"She was spotted carrying books including The Iliad, a classic saga of male rage and refusal to accept defeat, on the campaign trail."

From "Who Is JD Vance’s Wife? Second Lady Usha Vance, Former Democrat, Steals the Inauguration Spotlight/Just after his swearing-in, Donald Trump joked that he 'would have chosen' Usha as VP—'the only one smarter than' JD Vance" (Vanity Fair).

A classic saga of male rage and refusal to accept defeat — that amused me. The boundaries of the manosphere are vast.

They say don't judge a book by its cover, but apparently it's fine to judge a person by the visible cover of any book they happen to be carrying. Remember back in May 2008 when candidate Barack Obama was photographed carrying "The Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria? The NYT had just reviewed the book and said:

Zakaria’s is not another exercise in declinism. His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the "rise of the rest.”...  The real problem, Zakaria argues, is the rise of China.... Authoritarian modernization just hums along. The Party’s message reads "Enrich yourselves, but leave the driving to us,” and most of 1.3 billion Chinese seem happy to comply — and to consume. With power safely lodged in the Politburo, China does not conform to the historical pattern of "first rich, then rowdy,” which led to Tokyo’s and Berlin’s imperialist careers.....

How did we read his reading? 

"The Chinese [hypersonic missile] test has nothing in common with Sputnik, and claiming that it does feeds a dangerous paranoia growing in Washington these days...."

"Coming in the wake of multiple powerful Soviet nuclear tests, Sputnik signaled that in the next frontier, space, the Soviets were ahead.... Hypersonic missiles, on the other hand, are old news. A hypersonic missile travels at five times the speed of sound or faster. Starting in 1959, the United States and the Soviet Union have deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles that travel more than 20 times the speed of sound.... For the Pentagon, it’s an opportunity: Raising fears about a huge and tech-savvy enemy is a surefire way to guarantee vast new budgets that can be spent countering the enemy’s every move, real or imagined...."

From "It’s not a ‘Sputnik moment’ and we should not feed Cold War paranoia" by Fareed Zakaria  (WaPo).

"Too Many of Trump’s Liberal Critics Are Praising His Strike on Syria."

According to Joan Walsh at The Nation.

She's fareeking out.

On CNN’s New Day Thursday, global analyst Fareed Zakaria declared, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States” last night. To his credit, Zakaria has previously called Trump a “bullshit artist” and said, “He has gotten the presidency by bullshitting.” But Zakaria apparently thinks firing missiles make one presidential. On MSNBC, Nicholas Kristof, an aggressive Trump critic, said he “did the right thing” by bombing Syria. Anchor Brian Williams, whose 11th Hour has regularly been critical of Trump, repeatedly called the missiles “beautiful,” to a noisy backlash on Twitter....

Any liberal who praises these missile strikes has to account for what comes next....

It was disappointing to see Hillary Clinton say Wednesday afternoon that she thought air strikes on Syrian airfields were an appropriate response to the chemical-weapon attack. She was always more hawkish than I wished, and that shows it. But it’s wrong to insist she’d have done the “same thing” as Trump. Clinton’s secretary of state wouldn’t likely have told Assad we were no longer concerned about removing him; if she did fire missiles at Syrian airfields, she would have done so with a clearer notion of what comes next. Trump appears to be clueless....

Yes, in the imaginary world where Hillary is President, she does the same thing as Trump, but differently. She's so disappointing, and yet so superior to Trump.

It's so difficult for Joan. She doesn't know which way to tsk.

Talking bad about talking bad: Liz Mair calls Donald Trump "a loudmouth dick" on Anderson Cooper's CNN show.

Now, why do I remember the name Liz Mair? Oh!

Mair was previously known for resigning from Scott Walker’s unsuccessful presidential campaign after just one day on the job.

I see I already have a tag for her. Old posts:

1. March 17, 2015: "Scott Walker hires a strategist who supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights and tweets with obscenities." Okay, so then, it's her branding. Back then, she'd tweeted things like "... Walker doesn't use notes, teleprompters, etc. He actually knows what the fuck he's saying." And, about Hillary: "The fucking press conference today and her whole handling of this email stuff? Are you paying any attention?" (Wow, Hillary actually did a press conference back then. These days she won't even give us a fucking press conference.)

