For the annals of civility.

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

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 16, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

"This week, Anschutz and McKibbin murdered The Weekly Standard, the conservative opinion magazine that Anschutz owned."

"They didn’t merely close it because it was losing money. They seemed to have murdered it out of greed and vengeance," writes David Brooks in "Who Killed The Weekly Standard?/The bureaucratic mind has a temporary triumph" (NYT).

John Podhoretz, one of the magazine’s founders, reports that they actively prevented potential buyers from coming in to take it over and keep it alive. They apparently wanted to hurt the employees and harvest the subscription list so they could make money off it. And Anschutz, being a professing Christian, decided to close the magazine at the height of the Christmas season, and so cause maximum pain to his former employees and their families....

I was on staff when The Standard was founded, by Bill Kristol, Podhoretz and Fred Barnes. They gathered the most concentrated collection of talent I have ever been around. The first masthead featured Charles Krauthammer, P.J. O’Rourke, Robert Kagan, David Frum, Chris Caldwell, Matt Labash, Tucker Carlson and the greatest political writer of my generation, Andrew Ferguson. Early issues featured the writings of Tom Wolfe, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Q. Wilson and Harvey Mansfield....

It was and remains a warm, fun and convivial group....

Brooks says, "[T]his is what happens when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at the magazine try to maintain some sense of intellectual standards." And: "This is what happens when people with a populist mind-set decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells better than learning."

Let's use Brooks's phrase "This is what happens" and complete the statement: This is what happens when _________.

It's tempting to write:  This is what happens when Trump happens.

I'm also thinking: This is what happens when the elite feel too warm, fun, and convivial, and the warmth, fun, and conviviality doesn't flow through to the readers who are feeling greater warmth, fun, and conviviality coming from that horrible orange man the elite told them to eschew.

Trump bids good riddance to The Weekly Standard.

The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke and out of business. Too bad. May it rest in peace!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

"Why is Slate acting like the suppression of this ThinkProgress article is a shocking aberration that’s all the Weekly Standard’s fault?"

"Facebook should give up on the inevitably subjective task of policing 'fake news,' and simply let us, the users, decide for ourselves what news is credible."

Writes John, at Facebook, linking to "When Fact-Checking Becomes Censorship/Facebook has empowered a conservative magazine to suppress liberal viewpoints" (Slate).

Things that have nothing to do with Keith Richards.

Drudge looks like this right now:



Great photograph of Keith Richards. I'm really enjoying it, but... robot rape? The link goes to The College Fix:

John Banzhaf, a well-known activist professor of public interest law at George Washington University Law School, says experts disagree on the consequences of allowing people to engage in mock acts of rape with humanoid dolls, and lawmakers should vet this issue as soon as possible....

“The obvious first step would be to have hearings and do studies to determine just how serious the threat is, whether there are any real benefits to having sexbots programmed to simulate being raped, and then what if any new laws, regulations, etc. might be appropriate,” he said....

Sexbots, already in use in European brothels, can be intentionally set to “frigid” mode in which the user must effectively rape the robot because it will resist advances....

Let me know when they make a robot in the image of Keith Richards and program it to "effectively rape" the customer who intentionally sets herself in "frigid" mode. 

The "In Defense of Cigarettes" piece at the link does feature a (different) photo of Keith Richards smoking and a text reference to him, but it's just the fusty Weekly Standard musing about whether it was better back in the good old days:

I liked the ceremony of the cigarette. The implicit danger of starting a fire near your face. The punctuation that talking while smoking affords, giving your words animation and shading: the stops and starts, the dramatic pauses, sitting still after exhaling while letting the smoke do all the work around you. It could make even some suburban hump drinking piss-water beer at the Greene Turtle on a Tuesday afternoon feel like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or like Keith Richards in life.

What's a suburban hump?  Is "hump" even a noun there? Suburban hump drinking piss-water beer... I'm just guessing that "hump" and "beer" are nouns, that there's a type of person called a "hump" who lives in suburbia and that beer needs to be compared to piss for the billionth time.

