manipulation of the platform in the 2016 campaign... All of this should be pursued in the spirit of perfecting rules of the road to keep social networks free and open. In the end, they should remain what they are, great sharing machines.")

The owner of WaPo is Jeff Bezos, so what's his connection to Facebook? He's an investor in Facebook. I saw a comment (which I can't find anymore) that he lost billions when Facebook stock slid this week. Trying to research that factoid, I found this article from yesterday: "Jeff Bezos Is Now $40 Billion Richer Than Anyone Else on Earth."

But since the start of 2018, Jeff Bezos has seen his net worth skyrocket compared to his billionaire peers.... At the close of the stock market on Tuesday, the index estimated Jeff Bezos’ net worth at a whopping $132 billion. That’s thanks to Amazon’s stock price, which has jumped roughly 40% so far in 2018.... That’s obviously enough to make Bezos the world’s richest person. What’s particularly astounding is that no one else is even in the same ballpark as Amazon’s founder.

What do you think? Is he so rich it's stupid to think he cares what slant the piddling Washington Post takes in its editorials or is the Washington Post central to his machinations and part of why Amazon is up 40% in 2018?

If you go to the editorial urging gentle treatment of Facebook, you'll see, at the bottom, a list of additional Facebook related articles in WaPo:

Anne Applebaum: Does Cambridge Analytica have my data? I have no idea. That’s the problem.

Sandy Parakilas: I worked at Facebook. I know how Cambridge Analytica could have happened.

Jennifer Rubin: If Facebook isn’t forthcoming, voters might opt to ‘unfriend’ the network

Karen Tumulty: Maybe we should be thanking Facebook

The Post’s View: China’s intrusive, ubiquitous, scary surveillance technology

Does that all sound like gentle treatment of Facebook? Well, yeah, it kind of does.... especially since it leaves out an ungentle treatment of Facebook that's also currently in WaPo, "Yes, we should be outraged about Facebook" by E.J. Dionne.

Dionne writes: "We must decide when Facebook and comparable companies should be held accountable as public utilities." Notice how closely that tracks the line from the editorial I quoted in the first paragraph of this post: "Facebook and others are under enormous pressure to behave more as publishers responsible for their content than as neutral platforms. They should not resist."

Dionne continues: "And when do they look more like publishers who bear responsibility for the veracity of the 'information' they spread around?" Well, if they are publishers, then they have freedom of speech, which means they have less responsibility and can lie and distort and pass along private information (subject to very few legal limits) just like the Washington Post.

More Dionne: "We also need to confront conflicts between the public interest and the ways that social media companies make their profits. Where do privacy rights come in? Are they unduly blocking transparency about how political campaigns are conducted and who is financing them? Were they indifferent to their manipulation by foreign powers?" The questions he forgets/declines to ask: What about the freedom of speech of users of Facebook? Is Facebook unduly censoring speech based on political viewpoint?

(By the way, I hope some of you remember how vehemently I took the position (back in 2011) that free speech on Facebook matters even though Facebook is a private company. I had a big email debate about it with Bob Wright (after a Bloggingheads discussion). You can read that here.)

E.J. Dionne asks "Does our presidential campaign lack a moral core?"

He purports to delve into the debate:

However you analyze it in electoral terms, the exchange between President Obama and Mitt Romney was most striking as a festival of technocratic mush — dueling studies mashed in with competing statistics. In many ways, the encounter offered voters the worst of all worlds: a great deal of indecipherable wonkery and remarkably little clarity about where each would lead the country.

However you analyze it? Well, I don't even have to check the debate transcript to remember a striking use of the word "moral." Let me get the exact quote from the transcript. Jim Lehrer had just asked "what are the differences between the two of you as to how you would go about tackling the deficit problem in this country?" And Mitt Romney said:

Good. I'm glad you raised that, and it's a -- it's a critical issue. I think it's not just an economic issue, I think it's a moral issue. I think it's, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they're going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives. And the amount of debt we're adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral.

But Dionne would like you to think of the debate is just a big indecipherable mush. And then the whole rest of his column is about — can you guess? — Nuns on the Bus! Because who's better than nuns "to remind us that our decisions in November have ethical consequences?" I'd say Mitt Romney was better, in his utterly clear statement quoted above, which is in no way "technocratic mush" or "insufferable wonkery," Mr. Dionne. But... hey! Look! Nuns! Nunnnnzzzz!

