"Once M.I.T. starts choosing speakers based on their public stances, it becomes responsible for every stance of every speaker it does invite. Isn’t that a bigger risk for M.I.T. than a stance-neutral policy?"

A tersely brilliant question framed by Ilya Shlyakhter, published in "Letters: Canceled by M.I.T.: The Professor’s Talk" (NYT).

It could become impossible to invite anyone anywhere, because something could turn up post-invitation and you'd need to pull off the awkward, conspicuous act of revoking the invitation. It could become impossible to accept an invitation, because you're asking for anyone to search through whatever there might be out there that could be used against you, throwing your life into total disarray.

ADDED: I'm searching the NYT and finding a lot of letters to the editor from Ilya Shlyakhter. I'll highlight a few:

"In Rodham, Bill Clinton marries another, more conventionally feminine woman and becomes governor of Arkansas."

"When a cabaret singer... exposes the longtime affair she’s had with him, Clinton and his wife agree to an interview on 60 Minutes. In our world, Hillary’s forceful participation in that interview saved Bill’s career; in Sittenfeld’s novel, his girlier wife crumbles on the air, and so do his political prospects. Sittenfeld’s Bill Clinton decamps to Silicon Valley, where he becomes a tech mogul, the glad-handing face of a web services company, and very, very rich. Then he gets interested in politics again.... Hillary Rodham never marries, becomes a law professor, then a senator, then the first female candidate to run for president on a major party ticket in 2016. In the absence of a Clinton candidacy, George H.W. Bush is elected to a second term in 1992, followed by a one-term Jerry Brown presidency and two terms of John McCain. Several major historical events, most notably 9/11 and the Iraq war, never occur, leaving Sittenfeld’s Hillary untainted by a Senate vote supporting the latter. She dirties her hands a bit—running against Carol Moseley Braun in a Senate primary and accepting the endorsement of Donald Trump—but the character Sittenfeld makes of this alternate Hillary remains essentially static: cautious, mildly humorous, committed to public service, but no firebrand. Above all, she is diligent, a grind. The weakness of Rodham is this lack of any significant transformation. Unlike Alice Blackwell, [the Laura Bush character in Sittenfeld's American Wife], Hillary Rodham doesn’t come to the gradual realization that she has thrown away her life on a man she can no longer respect and whose values she doesn’t share. Sittenfeld’s Hillary eventually grasps how perilous her passion for Bill Clinton was, but that’s a revelation without much of a price... Alice Blackwell has humbler dreams than Hillary Rodham....  Sittenfeld’s Hillary... is an admirable woman, but a bit boring, her interior life free of the kind of conflicts that make for a fascinating heroine... [The real-life Hillary is] a survivor of conditions most of us could not endure or even really imagine.... How could we hope to truly know such a person, or more to the point, how can we go on kidding ourselves that this is her fault?"

From "Curtis Sittenfeld’s New Book Imagines if Hillary Never Married Bill/Rodham isn’t as satisfying as her novel about Laura Bush, but together, they’re both richer" (Slate).

The answer to that question — "How could we hope to truly know such a person?" — should be: by reading a 400-page novel published by Random House that purports to explore precisely this topic. Characters in novels tend to go through "conditions most of us could not endure or even really imagine," and it's up to the novelist to make the character comprehensible and excitingly interesting. The question isn't whether it's Hillary Clinton's fault that we don't know what she's really like inside, but whether it's the author's fault that there isn't a compelling imagined inner life.

Here's the book, in case you want to read it. I was interested in it because someone I respect recommended it. The publication date is May 19th, so I assume this person had an advance copy. I hope. It's awful when authors promote each other's book based on their friendship or their interest in mutual promotion. The author's allegiance should be to the reader.

AND: Does this book rely on the premise that Hillary Clinton married Bill Clinton simply out of "passion"? I've always thought she figured that the partnership was a good bet in the achievement of her worldly ambitions. It's so soppy not to give her that.

ALSO: I'm reading "Hillary Never Married Bill/A new novel hypothesizes a different history — and future — for a trailblazing woman" by Frank Bruni (NYT), who interviews the author:

I mentioned her fixation on first ladies and asked whether there might be Michelle Obama and Melania Trump novels to come. No, she said, suggesting that Michelle’s 2018 memoir, “Becoming,” was so openhearted and definitive that it didn’t leave much room for a novelist.

And Melania? Sittenfeld declined to say much about the current first lady to me, but she previously told The Guardian that she didn’t “see her as someone whose consciousness I yearn to explore.”...

