"Of all the repellent Kennedy spectacles of the past 60 years, today's spectacle of Kennedys disavowing other Kennedys for not being good Kennedys..."

"... is really the kind of false aristocratic creepiness that makes me want to, you know, drive off a bridge."

Tweets John Podhoretz.

"We’re told the decision to act this way came last week but that Biden wanted to keep it quiet until he delivered his speech commemorating the Holocaust...."

Writes John Podhoretz in "Biden’s Shameful Betrayal" (Commentary).

Last week, the administration’s line was that it needed to see a plausible evacuation plan from Rafah—a statement indicating that it still supported the overall aim of eliminating Hamas and that the problem going forward was primarily logistical. So that might simply have been a lie....

But if his primary aim is to limit civilian casualties, his methods of doing so are insane. The munitions he is holding back would in part allow Israel to hit sites and areas in Rafah with great precision. That is how you limit casualties. Which leads me to believe that Joe Biden is literally trying to freeze the conflict in place permanently....

And why does Biden want this anyway? To what end? Unless your purpose is to prevent an Israeli victory, it’s nonsensical. And if he doesn’t want an Israeli victory, why did he spend months pushing for aid? Why? Why?...

I hesitate to attempt to answer, but my working theory would be that Joe Biden has prioritized his own reelection. And he's not even performing well at that. Ironically, his reelection theme seems to be that he — and not Trump — is a man of integrity. I would recommend that the old man step back from the tawdry exercise of getting reelected and actually behave with integrity.

But I suspect he's too far gone to give us that. May I recommend:

"She was around in the early 1960s when JFK was cutting a swath through his aides at the White House..."

"... which served as preparation for the moment she became world-famous. That was at the end of January 1998, when she became the public representative of Linda Tripp, the intimate (and betrayer) of Monica Lewinsky, whose taped phone calls (taped on Lucianne’s advice) revealed the relationship between Lewinsky and President Clinton. You’ve probably forgotten, but I haven’t, the hilarious spectacle of a hundred reporters standing on the sidewalk at 84th and Broadway in front of Lucianne’s building as she calmly and with a Cheshire-cat smile replied to the screams of America’s journalists. 'That’s not a Linda Tripp question,' she would say, in her sing-song voice, if they asked what the agenda was here, or the angle, or whatever. Sure, she had an agenda, and she was totally honest about it. She didn’t like Clinton, either personally or ideologically, and wanted to see him laid low, and unlike other people who’ve been in the destroy-the-president game, she didn’t make any bones about it. When Lewinsky-gate ultimately came a cropper, she was even-keeled. 'If you go at the king, you’d best kill the king,' she said, 'and we didn’t.'"

From "Lucianne Goldberg, 1935-2022" by John Podhoretz (Commentary).

Lots more at the link, but let me quote this too: "She could tell you...  how incredibly depressing it was to spend time with Charles Schulz, who drew 'Peanuts'... 'They called him Sparky... It was the most inappropriate nickname ever.'"

Will anyone switch their vote from Fetterman to Oz because Fetterman struggled to speak in the debate last night?

I think not. What's overwhelmingly important is which party gets the majority in the Senate, and every single Senate race could be the one that shifts the power one way or the other. All Fetterman needed to do was not seem dangerously incompetent, and he crossed that low bar. The rest is chitter-chatter. Good night!

But I'll give you some links:

"Fetterman's painful debate" (Axios)("Fetterman struggled at times to respond to the moderators' questions, even with the assistance of a closed captioning device").

"POLITICO Playbook: How much will John Fetterman’s rocky night matter?" (Politico)("The plain fact is that Fetterman was not capable of debating Oz. He could have skipped the debate... but the Fetterman campaign gambled that the media would educate voters about his auditory issues and then referee any attacks on him with charges of ableism").

"The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Pennsylvania Debate/Oz came across as obnoxious. Fetterman struggled to connect" (The Bulwark)("In what sounded like lyrics snatched from Chumbawamba, Fetterman promised that if he got 'knocked down,' he would 'keep coming back up.' He’ll need that kind of attitude in the days ahead").

