"The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy."

"The Iranians are clearly negotiating skilfully or very skilfully not negotiating... a whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership."

Said Chancellor Friedrich Merz, quoted in "Is German troop withdrawal start of US uncoupling from Europe? After President Trump took offence at Friedrich Merz’s Iran war comments, Donald Tusk warned that infighting was a bigger threat to Nato than its external enemies" (London Times).

Not a typo for "Donald Trump." There really is a Donald Tusk in this story. He's the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. His mild-mannered contribution to the debate is: "The greatest threat to the transatlantic community is not its external enemies, but the ongoing disintegration of our alliance."

Last paragraph of the article:

"The backlash against the left was a key part of the 1968 presidential race. Richard Nixon famously ran a campaign on 'law and order'..."

"One commercial featured scenes of protest, as Nixon argued that 'in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies a resort to violence.' Alabama Gov. George Wallace was a lot more direct that year in his third-party bid. While racism was at the heart of his message, he also denounced student protesters as 'silver spoon brats' who advocated 'treason' and said of protesters, 'Some of ’em lie down in front of my automobile, it’ll be the last thing they’ll ever wanna lie down in front of.' The scenes of violence in Chicago outside the Democrats’ 1968 presidential convention, meanwhile, further contributed to the notion that left-wing lawlessness had gotten out of control. It was a nightmare event for Hubert Humphrey’s beleaguered presidential campaign, one where the public overwhelmingly sided with the Chicago police, not the demonstrators. (And, of course, guess where Democrats are holding their 2024 convention: Chicago.)... [I]n November of 1968, Nixon and Wallace combined for 57 percent of the vote...."

Writes Jeff Greenfield, in "Don’t Forget the Backlash to the ’60s/Today’s campus chaos carries a grim warning for Biden" (Politico).

Ron Johnson said that word that can get you in so much trouble: "purity."

I'm reading a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article that begins: "U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has one main concern when it comes to the merger of the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf series: maintaining what he calls the 'purity' of golf."

What? Is that racist?! That's the static I had in my head as I read through many paragraphs before I could see the actual quote that contained that word, "purity":

"The race is not yet won.... we have not yet reached that blessed destination, where we are judged by the content of our character."

"[John Lewis] knew, from his own life, that progress is fragile, that we have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history, of our own history, with their whirlpools of violence, and hatred, and despair that can always rise again. Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witnessed with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks black Americans. George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the run up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail in ballots so people don’t get sick. Now, I know this is a celebration of John’s life. There are some who might say we shouldn’t dwell on such things. But that’s why I’m talking about it. John Lewis devoted his time on this earth fighting the very attacks on democracy and what’s best in America that we’re seeing circulate right now. He knew that every single one of us has a God given power and that the fate of this democracy depends how we use it. That democracy isn’t automatic, it has to be nurtured, it has to be tended to, we have to work at it. It’s hard...."

Said Barack Obama, from "Barack Obama Eulogy Speech Transcript at John Lewis Funeral July 30."

NYT creates a video montage to demonstrate that Trump talks like George Wallace.

Check it out:



The main thing seems to be the phrase "law and order." It would help the anti-Trump cause quite a bit if people would believe the phrase "law and order" signals white supremacy. It's easy to do the counter-spin however: It is racist to hear "law and order" as white supremacy.

Accompanying that video montage is this article — "A Half-Century After Wallace, Trump Echoes the Politics of Division/George Wallace’s speeches and interviews from his 1968 campaign feature language and appeals that sound familiar again as the 'law and order' president sends federal forces into the streets" by Peter Baker:

The president rails about the “anarchists and agitators” and accuses “the radical left” of running rampant through the streets of cities run by “liberal Democrats.”...

Like Mr. Trump, Wallace denounced “anarchists” in the streets, condemned liberals for trying to squelch the free speech of those they disagreed with and ran against the elites of Washington and the mainstream media....

Like the pugnacious Mr. Trump, Wallace enjoyed a fight. Indeed, he relished taking on protesters who showed up at his events. “You know what you are?” he called out to one. “You’re a little punk, that’s all you are. You haven’t got any guts.”