So what does Sittenfeld "yearn to explore"? The next thing in this piece is:

There are whole facets of public figures’ humanity — of the Clintons’ humanity — that we don’t have access to and can’t explore... Indulging in guesswork, [Sittenfeld] visited interiors and rummaged around in intimacies that are otherwise off limits.

“Falling in love and kissing another person — that’s what you read novels for, and that’s what you write novels for,” she said. “I certainly read a lot of nonfiction and respect it, but even the most personal profile of a public figure is not going to have almost anything about them kissing or feeling attracted to someone or maybe having sex and feeling awkward.”

And the piece began with the line "Curtis Sittenfeld likes to imagine the sex lives of presidents." I'm going to say Sittenfeld doesn't want to live vicariously within the persona of Michelle Obama or Melania Trump because she's not turned on by imagining having sex with either Barack Obama or (especially) Donald Trump.

"I remember when I saw Laura Bush.... She said, 'Oh, there she is. The voice of reason on The Five.'"

"I hear that quite a lot. I think, partly, it’s just in my nature to be somebody who tries to bring people together. Ever since I was a kid, I paid a lot of attention to communication. I would sit in the backseat of the car with my sister. If my parents got in an argument, I would immediately start to think, 'If she had just waited until we got home and then if he had said it this way.' I was always trying to figure out, how can we all get along better through communication? I think about that now. It’s just my natural state. I want people to try to get along. Also, I feel like, again, with the background that I have, I’m like, 'Everything changes.' I worked on Capitol Hill when President Clinton was president and we went through the Lewinsky impeachment. I was there on 9/11. I was there during the Iraq War. I was there during the financial crisis. I covered the Obama administration and now Trump. I constantly seek serenity in my life. I’m not saying I’m very good at it, but I’m always seeking it. The other thing I love about being at Fox, and especially I think The Five helped me with this, is that I just am who I am. I can’t fake it. What you see is what you get."

From "Dana Perino’s Rising Stature in Fox News’ Post-Shep Landscape: A Mediaite Q&A" (Mediaite).

It’s just my natural state. I want people to try to get along.... That's the way I feel too.

Everyone was saying Melania got her inspiration for that blue outfit from Jackie Kennedy...

... but I'm seeing the tie to Laura Bush...



Here's how Melania showed up to appear with her predecessor:



Note the similarity in the sleeve length and the flapped over section at the top as well as the color. The colors are interestingly different, and — funnily enough — for all of Melania's matchy-matchiness* — Laura's color would have much more closely matched the Tiffany box...



... the box that led to so much awkwardness yesterday — laughed at by me here.

I ran across that picture of Laura because, in the comments at that last link, MadisonMan said:

The picture of the Obamas' arrival at the White House 8 years ago includes Michelle handing a package to Laura. Why should she have been surprised to receive something today?

I still haven't found a picture of Michelle arriving with a package for Laura. I have no idea whether bringing a gift is traditional and required or bizarre and rude or somewhere in between, but I do think there is a principle of etiquette that overrides all others which is that when someone else is trying to be nice but gets something technically wrong, you do what you can to smoothly erase the appearance that anything is awry. The classic trope is Drinking the Fingerbowl. Thus, if Melania committed a faux pas, Michelle committed a worse faux pas.
____________________

* "Matchy-matchy" has been a standard fashion insult for many years, but as Maureen Dowd said in her live-chatting of the inauguration:

Matchy-matchy used to be bad but Melania may make it a trend. Coats and dresses that match, like old Doris Day movies. Monochromatic outfits that make you look tall and slim, like Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn in the “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” scene where she’s all in fuschia.

ADDED: Here's the video showing that Michelle did in fact bring a gift and hand it to Laura. Watch how deftly Laura hangs onto it while keeping it out of the photo op:



Laura carries it as if she appreciates it and hands it off discreetly to an unseen person after she enters the house.

Washington Post "stance on display" in a triad of Trump-related headlines.

