"As an impromptu speaker, Bush had a reputation for gaffes and mangling phrases, but Mr. Gerson provided him with memorable flights of oratory..."

"... such as the pledge to end 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' in the education of low-income and minority students and the description of democracy — in Bush’s first inaugural address — as a 'seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations.' As a Bush confidant and head of the speechwriting team, he also encouraged such memorable turns of phrase as 'axis of evil,' which Bush used to explain the administration’s hawkish posture as it started long and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.In the chaotic months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mr. Gerson became the key craftsman articulating what became known as the 'Bush Doctrine' — which advocated preemptive strikes against potential terrorists and other perceived threats. With his team of writers, he began shaping Bush’s tone and tenor... 'It is a real mistake to try to secularize American political discourse,' Mr. Gerson told NPR in 2006. 'It removes one of the primary sources of visions of justice in American history.'"

From "Michael Gerson, Post columnist and Bush speechwriter on 9/11, dies at 58/Mr. Gerson helped shape President George W. Bush’s messaging after the 9/11 attacks and then moved to The Washington Post, where he wrote about politics and faith" (The Washington Post).

"She is our indomitable, irreplaceable, unsinkable Liz."

Effuses Michael Gerson, in the final sentence "History will accept only one Jan. 6 narrative. This committee has it" (WaPo).

I'm reading that only because the headline bothered me so much that I felt that I needed to know how any educated, intelligent person could say such a thing. What a static, impoverished view of history! He seems to have it mixed up with propaganda — specifically, the propaganda of a totalitarian state. 

But I got distracted by the gooey fawning over Cheney. "She was calm, methodical, factual and morally grounded...." 

Anyway... here's what Gerson says about history: "There is only one narrative about Jan. 6 that history will accept: the evidence meticulously gathered and presented by the House select committee." Huh?

We will see what historians will write when they have the long perspective, see a fuller context, and it no longer has to do with the outcome of elections. What is being written now is not history. Not that history itself isn't biased, distorted, and incomplete. But it's got to be far superior to what the "select" committee is piecing together.

"Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone?"

That's a headline in the NYT. A column by Frank Bruni.

How sanctimonious and simultaneously blind do you need to be to proclaim the soullessness of another human being?

I mean, it's tempting sometimes. I was just driving home from a glorious sunrise...



... and I had the satellite radio on MSNBC. Mika Brzezinski was reading some news story, got the word "humane" and pronounced it "hoo-mane." I wondered, is she even there? Robot mode. But I didn't question her humanity. Hoomanity.

The subheadline on that Bruni piece is — I am not kidding — "He’s not rising to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic. He’s shriveling into nothingness."

Well, it's a column. It's subjective. Bruni is seeing the President shriveling into nothingness. Wishful thinking. Why won't this man disappear entirely?

Do you remember President George W. Bush’s remarks at Ground Zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? ... Do you remember President Barack Obama’s news conference after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 28 people, including 20 children, dead? I do.... Do you remember the moment when President Trump’s bearing and words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it?

It passed me by, maybe because it never happened.

And maybe because you hate him so much you can't see it. I see it every day when I watch the press briefing.

In Trump’s predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can’t, and that fills me with a sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don’t know what to do with.

I could sense... I can’t... me with a sorrow and a rage... I quite frankly don’t know....

Bruni knows he's talking about his own subjective experience, but he cannot stop. He insists on dehumanizing his adversary.

[Trump stressed that masks are] voluntary and that he himself wouldn’t be going anywhere near one that he might as well have branded them Apparel for Skittish Losers. I’ve finally settled on his epitaph: “Donald J. Trump, too cool for the coronavirus.”

That is, Bruni is picturing Trump catching the coronavirus and dying. The epitaph says "too cool." Speaking of cool, that's cold, Mr. Bruni. Is this what entertains the readers of the NYT? Standing back, looking for the bad, and laughing at the image of Trump dead and buried?

This is more than a failure of empathy....

Thanks for writing a next line that was the very thing I was thinking about you.

It’s more than a failure of decency, which has been my go-to lament. It’s a failure of basic humanity.

Hoomanity. It's that thing you say the people you don't like don't have. It's a wonderful foundation for building a political ideology.

In The Washington Post a few days ago, Michael Gerson, a conservative who worked in Bush’s White House, wrote that Trump’s spirit is “a vast, trackless wasteland.”

Oh! Bruni is copying Gerson's idea. Trying to get in on the hot Trump-hating over there in America's other newspaper.

Not exactly trackless. There are gaudy outposts of ego all along the horizon.

I see Bruni stumbling through the canyons of his mind. There's an outpost up ahead... your next stop — the Trump Hotel. Columnists check in. But they never check out.

On "Face the Nation" today, the panelists seemed to be playing a game called: Talk about Trump as much as you can without talking about Trump.

The moderator was John Dickerson, and his actual question was: "You are an assignment editor. And you have to assign coverage for the year 2017. How do you deploy your forces? What’s the story?" Obviously, the story you've got to cover is President Donald Trump. But they're not going to say Well, duh, John, we've got to cover the damned Trump presidency.

