"Some historians who follow the presidency say Biden has always shown flashes of anger when he feels underestimated."

"While they are far more fleeting than Trump’s brandishing of grievances, they have at times been unmistakable. 'There has always been this issue of resentment with Biden. He resented [former president Barack] Obama and crew for supplanting him in 2008 and for telling him not to run in [2016], and he has many other resentments,' said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian who recently published a book on the relationship between presidents and CEOs. 'But can you imagine how resentful he is of the shifting narratives and the way he’s been pushed aside and manipulated and not treated fairly. So yeah, I can see him being resentful.'"

From "Biden touts his legacy, but frustration seeps through/The president is observing the traditions of a peaceful transfer of power, but his regrets and misgivings are evident" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Lots to talk about there, but I want to focus on "brandishing" — Trump’s brandishing of grievances. This is an article about Biden, his resentfulness, but Trump must be inserted, and he must be worse. Biden has  fleeting flashes of well-founded anger, but Trump has grievances, and he brandishes them. So Biden briefly displays resentment but Trump waves his resentment around like a weapon. 

Just yesterday, I was talking about the journalistic deployment of the word "brandish." Discussing a NYT article — "In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump/It was a week of frenzied activity as Silicon Valley billionaires and their companies brandished checks and compliments for President-elect Trump"  — I wrote:

"GOP leaders and confidants of President Trump tell Axios his legal fight to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory... could last a month or more, possibly pushing the 2020 political wars toward Christmastime."

Axios reports.

Axios is told an internal effort is underway to dissuade Trump from pursuing a blitz... that could mean three to six weeks of legal challenges, discovery and rulings — at the same time that Biden is talking daily about a message of healing....

A senior Republican who talks often to Trump said the president is "angry ... volatile ... disconsolate."...  Trump plans to hold rallies focused on the litigation, and brandish obituaries of people who were recorded as voting but are dead....

Republican operatives told Axios they worry that Trump's scorched-earth fight will divert money from the real remaining prize for the GOP — the twin Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5 that'll determine control of the Senate.... 

ADDED: I'd like to see some clear-headed analysis of whether Trump's holding out and fighting will help or hurt the Republicans in the Georgia runoffs. Axios — which obviously wants Trump to concede — is pushing the assumption that a concession will boost the Georgia GOP candidates. And I can see that. It's not just how much money is available but how important it is to keep the Senate. But you could say that Trump's diehard fighting is about the importance of keeping the liberals out of power, and if you really believe that, then if Trump fails in his effort, he will leave conservatives pumped up and that will fuel the fight for the Georgia Senate seats. 

"I thought he was just saying he reads the Bible. In there, it says we're all sinners. 100% not very good people."

I comment at Facebook, where my son John put up a link to "Biden claims '10 to 15 percent' of Americans are 'just not very good people'" (Fox News).

John's comment was: "A basket of deplorables, if you will."

The full quote from Biden:

“Do we really think this is as good as we can be as a nation? I don’t think the vast majority of people think that. There are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the people out there who are just not very good people, but that’s not who we are. The vast majority of the people are decent. We have to appeal to that and we have to unite people -- bring them together. Bring them together.”

Here's what I was remembering:



"The president held up a Bible at St. John's Church yesterday. I just wish he opened it once in a while.... instead of brandishing it...."

To "brandish" is "To flourish, wave about (a sword, spear, dart, club, or other manual weapon) by way of threat or display, or in preparation for action" (OED).

"Brandish" is a key word in the Bible — Ezekiel 32:10:

I will make many peoples appalled at you, and the hair of their kings shall bristle with horror because of you, when I brandish my sword before them. They shall tremble every moment, every one for his own life, on the day of your downfall....

The hair of their kings shall bristle with horror...

(Source: "Trump boarded Air Force One in high winds — and the photos of his hair are mesmerizing.")

Did CIA interrogators stage mock executions and brandish a gun and a drill to frighten detainees into giving up information?

WaPo:

The tactics -- which one official described Friday as a threatened execution -- were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the CIA's inspector general's report on the agency's interrogation program....

Three months before Nashiri's capture, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel -- Jay S. Bybee, now a federal judge -- advised the CIA in an August 2002 memo that threats of "imminent death" were not illegal unless they deliberately produced prolonged mental harm. Independent legal experts have called that interpretation too hedged and thus too lax....

A ... former U.S. official who has read the full, classified report said that it contained an entire section listing ways in which the CIA and contracted interrogators had "gone beyond what they were authorized to do -- a whole variety of deviations." The official said that what struck him most strongly was that the report suggested these techniques were "really not effective."