I don't know what's oddest here:



1. "Trump’s stance on display..." tripped me up. Is there some "display" in the news about which Trump has a position, a "stance," that I need to know about? No, Trump has a "stance" — on what? — and he's showing it to us. The stance isn't on anything. It's just his self-assurance, the attitude that  he's "never wrong." The "stance" is not that he's "never loved more by his supporters." The love from the supporters is just a consequence, supposedly, of observing the display of the "stance." It's hard to read, because there's a colon after an introductory clause, and only one of the things after the colon is what the phrase before the colon is pointing at. When you click through, the story is "Trump: Never wrong, never sorry, never responsible," by Karen Tumulty. Why is this the top Trump story of the day? I guess it's because Trump made Obama's birthplace the story-of-the-day yesterday, and it must be wrestled into an anti-Trump story. So Trump's stating clearly that Obama was born in Hawaii becomes a generality about his character, which — I keep reading — is so different and much more dangerous than the character of all the other politicians, but I've never noticed that other politicians call attention to their errors as outright errors and refrain from deflecting blame onto others.

2. The second headline is just plain funny. The media is "playing the stooge for Trump"?! And it's  time to stop. Subheading: "The Republican nominee said, 'Jump.' And TV news asked, 'How high?'" The media has been obviously trying to help Hillary, but I guess its efforts are so inept that Trump can figure out how to flip them into doing things to work in his favor. When I hear "stooge," I think of The 3 Stooges, and I guess if they ever formed a goal, they'd bumble into exactly achieving the opposite effect. Here's the full story — "It’s time for TV news to stop playing the stooge for Donald Trump" — by Margaret Sullivan, WaPo's media columnist. It's another piece that follows on from yesterday's story-of-the-day, Trump's wrangling the media to hear his announcement of Obama's birthplace and deflection of blame onto Hillary. Sullivan explains how the press got played, but not why. The why is, I think, eagerness to help Hillary: They've made themselves stupid —  stupid for Hillary. What's the cure? I would think: serious, professional journalism. But Sullivan just tells them to stop it.

3. Oh, my, it's Laura Bush! Maybe she can help. The story is "In a tense election year, Laura Bush picks an interesting ally: Michelle Obama," by Krissah Thompson. It's as if somebody at WaPo decided to make the left-hand column as female-oriented as possible. All the authors are female. Story #1 alarms us about Trump's "stance" — which calls to mind that bane of female existence, manspreading. Story #2 calls to mind The 3 Stooges, who enact a style of male behavior that women find so off-putting. We all know women hate The 3 Stooges. And finally, there's relief: 2 female lead characters. If we can't love Hillary Clinton, surely we can warm up to these 2 solid standby females, Laura and Michelle. Gotta love at least one of them. First Ladies! Hillary was a First Lady, so... let's love First Ladies. Maybe that will help. Help us with our tension in this "tense election year." Laura and Michelle are sitting together on a stage at some worthy, non-tense event burbling about their mutual love and respect. Yes, yes, this is the tone we need now. Something gentle and feminine, not blustering and manspreading, not slapstick stoogery. There, now — do you see it? — forming mistily, gauzily in your mind? The female face — soft, smiling...

... tension-releasing....

"Proving that the library is more a monument to Laura’s artful airbrushing than W.’s artless leadership..."

"... there’s a swank Café 43 with fancier fare than W.’s cherished PB&J’s, and a gift shop featuring Laura’s favorite books, from Dostoyevsky’s 'Brothers Karamazov' to Truman Capote’s 'Music for Chameleons.'"

Highlights from the Bush interview: "I'll be dead... our afterlife... assiduously."

I'm watching John King's interview with George and Laura Bush (on the occasion of the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum).

GEORGE BUSH: History will ultimately judge the decisions that were made for Iraq. And I'm just not going to be around to see the final verdict.

KING: Not going to be around. That's an interesting way to put it. You...

GEORGE BUSH (laughing): In other words, I'll be dead....

I don't know why King acted puzzled over the phrase "I'm just not going to be around," but it was hilarious when Bush clarified the term. Lightheartedness at the idea of one's own death is disarming, and coming after King's strange confusion, it made us laugh. Perhaps King was hoping to draw Bush into some deeper contemplation of death. That didn't happen. We get a glimpse of Bush's social skill.

Having said so bluntly "I'll be dead," it was striking when Bush proceeded to refer to the post-presidency period as the "afterlife."

George Bush sent Laura "these very funny stick figure drawings of him in bed with Barney..."

"... 'Good night.'  Then, the active stick figure in the morning: 'Good morning.'"

I showed them to a friend who’s an artist here in Dallas and she thought they had a lot of creativity. George said, “Well, let’s find me an art instructor.” So my friend recommended someone who’s now George’s art instructor and he’s having a really wonderful time painting. George is very determined and he’s very, very disciplined. He paints for a lot of hours a day and it transports him. You know, he’ll go up to clean his brushes and then glance at his watch and he’s been up there for two hours.

