Category: Notes and Comment Blog

The Times says it’s all over between Don and Steve.

President Trump essentially excommunicated his onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, from his political circle on Wednesday, excoriating him as a self-promoting exaggerator who had “very little to do with our historic victory” and has now “lost his mind.”

In a written statement brimming with anger and resentment, Mr. Trump fired back at Mr. Bannon, who had made caustic comments about the president and his family to the author of a new book about the Trump White House. While Mr. Bannon had remained in touch with Mr. Trump even after being pushed out of the White House last summer, the two now appear to have reached a breaking point.

Don threw away the friendship bracelet Steve gave him.

Mr. Trump berated Mr. Bannon for the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama and said the former adviser did not represent his base but was “only in it for himself.”

I know, right? There’s just nothing quite like the way Don rages at people for being exactly like him. It was just four days ago that Don was milking the presidency (at our expense) to get higher prices for his party at Mar-a-Lago, but today he’s complaining that some other guy was “only in it for himself.”

“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was,” he added. “It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

Ok Don, one, then why did you hire him? Doesn’t say much for your ability to judge character, does it. If he does nothing well except make himself look important, why did you give him the job?

And two, you’re the guy who’s always yipping about loyalty, but look at you, talking public smack about a former buddy while everyone watches. Have you thought about what this tells all your other employees? Good luck when they start heading for the doors.

The Post says the working class is protesting in Iran, to the alarm of the mullahs.

“The rebuke both from the urban poor and more religious cities in Iran should be a wake-up call” to the Iranian leadership, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

In the past week, there were echoes of the mass demonstrations that flared in 2009 after reformist political candidates were defeated in disputed presidential election: women pulling off headscarves, fist-pumping crowds, chants against Khamenei.

But unlike that earlier, largely middle-class movement centered in Tehran, the recent demonstrations are drawing heavily upon lower-income youths in religious cities and rural towns. In some cases, protesters have attacked police stations and government buildings.

That’s their “base” turning against them.

Iran’s conservatives have long counted on rural constituencies as a bulwark against the middle-class city-dwellers, who represent the base of support for reformists.

Even rural constituencies can rebel.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Aw, another rift.

forgotten men and women of this country

Honestly, I am so sick of this phrase. No one has forgotten these people; they would never let us. They make more noise, and get more attention than any other group. Bernie Sanders suggested putting up a pro-life Democrat to make these people happy. Every pundit across the spectrum has been saying for at least the past 5 election cycles that these are the people we should be pandering to, instead of “identity politics”, which means, in translation, we should be continuing to ensure that white midwesterners who are Christian and anti-feminist, who are pro-life and pro-Jesus, should continue to run the country (as they have been doing for most of history).

From me to Donald Trump: Yo, Donnie! Your base is not forgotten! Your base was never forgotten! The “forgotten” men and women of this country are those who are impoverished, minority, female, and/or non-Christian! Michael Brown…Treyvon Martin…see, I’m even having trouble remembering the names, and I don’t forget these truly forgotten people.

The Ammon Bundys and Phil Robertsons of the world are not forgotten, have never been forgotten, and will probably never be forgotten, much as we might try. The only reason Donnie’s base is angry is that someone is trying to render them equal with everyone else, instead of superior….and Donnie thinks they should be superior, because…well, because white. Because male. Because wealthy. Because voted for Donnie.

Frederick Crews, whose latest book is the wonderful Freud: The Making of an Illusion, has a review-article on a new book about “recovered memory” and a criminal trial.

Until now the work has been almost entirely ignored by reviewers. Yet it comes with the strong endorsement of a world-renowned psychologist and memory expert, Elizabeth Loftus, and a leading expert on coercive interrogation methods and false confessions, Richard A. Leo. If they are right, Mark Pendergrast’s 391-page The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment can erase the shame of both Penn State and Sandusky, who languishes in solitary confinement, for 22 hours a day, in a maximum-security state prison.