MEANWHILE: At the New Yorker, they're talking about Joe McCarthy because — don't you know?! — Trump is like Joe McCarthy. The article, by Louis Menand, is "Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods/McCarthy never sent a single 'subversive' to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures." Excerpt:

Larry Tye’s purpose in his new biography, “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy.... He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was.... To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong.... He was... a conspiracy-monger.... What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy.... McCarthy lied all the time.... He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.

Trump is like McCarthy, who loved chaos, and Trump is like George Wallace, who loved law and order. Oh, that Trump — he's everything you need him to be.

"That is the lesson we're inscribing into American history as we create The Story of The First Woman President. "

So I wrote in an afterthought to the previous post. I'm restating it at the top of a new post because I'm reminded of something I've been wanting to say for a while.

I find myself utterly un-thrilled at the prospect of the First Woman President that is Hillary Clinton. Her team presents her as if she's the fulfillment of a lifetime of hoping and dreaming — an especially deep and lovely feeling for older women (like me), whose life stretches back before the successes of the women's movement, who grew up in an America where young girls were not yet encouraged to go for great power and wealth... other than through marriage to a great man or a good enough man that she could make great.

I'm not surprised that a woman with Hillary's talents chose to be the woman behind a man and to support and assist him as he attained greatness. That was the convention, and many women did it. It's what I thought I was modern to reject, circa 1970, when I came of age. The woman could make it on her own, in her own right, in a way that was new and different from the age-old patriarchy.

I remember Ella Grasso:

Former Gov. Ella T. Grasso of Connecticut, the first woman to be elected governor in her own right in the United States, died here today. She was 61 years old....

That's the NYT obituary, dated February 6, 1981. You see the key words: in her own right.

When she was elected Governor in 1974, Mrs. Grasso drew national attention as being in the vanguard of a new era in politics.... [S]he was the first woman to be elected governor who was not the wife or widow of a governor....

There were women governors before Ella Grasso. There was Nellie Tayloe Ross, elected governor of Wyoming, in 1924, after her husband the governor died. And there was Miriam A. Ferguson — Ma Ferguson:

After her husband's impeachment and conviction, Ma Ferguson sought the Democratic nomination for governor, and was elected to office. She told voters that she would follow the advice of her husband and Texas thus would get "two governors for the price of one." A common campaign slogan was, "Me for Ma, and I Ain't Got a Durned Thing Against Pa." Against the odds, Ma Ferguson was elected governor, becoming the first female chief executive of Texas. 

That happened in 1924.

But the one we really thought about, back in the 1970s — when it felt so important to use that phrase "in her own right" for Ella Grasso — was Lurleen Wallace:

Lurleen Brigham Wallace (September 19, 1926 – May 7, 1968)... was the 46th governor of Alabama from 1967 until her death in 1968. She was the first wife of Alabama Governor George Corley Wallace....

The 1966 [gubernatorial election] results showed that George Wallace, strengthened at the time by his opposition to desegregation, could have easily won a second term had he been constitutionally eligible to do so. In Alabama (as in most southern states at the time), governors were not allowed to serve two consecutive terms...

When Wallace failed in 1965 to get the constitutional ban on his candidacy lifted, he devised a plan in which Mrs. Wallace would run for governor while he continued to exercise the authority of the office behind the scenes....

Oh, wait, that's the wrong picture.

So you see what I'm saying. Bill Clinton is term-limited out of the presidency. His wife, a woman who rose to prominence behind him — who even said "two for the price of one" like Ma Ferguson — now runs to reclaim the office for the twosome.

Some day, some other woman whose husband did not build the platform for her will get elected President and we will be able to say about her: She is the first woman to be elected President in her own right.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, the politics of crime turned distinctly punitive and remained racially coded."

"Hillary Clinton’s reference to 'superpredators' when talking about crime (which has come up repeatedly in the current campaign) was made in 1996. On the campaign trail and in office, Bill Clinton worked to shore up his 'tough on crime' credentials. As the legal historian Ian Haney Lopez writes, 'Clinton flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally impaired black individual, Ricky Ray Rector,' and he advocated for a number of federal measures, including [the] federal 'three strikes' law."

From "From Wallace To Trump, The Evolution of 'Law And Order,'" by Marquette polisci prof Julia Azari at FiveThirtyEight.

That reminds me: At Sunday's Democratic candidates town hall, Hillary Clinton got a question from a black man named Ricky Jackson, who'd spent 39 years in prison, some of it on death row (and won freedom through the work of the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati).

