"Elon Musk Gives Rambling Explanation of DOGE’s Work In Oval Office Address."

I'm laughing at that Mediaite headline. Musk speaks at length, extemporaneously, answering all the questions, managing his little son, keeping up good cheer, and making a lot of us viewers feel energized and optimistic, and Mediaite needs to stress that he rambled.

Remember when we had a President who was tightly scripted and couldn't find his way through the script without repeated stumbling? There was little sense that he knew what he was saying and we were utterly deprived of transparency about who was actually wielding the executive power. 

I ran across that Mediaite article because I'd googled "the woman that walked away with about 30 million," which is something Trump said to Musk as he prompted him to tell us about some "things that your team has found."

Musk said: "Right. Well, we often do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few people in actually here who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position."

He didn't name the woman, but, as even Mediaite admits, it's Samantha Power.

More Musk rambling:

Autocrats everywhere.

Here's Samantha Power, writing "I Ran U.S.A.I.D. /Killing It Is a Win for Autocrats Everywhere" (NYT).

Of course, she will defend her reign, but what are her most substantive points and does she accept any blame? That's my attitude as I'm reading this to make some excerpts for you. Power begins by listing some things that will seem good to many or most Americans — health programs, "giving girls a chance to get an education," "growing local economies," "helping communities rebuild after ISIS."

She asserts that these activities have "generated vast stores of political capital" for the United States. They have also, she said, been the subject of attacks by China and Russia. Those attacks she calls "propaganda." And what we did... well, that was in the interest of the United States:

"7 Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO's 'The Final Year'" — a documentary about the last year of the Obama Administration.

I saw this tweet...

Ben Rhodes reacting to Hillary Clinton's hilarious defeat in 2016 is the funniest part of the new Obama Documentary on HBO.

What makes it even better is throughout the documentary he brags how she is going to win. pic.twitter.com/MGBQNE5ATY

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) May 30, 2018

... and it made me check out a bit of "The Final Year," but I thought it was such a bad documentary. They didn't seem to have any good footage of anything. Mostly shots of various people, e.g., Samantha Power, musing flatly in dull language. I amused myself briefly by testing out the theory that people were paraphrasing the stock line "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Anyway, I bailed out and went looking for some reviews and found "7 Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO's 'The Final Year,'" which expands the scope of the badness — the media's mediocrity on top of the filmmaker's.

I like this: "HBO's Dishonest Obama Documentary Is Fantasy Foreign Policy Puffery" (Reason).

In reality, it's less a documentary than a wet goodbye kiss to Obama, as well as a personal PR document for a few key members of his foreign-policy brain trust, employing that term loosely....

The Obama team repeatedly boasts that its three signature achievements are the Paris climate accord, the rapprochement with Cuba, and the Iran nuclear deal. But of how these agreements were reached, or who opposed them and why, there's not a word.

And even less is there an explanation of why, if they were so important, the Obama administration let them stand on a foundation of executive orders, rather than seeking congressional approval to make them law.

The consequence of that decision is that barely a year after he left office, practically nothing is left of what Obama policy-makers regarded as their most important works. ...

Samantha Power and the "pale, Irish statue."

From "Samantha Power: Hosting election-night party to celebrate Clinton victory was one of my many 'bad ideas'" (Washington Examiner):

Power said she is “haunted most” by images of her children on the night of the election, who spent much of the night running around her apartment. When the election was called for Trump, though, Power said her daughter, who was 4 years old at the time, was “just lying in my lap, kind of like this pale, Irish statue.”

“And there’s something about the way she’s lying, I don’t know, that just makes her look like she’s the one who’s going to inherit … she’s going to inherit this—what he does is on her, right?” Power said.

I'm musing over the ethnicity and the calling of our attention to the whiteness of the child's skin. What can it be but a mother's love for her own little child? And yet, if a conservative were to tell us of his reaction to the election of a liberal in terms of a haunting memory of gazing at his child's very white skin, he would be called a racist.

The Vice-Presidential debate is tonight — What question about Trump will be wielded to trip up Pence?

The moderator is Elaine Quijano. I don't know much about her — other than that she's Filipino-American and a Democrat and her mother was an immigrant. I'm not basing my idea of a question on anything about Quijano, who will be chosing the questions herself. I'm just speculating about what I think will have to be a question for Pence.

I won't try to word this in the style of a debate moderator. I'm going to put this much more bluntly and you can just imagine a neutral-sounding version with appropriate foundational clauses. I'm just conveying the core idea.