"No one pretends that better laws would prevent all tragedies, but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all."

On NPR last evening, the topic was the Aurora movie-theater murders, and the NPR host, Robert Siegel, invited WaPo's E.J. Dionne to comment on "mass shootings, guns and politics." Siegel quoted something Dionne had written, that events like this cause "our whole public reasoning process [to go] haywire." That is, other people go crazy and can't think straight, so let's check out the quality of Dionne's thinking.

What I mean by that is that the NRA and the rest of the gun lobby have such a firm hold on our political system that no one can bring up the notion, which we bring up with every other kind of tragedy, that maybe we can do better. Maybe there are laws we could pass that would prevent something like this.

No one pretends that better laws would prevent all tragedies, but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all. We have the most permissive gun laws pretty much in the industrialized world. And I hope, but I have no confidence, that we won't make the same mistake again.

I'd like to think that one time, we could say: Oh, let's open this up. Let's talk about the assault weapons ban. Let's talk about ways in which we might reduce the chances that someone with mental problems might get a gun. And I'm just worried that we're going to revert right back to our usual sort of giving and saying, well, the gun lobby controls Washington, so we can never do anything about things like this.

Maybe we can do better.... laws can't solve everything... but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all... so... so, what? Since we do sometimes pass laws, we must think that laws can sometimes help when there's a problem. And there's a problem, so... so... what?  Let's open this up. Let's talk about it.  E.J. Dionne is afraid we'll just knee-jerk do nothing, instead of knee-jerk propose gun control... I mean think and think with thoughtful contemplation and talk about and around and through and through and arrive at the solution that immediately popped into E.J. Dionne's mind.

I'm fascinated by this notion that we do sometimes pass laws and therefore that means that we should pass laws. The resistance to passing laws is some nasty dysfunction caused by a nefarious interest group — here, the NRA — but good people want to do something. This do something orientation is characteristic of the modern liberal mind. I heard Dionne saying that on the radio yesterday evening, but it came back to me as I was reading about rabies and marveling at the crazy — desperate — ideas for a cure: "you burn a hair from the dog that bit you and insert the ashes into the wound... [a] maggot from a dead dog's body... a linen cloth soaked with menstrual blood of a female dog... [c]hicken excrement, 'if it is of a red color'... [a]shes from the tail of a shrew-mouse...."

When is it that reasoning goes haywire? After Dionne presented his patchwork of liberal logic, the host called upon David Brooks. (Don't say NPR doesn't balance liberals and conservatives!) He said...

Well, I'm no fan of the NRA, I'm not really an opponent of gun control or an assault weapon ban...

That sounds like a necessary preface for the NPR listeners, but I'm going to give Brooks credit for subtly deactivating the bogeyman Dionne inserted into his call to action, because Brooks continues with:

... but, you know, public policy is based on evidence and data and whether it would work. 

Brooks is displaying the pin with which he is about to puncture the liberal's inflated self-image.

This is one of the most studied things in criminology. And the weight of the evidence is pretty clear that there's no relationship between gun control and violent crime. Areas with higher gun control do not have less violent crime. Over the last few years, the number of new guns entering the country has been about four million a year. 

So you've got to look at evidence, not your instinctive notions about what just might work. Put down that shrew mouse's tail now, E.J.

At the same time, violent crime has plummeted by about 41 percent a year.

Brooks's "evidence and data" dump seemed really powerful until he got to that implausible percentage. What is it, 41% a decade, I don't know what to make of this point-counterpoint style radio presentation. There are no links to click on, so I'm just forced to be suspicious of Brooks's I've-got-the-facts posturing. [ADDED: Meade suggests that the percentage of decline has increased by 41% a year.]

Brooks concludes:

So I'm not necessarily opposed to the policy, I don't really think it would matter in violent crime generally, and I really don't think it would matter too much in the case of lunatics or whatever who are committed to this sort of pre-planned massacre.

So Brooks retreats to reassuring the NPR audience: He's not opposed to gun control, he just doesn't think it would work.  He began with the assertion that "public policy is based on evidence and data and whether it would work," explained why he didn't think it would work, but nevertheless won't oppose the policy. Brooks isn't a conservative by my standard. I think to be conservative, you should have the instinctive orientation: do nothing. You have to convince us what you've got there is better than nothing. And what have you got there? A bucket of red chickenshit? A dog's tampon?!!