Ricky Jackson did not bring up the horrible Ricky Ray Rector case and the racial politics of 1996. I don't know who screened or wrote his question for him, but it was a tame invitation to justify the death penalty in light of the cases of innocence we've seen. The only racial element to Jackson's question was the visual, Jackson himself. And Hillary had a nice opportunity to express empathy for him and balance that with a demand for excellent judicial process and some targeted outrage over real crime (without using the word "superpredators").

What she did was take a hard shot at state courts: "[T'he states have proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials that give any defendant all of the rights a defendant should have, all of the support that the defendant's lawyer should have."

State courts are incapable of giving any defendant a fair trial? Not only are all state court trials unfair, it's impossible for state courts to give a fair trial! That's a ridiculous statement. Presumably, she'll walk it back if confronted, but clearly, she had no compunction about stirring up anxiety that the courts that hear the vast majority of criminal trials are hopelessly unfair. That doesn't relate only to the death penalty, but to everyone who's convicted, now and in the future, in state courts.

But federal courts — federal courts are different. She doesn't discourse on the reason. (I'm familiar with it. It's a topic I teach. But it doesn't go so far as to portray the state courts as always and forever unfair.) She supports the death penalty — though she's still "struggling" with it — for "terrorist activities" — but maybe that's a "distinction that is hard to support." Note the weak hedging, even after the intemperate trashing of state courts.

Here's a Salon article from last July, "Bill Clinton’s gutsy apologies: Now he owes one to Ricky Ray Rector," quoting Margaret Kimberley at The Black Commentator:

[R]icky Ray Rector became world famous upon his execution in 1992. Then Governor Bill Clinton left the campaign trail in January of that year to sign the warrant for Rector’s execution. Rector’s mental capacity was such that when taken from his cell as a “dead man walking” he told a guard to save his pie. He thought he would return to finish his dessert.

I try to remember this story when I am told that all Black people love Bill Clinton or that he should be considered the first Black president. Clinton wasn’t Black when Rector needed him. He was just another politician who didn’t want to be labeled soft on crime.

AND: By the way, what's the historical origin — in American politics — of the stock argument that a candidate is "soft on crime"? Was it George Wallace in 1968?

WaPo columnist says it's "trivial to compare" Roy Moore's trying to stop gay marriage in Alabama to George Wallace's blocking the door to racial integration at the University of Alabama.

But which way is it trivial? I couldn't believe the columnist Philip Bump could possibly say that what Moore is doing is a much bigger deal than what Wallace did, to the point where anyone just saying they are at the same level was being trivial, and Bump's convoluted verbosity makes it especially hard to see what one finds hard to believe. But I slogged through it, and I survived to report that Bump actually thinks Moore's resistance to the federal court requirement that Alabama immediately issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples is a far bigger deal that Wallace's resistance to integration.

Bump's hard-to-understand argument has to do with Obama's reelection in 2012 and the Republican victories in 2014.

Moore's move is very much in the "states' rights" vein of the 1960s, a 10th Amendment argument that's seen a renaissance in the era of a president who is deeply unpopular with Republicans. But it's hard to point to Moore's action as being simply Wallace redux when you consider the national picture. Boehner and McConnell are necessarily arguing for the primacy of local priorities, representing states and districts, not the whole country. In those places, Obama is so unpopular among their constituents that 66 percent of Republicans opposed working with Obama in the wake of last year's election; the response to his actions was similarly predictable. For the next two years, we have a Congress that was elected by Americans to be Republican and a president that was elected to be Democratic. Moore's battle is with the Supreme Court, hardly an arm of the Obama administration, but the political fervor he's likely to leverage echoes the strains in national politics.

Sorry to call attention to something so badly slapped together and so blatantly partisan in the bemoaning of partisanship, but I think the utter badness of the column deserves some attention.

I was surprised to see that Roy Moore was back on the Alabama Supreme Court. He got kicked out back in '03 over that 10 Commandments business. I hadn't noticed — or I'd forgotten — that he got elected to the position again in 2012. If it weren't for the reappearance of Moore, I would have passed by this topic — the same-sex topic of the week. There are so many of these states, falling one by one, to the seemingly inevitable consequences of earlier constitutional law decisions. I see the headlines, but, even though I've been blogging profusely about same-sex marriage since early 2004, I don't feel the call to blog every new state that finds itself subject to a judicial ruling. But Moore kicked up some resistance, and he's getting attention in the style that made him famous back in the simpler times, when passions swirled rather innocuously around 10 Commandments monuments, which no one gets heated up about anymore.