New ad includes Laura Bush, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney expressing support for same-sex marriage.

Laura Bush didn't approve of the use of this video clip (which comes from a 2010 interview with Larry King) and she's voiced her objection to it:



Who knows what she secretly thinks, but officially, she's saying you shouldn't have used me without asking. Of course, the group that made the ad — the Respect for Marriage Coalition — has the right to appropriate this clip and use it in their political message. Imagine how hard it would be to make political ads if you couldn't use clips like this. I suspect that secretly she's happy to influence opinion this way — especially as she's able to hold herself at some distance from politics. She clearly likes to seem modest and completely unpushy, as you can see in the longer clip from the Larry King show:



What a terrible shame that the Republican Party didn't accommodate itself to this idea at least 10 years ago. Really, it's a shame they didn't buy in even earlier, 18 years ago, when Andrew Sullivan's "Virtually Normal" came out. At the time, the left-liberals I knew were antagonistic to the institution of marriage and viewed Sullivan's contribution as an unwelcome conservative intrusion on the gay rights movement, which they saw as belonging within a left-wing ideology that transcended traditional institutions. Back in the 90s, I sat through serious, lawyerly presentations aimed at stopping the marriage equality proponents from changing the focus of the movement. There was a wonderful opportunity then for conservatives to embrace the issue, and they missed it.

The Republican Party saw the advantage elsewhere, and now they're stuck with the result.

UPDATE: The Respect for Marriage Coalition withdraws the ad.

"I hope people remember George, and I think they will, for having the determination and the toughness and the persistence..."

"... to be able to see... our country through such a very difficult time after the terrorist attack," said Laura.

"There was never a taint of scandal around his presidency," said Bush the Elder. "And I think we forget the importance of that. But they'll remember him for being a good, honest president that got a lot of things done, but I think the thing I take pride in is integrity."

Video at the link. It's the video that was shown at the GOP convention last night, a convention where the party's last failed candidate spoke at great length. The party's 2 living Presidents appeared only in a charming, modest — overly modest — video. Sad. Almost shameful.

Was the Elder correct? Never a taint of scandal around W's presidency? Here's a Salon article, published in 2005 (before the second term), listing "34 scandals" from the first term — "every one of them worse than Whitewater."

Imagine if Salon were committed to maintaining a single standard for the meaning of "scandal" and had to make an equivalent list for the Obama administration. How many scandals would it list? It too absurd to imagine. Holding Obama to the insane standard that was imposed on Bush?!

Ironically, this is one of the reasons I voted for Obama and I won't apologize for that vote. I anticipated that Obama would have to own many of the policies that Bush — with his "determination and... toughness and... persistence" — followed. The Democratic Party would not be able to continue standing on the sidelines, calling everything outrageous, "a scandal," with the press amplifying each charge. They would do many of the same things and preen about their toughness on terrorism, and the press would boost them along.

And so now we are here in the fall of 2012, and that has been accomplished. Can you imagine where we would be if McCain had been President and the carping on the sidelines had continued all these 4 years? Would McCain even be attempting to get reelected?

One more thing about Clinton lambasting Scott Walker in Wisconsin...

You don't see George W. Bush traveling around the country campaigning for Republicans, even in a gentle, dignified way. But his fellow former President Clinton is jumping into the Wisconsin recall election. Note too that Bush never criticizes President Obama, to whom he paid a cordial visit in the White House yesterday:

Beautiful clip:



Three of the 5 living Presidents were there in that charming scene. Bill Clinton was in Milwaukee, insulting Scott Walker. I don't know what Jimmy Carter was doing. But you tell me: How should a former President conduct himself? Should he do partisan politics, or should he withdraw to a higher plane of national eminence?

ADDED: What did they say off camera? I'm picturing some reference to the time Bush said "I want justice, and there's an old poster out West I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive'"and how Obama went with: dead.

Presidents Obama and Bush arrive at the World Trade Center memorial.

That time George Bush — at the dinner table with his wife and parents — said "What is sex like after 50?"

From an interview to air Monday:

"So I'm drunk at the dinner table at Mother and Dad's house in Maine. And my brothers and sister are there, Laura's there. And I'm sitting next to a beautiful woman, friend of Mother and Dad's," says Bush. "And I said to her out loud, 'What is sex like after 50?' "

After that, one could hear a pin drop. It was "total silence," says Bush. "And not only silence, but like serious daggers" from my mom and my wife.