Governor Pence, you are a respectable, honorable man. How could you squander your hard-won reputation to prop up the monster that is Donald Trump?

There should be a corresponding question for Tim Kaine. Like Pence, he's got a more honorable reputation than his running mate and he's on the ticket to lend respectability to a person who could be called a monster... who has been called a monster.

2 monsters. It's like an old horror movie...



We get what we want in a democracy. And it seems we wanted a horrorshow. Too late to find another show. Yes, there's nice little Timmy and Mikey, with their little show tonight. But all that matters is what they will have to say for themselves as they prop up a monster. What are you doing with that monster?

When Samantha Power asked "Why do you think my dad was the one who died?"

From the "In the Land of the Possible/Samantha Power has the President’s ear. To what end?" by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker:

Her mother, Vera Delaney... a nephrologist... married a Dublin piano player, raconteur, dentist, and drinker named Jim Power—“a fearsomely formidable pub debater,” as the Irish Independent once put it. “I was extremely close to my father, inseparable,” Power said. “Where we hung out most of the time was the pub.” Her father expounded on the day’s papers, while she read mysteries by the light of a slot machine in the basement. Her parents’ marriage didn’t last. “My mother, in effect, started leading her own life,” Power said. At the hospital, Delaney fell in love with her boss, Edmund Bourke. Divorce was illegal in Ireland, and they wanted more opportunities in medicine, so, when Samantha was nine and her brother was five, the family moved to Pittsburgh and, later, Atlanta. Jim Power remained in Ireland. She said, “We stayed in touch, and, then, the drink, I think.” She trailed off. He died when she was fourteen. [Power's husband Cass] Sunstein recalled that, decades later, on a trip to Ireland, Power took him to visit her father’s favorite pub, where they met a woman who had worked behind the bar and remembered her dad. Others seemed to drink just as much, and Power asked, “Why do you think my dad was the one who died?” The barwoman answered simply, “It’s because you left.” Power told me, “I knew he was drinking too much. But I had no idea he was sick—he was just forty-seven, and his death was devastating.”

"Strongly condemn attacks in Mosul by the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (#ISIL), and its efforts to turn back clock on #Iraq's progress."

Samantha Power lets slip the hashtags of war.

Strongly condemn attacks in Mosul by the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (#ISIL), and its efforts to turn back clock on #Iraq's progress.

— Samantha Power (@AmbassadorPower) June 12, 2014

"You know life has changed when you’re hanging out with Jane Fonda backstage."

"There is no greater embodiment of being outspoken on behalf of what you believe in — and being 'all in' in every way — than Jane Fonda. And it’s a huge honor just to even briefly have shared the stage with her."

Said U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power.

"We spent so much damn time navel gazing, and that’s the tragedy of it" — it, being Syria.

A former senior White House official, quoted in a NYT piece navel-gazingly titled "Obama’s Uncertain Path Amid Syria Bloodshed."

This article marks the return to the topic of Syria, which had dropped out of public consciousness, like a lot of other things that are waiting to be rotated back in.

The article at the link is long and detailed. You should read the whole thing. Watch for Hillary Rodham Clinton arguing for the United States to get "skin in the game" and Samantha Power saying "if you had met the rebels as frequently as I have, you would be as passionate as I am." Obama, by contrast, comes across as brooding and indecisive.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

Obama's Uncertain Path Amid Benghazi Attack

Obama's Uncertain Path Amid IRS Scandal

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I said:

Yeah... "uncertain path amid"... how hard did they need to think to come up with that?

It's such an all-purpose excuse for the President's failures. And so weird. "Path Amid Bloodshed"... that's one of these concrete images that don't really look right in the mind's eye. "Path" is metaphor, but what is a "path amid bloodshed"? We're asked to picture him — what? — walking around pools of blood?

"Amid" suggests standing still and being confused. "Path" suggests he's going somewhere.

The word "path" seems to give too much credit.

The word "amid" seems to suggest that he's not responsible for anything.

The NYT's uncertain path amid presidential failure.

"A White House national security official was fired last week after being caught as the mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community..."

"... with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years."

2 years!

The Daily Beast preserved the tweets of Jofi Joseph, AKA natsecwonk, which included crap like:

“I'm a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.”

“Was Huma Abedin wearing beer goggles the night she met Anthony Wiener? Almost as bad a pairing as Samantha Powers and Cass Sunstein ...”

“So when will someone do us the favor of getting rid of Sarah Palin and the rest of her white trash family? What utter useless garbage....” 

2 years! What does this say about national security?

(I know. It's Samantha Power (not Powers) and Anthony Weiner (not Wiener).)

