I'm reading that J.D. Vance's reaction to Kamala Harris's swearing in of new Senators today has gone viral.

I don't understand why. It's an interesting situation, the defeated presidential candidate performing this role, but it is her duty as the current President of the Senate (i.e. Vice President), and J.D. Vance looks happy, but it's not as though he's taunting her. He's there, along with Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, former U.S. Sen. Rob Portman of Cincinnati, to support the new Senator from Ohio, Bernie Moreno:

Some news media are calling attention to this other awkwardness: "Kamala Harris Heads to Capitol to Swear-In Senators Who Won’t Even Say Her Name Right" (Time), "Kamala Harris will give oath of office to GOP senators who couldn’t get her name right" (Independent).

It seems to me that this was a formal, required ritual, and everyone went through the motions with dignity and collegiality. 

"Rushing an impeachment case through the House without due process and giving the Senate a half-baked case to finish set a dangerous precedent."

"If the Senate were to convict, it would risk making this kind of quick, partisan impeachment in the House a regular occurrence. That would serve only to further deepen the divides that seem to permeate every part of our society today.... While the Senate is where this impeachment process will end, it is also the Senate that is best suited to help turn the page and begin a new chapter. We can do that by demonstrating that we can work together and address the issues our constituents care most about...."

Writes Senator Rob Portman in "Why I’m Voting to Acquit President Trump/Impeachment will end in the Senate. It’s time to take up consensus issues" (NYT). Portman is a Republican from Ohio.

The comments over there are very skeptical of Portman's asserted reasons. Example:

Maybe your rationalization helps you sleep at night, Mr. Portman. The only reason this was the only purely partisan impeachment in history is because Republicans refused to do their job, refused to be impartial despite an oath to do so, and declined to allow evidence and witnesses despite overwhelming probably cause to do so....

That reminds me... I think the #1 lesson of this impeachment is that there should never be another impeachment without bipartisan support in the House. With the 2/3 majority requirement in the Senate, it was easy to see that the vote to convict would not materialize and that therefore the vote to impeach was for show.

Maybe the show was exciting for House Democrats at one point, but what an awful ordeal for the country, and now here they are complaining that acquittal will further empower the President to do — as the phrase goes — "whatever he wants."

Are you lying about the effect of acquittal now? Are you denying that you foresaw this effect all along? Or do you really believe acquittal empowers the President to do whatever he wants and you knew that would be the end result and you chose to impeach him anyway? All the options are incompetent!

Things that made me say "Oh, no!" out loud while sitting alone.

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I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date. And after briefly dating in 1999 we remained friends for years. I like Natalie, and I respect her intelligence and activism. But, to be honest, I can’t figure out why she would actively misrepresent the truth about our(albeit brief)involvement. The story as laid out in my book Then It Fell Apart is accurate, with lots of corroborating photo evidence, etc. Thanks, Moby Ps I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me(to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too), but it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history

A post shared by moby xⓋx (@moby) on May 22, 2019 at 3:23am PDT

I'm seeing this because I was starting to read "Moby's treatment of Natalie Portman is a masterclass in beta-male misogyny/While the musician might not spout misogynistic lyrics, he’s no feminist" by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian, where you see a cropped version of the picture (cropped above the nipples). I wanted to form my own opinion and get the code to embed the Instagram, and I clicked through and saw the full chestal expanse. Oh, my! What to think? The man is not attractive, but he's not totally horrible, but he's grimacing as if to try to look as horrible as possible, while she's just as pretty as a girl can be.

What's going on? Why doesn't she look uneasy? She's an actress — Who knows what she's thinking? Maybe she's only thinking of looking good in a photograph — which is what I think most people try to do when they know they're being photographed. What's he thinking? Something other than what I think most people think. Maybe I'm a beast — this is Beauty and the Beast — so go full beast, that's my only hope at some version of dignity.