He says that, with a case of "after-dinner remorses," he later called the woman to apologize. But she got the last laugh. Bush says that on his 50th birthday, when he was Texas governor, the woman sent him a letter reading: "Dear Governor, Well, what's the answer?"

Why can't adults talk about sex? This is only a story about the depredations of alcohol... but why? Why must conversation be so boring that an interesting question draws "serious daggers"?

Althouse in the NYT.

Talking about feminism and the First Lady. (A Bloggingheads clip.)

"We've almost gotten where we think it's funny. Now we're all blaming George for something in our family."

Laura Bush on how she and her family deal with the way the Democrats these days try to blame everything on George Bush.

Laura Bush supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

"If I'm ever 82 years old and acting like that have someone put me away."

What George Bush said about Jimmy Carter.

From the same article — with juicy bits from a new book about Bush:

For a commencement address at Furman University in spring 2008, Ed Gillespie wanted to insert a few lines condemning gay marriage. Bush called the speech too "condemnatory" and said, "I'm not going to tell some gay kid in the audience that he can't get married."...

Laura Bush... "was secretly a Democrat for all intents and purposes, though it really wasn't much of a secret."

"Janet's perfect for that job. Because for that job, you have to have no life. Janet has no family, perfect."

What Gov. Ed Rendell said about Gov. Janet Napolitano.

Okay, now, how bad is this? Rendell's getting ripped for being a big old sexist, but does he deserve it?

He was caught speaking casually, using the jocose expression "no life," which may not be as insulting as it sounds to some people. I don't think he meant anything like: She's not much of a woman (or human being) because she has no husband or children/she must be emotionally unfulfilled/cold/stunted.

I hear this as: She will be able to give absolutely the entirety of her attention and energy to a job that truly requires it.

Now, this may upset some people who want to believe that everyone has to live a life in which work is leavened and enriched with time in the warm embrace of a family. What's worse is the idea that a job requires all of a person's attention, so that anyone with a family is disqualified. And of course, there's one terrible implication: That men can have a family and a highly demanding job, but women cannot.

Did Rendell's statement contain that terrible implication? Perhaps! I do get a little whiff of: Normally, you don't send a woman to do a man's job, but that doesn't apply to Janet Napolitano. It's not that she has "no life," but that she has no female life. She can run with the men. I hear a bit of that.

But perhaps Rendell meant to boost opinion of Napolitano, to rebuff accusations that her lack of a family would make the job too tough for her. Remember when Laura Bush said this about Condoleezza Rice?

"Dr. Rice, who I think would be a really good candidate (for President), is not interested. Probably because she is single, her parents are no longer living, she's an only child. You need a very supportive family and supportive friends to have this job."

It could be that Rendell knew the way not having a family is used against women and he wanted to get out in front of that criticism to help Napolitano. There's sexism in that, but it's not Rendell's sexism. He's proactively defending her from attacks. Now, I might concede that it's better feminism to behave as if sexism does not exist, and maybe Rendell's proactive defense against sexism unwittingly promotes it in some ways, but I'm inclined to give him a pass.

The Bush twins, Barbara and Jenna, taught the Obama girls, Sasha and Malia, how to jump on the White House beds.

First Lady Laura Bush verified the story, and added that there was a real trick to proper White House bed-jumping: "They're really tall beds; you need to get a running start."

***

In some families, you can jump on the beds, and in some, they tell you no jumping on the beds. Both the Bushes and the Obamas allow bed jumping. Or, no, maybe Barack and Michelle are the no-jumping-on-the-beds kind of parents. And Malia and Sasha will say but Jenna and Barbara jumped on the beds -- they showed us how to jump on the beds. And Barack and Michelle will be all: The American people voted for change. No more of the failed policies of the Bush years. No more jumping on the beds.

The Obamas pay a visit to the Bushes.

"Mr. Obama walked just at Mr. Bush’s shoulder and appeared to be speaking animatedly, gesturing with both hands."

Love the picture. Michelle looks great in a bright red dress -- as she towers over Laura. Laura's wearing a dull rust-colored dress and is careful to stand in a flattering 3/4 view, with one foot carefully placed in front of the other. Michelle's just standing there head on, with feet planted side by side. Laura and Michelle are wearing nearly identical sling-back shoes with 2" heels. Barack and George are wearing identical shoes too. They're also both wearing blue suits and blue ties. George's suit is lighter and much more rumpled and, while they are all squinting in the sunlight, George is squinting the most.

ADDED: I love this pic of George and Barack in the OO. Artfully composed and deeply historic.