The OED does have 2 definitions of the noun "hump" that are a type of person. One is "hump-backed person." The other is "Sexual intercourse; (hence) a woman who makes herself available for sexual intercourse. coarse slang." So it's like calling somebody a "fuck." But is it special for women? Because I don't get the process of smoking making a woman feel like Robert Mitchum. I do, however, understand how a woman smoking might get into the feeling that she's like Keith Richards.

"Walker Readies Himself as the Candidate of the Mainstream Conservative Movement."

A Weekly Standard headline for an article by Stephen Hayes that is mainly about Michael Grebe, who reportedly will be named Walker's campaign chairman.

I asked Grebe about a New York Times article from last month that purported to explain Walker’s electoral success. With a hint of dark conspiracy, the article suggested that Walker had been an unremarkable and unsophisticated local politician until Grebe and a band of big-money right-wing ideologues plucked him from obscurity in order to advance their schemes....

The article “was a totally unfair characterization of our relationship,” Grebe says, offering several specific examples of ways in which he says the piece was misleading in order to fit the preconceived narrative of its authors. (In one, he says that he responded to a question about first meeting Walker by saying that he recalled it came at a meeting of college Republicans at Marquette University, where the future governor was a student. In the telling of the Times, the insignificant aside became a big moment in Grebe’s grooming of Walker for future manipulation).

Weekly Standard bellyaches...

... about the Creedence song "Fortunate Son" getting played at the "Concert for Valor" (a televised Veterans Day event on the National Mall). The song is termed a "famously anti-war anthem," "an anti-war screed," and "an anti-draft song." The latter is most accurate, but the Weekly Standard author says that makes it "a particularly terrible choice," since the concert was "was largely organized to honor" those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and these people were all volunteers.

It seems to me that an anti-draft song is a good choice to honor the volunteers. Read the lyrics here. The singer complains that he has to do the fighting because the sons of the men who decide when wars will be fought manage to evade the draft. I don't see how that's generically anti-war. What it's against is a particular political dysfunction that has been corrected. So it's a complaint that doesn't hold up anymore. You don't have to be a "fortunate son" to avoid the military. You can do what you want. Every single person who serves chose to serve.

Now, some people think that's also a dysfunction, and they'd like to correct that by bringing back the draft so people in general would have more of a stake in avoiding unnecessary war. But I don't know any songs about that.

I couldn't watch the clip at the first link. I can't stand Bruce Springsteen, and much as I dislike the Weekly Standard's bellyaching, it's not as bad as listening to Bruce straining histrionically. I have to concede that it's possible that Bruce thinks — and somehow conveyed — that those who volunteer today are doing so because it's their best option in the limited array of choices they have because they are not rich or well-connected. If that's the message, then it really is a rotten thing to say to our American volunteers.

Did Chris Christie react to the charge that he was using his power as chair of the Republican Governors Association to undercut Scott Walker's reelection bid?

"The RGA, chaired by Gov. Christie (R-N.J.), has been under pressure in recent days to do more to help Walker, a tea party favorite who rocketed to political stardom after he curbed bargaining rights for most public workers in his state. The Weekly Standard reported Thursday that there were brewing suspicions on the right that Christie, as RGA chairman, has been “undercutting” Walker, his potential rival for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination."

That's from a Washington Post article noting that the Republican Governors Association has just put another $1 million into ads for Scott Walker's reelection. The headline of the article puts the emphasis on Walker's state of mind — "RGA puts additional $1 million into Wisconsin ad buys as Walker frets" — but I think Christie's is the more interesting mind about which to speculate.

Walker is trying to get reelected and the polls show a close race. That's a mundane objective reality. The subjective matter of how that feels to him — whether he "frets" — is dumb in the same way that it's dumb for reporters to ask, say, a person whose house is burning down "How do you feel?" The answer is already known: How do you think I feel? There's nothing about the subjective aspect of the story that isn't inherent in the objective aspect of the story.

But what's going on in The Mind of Chris Christie? That's where the subjective part of the story is complex and speculation-ripe.