2. Another post on the same day is mostly one Liz Mair tweet: "Hillary may have a higher IQ than Bill and objectively be smarter, but man when it comes to optics and basic politics, she's pretty dumb." That's absolutely apt. I rather like Mair. She's got a great look too, don't you think? So she said "dick" on CNN? Fareed Zakaria just said "Bullshit." He was talking about Trump too. It almost seems that Trump is causing his antagonists to talk more roughly than he does. He could do an ad collecting all that crap they've said trying to make what he's said seem as bad as possible. And if you ever get back to his original quotes, they're going to seem tame. It's a world turned upside down.

3. Only one more, March 18, 2015, marking Liz Mair's ouster from the Walker campaign:

"The tone of some of my tweets concerning Iowa was at odds with that which Gov. Walker has always encouraged in political discourse."

Said Liz Mair, resigning from Scott Walker’s political operation. We were just enjoying her work here. [Link goes to the first March 17th post.]

What did she tweet about Iowa? "Morons across America are astounded to learn that people from *IOWA* grow up rather government-dependent" and "The sooner we remove Iowa’s frontrunning status, the better off American politics and policy will be."

If Walker had only known that talking tough was going to be the thing this year. Ah, well. I hope Mair's play for attention works out for her. I have much less problem with calling Trump (or anyone) a "dick" than with exclaiming "Oh, good God" which Megyn Kelly just did (on Fox News, talking about Trump):

On the occasion of the accusations of plagiarism against Rand Paul...

Let's go to the blog archives. It's nice to have a "plagiarism" tag that lets me pull out so many old conversations about plagiarism that were prompted by various things over the years. (The links are on the numbers.)

1. "The internet is changing the way students think about plagiarism... or — I would add — they way they lie about it."

2. "Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength; if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information."

3. "The real fault is not making it a point always to write sharp, distinctive prose. Prose like the stuff [Maureen] Dowd lifted called out for rewriting. She might not have known to think I can't use that because I didn't write it. But she should at least have thought I can't use that because it's dull."

4. "'[T]here is a big difference between being a plagiarist — at bottom, lazy or sloppy — and being a fabulist.' It's tougher to make things up than to copy, and yet it's Lehrer who's screwed himself more deeply."

5. "'To coin a phrase, in the spirit of the vice president-elect, you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need,' Alito said, an imperfect rendering of a Rolling Stones lyric. Then, he added, 'Did someone say that before?'"

6."My dear, it's called an allusion. The error isn't stealing, it's assuming people get it."

7. "Jerry Seinfeld's late-night rant about his wife's cookbook rival was no joke to the author's family."

8. "When you are discovered, I want you to claim — really sincerely — that you actually mistakenly believed that you remembered the incident as if it had happened to you. You can be all: 'I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me.'"

9. "How is it possible for someone in [Fareed Zakaria's] position to make a mistake of that kind? The risk far outweighs any convenience in copying material like this. It can't be deliberate."

10. "Once you’ve been busted for making stuff up, you need to be sure that what you publish is reasonably accurate... though I suppose that passing on other people’s fabrications is arguably a modest improvement over creating his own."

11. "Should Coldplay be able to force Hoepfner to take down his accusatory video and apologize, or do we think it's a nice resolution of the controversy for Coldplay to escape unsued and for Hoepfner to have his viral video to leverage his band to whatever degree of fame it can get out of this amusing little artistic squabble?"

12. "'I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs.... It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.' Well, theft itself is a traditional 'process,' but it would still piss me off if someone robbed me, either with a six gun or a fountain pen. At least Dylan called an album 'Love and Theft,' and he's repeatedly presented himself as a thief in various lyrics. To have Bob Dylan steal some of your phrases and the Dylan fanatics ferret out the connection he declined to tell us about is to get publicity you never would have gotten otherwise."

13. "When you accuse a 6-year-old of plagiarism in an art contest, you'd better be ready to make a decision to disqualify her and stick to it. You've besmirched her, and you can't unbesmirch her. Oh, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service! You idiots!"

14. Rush Limbaugh appropriates my question, without attribution.

15. "And if our good opinion of him is based mainly on his speeches, then we have reason to examine why we're supporting him. But politics is full of stock phrases, contagious memes, and brainstormed messages."