Now, how will the very very thoughtful E.J. Dionne deal with Brooks's argument from evidence! and data! He's got to demonstrate that he's one of the smart people, the non-haywire people, your betters who proposed open and thorough debate about solutions to problems (after the bogeymen are kicked out of the room):

DIONNE: If we had better background checks, yes we'll miss some lunatics, but with real background checks, we could reduce the number of lunatics who get guns. And there's also a spillover. If you have permissive laws in one state - as Mayor Bloomberg has shown, Mayor Bloomberg of New York, who has proposed a lot of very practical remedies, not sweeping remedies but practical remedies - he's shown how loose laws in one state can send guns into a state that may have stricter laws. So I don't think we should throw up our hands and say it's impossible...

BROOKS: Yeah, one area of agreement, I do think people who have history of mental health issues, and this came up with the Loughner case, that...

SIEGEL: The shooting of Gabby Giffords...

BROOKS: That should show up when you're trying to buy a gun. And legally, that's supposed to happen, but it doesn't always happen.

SIEGEL: We don't know all that much about the suspect. So far no indication that any such record would have shown up. We just don't know yet.

DIONNE: Right, and my argument is not that you can prevent every one of these things, but when I heard this this morning, like everybody else, I was, you know, sick about it. And I just thought that every time this happens, people say, well, there are very particular factors in this case, so let's not talk about gun control, gun control wouldn't solve it. Well, maybe it would, or maybe it wouldn't in a particular case, but it would prevent some of these things in the future.

And there you have it, the liberal mind at work, in real time.

The Top 10 Things That Just Had to Wait Until the Last 24-Hours Before the Obamacare Decision.

No, no, no. It's not just filler. It's the last amazing thing that was finally realized, on the Eve of Destruction — or Non-Destruction or Semi-Destruction — and needed to be published right now — quick! link! read! — for the edification of the American people.

1. Scalia is a rascal. I insist that he resign! Pronto! He's been annoying Elmer J. Dionne Jr. for years. Oooh, I'm just so mad. How dare he!

2. The NYT still has Linda Greenhouse available to wheel out for special occasions. Today will probably be a "rare day" of "theater." There might be "tears of relief" or "of regret." But "whose"?

3. President Obama will need to respond to the ruling. Will it be with tears? Of relief? Or of regret? He's got 3 speeches ready. Tears of relief... tears of regret... and laughing through tears.

4. "In the end, you have to make a prediction and take responsibility for it. I believe the mandate will not be invalidated tomorrow." As The Beatles sang: And in the end, the predictions you make are equal to the responsibility you take. Aaaah aaaah....

5. "We don't know what will happen this morning. But no matter what, today is an important day to have Barack Obama's back." Email just now from the Obama campaign. Because everything is an occasion for giving money to Obama. Especially this. Transmogrify your tears of regret — or relief! — into cash for Obama.

6. A roundup — like mine right here — of all the predictable bullshit: "Obamacarians' Pregame Rationalizations: Doesn't Matter; Good for O; All Scalia's Fault, and More!"

7. Instapundit provides a roundup of last-minute links including the roundup of links that I just linked to at #6 (which I took, not from Instapundit, but from that one guy in the comments here).

8. Randy Barnett thanks everyone — whatever happens — he's happy to have at least been taken seriously. Especially by Orin Kerr, who really annoyed him.

9. What do I actually think? Should I after all this time reveal whether I think the individual mandate is constitutional? We're about to hear what the Supreme Court thinks, so what does it matter what I think? It's emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. That's what I think. Now, if they go 5-4, liberal-conservative or conservative liberal, The Law will not have the awesome solidity We, The Children want it to have, but I'm not going to cry about it. I'm old. And I've been watching the Supreme Court for a long, long time. It's 9 human beings — could be 19, but it's 9 — trying to do something serious and complicated.

10. Oh! It's so exciting! Let's watch it unroll at the SCOTUSblog live blog, where the venerable  Lyle Denniston is saying "Good morning from a slightly zoo-like, but still surprisingly civil, press room at the Court."

Gov. Corbett suggests that Second Mile groomed children for Jerry Sandusky.