I've already written about the Moby-and-Natalie tiff — here, with excerpts from his book — so please go there if you want to know what I think about it. This post is just about my reaction to Moby's Instagram and to The Guardian's effort at doing feminism about it. Reading the Guardian article, I see he's got a second Instagram, just fretting about his reputation now that Portman is turning people against him. He writes:

"I’m proud of my dad, not necessarily because of where he is now on marriage equality (although I’m pretty psyched about that)..."

"... but because he’s been thoughtful and open-minded in how he’s approached the issue, and because he’s shown that he’s willing to take a political risk in order to take a principled stand. He was a good man before he changed his position, and he’s a good man now, just as there are good people on either side of this issue today. We’re all the products of our backgrounds and environments, and the issue of marriage for same-sex couples is a complicated nexus of love, identity, politics, ideology and religious beliefs. We should think twice before using terms like 'bigoted' to describe the position of those opposed to same-sex marriage or 'immoral' to describe the position of those in favor, and always strive to cultivate humility in ourselves as we listen to others’ perspectives and share our own."

Dad = Rob Portman.

ADDED: Clicking "edit" on this post, I said: "Do I have a 'humility' tag?" Then, laughing: "No, I only have a 'humiliation' tag." I love adding tags that I've already made, but I resist making new tags. Having "humiliation" but not "humility" strikes me as funny, but on further thought, I do have a tag for humility, which is "modesty." You don't want a lot of synonyms in the tags. "Modesty" is close enough — even if it sweeps together things as diverse as World Hijab Day and the judicial philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Hillary Clinton — at long last — endorses same-sex marriage.

She's been quite the laggard. Why today? Can't let Portman get out in front of her?

Monday’s announcement marks something of a gradual evolution for the former Secretary of State. Mrs. Clinton supported civil unions but opposed same-sex marriage during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination back in 2008. But she lauded New York State back in the summer of 2011 for passing an “historic” measure to legalize gay marriage. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, joined with the Human Rights Campaign to help pass the New York law. Earlier this month, he said the 1996 law is incompatible with the Constitution and should be overturned... 

“Like so many others, my personal views have been shaped over time by people I have known and loved, by my experience representing our nation on the world stage, my devotion to law and human rights and the guiding principles of my faith,” she said. “Marriage, after all, is a fundamental building block of our society, a great joy and, yes, a great responsibility.”

A great joy and also, sometimes — isn't it, Hillary? — a great pain. If joyful heterosexuals are permitted to undertake this tremendous responsibility, it's only fair that adulterous heterosexuals be permitted to shirk it... I mean, it's only fair that homosexuals have access to equivalent pain and suffering, don't you think?

Rob Portman has "come to believe" in gay marriage now that he has a personal interest in that matter.

What's his personal interest? Here's what he says:

As a congressman, and more recently as a senator, I opposed marriage for same-sex couples. Then something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way.

Two years ago, my son Will, then a college freshman, told my wife, Jane, and me that he is gay....

At the time, my position on marriage for same-sex couples was rooted in my faith tradition that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years.

I wrestled with how to reconcile my Christian faith with my desire for Will to have the same opportunities to pursue happiness and fulfillment as his brother and sister. Ultimately, it came down to the Bible’s overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God....

Now, I assume his actual personal interest is in his political career. Previously, he'd determined that the most advantageous position is to say marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, but seeing the intensity of the younger generation's enthusiasm for same-sex marriage, he's getting out in front of the issue for 2016 election purposes.

I guess he can't just say that. That would be honest, but he needs to be deep — in a much deeper way. Yet what is this deepness? He claims deepness because, before, gay marriage was only something that affected people outside his family, now it affects his own son. Why is that supposed to be deep? I consider it shallow — shallow in a way that ought to disqualify a person from representing the general populace.

Imagine if he announced as a general principle: When governmental policies affects close intimates of mine, I will reframe my positions so that their interests are served. 