16. "Obama defends his use of a couple lines given him by his associate Duval Patrick. 'This is where we start getting into the silly season in politics.'"

17. Ch-ch-ch-changes:

"Romney’s tongue-tied eloquence."

Fareed Zakaria is back, back to kick Romney in the mouth, back from exile, presumably now purged of his plagiarism sins. Let's see how eloquent his eloquence critique is:

As President Obama has surged in the polls, Republicans have been quick to identify the problem: Mitt Romney. Peggy Noonan eloquently voiced what many conservatives believe when she said that Romney’s campaign has been a “rolling calamity.” Others have been equally critical of his candidacy. And yet, shouldn’t it puzzle us that Romney is so “incompetent” (also from Noonan), given his deserved reputation for, well, competence? He founded one of this country’s most successful financial firms, turned around the flailing Salt Lake City Olympics and was a successful governor. How did he get so clumsy so fast?

Rasmussen has the candidates locked in a tie. They're 46/46 again today, same as yesterday, and pretty much the same for the past week.  But if you want to find Obama surging, there are polls to satisfy your urge for the surge. These polls are grotesquely oversampling Democrats, to the point where the joke has become obvious, but maybe you can find your pleasure there, if you're also the sort that listens to Peggy Noonan as the exemplar of what conservatives are thinking. She eloquently voiced the opinion you want to hear: Romney’s campaign has been a “rolling calamity.”

If you bother to keep reading — and it's likely both Obama fans and Romney fans stopped at "rolling calamity," either pleased or disgusted — you'll see many paragraphs asserting that Romney doesn't want to talk about taxes and illegal immigration. He's "tongue-tied" because there's "a new kind of political correctness" in the GOP:

They cannot speak certain words (taxes) or speculate about certain ideas (immigration amnesty) because these are forbidden.... As a result, he has twisted himself into a pretzel, speaking vacuously... That’s a straitjacket that even Peggy Noonan’s eloquence cannot get him out of.

I'm picturing Peggy using her tongue to untwist a pretzel. Or is she unbuckling a straitjacket? Marvelous writing, Fareed. Did you make that all up yourself?

"[T]here is a big difference between being a plagiarist — at bottom, lazy or sloppy — and being a fabulist."

David Carr on Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer.

It's tougher to make things up than to copy, and yet it's Lehrer who's screwed himself more deeply.

Fareed Zakaria plagiarism screwup.

How is it possible for someone in his position to make a mistake of that kind?

The risk far outweighs any convenience in copying material like this. It can't be deliberate. It's easy these days to copy something for your notes and later simply mistake it for something you've written. It's also possible that someone else, someone untrustworthy, ghostwrites for him. Or perhaps there are talking points floating around in email and both LePore and Zakaria cut and pasted the same thing.

"Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there forever."

"There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure."

So wrote the historian Arnold Toynbee, describing his childhood impression — he was 8 in 1897 — of the Diamond Jubilee — the celebration of 60 years of Queen Victoria's monarchy.

Quoted by Fareed Zakaria in "The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest" — a very interesting article that is (qualifiedly) optimistic about America — even though we know what happened to Britain.

The problem today is that the U.S. political system seems to have lost its ability to fix its ailments. The economic problems in the United States today are real, but by and large they are not the product of deep inefficiencies within the U.S. economy, nor are they reflections of cultural decay. They are the consequences of specific government policies. Different policies could quickly and relatively easily move the United States onto a far more stable footing. A set of sensible reforms could be enacted tomorrow to trim wasteful spending and subsidies, increase savings, expand training in science and technology, secure pensions, create a workable immigration process, and achieve significant efficiencies in the use of energy. Policy experts do not have wide disagreements on most of these issues, and none of the proposed measures would require sacrifices reminiscent of wartime hardship, only modest adjustments of existing arrangements. And yet, because of politics, they appear impossible. The U.S. political system has lost the ability to accept some pain now for great gain later on.

As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak economy or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. What was an antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with (now about 225 years old) has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia -- politics as theater -- and very little substance, compromise, or action. A can-do country is now saddled with a do-nothing political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving.

Ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia...

Hmmm.... must move on to the next post.