Chris Wallace, on Fox News Sunday, did an excellent job of drawing out Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, who, bound by ethical restraints, was trying to be circumspect. Here's a key moment in the colloquy. Wallace has just asked Corbett about the Second Mile charity "that Jerry Sandusky helped form for disadvantaged kids that quite frankly gave him access to these young boys."

WALLACE: Should actions be taken against the charity or the CEO who allegedly was told about some of these abuses as far back 2002?

CORBETT: ... I'm going to be very careful here....  If you talk to people who have worked with Second Mile, it has done great work.... But in this case, as the allegations indicate, some of it was used to pick on some children and the term was used, grooming, groom those children for Mr. Sandusky's purposes.

Did Corbett just reveal that there were other individuals within Second Mile who functioned in grooming children for Sandusky?

Corbett also appeared on "Meet the Press" this morning, and I thought David Gregory was much less successful in breaking through Corbett's controlled facade. It was interesting to compare these 2 interviews. Gregory expressed outrage on behalf of the children. ("You have to understand people, those of us who are parents, including myself, I have a nine-year-old boy at home....") Wallace, by contrast, came off at first — to my ear — as a Paterno fanboy. ("But, Governor, let me point out -- these are just allegations. Joe Paterno, who had spent half a century at Penn State, did not have an opportunity to offer a full defense. Why not let him finish his season and retire as he offered to do?")

I don't know whether Gregory and Wallace were showing how they really felt or using a strategy to lure Corbett into making revelations, but the Wallace interview was more revealing.

ADDED: Wallace also interviewed Franco Harris, a football star who came out of Penn State, and he seemed very much in service of the pro-Paterno attitude that I thought I detected in Wallace. It got a little odd when Wallace grilled Harris about the distinction — a vitally important distinction — between criminal law and morality.

"Are we now going to witness a subtle return of Jim Crow voting laws?"

WaPo's E.J. Dionne Jr. is getting histrionic about voter ID laws in his piece called "How States Are Rigging the 2012 Election." Making it as racial as he possibly can...

In the bad old days, poll taxes, now outlawed by the 24th Amendment, were used to keep African Americans from voting.... This is the civil rights issue of our moment.

... he himself propagates racism in the form of an assumption that black people have trouble performing the simplest task. 

What the Democrats really need right now...

... George Bush.

His presidency was a tonic for Democrats and led to a blossoming of political creativity on the center-left not seen since the 1930s. No tactic, no program, no leader ever did more to catalyze the party than the rage Bush inspired.

Without him, they are the rage-inspiration. Power hurts. And no one sympathizes. So lonely!

"Republicans would be foolish to fight the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court..."

"...because she is the most conservative choice that President Obama could have made," says E.J. Dionne, whose assertion shouldn't be trusted.

IN THE COMMENTS: traditionalguy said:

Dionne's advice is letting the cat out of the bag. The Progressive wing will gladly push for withdrawal of her nomination if the repubbies continue to posture and vent over a few imperfections in Sonia's speeches. Then Obama could really un-load on them with his next choice. The nomination of Sotomayor needs another "just like Bush" tag.

Ah, yes. Just like Bush did with Harriet Miers and then Samual Alito. As kentuckyliz suggested, we ought to call Sotomayor Sorta-Miers.

"Democrats claim to be more community-minded but act like radical individualists..."

E.J. Dionne diagnoses Democrats. They can't get organized, unlike "Republicans, who defend individualism in theory, [but] act like communitarians where their party is concerned." He calls this "odd" but does he even attempt to explain why this should be? He calls it a "self-image problem," without saying what the wrong image is, and he blames them for only caring about isolated issues and not the party itself, which to me just suggests that people who vote Democratic aren't really Democrats at all but just people who get the feeling they're voting in a referendum on some highlighted issue. He cites the Democrats' dependence on "a handful of wealthy donors," which keeps them from needing to develop the support of a broad group of party loyalists. Really, talk about organization! Is this column organized at all? He even drags in Karl Rove and says he's "spooked Democrats about themselves."

And let me just mock the title of the column: "A Gap In Their Armor." First, if an old cliché contains a word that you think you can't use anymore, why not just retire the cliché? It is a cliché anyway! Why are you bending over backwards to preserve a cliché? And why wave it in our faces that you think we're too dumb to understand language? Second, the Democrats have armor?

One more thing, do Democrats really want to disown individualism? Openly?