Questions, questions.

I was amused to find myself amongst the miscellaneous items at the end of "The Best of the Web" today. That stuff at the end is definitely not the best of the web. It's more of a grab bag of things that can be made funny by putting it under a funny heading.

Questions Nobody Is Asking

" 'Why Don't You Ask Me Next Time Before Writing That I'm Either Malicious or Dumb?'" --headline, Althouse.blogspot.com, Aug. 14

"Why Is Samantha Power Speaking to Invisible Children?"--headline, NationalInterest.org, Aug. 14

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking

"Michelle Obama: 'No,' I Will Never Run for President"--headline, WeeklyStandard.com, Aug. 15

Susan Rice as the new National Security Advisor.

And Samantha Power as the new U.N. ambassador.

ADDED: Rand Paul: "I can’t imagine... keeping Ambassador Rice in any significant position, much less promoting her to an important position." (Video at link.)

Camille Paglia, who voted for Obama in '08, delivers a fine rant about why she's not voting for him this time.

She's interviewed on video here, by Glenn Reynolds. Most of the interview is about art in America and her new book "Glittering Images" (which I just bought, in Kindle). But in the end, she's asked why she's not voting for Obama — she's voting for Jill Stein — and out flow the words, which I started transcribing without knowing how long she'd go on. I kept transcribing, because it was all such great material, so here it is (with a few screen grabs, taken from the art section of the interview):

I was very excited about him. I thought he was a moderate. I thought that his election would promote racial healing in the country. 

This is the point at which I started transcribing, thinking: This is how I felt, when I voted for Obama in 2008. Except I wouldn't say I was "very excited." I wasn't caught up in the ecstasy. I thought it was the better bet, compared to the GOP alternative, and I hoped for the moderation and advancement in attitudes about race.

It would be a tremendous transformation of attitudes. And instead: one thing after another. Not least: I consider him, now, one of the most racially divisive and polarizing figures ever. I think it's going to take years to undo the damage to relationships between the races. 

Yes, this hope for racial transformation got squandered early, over that awful Henry Louis Gates incident. Back to Paglia:

But beyond that, I am just sick and tired of endless war. I was in favor of bombing the hell out of the Afghanistan mountains after 9/11, but I would have never agreed to this land war in Afghanistan, this endless land war, as well as things like this Libyan incursion that Obama appears to have been pushed into by these women, like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, the chaos in foreign policy, the bowing to foreign leaders.

Also the Obamacare: of course, we need health care reform in this country. What a mess! Everyone agrees about that. But the Obamacare is, to me, a Stalinist intrusion — okay? — into American culture.

The creation of this culture of surveillance, from these bureaucracies, which is also carried over into Obama's endorsement of drones on the military level as well as for police control of the population. I mean, I don't understand how any... veteran of the 1960s who's a Democrat could not see the dangers here, that Obama is a statist. It's exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about in "Subterranean Homesick Blues," okay?

I paused the video at "It's exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about" and asked Meade what song she's about to name, and he said "Masters of War," and I said "That's what I thought." But it's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," and as soon as she says it, we know why. (Look out kid/They keep it all hid/Better jump down a manhole/Light yourself a candle...)

You don't want government agencies being empowered to intrude into people's lives like this. The controlling force in Obamacare is the IRS! Okay? This flies in the face of what the Free Speech Movement was about at Berkeley or about any of the values, I feel, of my generation.

Yes. Exactly. This is how the Democratic Party lost me — by trading freedom for statism.

So I feel the Democratic Party needs to be shattered and remade to recover its true progressive roots. I don't see progressives. All I see is white upper-middle-class liberals who speak in this unctuous way about the needs of the poor.

Unctuous. Yes. White upper-middle-class liberals lubricating themselves.

They have no connection whatever with the working class. Okay? It's the professional class gone amok. And that's why they don't notice what a bureaucratic nightmare Obamacare is.

A feminist milestone: Our male President has been pulled into war by 3 women.

It's the opposite of the Code Pink idea that women bring the peace. How long have I heard this feminist plaint: If only women had the power, we would have peace, not phallocratic war.

But no:

In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton... changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.

Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act...

... Mrs. Clinton joined Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been pressing the case for military action, according to senior administration officials speaking only on condition of anonymity. Ms. Power is a former journalist and human rights advocate; Ms. Rice was an Africa adviser to President Clinton when the United States failed to intervene to stop the Rwanda genocide, which Mr. Clinton has called his biggest regret.

Now, the three women were pushing for American intervention....