Maybe you are about to say, hey, Althouse, you hypocrite, you have a gay son and you support gay marriage. I have supported same-sex marriage since I first heard about it, which was before I found out my younger son is gay, and I have written 355 posts on gay marriage. See if you can find one that exploits this personal fact about me. I don't think you can. It's an argument I avoid. It offends my principles.

But that doesn't mean it's not a persuasive argument. It shouldn't be persuasive, rationally, but it hits people emotionally, and that's what Rob Portman is trying to do. A presidential candidate needs to feel like a real and trustworthy human being, and this drama of struggling with religion and love of family is the sort of thing that works.

I would not be a good politician. You have to feel reasonably comfortable with bullshit. I'm not saying you need to be a big old liar. But you must take policy positions that will appeal to voters and to articulate reasons that feel right to them. That's all Rob Portman is doing here. He's in the politician zone, and we'll see how he does.  I wish him well.

ADDED: Imagine a politician switching from a pro-life to a pro-choice choice position and writing an op-ed saying that he saw things a different way after his own daughter got pregnant.

Senator Ron Johnson said it 3 times today: "The American people have the right to know."

On Fox News Sunday today, the Wisconsin Senator made it all about Benghazi. The moderator gave him the last word after a long colloquy, including him and Senators Warner, Udall, and Portman, and he said:

Chris, the American people have the right to know. And that is what they are demanding here in Wisconsin.

Let's face it. What was the president doing, during those seven hours? Did he give that directive? Or didn't he? Did Leon Panetta directly defy him? I mean, what happened?

Who sent out? Who sent Ambassador Rice out five days later when they knew it was a terrorist attack that was preplanned, sent her on Sunday talk shows to say in fact it was a spontaneous reaction to, of course, the video. This administration purposefully misled the American people for weeks. This president misled the American people for weeks.

And, I think the American people have the right to know.

It was either misleading or is incompetent. I think we are finding out it was probably both, misleading and incompetence on the part of this administration. The American people have the right to know.

"That directive" refers to what Rob Portman was talking about earlier:

The Obama campaign used the excuse — blame Kerry — that I offered at 10:29 on the night of the debate.

That's Central time, so: within half an hour of the end of the debate. In fact, I flagged the Kerry problem 10 minutes before the debate began. From my live-blog:

7:50: In the practice debates, Obama had John Kerry pretending to be Mitt Romney, and Romney had Rob Portman pretending to be Barack Obama. I've got to think Romney had the better practice partner. Why would Kerry be any good at that?...

10:29: Everyone seems to be saying that Obama lost by a lot. I blame John Kerry. I'll bet he was a terrible practice partner.

The day after the debate, I quoted a passage from the David Maraniss book about Obama, about how he learned how to debate as a teenager arguing with his grandfather ("Gramps") — "who had tried without much success to assume the role of disciplinarian, laying down what the teenager considered to be 'an endless series of petty and arbitrary rules.'" As Obama himself remembered: "With a certain talent for rhetoric, as well as an absolute certainty about the merits of my own views, I found that I could generally win these arguments in the narrow sense of leaving my grandfather flustered, angry, and sounding unreasonable." I said:

And Romney's not Gramps, though I note that, in Obama's practice sessions for the debate, the role of Romney was played by John Kerry. And I think Kerry was Gramps.

2 days after the debate, I looked at Obama's post debate zinger —"When I got on the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney" — and I said:

It's as if Obama expected Mitt Romney to show up in the form that Obama supporters have been sculpting in the media! Perhaps that's how Obama's sparring partner in the debate prep portrayed Romney. Oh, how I'd love to get the secret video of Obama practicing debating Romney with John Kerry playing the role of Romney. I think it would explain a lot.

And then, 3 days after the debate, the campaign itself blamed Kerry!