Here's the above-referenced Weekly Standard article: "Does Chris Christie Have Scott Walker's Back?"

"The Center for Public Integrity reported Thursday that Walker and his backers spent nearly $6.1 million on ads through Monday, while Burke and her supporters ran nearly $6.6 million," the AP reported on Thursday. On Sunday, Walker told the Washington Post's Robert Costa: "We are always looking for more help. Our main help has to be the RGA." But according to the Center for Public Integrity, the Republican Governors Association has spent $5.9 million on TV ads in Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder is up for reelection, and just $801,000 on TV ads in Wisconsin.

Why would the RGA spend more on Rick Snyder than Scott Walker?...

ADDED: Writing this post made me want to look the word "fret" up in the OED. The original meaning is to eat, to devour, referring to the behavior of nonhuman animals. It still has that meaning in the sense of a small animal — like a worm or a moth — consuming or wearing away something by gnawing at it. The figurative usage is very old, the passions and various irritants consume or wear away at a person's mind. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "So many curiosities drive one crazy, and fret one's heart to death." The intransitive use — "To distress oneself with constant thoughts of regret or discontent; to vex oneself, chafe, worry" — is also very old, going back to 1551, first in a translation of Thomas More's "Utopia": "He..so fret so fumed & chafed at it."

I like the verb "fret," and use it a lot, probably mostly to make a person seem fussy and overly inward. But searching this blog to find how I've used "fret," I see the first thing that comes up is a fond tribute to an old Kinks song: "Don't You Fret." And there's a reference to the famous line from "MacBeth": "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." And, remember, MacBeth was already king when he said that. Chris Christie, on the other hand, is only the Thane of New Jersey.

"If low-wage men don’t present women with much of a good deal, why not double, or triple, or quadruple them up?"

"Pool resources, boost household income, and promote family values at the same time?" writes Judith Warner at Time Magazine, quoted at Weekly Standard under the headline "Time Magazine Endorses 'Polyandry.'"

Well, Warner is employing humor to critique the conservative argument that marriage is the solution to poverty and to highlight the problem of low wages. I guess her use of the word "seriously" threw some readers off. Noting something Barbara Ehrenreich said that made an audience laugh, Warner wrote: "But I think we should take Ehrenreich seriously." Like you never heard a comedian, upon getting one laugh, set up the next joke with "But seriously...."

I know, it's difficult to perceive humor coming from women. You don't expect it, and then it's a little subtle sometimes. Maybe if a woman has multiple husbands, at least one of them will get each of her jokes. I'm serious.

"Look, I can't speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable."

The Weekly Standard has this clip of Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer this morning on ABC's "This Week," asked whether the IRS's actions were illegal:



Drudge links to this in a top-left headline reading "Law is irrelevant," which appears above the main headline: "'IRRELEVANT' WHERE OBAMA WAS DURING BENGHAZI," which links to another Weekly Standard clip of Pfeiffer — appearing, also this morning, on "Fox News Sunday" — saying "I don't remember what room the president was in on that night, and that's a largely irrelevant fact":



The double use of the word "irrelevant" seems significant, but let's notice the difference between the 2 usages.

In talking about Benghazi, the interviewer, Chris Wallace, is trying to extract a specific fact about the events, a fact that has not yet come out and that Pfeiffer might know. Pfeiffer blows out a tirade of truly irrelevant verbiage to distract us from the question asked, including the notion that the fact isn't important. Who cares where the physical body of Obama was as long as he was "in touch"?

"Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012..."

"... fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults. The Weekly Standard has obtained a timeline briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing the heavy substantive revisions made to the CIA’s talking points, just six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, and additional information about why the changes were made and by whom...."

"There’s no way of knowing what combination of these singular features of marriage confers which of its demonstrated advantages, culturally and psychologically."