He said he concluded that "there has to be a better way to do this" but that the CIA resisted suggestions then that it should back away from the program. Asked why, the official said he could not say for sure, but he added that "maybe it was that if you change, then it means you were wrong" in pursuing the harsh interrogation methods in the first place.

Let's read Andrew Sullivan's new Sarah Palin post.

Here's the post:

It's getting worse. This is a classic:

"The Palins have no intention of providing a ratings boost for David Letterman by appearing on his show. Plus, it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman," PalinPAC spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton said Wednesday.

So Letterman is a child abuser for making a tasteless joke?

Sullivan seems to miss that Stapleton just made a child-rape joke. It's a joke! Well, it's a joke is not an apt excuse — is it? — when the joke is supposed to work based on a shared belief about the butt of it.

Stapleton's joke depends on seeing Letterman as someone who's enthused about the rape of children — or at least the children of politicians we don't like. By the same token, Letterman's joke worked to the extent that the audience shares the belief that Palin's daughter is a big slut.

Neither joke is any damned good. Letterman is a creep for making a girl the butt of his joke, and Stapleton is an idiot for trying to show that she can joke too and cranking out another dose of child-rape humor.

But the surrealism and narcissism of the Wasilla nutcase is what stands out:

"First, remember in the campaign, Barack Obama said, 'Family's off limits. You don't talk about my family.' "And the candidate who must be obeyed, everybody adhered to that and they did leave his family alone. They haven't done that on the other side of the ticket and it has continued to this day so that's a political double standard."

So brandishing a special needs infant as a campaign prop was putting your family off-limits? Pushing your own daughter into the klieglights to divert attention from your own fantastic lies is family-protective? Pushing Bristol Palin into an absurd abstinence campaign to gin up support from the Christianist right is looking after your kids? Palin reaps what she sows. And she clings to any whisp of victimhood like the attention-starved celebreality star she really is.

Now, this is absurd. Nearly all politicians display their families. Do they brandish them? Brandish means to shake or wave (as a weapon) menacingly/to exhibit in an ostentatious or aggressive manner. Occasionally, one reads of some criminal swinging a baby around like a cudgel, but with politicians, the displaying of the family is non-aggressive and without any weapon connotations. Obama displayed and continues to display Sasha and Malia in the conventional political way, and I'm sure Sullivan would be steamed if anyone mocked them or said anything sexual about them.

Bristol Palin's abstinence effort seems pretty silly to me too, but there's no reason to view that as opening her up to all sorts of vicious mockery. She found herself in an awfully uncomfortable spot. It's embarrassing enough for a teenager to become pregnant by accident, but to endure this in the crossfire of a political campaign had to be excruciating. But she put up with it somehow, didn't take the out of abortion, kept smiling, and tried to turn herself into a good lesson for others. How is this sowing something that she deserves to reap?

Or — oh — it's Palin who reaps what she sows. Is the girl not a person worthy of any regard? What did the girl do? "Family's off limits. You don't talk about my family." Obama said that. It was intended to bind his harshest opponents to a standard of behavior. Sullivan offers absolutely no reason why the same principle does not protect Palin's family.

And why should the governor of a state be called an "attention-starved celebreality star"? Is it because you don't respect her as a politician? You might call everyone with the nerve to run for President/Vice President an attention-starved celebreality star, but the fact is you don't. Apparently, it's because she's got kids who do things that you think we can sit back and view as objects of idle amusement. If anyone is to be a politician — in your nasty little world — their kids better toe the line and stay perfectly prim and healthy and smart (or hide).

Family disputes.

From CNN:

Bibi recounted how she was awakened by a shriek as Ahmed put his hand to the mouth of his stepdaughter, Muqadas, and cut her throat with a machete. She said she looked on helplessly from the corner of the room as he then killed the three girls -- Bano, 8, Sumaira, 7, and Humaira, 4 -- pausing between the slayings to brandish the bloodstained knife at his wife, warning her not to intervene or raise alarm....

Speaking to AP from the back of a police pickup truck late Tuesday as he was moved to a prison in the city of Multan, Ahmed showed no contrition. Appearing disheveled but composed, he said he killed Muqadas because she had committed adultery, and his daughters because he didn't want them to do the same when they grew up....

Despite Ahmed's contention that Muqadas had committed adultery -- a claim made by her husband -- the rights commission reported that according to local people, Muqadas had fled her husband because he had abused her and forced her to work in a brick-making factory....

Activists accuse President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a self-styled moderate Muslim, of reluctance to reform outdated Islamized laws that make it difficult to secure convictions in rape, acid attacks and other cases of violence against women. They say police are often reluctant to prosecute, regarding such crimes as family disputes.