And I know this will bother some of you, but I think it's pretty obvious that in 10 years, we'll look back on the swirl of passion over same-sex marriage as something even more of the past than getting heated up over 10 Commandments monuments. People will be living their private lives, as they always have, and some of the people will be gay, as they always have been, and life will go on.

Meanwhile, "Clarence Thomas faults Supreme Court for refusing to block gay marriage in Alabama."

“This acquiescence may well be seen as a signal of the Court’s intended resolution of that question,” Thomas wrote in a dissent from the court’s order refusing to stay the weddings. “This is not the proper way to discharge our . . . responsibilities.”

He was joined by one other justice, Antonin Scalia, in saying the court should agree to postpone the weddings until the justices hear the same-sex-marriage case in April and rule by the end of their term in June.

Do we need any more "signal[s] of the Court’s intended resolution of that question"?

Richard Posner gives 5 reasons to keep the Electoral College.

In case you want to contemplate the unachievable goal of getting rid of it or you just want to learn to love what you can't avoid.

After the 2000 election, I read 3 books, published in 1971/1972, dealing with the inquiry into the Electoral College that grew out of the very close 1960 election. The great constitutional law scholar Alexander Bickel wrote one of the books, "Déjà vu: Reform and Continuity; The Electoral College, the Convention, and the Party System." Here's the PDF of the article I wrote about it.

Posner doesn't mention one benefit to the Electoral College that was considered very important back in the 1960s: the perpetuation of the 2-party system. From my article:

Although the electoral college does not eliminate third parties, it suppresses them. Only the geographically concentrated third party can gain electoral votes. If third parties have a role to play, one should argue that it is the third party that transcends state borders that is more likely to infuse the political debate with worthy new ideas; better a Henry Wallace than a George Wallace. Despite the disturbing ability of a third party candidate like George Wallace to make headway in the electoral college system by appealing to regional prejudice, that candidate did not succeed. The threat he posed within the electoral college system was overshadowed, at least for some observers, by the potential under the direct vote system for multiple candidates to jockey for position in a runoff or to seek to provoke a runoff and then bargain with candidates who might need to make deals or concessions to win in the runoff. Withdrawing the need to win a plurality in a state to acquire votes would energize third parties who tapped national popular issues. More candidates would enter the field, creating a greater likelihood of a runoff election and lowering the percentage necessary to qualify for the runoff. What if moderate candidates cancelled each other out, resulting in a runoff between two ideologues or extremists? What would stop major party candidates who failed to win their party's nomination from routinely joining the race? Instead of opening the democratic process to greater participation, one might end up with a small crowd of “demagogues, quick-cure medicine men, and ... fascists of left and right” who would collude among themselves.

The perceived need to preserve the 2-party system led the ABA to identify 6 other reasons why it would continue without the Electoral College:

... (1) the tendency of an existing form to persist; (2) the use of plurality votes to determine the winners of single member districts; (3) public consensus; (4) a supposed American cultural homogeneity; (5) political maturity; and (6) the natural tendency toward dualism. 

Yeah, I know: what?! But that's what they said. You may wonder what's so damned good about the 2-party system. But a key point was: You can't amend the Constitution without the votes of the present members of Congress and the state legislatures, and these folks are all there as a consequence of the 2-party system. The argument they made out loud was that the 2-party system produced stability and moderation.

"Burris will not be allowed on the Senate floor, according to this aide and a Senate Democratic leadership aide."

"The aide familiar with Senate Democratic leaders' plans said if Burris tries to enter the Senate chamber, the Senate doorkeeper will stop Burris. If Burris were to persist, either trying to force his way onto the Senate floor or refusing to leave and causing a scene, U.S. Capitol Police would stop him, said the aide. 'They (police) probably won't arrest him" but they would call the sergeant-at-arms,' the aide said."

So at at time when there isn't a single black person in the U.S. Senate, a black man arrives at the doorway and means to go forward to take what he believes is his rightful seat...



Great imagery, Democrats!