They blame the President's team, first of all, for not preparing him to meet the challenge of an aggressive Mitt Romney.  They say that nobody in the room challenged him, including the guy that he was debating with, John Kerry, because, as they say, he wants to be Secretary of State so he's not going to get in the President's face. And Presidents are used to deference; they're not used to people challenging them like that."

Of course, it's not really Kerry's fault. It's Obama's fault. Presidents are "used to deference"?! It's up to the President to demand the stark truth from those around him. The choice of Kerry and allowing him to present easy practice sessions show terrible judgment. If Obama had such poor judgment about something that would put him at a disadvantage at a crucial event in which he knew he was about to be tested in public, think what that suggests about the advisers that surround him every day as he attempts to deal with the nation's problems in a private setting, where we don't get to scrutinize and evaluate him.

"[D]oubling down on the bland, middle-aged white guy quotient on the Republican ticket could be a major mistake."

Writes Chris Cilizza, giving 3 reasons why Rob Portman is the wrong VP choice for Romney. One of the reasons is "Boring":

Portman is not exactly Mr. Exciting. (When your calling card for charisma is a chicken impersonation, it’s pretty slim pickings in the personality department.)

Must everything be about chicken? I would invite everyone to read "15 Genuinely Interesting Things About Rob Portman." The "great impression of a chicken" is in there, and in fact, there's another one with chickens:

He assembled a chicken coop for his wife's Christmas present this year and he gave her four chickens that live in their backyard. They lay four eggs a day.

To be fair to Cilizza, he also wrote a column about why Portman would be a great pick. In that analysis, boringness was a plus:

The rap on Portman is that he’s a boring guy who no one knows. That fact virtually ensures that if Portman is the pick the narrative that will emerge will be along the lines of “he’s more interesting that you might think!”. It’s just how these things tend to work.

I see that column links to the "15 Genuinely Interesting Things" that I remembered.

By the way, will it ever become politically incorrect to say white men are boring? People assume that it's safe to be racist and sexist when you're insulting traditionally privileged groups, but if you are one of those people who's felt the comfort of that insulation, I'd like to invite you to consider the way those insults always contain an implicit stereotype insulting the traditionally disadvantaged groups. If you say white men are boring, you're also saying something about women and about black people.

Oh, but it's a compliment — you say — to call someone interesting.

Is it? And there's a big difference between saying that a specific person is interesting and asserting that a particular group is "interesting." Black people are interesting — Is that something you think is acceptable to say?

ADDED: Remember those pathetic people who ate rats in an art gallery and imagined that they were adding to their interestingness? In the linked post, the commenter t-man said:

The sad man who lives in fear of seeming to be uninteresting brought to mind the classic Bugs Bunny lines:

My, I'll bet you monsters lead in-teresting lives. I said to my girl friend just the other day, 'Gee, I'll bet monsters are in-teresting.' I said. The places you must go and the things you must see -- my stars! I bet you meet lots of in-teresting people too. I'm always in-terested in meeting in-teresting people. Now let's dip our patties in the water!

 Now let's dip our patties in the water!

Why is the Condi-for-VP rumor being floated?

1. It's a slow week, and everybody's looking for page views.

2. It helps offset the story about Romney getting booed at the NAACP convention, which conveyed the vague message that Romney has nothing to offer black people. What if he had Condi? That puts everything in a different light. Suddenly, he's not — what the hell did Rush Limbaugh call him? — "Snow White with testicles."

3. It's not much fun dragging out the veepstakes over the prospect that it's going to be Rob Portman, but it could be Tim Pawlenty. Quite aside from the white-with-testicles problem, it's just so predictable and dull. We need to be tantalized first, and nobody's more tantalizing than Condoleezza Rice. Except Sarah Palin. But Romney's too white-bread to tantalize us with Sarah. It's "white-bread" to go with the black lady? Yes! She's very solid and serious. She's gravitas personified.