"John Fetterman debate was painful and shameful — he is physically incapable of being a senator" (John Podhoretz, NY Post)("Only one thing mattered, and that was watching Fetterman try to make a showing of himself despite his painful impairment. I don’t want to quote what he said or make specific note of his speech patterns or answers because it would be unnecessarily cruel").

"Fetterman, Showing Stroke Effects, Battles Oz in Hostile Senate Debate/Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, tried to assure voters of his fitness to serve. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a former celebrity physician and Republican, attacked him as too radical for the job" (NYT)("Mr. Fetterman’s words were frequently halting, and it was apparent when he was delayed in either reading or reaching for a phrase or word. But he was also fluent enough over the course of the hour to present his Democratic vision...").

"During his COVID blather, Biden went on to claim that if he had said in November it would spread as rapidly as it has, people would have replied, 'Biden, have you been drinking?'"

"While that would be one explanation for why he slurred every third word in the speech, in fact, no one would have thought he was drinking had he said this — since that’s what everybody was saying would happen. The truth is that he and his people didn’t do anything about testing then because — well, who knows why he didn’t? We need a Bob Woodward book to explain it to us in a year’s time. For now, it’s enough to say Biden didn’t act — and right now, nationally, you cannot get your hands on a home antigen test to save your life. Go ahead. Give it a try. Go to every website in America. Here’s what you’ll see. 'Out of stock.' 'Sold out.' 'Delivery by Jan. 10.' Trust me. I spent an hour at it Monday and two hours at it Tuesday. They’re all gone. Poof. And guess what the television COVID-hysteric doctors are all blathering about? They’re all saying, 'Look, if you want to hang out with your family on Christmas, you’d better get tested first!' Oh, really? Where the hell are you supposed to get tested? I got tested Sunday. In Times Square. In the cold rain. I got there at 8:45 a.m. I was done by 10:45 a.m. When I left, the line was probably 300 people long. My two hours were going to be six hours for them. Judging from what I saw on New York streets Tuesday morning, testing lines are beginning to approach gas lines during the oil embargoes in 1973 and 1979."

Writes John Podhoretz in "Joe Biden’s Omicron speech was a pack of total bull" (NY Post).

Podhoretz is raving. Why can't people face what Omicron is? It's very contagious (but apparently relatively mild). Deal with it people. It's always the President's miserable fault when the President is in the party that's not your party. For Podhoretz, a Republican, Biden is an outrageous idiot. Democrats support their President, so, needing to blame people, they blame Republicans — all those Republicans who won't get vaccines and won't follow the rules. 

But it's a virus, which has no party affiliation and no capacity for good and evil. Just deal with it. Adapt to changing circumstances. One thing that would solve the problem of all these line-waiters in New York City would be to just give up your travel plans. But Christmas!!! Are you all a bunch of babies? Unfortunately, the President doesn't have the nerve to tell people to stop traveling. He's reduced to "blather" — and "total bull" — because he can't steal Christmas from the adult kiddies of America.

The tests seem like the magic answer. Free tests! The office of the President came up with the idea of a present: 500 million tests! Coming soon, in the mail! No sacrifice for you. Beneficence from above. Up on the rooftop, Santa's coming. No he's not. But you still want to believe he will, so our frail President told you he will. And now, you're so mad at him, you have a tantrum in the New York Post. Ridiculous!

"You humiliated yourself with your ludicrous run for president last year, and every time you open your mouth now, Andrew Cuomo runs over and drops a stick of dynamite in it to remind you who’s boss."

Writes John Podhoretz in "Bill de Blasio’s new low: blaming the Jews" (NY Post).

The headline refers to De Blasio's harsh reaction to a specific event: a large gathering of Jewish mourners that took place in Brooklyn. De Blasio blamed those Jews for that one thing that they did. The headline makes it sound as though de Blasio had engaged in classic anti-Semitism, blaming Jews in general for things that go wrong.

For example, during the Black Plague in the 1300s, Jews got blamed and murdered on the theory that they were causing the disease. I don't think de Blasio is much good as a mayor and he should never have joined the overcrowded Democratic presidential race, but it's awful to characterize him as "blaming the Jews."