Our first contestant is Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic:

JEFFREY GOLDBERG:  Well, the story is-- there’s one overarchingly huge story. A very big league story, as Michele might say. The-- the-- the story is-- the-- the story is the upending of American politics. The story is of the outs coming in and the ins going out. --The story is trying to explain to the American people what’s happened to their two main parties. And-- and the deeper story, also, I don’t want to forget this -- the deeper story is globalization, and technological disruption, and anxiety born of-- of rapid change, rapid, destabilizing change, the fragility of institutions. All of that is-- is there undergirding the larger, more immediate story, which is how did Donald Trump become president of the United States....

Bzzz. Goldberg mentioned Donald Trump. He had a great run going — the outs coming in and the ins going out... anxiety born of-- of rapid change, rapid, destabilizing change, the fragility of institutions... Great stuff. There's overarching and undergirding — construction to go along with the destruction. It was mindbending. I was ready to give him the prize, but then he said the name. Wipe out.

Let's get the next contestant up here. Michele Norris, a journalist affiliated with something called the Race Card Project:

"Rush Limbaugh’s blessing of Trump is killing conservatism."

That's the headline at The Washington Post on a column by Michael Gerson. Now, Rush hasn't endorsed Trump, as Gerson must concede. In fact, he has to say:

Limbaugh takes pains to preserve neutrality between Trump and Ted Cruz, whom he describes as the obvious choice “if conservatism is the dominating factor in how you vote.”

That's in stark contrast to our local talk radio people who are overtly anti-Trump. So what's Gerson's problem?

But Limbaugh has also consistently defended Trump as a legitimate choice for those whose dominating factor is the humiliation of “the establishment.”... Trump’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy are noted but considered secondary. “I think with the case of Trump,” argues Limbaugh, “there’s a much bigger upside than downside.”

The upside, in this view, is not just taking the political fight to liberalism; it is also overturning a failed and corrupt Republican political order. Limbaugh dismisses defenders of this order as fundamentally self-interested. “[Trump] has put together a coalition that’s exactly what the Republican Party says that it needs to win, and yet, look what they’re doing. They’re trying to get Trump out of the race, because they’re not in charge of it.” Opposing Trump is the work of a “cliquish, elitist club,” preserving its influence and employment prospects. This criticism is sometimes expanded to include the conservative intelligentsia. “I’m talking about the establishment,” says Limbaugh, “conservative media, the brainiacs, the think tanks, the professors.”

Gerson argues that the GOP "establishment" — he always puts it in scare quotes — actually is conservative, conservative within "the constraints of our constitutional system" (as opposed to some "fantasy world") and within norms of "civility, inclusion and tolerance" (as opposed to "casual misogyny, racial stereotyping and religious bigotry"). And Trump is not a real conservative, Gerson says, because he "does not reason from first principles" and he appeals to "authoritarian populism" instead of — as Russell Kirk puts it — "an enduring moral order, political prudence, and restraints on power and human passion."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch dispatches George Will and swaps in the "compassionate conservative" Michael Gerson.

"The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier."

The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it. We have heard from both conservative and liberal readers asking for new conservative voices. We believe Mr. Gerson’s addition to our op-ed page will be a refreshing and revitalizing change.

Because what's more refreshing and revitalizing than caving to the demands of nonconservatives who posed as outraged over something they pretended to misunderstand?

ADDED: I've hardly noticed Michael Gerson over the years, though he's been a WaPo columnist since 2007. I've got 3 post tagged with his name (and 21 with George Will's). I tend to think that a liberal newspaper like The Washington Post will have relatively bland conservative columnists, and I'd always thought of Will as innocuous, but the standard of noxiousness is low/phony when liberals are judging conservatives.

Here's Gerson's first column as the Post-Dispatch's not-Will: "The reality conservatives must face." Uh oh. I think I know where that is going: Conservatives must be more like liberals or they won't win elections. Now, let me read it:

Let me stipulate that reform conservatism is the best hope of a Republican Party struggling to attract middle-class voters...

Some conservatives are trying to make common cause with tea party populism, which may be open to pro-middle-class reforms, but certainly not on immigration...

... the face of America is changing...

The ideal [presidential] nominee, therefore, would have tea party populist roots, middle-class sensibilities, a policy interest in social mobility and a conspicuously welcoming approach to immigration.

Exactly what I expected.

"This White House is so politicized that when it comes to a sort of a controversy like this, what they want to do is to get out a good story instead of getting out the real story."

David Gergen on "Face the Nation" today. (I've added italics that I hear in the audio.) Context (with my boldfacing):

"Those who emphasize 'objective' political facts at the expense of 'subjective' values have strained out the soul and significance of politics."

"It is an approach, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, 'that stores the sand and lets the gold go free.'"

Says Michael Gerson, in another one of those Nate-Silver-is-wrong columns.

The problem with the current fashion for polls and statistics is that it changes what it purports to study. Instead of making political analysis more “objective,” it has driven the entire political class — pundits, reporters, campaigns, the public — toward an obsessive emphasis on data and technique. Quantification has also resulted in miniaturization. In politics, unlike physics, you can only measure what matters least.

Is your soul weary of all these polls? Do you somehow know something in your subjective, intuitive guts that is never measured in Mr. Silver's algorithm?