4. Send the Obama campaign into a tizzy. Make them spend time and money preparing to push back Condi. Will they have to worry that she's more authentically black — American black — than Barack Obama? How will that debate about race be framed? Complicated. Here's something Rice said to the Republican National Convention in 2000: "My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did." What will the Obama people do if that sort of thing is thrown in their face? Let them worry about it.

5. Somebody trying to make money on Intrade?

"Rob Portman had flowing locks. Rand Paul dissects a cat."

Pictures of politicians, when they were in high school. Don't miss Scott Walker "the Desperado."

My favorite is Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano:

"Obama picks John Kerry to play Romney in mock debate rehearsals."

That seems like a terrible idea!

“There is no one that has more experience or understanding of the presidential debate process than John Kerry,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. “He’s an expert debater who has a fundamental mastery of a wide range of issues, including Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts. He’s the obvious choice.”

Who should he have picked? And who should Romney pick to play Obama? I asked that second question out loud and Meade said "Rob Portman!" I see that Portman played Obama for John McCain. (And Portman played Lieberman for Dick Cheney in 2000.)

"15 Genuinely Interesting Things About Rob Portman."

Hey, that stuff really is interesting.

And let me add #16:

16. Meade once ran into him on a biking trail, and he was doing something with something in a tree, and he just very gregariously explained to Meade that someone had lost a mitten and he was just putting it in the tree hoping I'm putting it in a place where whoever lost it will see it. Meade rode on thinking "What a good guy."

Politico deploys the racial epithet "vanilla."

"Rob Portman: Vice President Vanilla?"

 Not only is this offensively racial, it's an insult to an amazingly complex and powerful flavor.

Vanilla is, according to the OED, "A pod produced by one or other species of the genus Vanilla (see sense 2), esp. V. planifolia. Chiefly in pl."

Ah, yes. A pod. We were just talking about pods. Continuing in the OED with the oldest appearances of "vanilla" in the English language:

1662   H. Stubbe Indian Nectar ii. 11   They added‥the Vaynillas [to the chocolate] for the like ends, and to strengthen the brain....
1673   J. Ray Observ. Journey Low-countries 485   Vanillas which they mingle with the Cacao to make Chocolate....
1697   W. Dampier New Voy. around World iii. 38   There grow on this Coast Vinelloes in great quantity, with which Chocolate is perfumed...
1748 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 45 160   The Vanelloe. With the Fruit of this Plant the Spaniards perfume their Chocolate.

Strengthen the brain!

"A double-vanilla ticket will be attacked as un-diverse by the media."

Double-vanilla! Michael Barone uses the term in discussing Mitt Romney's reasons for picking a white male VP. (His "vanilla" males are Paul Ryan, Rob Portman, Mitch Daniels, and Bob McDonnell.)

Did Barone invent that term? He says "what opponents might call a double-vanilla ticket." Do opponents already say that or is that a Barone invention?

Is "double vanilla" an acceptable term?
	No, we should be color blind.
	No, race is a serious topic and that trivializes it.
	Yes, lighten up... I mean... appreciate a little levity.
	Yes, because it brings the lingering historical problem of white supremacy to the surface.
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How to comment at Instapundit.

Vote in (or view) one of his polls. You can comment at the poll results page.

That link goes to today's GOP 2012 nominee poll. Yesterday, he had this poll, with fewer options. And tons of comments at the results page. 136 pages of comments! I was going to copy and paste Meade's comment... but it's too hard to find. He tells me he wrote "Jeb Bush/Rob Portman" with a link to this article by Juan Williams ("The Perfect GOP Ticket In 2012 Would Have Jeb Bush and Rob Portman's Names On It"):

Bush and Portman can’t be marginalized as Tea Party extremists but they can spout enough hot rhetoric to stir the base. They are also perfectly acceptable to the social, economic and foreign policy conservatives in the Republican camp. The Bush-Portman ticket would satisfy the William F. Buckley rule for Republican Primary voters — pick the most conservative candidate who can win.