Podhoretz writes:

There’s no way to read your tweet from Tuesday night in an exculpatory fashion. Here it is: “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

Now, there really is something stupid about that tweet. De Blasio refers to the "Jewish community" when he meant the Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, and they are a small proportion of the much larger set of Jewish residents in New York City. Podhoretz writes that there are 1.2 million Jews in NYC. I had to look up the number of Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, who are not even 10% of the total who belong to "the Jewish community" in New York.

But maybe Podhoretz is seeing into de Blasio soul. Why did he get so mad at the Jews who came out onto the street in mourning? Why did that provoke him into posturing about a strong show of police force? Why did he look at one Jewish community and see "the Jewish community"?

And what a terrible visualization — Cuomo sticking dynamite into de Blasio's open mouth. Where does that violent imagery come from?

"New York Times columnist accused of eugenics over piece on Jewish intelligence/Bret Stephens faces backlash after suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other people."

Yikes, the heat on Bret Stephens has zoomed up since I blogged about his genius-of-Jews column at 5 a.m. yesterday morning.

The Guardian says:

The rightwing New York Times columnist Bret Stephens...

Eh. I don't think the right wing deserves responsibility for whatever it is Bret Stephens is.

... has sparked furious controversy online for a column praising Ashkenazi Jews for their scientific accomplishments, which critics say amounts to embracing eugenics.

In a column titled The Secrets of Jewish Genius and using a picture of Albert Einstein, Stephens stepped in the eugenics minefield by claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than other people and think differently.... [There were] furious accusations that Stephens was using the same genetics arguments that informed Nazism and white supremacist thinking.

The Guardian is simply collecting tweets. An editorial director at Vice says, "It’s hard to read this column as expressing anything other than a belief in the genetic and cultural inferiority of non-Ashkenazi Jews"; a NYT contributor says, "I don’t think eugenicists should be op-ed columnists"; a "journalist" says, "A Jew endorsing the idea that certain races are inherently superior to other, lesser races, what could possibly go wrong?"; a writer called it "eugenics propaganda" and urged subscribers to cancel.

This is what you get on Twitter: hot takes. There, Stephens is a eugenicist. I do see this mild-mannered correction:

"So I haven’t posted a tweet in nine months... Over the previous 10 years, I had written 180,000 tweets.... That’s 18,000 a year, 1,500 a month."

"I was putting out an average of 50 tweets a day — while holding down a full-time job editing a magazine, with two firm writing deadlines every week, and raising three children with a wife who works full-time... Over the course of this decade, my follower count rose from near zero to 141,000 people. The tweets helped garner audience for my writing and for articles in Commentary, the magazine I edit.... When I tweeted with my emotions engaged, especially when I responded to something out of anger, I could feel the dopamine rush. The tweet would resolve the emotion and bring me momentary and blessed relief.... I decided to quit Twitter this year after tweeting a joke about neutron-bombing a journalism school.... Nine months later, I still read Twitter.... If I could find a way to participate simply by tweeting out articles and gnomish would-be witticisms, I would. But... [Twitter] ­rewards bad rhetorical behavior, it privileges outrage of any sort over reason of all sorts, and it encourages us to misunderstand each other."

Writes John Podhoretz in "Why I quit Twitter — and you should, too" (NY Post).

First... "garner."

Second, his reason for quitting was not that he was writing 50 tweets a day, but that there was a danger of writing something every once in a while that got him in trouble.

Third, I don't see why I should quit Twitter too just because Podhoretz and others lose their mind and write something they regret every so often. But then, I hardly ever write on Twitter. I can see that it's a game where you try to score by racking up your numbers, and to play you have to play hard. Trying and trying 50 times a day on a website that doesn't pay you anything seems like a bad use of energy, and writing something crazy or nasty to grab for attention is a lowly business. In any case, I have my blog, and I've always done it in a way that fits my personal moods and interests and gives me a flow of intrinsic reward — whether other people link to me or get excited about me or not.

Fourth, it's interesting that he doesn't mention Trump. Trump seems to attract the most prescriptions for quitting Twitter. (I can't keep track of Podhoretz's position on Trump. I see that last April, he went from anti- to anti-anti- and I'm too bored to do any more research on the ultra-dull topic.) [CORRECTION: There are 2 Podhoretzes, and that article from last April is from the other Podhoretz.]

