"We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program," said JD Vance.

Quoted in "Vance says U.S. 'not at war with Iran, we're at war with Iran's nuclear program'/President Donald Trump said Saturday night that the U.S. had dropped bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites, the first time the U.S. has directly attacked Iran" (NBC News).

I'm interested in that rhetorical device: "We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program." 

I believe it's called paradiastole — or redescription. Other examples: 

George W. Bush, 2003: "We’re not occupying Iraq. We’re liberating it."

Barack Obama, 2013: "This is not a war on terror. It’s a campaign against specific networks like al-Qaeda."

Bill Clinton, 1999: "This is not a war. It’s a humanitarian intervention."

Benjamin Netanyahu, 2014: "We’re not fighting the Palestinian people. We’re fighting Hamas.”

Ronald Reagan, 1980s: "We’re not waging war against Nicaragua. We’re supporting freedom fighters."

Having created a new tag and added it to 7 posts in this blog's archive, I list the 7 posts in an order other than chronological.

The new tag is "Edmund Morris."

The list:

1. September 4, 2004 — Studying the recent spike in the phrase "barking mad," I quote Edmund Morris's reaction to Maureen Dowd's calling him "barking mad" — "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal."

2. November 28, 2010 — That time Edmund Morris reamed Bob Shieffer on "Face the Nation," and I compared him to Peter Finch in "Network" and Marisa Tomei in "My Cousin Vinny."

3. December 4, 2023 — President Theodore Roosevelt waded naked in Rock Creek in full view of onlookers, described by Edmund Morris.

4. November 16, 2023 — TR's smelling of arsenic, as described by Edmund Morris

5. June 24, 2004 — Edmund Morris has a theory about how Ronald Reagan came to think the way he did: "Not until he put on his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the world in all its sharp-edged intricacy."

6. December 1, 2023 — TR's "cyclonic" personality, as described by Edmund Morris.

7. April 25, 2004 — "Edmund Morris gives a pretty bad review to the brilliantly titled book about punctuation, 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves.'"

"So I don’t want to say anything off the cuff but I respect where you’re coming from."

Said Pete Buttigieg, quoted in "Climate protesters crash Buttigieg interview, chanting 'stop Petro Pete'" (The Hill).

Breaking: we just chased Secretary Pete Buttigieg off the stage at the Meyerhoff Symphony.

Petro Pete is a coward. As we write he is ramming down our throats the Sea Port and GulfLink oil terminals - each worse than Keystone.

We must resist him with all we've got. And we will. pic.twitter.com/aVKeCre5eH

— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) October 10, 2023

As I was playing that video out loud, Meade said, "Why doesn't a Cabinet Secretary have better security?" And that made me think perhaps the interruption was considered desirable — by Buttigieg, by the Biden administration/campaign. It isn't hard to generate ideas about why getting interrupted by extreme and rude climate activists might be advantageous.

And yet Buttigieg's response was so weak.  As one protester proclaims — after Buttigieg is ushered out of the room — "He said he can't speak off the cuff!" 

If the interruption had been anticipated, Buttigieg should have been prepared with something like Ronald "I am paying for this microphone" Reagan. 

"The thirty years since the release of 'Heathers' have solidified its legacy... Though J.D. emerges at first as a sensitive alternative to the football-playing lunkheads of Westerberg High..."

"... it becomes increasingly clear in the course of the movie that he is a product of what we now call 'toxic masculinity'.... J.D. is the kind of man who turns to violence because he feels that first, his mom, and later, his girlfriend, didn’t love him enough. With his trenchcoat and firearms, he can now be seen as a harbinger of the Columbine era, in which we unfortunately still very much reside.... The movie was ahead of its time in another respect.... [In 1988] 'Heathers' drew a prescient link between the self-satisfied, domineering Ayn Rand-ian cruelty of the Reagan era and the other side of the coin—sociopathic violence.... J.D., despite his seemingly subversive ethics, ends up espousing a vicious credo...."

Writes Naomi Fry, in "'Heathers' Blew Up the High-School Comedy/The 1989 cult classic ushered in a darker, weirder, more experimental era for teen movies" (NYT).

"Some Biden aides think the president would be better off occasionally displaying his temper in public as a way to assuage voter concerns that the 80-year-old president is disengaged and too old for the office."

And that the answer to the question why we are getting this now: "Old yeller: Biden's private fury" (Axios), in which we are told that private Biden is very different from public Biden. He has "a quick-trigger temper" and says things like "God dammit, how the f**k don't you know this?!," "Don't f**king bullsh*t me!" and "Get the f**k out of here!" 

When I first glanced at this article, I thought maybe it was the beginning of pushing Biden out of the 2024 race, but no. It's exactly the opposite. Biden has his public image as "a kindly uncle who loves Aviator sunglasses and ice cream," but his people want to "paint more complicated picture of Biden as a manager and president."

"Self-identified libertarians have always been tiny in number—a handful of economists, political activists, technologists, and true believers."

"But, in the decades after Ronald Reagan was elected President, they came to exert enormous political influence, in part because their prescription of prosperity through deregulation appeared to be working, and in part because they provided conservatism with a long-term agenda and a vision of a better future. To the usual right-wing mixture of social traditionalism and hierarchical nationalism, the libertarians had added an especially American sort of optimism: if the government would only step back and allow the market to organize society, we would truly flourish.... Had you written a history of the libertarian movement fifteen years ago, it would have been a tale of improbable success. A small cadre of intellectually intense oddballs who inhabited a Manhattanish atmosphere of late-night living-room debates and barbed book reviews had somehow managed to impose their beliefs on a political party, then the country.... Ever since the George W. Bush Administration, the libertarian movement, as such, has been disintegrating...."

Writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in "The Long Afterlife of Libertarianism/As a movement, it has imploded. As a credo, it’s here to stay" (The New Yorker).

DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, "normalcy": "We must return normalcy to our communities."

A couple hours ago, I put up a post that began to go through the transcript of yesterday's DeSantis event. I casually noted 2 things that called to mind former Presidents: 1. The Reaganesque "well," and 2. JFK's favorite word "vigor."

Getting back to the transcript just now, the next sentence I read is "We must return normalcy to our communities."

Normalcy! I can see wanting to resonate with Reagan and JFK — so presidential! — but Warren G. Harding? Here you have one of the famously bad Presidents, and the word is absolutely associated with Harding.

Harding said: "America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration."

From the "Back to Normalcy" chapter of the 1931 classic "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s":

[Harding's] liabilities were not at first so apparent, yet they were disastrously real. Beyond the limited scope of his political experience he was “almost unbelievably ill-informed,” as William Allen White put it. His mind was vague and fuzzy. Its quality was revealed in the clogged style of his public addresses, in his choice of turgid and maladroit language (“non-involvement” in European affairs, “adhesion” to a treaty), and in his frequent attacks of suffix trouble (“normalcy” for normality, “betrothment” for betrothal). It was revealed even more clearly in his helplessness when confronted by questions of policy to which mere good nature could not find the answer. White tells of Harding’s coming into the office of one of his secretaries after a day of listening to his advisers wrangling over a tax problem, and crying out: “John, I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then—God!—I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started. I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but, hell, I couldn’t read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but I don’t know where to find him and haven’t the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. God! what a job!” His inability to discover for himself the essential facts of a problem and to think it through made him utterly dependent upon subordinates and friends whose mental processes were sharper than his own.

In the transcript, DeSantis only said "normalcy" once — and never "normality." He also said "normal" twice: 

If there’s no accountability over any individual or entity of course they’re going to behave differently than if you have normal accountability....

My grandfather worked in the steel mill in western Pennsylvania. I just know instinctively what normal people think about all this stuff. I have a good sense of when the legacy media and the left are outside of where the average American is....

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."

For a longer version of that quote, read my post from June 2010, "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves." The post title is a quote from Michelle Obama. There was also this quote from Maureen Dowd: 

Of the many exciting things about Barack Obama’s election, one was the anticipation of a bracing dose of normality in the White House.

That was back when the abnormality was George W. Bush. The idea of a President as weird as Donald Trump was nowhere in sight. It's hard even to remember what was supposedly so un-normal about Bush. Remember when his brother Jeb stood on the debate stage next to Trump and pathetically relied on the assumption that we'd have to pick him over that unacceptably weird guy Trump? It didn't work, though it worked when Joe Biden stood on the debate stage next to Trump and argued, essentially, you'll have to take me over Trump because I'm the only thing here that approaches normality? That did work though.

Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again.  

"My name is Joe Biden. I’m Dr. Jill Biden’s husband. And I eat Jeni’s ice cream — chocolate chip. I came down because I heard there was chocolate chip ice cream."

"By the way, I have a whole refrigerator full upstairs. You think I’m kidding? I’m not."

Said Joe Biden, quoted in "Biden makes ice cream joke in first statement since Nashville shooting" (NY Post).

Remarkably, Biden again returned to the subject of ice cream with another shout-out to a rep from Jeni’s....

Remarkably? 

What's the deep meaning of Trump's kicking off his 2024 campaign in Waco?

I'm reading "A Trump Rally, a Right-Wing Cause and the Enduring Legacy of Waco/Thirty years ago, a fiery federal raid on a doomsday sect turned the city into a symbol of government overreach. Donald Trump will speak there on Saturday, and some supporters — and critics — say it’s no accident" by Charles Homans (NYT).

[Waco] has remained a cause for contemporary far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.... Alex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster who helped draw crowds of Trump loyalists to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, rose to prominence promoting wild claims about the Waco standoff. The longtime Trump associate and former campaign adviser Roger Stone dedicated his 2015 book, “The Clintons’ War on Women,” to the Branch Davidians who died at Mount Carmel.

By the way, that book title contains the only appearance of the name Clinton in the entire long article. (There's also one muted reference to Clinton: "the administration of a Democratic president.")

"The fact that Zelensky was a performer and is so good at presenting himself, the first reference I have to that is Reagan."

"The master communicator and professional actor. Right? And Trump, the entertainer recast as something. When did you get the sense that Zelensky was genuine?"

Asks the interviewer, Geoff Edgers, in "David Letterman on his surprise Ukraine trip and Zelensky interview A special episode of the former late-night king’s Netflix show, ‘My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,’ grew out of his admiration of the Ukrainian president during the ongoing war with Russia" (WaPo).

"'Literal grooming.' You can make your points without such anti-gay bigotry."

“Literal grooming.” You can make your points without such anti-gay bigotry.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) March 22, 2022

Accusing teachers of being gay sexual predators has a long vile history. Reagan stood up against it. It’s rank homophobic bigotry - and I don’t accuse people of that often. Attack the ideology. Don’t smear teachers.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) March 22, 2022

"For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor."

"Ronald Reagan portrayed Black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to 'a woman in Chicago' as the 'welfare queen.'... And the tension between the working class and the poor was easily exploited: Why should 'they' get help for not working when 'we' get no help, and we work? By the time Clinton campaigned for president, 'ending welfare as we knew it' had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs.... Yet when COVID hit, public assistance was no longer necessary just for 'them.' It was needed by 'us.'... The CARES Act, which [Trump] signed into law at the end of March, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000... But the real game changer... is the breadth of Biden's plan.... Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this bill unites them in its sheer expansiveness... Over 70 percent of Americans support the bill... The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. It's clearer than ever.... Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone."

Writes Robert Reich in "How Bidenomics Can Unite America" (Newsweek).

"Telling Didion that 'having a pretty place to work is important to a man,' Nancy Reagan fills an apothecary jar with hard candies for his desk..."

"... carpets the floors of the State Capitol 'in a pleasing shade of green,' Didion writes. (What green carpet, Didion’s deadpan delivery invites us to ask, has ever been 'pleasing'?) Didion’s understated tone registers the nuances obscured by the quotidian: the stiff neutrality between mother and son ('The Skipper’s arrival is, I have been told, the pivotal point of Nancy Reagan’s day'), Nancy’s preference for little choreographies... As [Didion] puts it in her 1976 essay 'Why I Write': 'I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. … What is going on in these pictures in my mind?'"

From "Joan Didion Revisits the Past Once More" by Durga Chew-Bose (NYT)(reviewing Joan Didion's new collection of essays, "Let Me Tell You What I Mean").

"We're told Biden doesn't have a 'vision.' He doesn't. We’re told he doesn’t have an ideology. He doesn’t. But he has a public image..."

"... which is that he’s a middle-class guy in the center who knows what he doesn't like — and he doesn’t like departures from common sense. In this initial, breath-gathering post-Trump moment, that might do as a Vision Substitute. It’s not asking not what your country can do for you or having a dream or a shining city on a hill or 'as Americans that is not enough we must be equal in the eyes of each other.' It’s just 'C'mon man.' Like Biden, it might do." 

Writes Mickey Kaus in "Wokeism Should Terrify Liberals... Here's a job for Joe...."

I see Matt Yglesias is doing a sunrise picture... but it's for politics, not, apparently, for any love of nature.

“I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” pic.twitter.com/tKtzHmJ2gO

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 2, 2020

I've got 2 poetry posts this morning, and I thought Yglesias's quote might be another poem... Maya Angelou, perhaps? But, no, it's Benjamin Franklin:

On the last day of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin observed that he had often wondered whether the design on the president's chair depicted a rising or a setting sun. "Now at length," he remarked, "I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun."

It's okay to use nature metaphors in politics. Reagan has his "Morning in America." It's nice to see the optimism, even though, I assume, Yglesias's optimism is an expression of the belief that Biden will win. If Trump wins, it will be... I had the transitory glimmer of happiness believing I was looking upon a rising sun, but no, no, it was a setting sun and darkness has fallen upon us once again.

Ah, whatever. Here's the sunrise I saw this morning — witnessed and loved purely as a sunrise and not any sort of metaphor:

"Mr. Biden is far better known than Mr. Dukakis was and he has shown a resilience to caricature that Mr. Dukakis did not have."

"Mr. Trump is viewed unfavorably by a big swath of voters. His lack of credibility with many Americans has undercut his ability to deliver an attack. The nation is more pessimistic than it was when Mr. Dukakis faced Mr. Bush, who as Ronald Reagan’s vice president was effectively running as an incumbent.... 'This is going to be tricky for them: Biden is a pretty well-known quantity,' said Susan Estrich, who was Mr. Dukakis’ campaign manager. 'The way you usually burst balloons is paint the other guy as a risk.' Mr. Dukakis, proud and disdainful of politics, refused to believe these kind of attacks would hurt them, and did not heed the advice of his staff that he fight back. He allowed Mr. Bush to define him before Labor Day.... His opponents even raised questions about Mr. Dukakis’s mental fitness, decades before Mr. Biden faced the same. Conservative groups were circulating rumors, with no substantiation, that Mr. Dukakis was hiding the fact that he had been treated for depression. As the summer came to an end, Mr. Reagan was asked if Mr. Dukakis should release his medical records. 'Look, I’m not going to pick on an invalid,' he said. Mr. Reagan later said this was a failed joke, but by design or not, it succeeded in thrusting the rumor to the center of public attention. Mr. Dukakis called a news conference to say he had never struggled with mental illness."

From "A Glimmer of Hope for Trump? How Bush Mounted a Comeback in 1988/For Biden, a cautionary tale. For Trump, a search for his own Willie Horton" (NYT).

"Where Do Republicans Go From Here?/The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches. But off in the corners, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment."

That's just the new David Brooks column, but I'm linking to it because it has a very cool illustration by Tim Enthoven. And I like that it fits so squarely into my tag "what Trump did to the GOP" which you might enjoy clicking on for a trip down memory lane.

Here's some Brooks:

If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes....

But somehow that wasn't enough. Other Republicans offered other "paradigms." First on the list, Brooks himself!

On Sept. 15, 1997, William Kristol and I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on what we called National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government.

They argued for "ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility." Brooks thinks John McCain, in 2000, represented their idea. George W. Bush, who won that year, had his own paradigm:  Compassionate Conservatism. That was, per Brooks, "an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism." There were more paradigms offered up:

Sam’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns. Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities. The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods. The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

"Many readers suggested that 'biker' is just another word for a motorcyclist, not a cyclist."

From a discussion in Bicycling magazine, "Cyclist or Biker? Here’s What Our Readers Had to Say":

“Have you ever seen a biker bar completely surrounded by bicycles? Bikers ride motorcycles, cyclists ride road bicycles, and mountain bikers ride mountain bikes,” said Instagram user @sdotdrisc.

Hm. So he used the word "bikers" for mountain bikers, but seems to insist that the word "mountain" stay attached to it. No shortening.

“Bikers are more rad, cyclists are more fast,” replied Instagram user @b._.stutts....

“A cyclist is what anyone who rides a bike calls themselves and someone else. A biker is what anyone who doesn’t bike calls someone who does bike,” said pro cyclist Ellen Noble, who goes by the handle @ellenlikesbikes.

At the end of the day, Rich Sieck (@rsieck44) might’ve said it best: “A cyclist logs many miles mostly on pavement. A biker flies up and down mountains in the dirt. Either way you do it, you’re awesome!”

The topic came up in the context of my post about Chris Cuomo railing about his encounter with a "jackass, loser, fat tire biker." The comma after "loser" was in the New York Post's transcription, and it's confusing, making it seem as though Chris Cuomo's sins included fat shaming. A better transcription would be: "jackass, loser fat-tire biker." There's a lot of discussion about fat-tire bikes over there, and I assume Cuomo was irked by the fat-tiredness because the "jackass" in question was biking on the sand of the beach where he was rich enough to own a house.

"Now, I wrote something off the cuff, if I can read this," said the My Pillow guy. "Okay," said Trump.

Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, was there at the Task Force press briefing yesterday, and he delivered his prepared remarks, about how his company was helping — putting 75% of its manufacturing capacity into cotton face masks. But then he wanted to add something that — presumably — nobody had checked out. Trump said "Okay."

Lindell laughed and plunged straight into religion and politics:

God gave us grace on November 8th, 2016, to change the course we were on. God had been taken out of our schools and lives. A nation had turned its back on God. And I encourage you: Use this time at home to get — home to get back in the Word, read our Bibles, and spend time with our families. Our President gave us so much hope where, just a few short months ago, we had the best economy, the lowest unemployment, and wages going up. It was amazing. With our great President, Vice President, and this administration and all the great people in this country praying daily, we will get through this and get back to a place that’s stronger and safer than ever.

Trump said:

That’s very nice. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it.... I did not know he was going to do that, but he’s a friend of mine, and I do appreciate it. Thank you, Mike, very much.

Trump did not know he was going to do that, but he's a friend of Trump's, so Trump must have known religion was coming. Religion is one thing, but this felt too much like campaigning — campaigning with religion. Trump said "okay" — go "off the cuff" — but he "did not know he was going to do that." Okaaaay.

The press briefings should not devolve into testimonials to the greatness of the President. Yes, there can be some room to get a little personal, to express some love, and it's fine to speak of God and prayers — a bit. Not too much. But we can't be having that Mypillowism every day.

For some reason, this subject reminded me of the trouble Trump had with the wind blowing his hair. (The head/pillow connection?) At the beginning of the event — in the Rose Garden — the wind was blowing briskly, pulling the long strands of Trump hair away from the usual stuck-together shape. He said: "And we’ve opened up — whoops, there goes our box" — the President had just done an unboxing of a new testing device — "And my hair is blowing around, and it’s mine. The one thing you can’t get away with. If it’s not yours, you got a problem, if you’re President."

Yeah, if it’s not yours, you got a problem, if you’re President. It's just awful when the President's toupee goes flying in the wind. Which President wore a toupee? I don't mean those openly wiggy wigs the first few Presidents wore. I mean the hairpiece that is supposed to deceive us. I tend to think it hasn't been done yet, but if anyone did, I'm going to guess Reagan.

Trump is 73, the same age Bob Dole was in 1996, when he was treated as absurdly old, and Trump's Democratic opponents are 4 or 5 years older than that.

Do you remember the age issue as it was presented in 1996?



Bill Clinton handled that elegantly, skirting outright ageism and attacking the ideas as old.

A NYT column "Still Running/Is Age-Bashing Any Way to Beat Bob Dole?" from May 5, 1996 noted that indirect approach — "coded partisan formulations" — but also the direct attacks:

[T]he old-guy bashing of Mr. Dole in political cartoons and late-night comedy routines has reached an intensity that makes the jokes about Ronald Reagan in the 1980's seem like gentle kidding. Dole age jokes ("Dole is 96") are now as much a part of popular culture as gibes at Madonna's impending motherhood, and sometimes as mean-spirited.

"Bob Dole is calling himself an optimist," David Letterman said in a recent monologue. "I understand this because a lot of people would look at a glass as half empty. Bob Dole looks at the glass and says, 'What a great place to put my teeth.' "