To ally with Power and Rice, Clinton had to make "an unusual break with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who, along with the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and the counterterrorism chief, John O. Brennan, had urged caution." Oh, timid men. Step aside! Yield to the boldness of women.

So... man, the power.

"We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining."

The quote that wrecked Phil Gramm, now out as a McCain campaign co-chairman.

We need to make a list of quotes in the 2008 campaign season that were deemed so bad that it made more sense to boot the quotee that to try to explain the quote. I think of Samantha Power calling Hillary a "monster."

Help me collect them all.

At some point, we're losing something, aren't we? People are expendible, and thinking more deeply about statements has become a luxury no one believes we can afford anymore.

On the other hand, Phil Gramm can't complain. He'd be whining.

No whining!

Eh, I'm sick of the whining about whining. Many complaints and criticisms are justified. The "no whining" retort is itself shallow and suggests that thinking more deeply is a luxury we can't afford anymore.

Monsters and demons.

I've been reading Carl Bernstein's book about Hillary Clinton, "A Woman In Charge," and I was struck by the way she talked to members of Congress about her health care plan:

Mrs. Clinton “tended to view anyone who criticized her plan, even constructively, as an enemy,” Mr. Bernstein writes, adding that much to the dismay of Senators Bill Bradley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, she advised Congressional Democrats that “the time had come to ‘demonize’ those who would slow down the health care train for some important roadwork.”

These days, her campaign people acted scandalized when Obama advisor Samantha Power called her a monster. I wonder what is worse — expressing the opinion that someone is a monster or exercising power by threatening to cause the public to think that you are a demon. Demons are worse than monsters, it seems, but that's the least notable difference.

Why did Obama let Clinton jerk him around over Samantha Power?

Here's the revolting and ridiculous conference call, in which Clinton campaign hacks pretend it's a giant outrage that the brilliant Samantha Power applied the word "monster" to Hillary Clinton. Power withdrew herself from the campaign, but where was Barack Obama? Why didn't he support her?

Here's Matthew K. Johnson:

For those of us who follow foreign policy and human rights policy in particular, Samantha Power is a fascinating and inspiring figure - a brilliant woman who has lectured and written equally from her heart and her head. Her Pulitzer-prize winning book A Problem From Hell is a passionately argued and beautifully written description of America's at times shameful and always complicated history during the genocides of the 20th century - it remains my favorite non-fiction book; the first one I will recommend to friends and colleagues and has inspired more than one of my own written works.... Her profession, and her approach to it, makes her a somewhat undiplomatic politcian, but I was still absolutely thrilled that she joined Obama's campaign, and was one of the first reasons that I became an Obama supporter - clearly he was attracting the top minds, many of whom were critical of the practices of the past (Power, like myself, is very critical of the Clinton years - the inaction on Rwanda, the ignorance of the power of strong leadership in the Balkans).

What do we learn from this incident? I don't need to learn that Clinton will do whatever it takes to win, and perhaps that does earn the label "monster," but let's not ignore the deficiencies in Barack Obama. How does he intend to win by shrinking away when her people pull their tricks? Where is his vigor? And, more importantly, where is his courage? It was cowardly to allow the Clinton campaign to savage Power and rip her away from him.

And now I'm wondering whether there is anything courageous about Barack Obama. Obama supporters, please: Make the case to me that the man has courage. And don't say that he opposed the war in Iraq, because I don't think, in the position he was in at the time, that it took courage to oppose the war. That served his political ambitions. Tell me something he did that was difficult to do, that took some risk to do what was right.

IN THE COMMENTS: Balfegor said:

I've read speculation that he may have used the "monster" kerfluffle as cover for tossing her overboard because in that same interview, she claimed he wasn't actually serious about getting out of Iraq in 16 months or whatever his plan was -- once he was president he'd discard his campaign plan and take a new look at the situation.

If this is the reason he let her go, it's a defense against the charge that he let Hillary push him around, but it only makes me worry more that he lacks courage. And ironically, Power's statement about how he would handle Iraq reinforced what I've been assuming, and this assumption was central to my decision to vote for him in the Wisconsin primary.

So what am I to think now that he let Power go? That what she said about Iraq was wrong or that it was right? If it's wrong, I like him less on policy. If it's right, then I'm more upset about the estrangement of Power and concerned that Obama is dishonest, saying things to get elected that he's never going to do in office. And yet — this is so troublesome for me! — I'm hoping that, if elected, he'll listen and reassess and exercise the good judgment that he now applies to the task of getting elected and the results of his presidential decisionmaking will be much more to my liking.