"The idea that Vindman would have grown up with any sense of fealty to the Ukrainian volk is patently absurd, not only because he and his twin brother are clearly ardent American patriots..."

"... who have committed their lives to this country’s service but because I have yet to meet a single Jew who came to America from the Soviet Union who feels any kind of personal or historical tie beyond any relatives who might have been left behind."

From "Vindman is a Jew, Not a Ukrainian, Mr. Duffy/A loaded charge" by John Podhoretz (at Commentary).

I'm reading about attacks on Vindman, but let's look at why Vindman matters. I'll read "White House Ukraine Expert Sought to Correct Transcript of Trump Call/Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, who heard President Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s president and was alarmed, testified that he tried and failed to add key details to the rough transcript" (NYT).

Excerpt:

The omissions, Colonel Vindman said, included Mr. Trump’s assertion that there were recordings of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. discussing Ukraine corruption, and an explicit mention by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, of Burisma Holdings, the energy company whose board employed Mr. Biden’s son Hunter.

Colonel Vindman, who appeared on Capitol Hill wearing his dark blue Army dress uniform and military medals, told House impeachment investigators that he tried to change the reconstructed transcript made by the White House staff to reflect the omissions. But while some of his edits appeared to have been successful, he said, those two corrections were not made.

Colonel Vindman did not testify to a motive behind the White House editing process.

So there's the old question of whether the transcript is completely reliable and the new questions about the importance of these 2 things that were (allegedly) said but left out.

The phrases do not fundamentally change lawmakers’ understanding of the call...

Okay, then it's only about how complete and reliable the transcript is. It's reconstructed and not verbatim. But there's no new material from Vindman that matters. Vindman is only useful for the proposition that not everything is in the transcript, and then, I presume, the idea is to add in things that do matter from others who unlike Vindman, did not listen into the conversation but only heard about it second hand (or third or fourth hand). That feels quite tenuous.

If there was something important that was left out, why isn't Vindman the one to tell us about it? You have to say that he was troubled by what happened to trouble him and though that turns out not to be important, there were other things that were important but that just didn't happen to trouble Vindman, and here's a second/third/fourth-hand witnesses who can tell us about that.

I'm skeptical because I assume that things would tend to become more troubling as they are retold, remembered, and retold again.

A rape revenge fantasy from Ellen Barkin.

Oh, my. I guess she meant it figuratively, but this is awful speech. Maybe she thinks it's okay because it's just not funny. Meanwhile, Louis CK was funny while saying awful things, as noted in this post yesterday. Some other Louis CK-related tweeting I'm seeing this morning:

I hold no brief for Louis CK, but if you don't like what he's done, you should probably cease using the word "transgressive" favorably to refer to things you like. If anything is "transgressive," it's that Louis CK routine.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 31, 2018

Every Judd tweet reveals his terror that the woke mob will drag him next. https://t.co/L8TZ77E52s

— jon gabriel (@exjon) December 31, 2018

For the annals of civility.

The problem with this tweet is that you are a foul, disgusting liar and a stain on American public life. The stench of your deceit and your views pollutes your district, your state, your party, and the United States. https://t.co/6Aate5nHSb

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 16, 2018

I had to look up whether John Podhoretz has expressed pieties about civility. I found this quote: "I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion" (from a NYT interview). So, I'm only putting the "civility bullshit" tag on this post because I'm discussing it, not because Podhoretz is doing it. I associate The Weekly Standard with the notion of elevating political discourse, but I haven't read it enough to know if they affected a tone of civility and chastised others for not keeping it. I read Podhoretz's quote about King as consistent with his "scorpion" assertion.

I assume the "scorpion" metaphor alludes to the "Scorpion and the Frog" fable:

A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, they would both drown. Considering this, the frog agrees, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When the frog asks the scorpion why, the scorpion replies that it was in its nature to do so....

This seems to be the inspiration for that awful snake poem Trump likes to recite.

The origin of "The Scorpion and the Frog" is unknown, but it might have been inspired by an ancient Persian story with a scorpion and a turtle, and there is this nice 1847 illustration for that: