How does the ratchet work? It begins with small, unobjectionable, or perhaps even salutary steps, coupled with assurances that potential downsides or extreme outcomes will never come about. Then, over time, incremental moves are made in the same direction until the unreasonable policy that we’d been assured would never happen is entrenched reality.... Trump has yanked the other way so far on these ratchet issues that it’s not clear when or how the left can get them back to the status quo ante.
Don't his antagonists like to think everything he could do on his own with presidential power the next Democratic President can just undo? But not so long ago, they thought that what their Presidents had done could not be undone? That was the ratchet theory.
"... and think cars are destroying the planet whereas trains can save it.
High-speed rail is to transit what windmills are to energy — an environmentally correct, futuristic technology that will always under-deliver.... The current focus is a line between Merced (pop. 93,000) and Bakersfield (413,000).... The original estimated $33 billion cost is now $35 billion for just the scaled-back line, and more than $100 billion and counting for the whole shebang.
There is no reason that the feds should pour good money after bad supporting a preposterous project that doesn’t have any national significance.
California governor Gavin Newsom — too embarrassed to admit failure or too drunk on visions of European-style rail — remains fully committed. In a statement, he said Trump’s defunding decision is a 'gift to China,' as if Beijing cares whether people get to Bakersfield by car, plane or high-speed rail...."
Why don't people who care about the environment simply stop traveling? Even if the line did connect L.A. to San Francisco, as it was originally sold, what is the need to go back and forth between these 2 cities... or any 2 cities in America? The high-tech solution is not high-speed rail. It's virtual connection. The amorphous interest in appearing somewhere in the flesh does not deserve a taxpayer subsidy.
"The indictments make everything about him more so than is the case ordinarily. His motorcades haven’t been covered as extensively since he was president, and his latest Truth Social posts denouncing his mistreatment are being covered as breaking news. It all contributes to the miniaturization of the rest of the field. Other candidates are given the choice of saying what many Republicans want to hear about how shabbily Mr. Trump is being treated and end up simply echoing his points or condemning his underlying conduct and seeming to pile on with his bitterest and most-hated enemies.... A figure like Mr. Trump, a colorful populist adored by a political base in part because he is so embattled, is unlikely to be taken down by the very authorities he says are corrupt and arrayed against him."
"He was also in the awkward position of trying to run against disorder as an incumbent rather than a challenger, and his chaotic governing style wasn’t a good match for a message of orderliness.
But now, more than a year into a serious crime wave, Democrats should beware—they are fooling themselves if they think they won’t be blamed for a rise in violence in Democratic-run cities that clearly, at some level, is a result of police forces feeling beleaguered and overwhelmed."
"It wouldn’t matter who the Democrats nominated for 2020. They could run Bernie Sanders on a ticket with Elizabeth Warren and promise to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez secretary of the treasury and Ilhan Omar secretary of defense, and they’d still win. A significant portion of the Republican party would consider a Senate conviction of Trump a dastardly betrayal.... Trump himself isn’t going to get convicted by the Senate and say: 'Well, I’m a little disappointed, to be honest. But it was a close call, and Mike Pence is a great guy, and I’m just grateful I had the opportunity to serve in the White House for more than three years.' He won’t go away quietly to lick his wounds. He won’t delete his Twitter account. He won’t make it easy on anyone. He will vent his anger and resentment at every opportunity. It will be 'human scum' every single day. And it’s not as though the media are going to lose their interest in the most luridly telegenic politician that we’ve ever seen. The mainstream press would be delighted to see Trump destroyed, yet sad to bid him farewell. The obvious way to square the circle would be to continue to give Trump lavish coverage in his post-presidency. He’d be out of the White House but still driving screaming CNN chyrons every other hour."
I think the entire theater of impeachment is taking place within the false security that the Senate will never be able to convict. But what if the momentum gets going and 2/3 of the Senators vote to convict? Yes, Pence becomes President, but what I mean is: What happens to the American people who voted Trump into office and who — from the moment they won — have had the experience of seeing their President treated like a big, horrible mistake? Their choice was never honored, never treated as respectable. They got to see that their opinion never mattered and was never supposed to prevail. And what will Trump do? Freed from the responsibilities of the presidency and past all the fighting of the impeachment battle, he won't hide away. He will be out and about, energized and inventing more new ways of being a politician in America, and he will have an immense audience, overshadowing what any other political candidate can do. The new temptation will be to prosecute him for crimes, but, again, how will this affect the millions of people who thought they won the election and then saw their victory taken away?
"Only Northam has been thrown overboard by the party, with Fairfax and Herring getting passes so far because Democrats don’t want to nuke the entirety of a state executive branch they control. Regardless, Virginia is an indication of an inflamed and unforgiving Democratic mood that will define the party’s battle for the 2020 presidential nomination. Democrats are about to embark on the first woke primary, a gantlet of political correctness that will routinely wring abject apologies out of candidates and find fault in even the most sure-footed. The passage of time will be no defense. Nor the best of intentions. Nor anything else. Any lapses will be interpreted through the most hostile lens, made all the more brutal by the competition of a large field of candidates vying for the approval of a radicalized base. The Democrat nomination battle might as well be fought on the campus of Oberlin College and officiated by the director of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.... No one will be woke enough to emerge from this process unscathed."
From "The Bonfire of the Democrats" by Rich Lowry (the National Review editor) writing at Politico. Go to the link for Lowry's details on the vulnerability of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kamala Harris.
The Democrats have created a weapon that will be used repeatedly against anyone that rises within their ranks, and they didn't even keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Court. What a disaster!
It's the ultimate in Alinsky's rule #4 — "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." Looking for a place for the precise text of the rule, I happened upon "Who is Saul Alinsky, and why does the right hate him so much?" That's from July 2016. Hate?!
By the way... Ridicule is man's most potent weapon (Rule #5).
ADDED: The Editorial Board of The Washington Post, last night, dug in, "Ralph Northam must resign." But what about Fairfax and Herring? The allegations against Fairfax and Herring are not "relevant" to the question whether Northam can continue as an "effective governor."
It’s reasonable to guess that other revelations elsewhere, about other public figures with their own histories or photos of offensive, insensitive or racist conduct, may surface in coming days. Each should be judged on its own set of circumstances. In the case of Mr. Northam, the circumstances are decisive; what’s done cannot be undone. He must go.
Judge each person as an individual. Good idea. But you're also going to have to treat like cases alike. So if you don't want to throw out everyone who did nothing worse that darken his face to go to a costume party in the guise of a pop star he loved, then you have to stop yourself as you make that individual judgment against Northam, or you're setting up all the future cases to hinge on the argument that what this individual did was at least as bad as what Northam did. And I think the real reason the WaPo editors are against Northam is not that they want the wearing of a Michael Jackson costume to deserve the new political death penalty. It's that so many prominent Democrats put their reputations on the line demanding that Northam resign, and the editors don't want to leave them exposed.
“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes... Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent, fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”
Swenson observes:
The passage — “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God” — has been read as an unequivocal order for Christians to obey state authority, a reading that not only justified Southern slavery but also authoritarian rule in Nazi Germany and South African apartheid.
And what about other things in the New Testament? Stephen Colbert joked darkly:
“Hey, don’t bring God into this. I don’t think God picked you, because I don’t worship Vladimir Putin... Jesus said, ‘Suffer the children to come unto me.’ But I’m pretty sure all Sessions saw was the words ‘children’ and ‘suffer’ and said, ‘I’m on it.’ ”
Swenson collects other pro-immigrant Christian responses
“I guess Sessions forgot about the Gospels part of the Bible. Matthew 25:35 says ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,’ ” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said on Twitter. “Nothing in the Bible says to separate kids from parents. It teaches the opposite.”...
Theology scholar Mike Frost wrote in 2016 that Romans 13 should not be used to quell dissent because it comes from a period when Christians faced persecution from the Roman Emperor Nero.
“This is the guy who was said to have had Christians dipped in oil and set on fire to light his garden at night,” Frost wrote. “It makes perfect sense that Paul would commend the fledgling church to keep its head down, to avoid rocking the boat, to submit quietly to the prevailing political winds. They had no choice. They lived under the authority of a dictator.”
Quite aside from what the Bible says, should the Attorney General be using the Bible to defend a government policy? One might answer yes, because the policy was challenged morally, and even though it is theoretically possible to discuss morality without religion and some people can only discuss morality without religion, for many people morality is bound up with religion, and it should be at least permissible to discuss the morality of a public policy in terms of religion. There are consequences to using religion this way, though, of course. It may feel exclusionary to those who don't share the religion or who have a religious problem with interpreting scripture for a political purpose. And if you've got a passage for your position, then I'll have a passage for mine, and I can reinterpret yours and you can reinterpret mine, and we may find ourselves making garbage out of what we were only using in the first place because we posed as believing it was holy.
By the way, we all feel bad for the children, but I'm seeing a spotlight on the point when the children are removed from parents who are being sent to prison. If the separation is wrong, what is the less wrong thing that ought to be done instead? I'm not seeing anyone talking about that. Am I missing everything that answers my question or are there reasons why no one wants to talk about that?
ADDED: At National Review, Rich Lowry explains the limitation imposed by the Flores Consent Decree (from 1997):
It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.
[T]hese children weren’t in HHS custody. They were placed with sponsors that HHS vetted. It’d obviously be better if HHS could locate all of the sponsors in its follow-up. Some of them surely moved, and perhaps others, if they or family members are illegal immigrants, may not want to be in further contact with authorities.
Some people like when I list the questions raised by the post. If that's not you, go ahead and start commenting. If it is, hang on a few minutes while I work that out.
AND: Questions presented:
1. What do you think Maguire and Rather mean when they use the word "Orwellian"? How diffuse has this pejorative become? Do you prefer a more precise meaning? If so, what is it? And how far off are Maguire and Rather?
2. Who is Maguire anyway? Why would anyone who wants to be taken seriously go beyond "Orwellian" to "one of the most Orwellian things I've every seen"? What has this guy seen? Seems like not much, right?
3. Why is Scott Adams taking such a mild-mannered shot at Maguire? Or is this style very effective as a response to Maguire's hyperventilation?
4. Isn't Rather pretty obviously indulging in a propagandistic style? Is it really possible that he doesn't realize that?
5. Do we remember Rathergate, or has it gone down the Memory Hole?
6. Does Althouse fall down the Memory Hole when something reminds her of something in the archive, and she's thinking you're probably wondering by now just what this post is all about? More baffling: What is this thing here for? Is it nothing?
7. Who the hell is "Mammon" anyway? And if there is no Hell, is there no Mammon?
8. What's in Mammon's sack?
9. How obscene is that illustration? Who is that woman and what does she have to do with Evelyn De Morgan?
10. Isn't it Orwellian the way it's always the other side that looks Orwellian?
Have you seen this one? National Review editor Rich Lowry was on "This Week" yesterday and this happened:
STEPHANOPOULOS: It's pretty clear [President Trump] said what's been reported. By denying it, he puts his supporters in the most difficult position.
LOWRY: He used a different -- my understanding from the meeting, he used a different, but very closely related vulgarity. He said s-house, and not s-hole. That's not going to make a difference to anyone. But the general remarks -- yes -- I'd like to have a transcript, because everyone is putting so much weight on this to see exactly what was said in what ways, but the general tenor of the discussion has been reported accurately.
Not going to make a difference to anyone?! Now I'm determined to find a shithouse/shithole distinction.
Historically, going back to the 1600s, "shithole" first meant "The rectum or anus." (I'm using the OED.) "Shithole" took on other meanings in the early 20th century: "a wretched place," "a toilet." And in the late 20th century, it also became an alternative to "asshole" to mean "a despicable person."
"Shithouse," going back to the 1600s, meant "toilet," usually an outdoor toilet — a "privy" or "outhouse." The oldest published usage is (like Trump's purported use) metaphorical:
1659 J. Howell Ital. Prov. Let. Ital. Prov. sig. A4v, in Παροιμιογραϕια If Florence had a Sea Port, she would make a Hortyard of Pisa, a Counting-house of Ligorn, and a shitt-house of Luca.
Like "shithole," "shithouse" came to mean "a wretched place" in the 20th century. The first published use was in 1949, in Henry Miller's "Sexus": "You leave the toilet and you step into the big shithouse. Whatever you touch is shitty."
And here's Martin Amis in "London Fields" in 1989:
The class system just doesn't know when to call it a day. Even a nuclear holocaust, I think, would fail to make that much of a dent in it. Crawling through the iodized shithouse that used to be England, people would still be brooding about accents and cocked pinkies, about maiden names and settee or sofa, about the proper way to eat a roach in society. Do you take the head off first or start with the legs?
Ha ha. Settee or sofa. It's so like shithouse or shithole. And yet so different.
Anyway, "shithouse" also came to mean "despicable person" in the 20th century (at least in Britain). And it's been an adjective meaning "contemptible, bad, disgusting" at least since 1966, when Charles Bukowski wrote in a letter, "The flunky fired from his shithouse job, the guys like me."
There are also the phrases: "To be in the shithouse" (as in "Fleetwood Mac's career was definitely not in the shithouse") and "shithouse rumor" ("All you had was a shithouse rumor" (heh, that's all we have about Trump and "shithouse")) and the well-known "shithouse rat" ("Cute as a shithouse rat," wrote the lowly, lowry cur James Joyce in that shithouse book "Ulysses").
I've got to say, if Trump said it, I hope he said "shithouse." First, I like the resonance with his real estate career. It's the humblest real estate, a shithouse. "Shithole" has more of an anatomical whiff to it — not that Trump doesn't also have his connection to body parts (tiny hands, grabbed pussies, differently sized penises).
ADDED: There's also the subtle topic of what goes on in the mind of a person who hears "shithouse" and later drags "shithole" up out of his memory. If the wrong word was reported, what caused the house-to-hole substitution? Phobia about human anatomy?
Said Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, on "Meet the Press" today. Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, had just said:
The president is not randomly attacking these players. He is attacking them because they're kneeling during the national anthem. And the national anthem is not a white-supremacist symbol.
When Henderson responded with "Some of the words of the national anthem are white supremacist," it surprised me. I thought about the first verse — the only verse that's sung at games and the only verse I have uploaded to memory — bombs bursting in air? dawn's early light? land of the free? — and briefly considered whether "land of the free" celebrates white supremacy before vaguely remembering reading something about some other verse.
A quick google got me to "Star-Spangled Bigotry: The Hidden Racist History of the National Anthem" at The Root, which I read and puzzled over. There's a line in the third verse, "No refuge could save the hireling and slave," which The Root says exults at the idea of Americans killing freed slaves who were fighting with the British in the War of 1812. "'The Star-Spangled Banner' is as much a patriotic song as it is a diss track to black people who had the audacity to fight for their freedom."
Wikipedia says: "A diss track or diss song is a song primarily intended to disrespect people," and gives examples, including John Lennon's "How Do You Sleep?" which lashed out at Paul McCartney. Every line of that — from "Those freaks was right when they said you was dead" to "You live with straights" — was aimed at Paul. "The Star-Spangled Banner" may have one line about slaves in verse 3, but even that one line isn't aimed at slaves. It's aimed, like the rest of the song, at the British.
I'm not going to attempt to resolve the question of what was in the mind of Francis Scott Key when he mentioned slaves in that verse we don't sing at sports events and maybe don't even ever sing,* but here's a beautiful monument to him in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco:
Back to "Meet the Press." Stephen Henderson said, "Some of the words of the national anthem are white supremacist," and Rich Lowry seemed surprised: "You think the national anthem is racist?"
Henderson said: "I think this is a country whose history is racist, whose history is steeped in white supremacy, and the anthem reflects that in its very words." He had no chance to explain which words or to argue about why they are racist, which might make us think that he's only making the weaker argument that because the country has been racist, the song must reflect that racism.
Lowry's parry — "Well, it's also a nation with very important ideals that have worn down those injustices over time and created a more just society" — makes it most likely that viewers will think Henderson was only making the weaker argument.
Meanwhile, on State of the Union, the host Jake Tapper was talking to Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who's now a CNN commentator, and she said it was "utterly ridiculous" for Trump "to pick up this fight" about protesting the anthem. Tapper said he had "a feeling" she's right and that "this is going to drive people to Kaepernick's side." Tapper asked Turner if she thought "it's an accident that he's talking about predominantly African-American players." She said:
Not at all. Look at his audience. It's no accident. He doesn't do anything by accident, he's very strategic about this.
So Trump is not the chaotic, impulsive, crazy man?! He's got it all planned out. Turner went all Scott Adams there for a second. She continues:
And this kind of (INAUDIBLE) is right up his alley. He loves when all this chaos and confusion -- this feeds his agenda.
Oh, so it only seems like "chaos and confusion," but that's what's so deviously strategic about it. Maybe Turner got an advance copy of Scott Adams's forthcoming book.
_____________________
* The song has 4 verses. Have you ever heard anyone sing them all? I have a feeling I've heard at least one other verse sung, but the 3d verse is completely alien to me and, I presume, to the vast majority of American sports spectators who care about the opening ceremony. I went looking for the full version, and this was the finest one I found, by Tom Callinan (even though he botches the word "hireling" in the crucial line):
"[A]mazingly enough, they find the West itself an offensive and exclusionary concept. Th[is] critique speaks to how the mantra 'Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go' is no longer just the creed of fringe activists, but is seeping into the mainstream. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post worries that Trump’s speech invites civilizational conflict. Really? Trump just had a successful trip to Saudi Arabia, where presumably it isn’t news that the West is vested in Western values. Peter Beinart of the Atlantic objects that 'the West' is allegedly 'a racial and religious term.' This is bizarre, given that countries everywhere can 'Westernize,' or adopt the norms and practices that were first adopted in the West and are uniquely suited to human flourishing. Trump warned in his speech of fighting for centuries to maintain our freedom, only to lose it to 'a lack of pride and confidence in our values.' The unhinged reaction to his address... shows how this, alas, is not an idle worry."
Do you remember the original "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go"? It happened at Stanford:
By the mid-1980s, increasing dissatisfaction with the introductory humanities program known as “Western Culture” that had begun in 1980 came to the fore. The program was criticized for its lack of diversity and its predominantly Eurocentric readings. Students advocated for a curriculum that included ethnic minority and women authors. On January 15, 1987, as many as 500 students, along with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, rallied down Palm Drive chanting, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go." The curriculum debate drew national attention, and in 1989 Western Culture was formally replaced with the Cultures, Ideas, & Values (CIV) program that included more inclusive works on race, class, and gender.
At Stanford, a backlash against this censorious student culture is taking shape in the form of a petition to reinstate the university’s Western Civilization curriculum. In the next two days, students will vote on a referendum proposed by the Stanford Review, an undergraduate political magazine, urging the Stanford’s Faculty Senate to require a two-quarter course for freshman “covering the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.”...
On "Meet the Press" today, Chuck Todd interviewed Glenn Beck. Beck, a Cruz supporter, was there to argue that if there's an open convention, the delegates should be limited to choosing between Trump and Cruz (and should pick Cruz). Todd does enough to show Beck's incoherence but doesn't really nail him down:
CHUCK TODD: Let me start with this concern. We've heard it from many people that are Cruz supporters and that Trump supporters over the airwaves, who are concerned that somehow the party establishment may deny both of them. What would happen do you think to, what would your listeners, how would they react?
GLENN BECK: I think it would be the end of the G.O.P. ...
CHUCK TODD: So you think if Paul Ryan is somehow plucked as the Republican nominee, that it would be the end of the G.O.P. --
GLENN BECK: -- I think it would be very bad. You can't disenfranchise people. We've all gone out. We've been passionate about it. We've all been going back and forth and voted on the people that we believe. I really think it has to be one of the two frontrunners. I just think people would feel very betrayed....
I know he wants Cruz, but he's mischaracterizing what the people are doing. We were enfranchised when we voted in a primary and our vote was given the effect that we were told it would have toward selecting delegates who would vote on our behalf at a convention. And let's be clear about where the passion is and is not. Many of us in Wisconsin who voted for Cruz were voting to stop Trump and to get to an open convention where we hope to see Paul Ryan selected. Don't imagine some passion on our part that augments that passion of yours. If the GOP convention picks Paul Ryan, I wouldn't feel betrayed. I'd feel vindicated.
"Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones,” the editorial reads.
And that’s just the start.
The National Review issue features anti-Trump essays from more than 20 conservative thinkers, leaders and commentators spanning the GOP’s ideological spectrum from David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian-infused Cato Institute, to William Kristol, the hawkish editor of the Weekly Standard, to David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth. All call for Republicans to nominate someone other than Trump.
“This is the time to mobilize,” said National Review editor Rich Lowry, who is also a weekly opinion columnist at POLITICO. “The establishment is AWOL, or even worse, so it’s up to people who really believe in these ideas and principles, for whom they’re not just talking points or positions of convenience, to set out the marker.”
Trump tweets:
The failing @NRO National Review Magazine has just been informed by the Republican National Committee that they cannot participate in debate
Meanwhile, at least according to the NYT, "the cadre of Republican lobbyists, operatives and elected officials based in Washington is much more unnerved by Mr. Cruz, a go-it-alone, hard-right crusader who campaigns against the political establishment and could curtail their influence and access, building his own Republican machine to essentially replace them."
[M]any members of the Republican influence apparatus, especially lobbyists and political strategists, say they could work with Mr. Trump as the party’s standard-bearer, believing that he would be open to listening to them and cutting deals, and would not try to take over the party...
Of course, this willingness to accommodate Mr. Trump is driven in part by the fact that few among the Republican professional class believe he would win a general election. In their minds, it would be better to effectively rent the party to Mr. Trump for four months this fall, through the general election, than risk turning it over to Mr. Cruz for at least four years, as either the president or the next-in-line leader for the 2020 nomination.
But what if Trump wins? Somebody is going to have to win. The idea that each one "can't win" makes no sense. The establishment, we're told, is thinking that Trump would be a pragmatist and he wouldn't break their hold on the GOP. To flip that: If you want more disruption, Cruz is the one.
During the 2008 race, Republican Mike Huckabee surged 17 points between an October poll and a late November poll, moving into a lead he did not relinquish.
In 2004, Democrat John Edwards jumped from 5 percent to 22 percent, also a 17-point leap, in the final poll before the vote. And Democrat John Kerry rose 10 points, from 15 percent to 25 percent....
And:
Among Trump supporters, a strong number say Cruz is their second choice (49 percent). Ben Carson's second-choice votes go mostly to Cruz (35 percent), with Trump getting 17 percent. Carson and Trump are nearly tied for Cruz supporters' second choice, 26 percent and 25 percent respectively.
As this new poll attracts new attention to him, Cruz should be able to take great advantage of the debate coming up on Tuesday. Cruz has unique skill in debate, and people should think about how that skill will work in a general election debate against Hillary Clinton.
An important question here is what matters more to Trump: the fact of the (transparently insincere) gestures of submissiveness from Cruz, or the purpose of the (transparently insincere) gestures of submissiveness from Cruz, namely to tip-toe around Trump in Iowa?
I have a question: If he cared, would Trump understand the game Rich Lowry is playing? I say the answer is yes, because I just assume Trump figures out whichever games he wants. But I myself don't know. But here's something Lowry put up on December 6th: "All Things Considered, I’d Rather Be Ted."
"And I don't think there's any clever way for the establishment to take him down. It's very simple. Another candidate is going to have to find a way either to out-maneuver him, or to just frankly beat him in the argument. And if no one can do that, yeah, he better man the lifeboats, because there's some significant chance he'll win the nomination."
That was on "Meet the Press" yesterday. I never got around to watching my recording of it — only got to "Face the Nation" and "Fox News Sunday" before maxing out and letting the television do what it wanted to do: display football games. So I'm just reading the transcript this morning, which is easier to scroll through and easier to blog.
I'm cherry-picking that Rich Lowry quote because it exemplifies the tedium. We've had months of this almost perfectly empty staring at the blunt fact of Trump's existence. It's progressed from he's not really there to he won't go away to he'll have to go away soon to we need to recognize that he's not going away like we thought he would to — newly emerging — he's (probably) going to get the nomination and then what will we do?
Lowry's rhetoric — which perhaps he said with the simulacrum of a pleasant smile on his face — has an edge of violence. Trump should just "disappear." (We'd use sorcery to disappear him if we could.) We needed to "take him down." And if we can't, "he better man the lifeboats." Did he say "he"? Why should Trump man the lifeboats if Trump wins the nomination? Ah, do I have to check the transcriptions? Dammit. But the violence is there, you see? A shipwreck. Oh, I get it, I think. The whole big Republican Party is the sinking ship, and Trump will have to proceed by lifeboat, because he will have lost the party, the establishment. But was Trump even ever on that ship? And if you look at the polls, is the ship even big? I don't know, but perhaps Mr. Lowry has some ideas about whether the deck chairs would look better rearranged.
ADDED: Meade IMs an image with the caption "Trump’s lifeboat will be HUGE"...
AND: I checked the recording, and on first listen, it did sound like: "And if no one can do that, yeah, he better man the lifeboats...." But by the 4th listen, it was absolutely clear that he said: "And if no one can do that, yeah, you better man the lifeboats...." Does this ship still sink?
... which might not be quite fair. That FoxNews thing is this: "TRUMP GOES OFF – BLASTS RICH LOWRY After Conservative Pundit Talks About 'His Balls' on Kelly File." What Lowry said was: "Let’s be honest, Carly cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon." That is, it wasn't an imperative. (It wasn't: "cut his balls off!") And I suspect Lowry thought he was exercising some kind of twisted female privilege, since he was interposing a woman between himself and Trump and female violence is sexistly regarded as a big joke.
Writes Rich Lowry, letting us see the anguish caused by the relentless sticking power of that number 77. So irksome! So unforgettable!
The statistic, and the political use to which it is put, deserve each other; they are equally shoddy, shameless and disreputable....
Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute note that men are twice as likely to work more than 40 hours per week as women....
Feminists are mistaking a byproduct of the laudable desire of mothers to spend time with their kids for a depredation of The Man.
Are they "mistaking" — or in thrall to a "cargo cult" — or are they utterly savvy and laughing at the anguish of Lowry, et al.? The factoid works politically, and there's some kind of problem involving women and work that a lot of people care about. Lowry would sweep aside that problem by calling it the laudable desire of mothers to spend time with their kids. That's not particularly accurate and subtle, and I'm not surprised that his political opponents continue, gleefully, to antagonize him and his ilk with that 77¢ business.
The part of pay disparity driven by sexism is so small that it will be very difficult to detect in any given case, or even in aggregate. The sexism that drives it probably mostly operates below the conscious level, in men and women who know that they don’t like hard-charging, opinionated women, but don’t recognize that this is partly because they’re women.
The part of pay disparity that is driven by differential ability to work long hours is easy to detect, but what do we do? Mandate that everyone be paid a flat rate by the hour? Put everyone in the country on something like the government’s GS system? Cap working hours? To state the meaningful solutions is to reject them....
See? She appreciates the nature of the real problem and doesn't slough it off as mere "laudable desire" to spend time with children (which sounds — infuriatingly — as though he thinks women are just doing what they like and deserve to make less money).
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
Posts