"We do know, however, that if the state suddenly creates the institution of gay marriage by fiat, the result will lack most of the features that make marriage unique—and uniquely beneficial. It will not be the same institution that has won the unanimous endorsement of social scientists. It will be a novel and revolutionary institution owing its existence to the devaluation of an old and settled one. Should we assume that the former will confer the same social and personal benefits as the latter, the two being different in such fundamental ways? The only honest answer—the only intellectually respectable answer—is, Who knows?"

Writes Andrew Ferguson, in The Weekly Standard.

But that "only honest answer" is a question, and that question — "Who knows?" — invites another question: Who decides? Is it a matter for majoritarian or individual choice? That's the legal question to be decided by the Supreme Court.

And speaking of honesty and intellectual respectability, restricting myself to the paragraph I've quoted, I question all of the following words/phrases: state suddenly creates... fiat... lack most... unique... uniquely... unanimous... and devaluation...

Tell me: Did the state create marriage? If marriage is not the creation of the state, but a relationship the state built various welfare, pension, tax, and child custody policies around, then it would not be the state creating gay marriage, but the state readjusting its programs to accommodate more people who've made their personal, private decisions to form committed relationships. These relationships have been around for a long, long time. There's nothing sudden about them.

There's been a pretty quick social change from disparaging gay relationships to treating them with tolerance or even honor. That's been so sudden that some of the people who'd felt complacent and comfortable in their disparagement are taken aback to find themselves disparaged.

But that's not state fiat. That's freedom of thought and freedom of speech.

"There's never been a day in the last four years I've been proud to be his vice president."

The Weekly Standard (linked by Drudge) thinks it has a hilarious Biden gaffe, but they've misheard/mistranscribed it. You have to have an ear for the "working class"-style mushing of syllables, but he's saying "There's never been a day in the last four years I haven't been proud to be his vice president." The boldface is spoken: I 'n' been.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

I've listened to the audio at 0.35 speed and it's a precise "I've."...

I disagree.

It's an east-coast kind of "n" ... sort of almost "i uh" like the "no" in "uh uh."

rhhardin says:

"n" is voiced and there's no voicing in Biden's 've part.

I note that I grew up in Delaware and I feel I understand the implied "n." And rh gives us his slowed down audio with repetition. I've listened, and I hear a sound after the "I" that I'm sure is the negative. There's this southern Jersey/northern Delaware/Philadelphia dropping of a sound that I can her. There's a muddled verb after the "I" that I just know. Rh says "Call in Language Log," and I will send an email. I think they will believe me. And not just for political reasons.

UPDATE: Language Log responds!

Romney on abortion — 2 ads.

Romney's ad:



Obama's response:



That sounds terrible:

“If Roe v. Wade was overturned, Congress passed a federal ban on all abortions, and it came to your desk – would you sign it? ‘Yes’, or ‘no?’”

“Let me say it: I’d be delighted to sign that bill.”

Ban all abortions? Including abortions that would save the life of the mother? Did Romney really say that? The Weekly Standard prints whole context:

Stirring up rumors that Obama may replace Biden with Hillary Clinton.

It's the Weekly Standard... conspicuously promoted by Drudge.

It would be a great "game change" — to use the term applied 4 years ago to Sarah Palin.

And — amusingly — it would be Obama taking advice from Sarah Palin, who just a couple days ago said:

[T]he strategists there in the Obama campaign have got to look at a diplomatic way of replacing Joe Biden on the ticket with Hillary. And I don't want to throw out that suggestion and have them actually accept the suggestion because then an Obama-Hillary Clinton ticket would have a darn good chance of winning.

Don't you love the role of Sarah Palin in American politics? On the sidelines... looming...

"Once upon a time there was a Democratic president who, despite his faults, championed the power of markets, technology, and the global economy."

"He spoke about building 'a bridge to the 21st century.' He ratified major trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO. He supported balanced budgets and signed into law a tough welfare reform. He cut the capital gains tax. He boasted that government spending as a share of the economy fell on his watch. He went so far as to call himself (privately) an Eisenhower Republican."

Bill!

"One sign that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is likely to win the election on June 5 is the sudden disappearance of national media attention to the race."

Writes Stephen F. Hayes in The Weekly Standard:

The networks and newspapers that gave wall-to-wall coverage to protests in the streets of Madison in the spring of 2011 and excitedly reported on the drive to collect signatures to force a recall have gone relatively quiet as a succession of polls show Walker leading.... Obama himself, who once promised to walk the picket lines with his union backers when their interests were threatened, seems to want no part of the recall​—​or at least not a high-profile part.

"This grasping at straws was just the capstone to what even liberal observers admitted was a week of self-immolation..."

I'm annoyed that I can't get into that article — about the SG's argument in the Obamacare case — because I don't have a subscription to the Weekly Standard. Now, I'll never know whether that article contains a funnier mixed metaphor than that.

What are those images?

Self-immolation is deliberately setting oneself on fire. I picture dramatic protests from the Vietnam era, but it's been going on for centuries:

It was Western media coverage of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest of the South Vietnamese regime in 1963 that introduced the word "self-immolation" to a wide English-speaking audience and gave it a strong association with fire. The alternative name bonzo comes from the same era, because the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves were often referred to by the term bonze in English literature prior to the mid-20th century...

Bonzo! Most Americans think of that Ronald Reagan movie when we hear "Bonzo." Perhaps some think of Led Zeppelin. But fiery suicide, to make a political point? That's new to me.

A capstone is "a stone that caps or crowns." I'm quoting the OED, where we can see the metaphorical use of the word goes back to 1685: "Here is the fair occasion... to put the cap-stone upon his other perfections" (tr. B. Gracián y Morales Courtiers Oracle 150). By the way, the Great Pyramid is missing its capstone. Ever notice? Makes you want to put an eye there:



Okay, now what about grasping at straws? What's the image there? I realize I've always pictured ants trying to get out of water by climbing onto some bit of straw. Focusing on that for the first time, I can see that grasping at straws would probably work for an ant. You're supposed to picture a human being trying to escape drowning and desperately grasping at anything, no matter how absurdly useless it is. Wiktionary tells me that the image goes back Thomas More, "Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation" (1534). More is talking about people who will not seek the "comfort" of God. Some of them are completely lethargic — "so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness." Others are so "testy" and "fuming" that you don't even want to talk to them. Then there are people who do want to be comforted. Some of them "seek for worldly comfort":

He who in tribulation turneth himself unto worldly vanities, to get help and comfort from them, fareth like a man who in peril of drowning catcheth whatsoever cometh next to hand, and that holdeth he fast, be it never so simple a stick. But then that helpeth him not, for he draweth that stick down under the water with him, and there they lie both drowned together. So surely, if we accustom ourselves to put our trust of comfort in the delight of these childish worldly things, God shall for that foul fault suffer our tribulation to grow so great that all the pleasures of this world shall never bear us up, but all our childish pleasure shall drown with us in the depth of tribulation.

You know, that eye on the pyramid, as seen on the Great Seal of the United States dollar bill is the "Eye of Providence":

On the seal, the Eye is surrounded by the words Annuit Cœptis, meaning "He approves (or has approved) [our] undertakings", and Novus Ordo Seclorum, meaning "New Order of the Ages". The Eye is positioned above an unfinished pyramid with thirteen steps, representing the original thirteen states and the future growth of the country. The lowest level of the pyramid shows the year 1776 in Roman numerals. The combined implication is that the Eye, or God, favors the prosperity of the United States.

Have we gone so deeply into the mixed metaphor that it's all coming together somehow?

"The absurdity of the Democrats’ outrage was too much.... They were accusing Republicans of 'making a mockery of democracy,' operating like a 'banana republic,' and..."

"... in former labor secretary Robert Reich’s words, conducting a 'coup d’état.' All the while, Democrats were hiding in another state trying to prevent a newly inaugurated senate from holding a vote on vital state business. But in the end, senate Republicans had found a way to vote. The Assembly passed the bill on Thursday. Scott Walker signed it into law on Friday. And that is what democracy actually looks like."

Art means nothing in Washington.

A venerable poet is a figure of fun.