Pendergrast is an independent scholar and science writer who has long been concerned with the psychology and disastrous consequences of falsely “recovered memory.” Like nearly all consumers of mainstream news, Pendergrast at first took the reports of Sandusky’s misdeeds at face value. But when, in 2013, he received a tip that there appeared to be a recovered memory aspect to the case, he was intrigued. After studying all pertinent documents, corresponding with Sandusky and twice visiting him, and interviewing family members, alumni of Sandusky’s Second Mile program, and other figures involved in the case, Pendergrast assembled an imposing argument against the consensus.

It’s unsettling. Could the Sandusky case be just another McMartin Preschool case?

Many factors contributed to the Sandusky debacle: a prurient misconstruction of well-meant deeds; excessive zeal by officials, police, social workers, and therapists; scandal mongering by the media that preempted the judicial process; the greed of abuse claimants and their lawyers; and a political vendetta against Penn State’s President Spanier by then Governor Tom Corbett. But the main ingredient in the witches’ brew, the one that rendered it most toxic, was something else: bogus psychological theory.

The indefinite and unsupported concepts of dissociation and repression, wielded without allowance for the distorting effects of suggestion and autosuggestion, lent forensic weight to nightmarish scenes that were “retrieved” in a climate of fright. Without that bad science, imparted first by therapy (Fisher) and then by social contagion (McQueary), there would have been no case at all against Sandusky. Attorney General Linda Kelly acknowledged as much in her triumphant press conference following the conviction. She praised the accusers for their courage and persistence in struggling toward a negation of their original statements to authorities. “It was incredibly difficult,” she proclaimed, “for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”

When you hear prosecutors talking about “long-buried memories” you should be suspicious. Long ignored or avoided memories are one thing, but buried ones are another.

The BBC is excited but brief.

Breaking News, it declares.

Former White House aide Steve Bannon “lost his mind” after he lost his job at the White House, US President Donald Trump has said.

The president disavowed Mr Bannon after he was quoted in a new book describing a meeting between Mr Trump’s son and a group of Russians as “treasonous”.

But where did he say it, when did he say it, to whom did he say it.

I guess the reporter is still typing; the Beeb says to keep refreshing the page.

Updating to add:

Oh, I see, it’s a press statement. You’d think the Beeb could have said that before pressing Publish.

holy WHAT.

Trump: "When [Bannon] was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind." pic.twitter.com/dsX6HwExus

— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) January 3, 2018

It’s an actual press statement. That’s pretty funny/sickening.

Updating again: CNBC has the full statement.

Here is President Donald Trump‘s full statement regarding former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon:

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media,which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.

Professional presidenting.

The toddler ran amok.

It's not only Pakistan that we pay billions of dollars to for nothing, but also many other countries, and others. As an example, we pay the Palestinians HUNDRED OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

…peace treaty with Israel. We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table, but Israel, for that, would have had to pay more. But with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948362512315056129

Twitter has told “Sheriff” David Clarke to knock it off with the violent threats.

Former Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., a vocal surrogate for President Donald Trump on the campaign trail, was temporarily blocked from tweeting after Twitter users’ complaints alerted the company that three of his messages violated the terms of service, CNN has learned.

Clarke was placed in read-only mode until he deleted three tweets that seemed to call for violence against members of the media.

In one of them, which has since been deleted, Clarke told his followers, “When LYING LIB MEDIA makes up MAKE NEWS to smear me, the ANTIDOTE is to go right at them. Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD. Nothing gets a bully like LYING LIB MEDIA”S attention better than to give them a taste of their own blood #neverbackdown.”

Good. I reported that one. I don’t report stuff on Twitter, but when it’s a law enforcement official, current or former? That’s different.

One Twitter user who complained about Clarke shared with CNN the email response from Twitter in which the company stated, “We have reviewed the account you reported and have locked it because we found it to be in violation of the Twitter Rules:

https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311. If the account owner complies with our requested actions and stated policies, the account will be unlocked.”

This is good because he was tweeting boasts about the “snowflakes” reporting him and how we FAILED neener-neener.

Clarke did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

He tweeted about the Twitter reports, writing, “I know I’m winning. Some snowflake lib made a complaint to Twitter because of my earlier tweet about black kids being exploited by lefty failed policies at Ballou High School. I said in my tweet, this CRAP is criminal. Twitter said no violation of rules. Diaper change time.”

Happy new year, Mr. Clarke.

Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, yesterday:

As many of you know, Bloodroot has recently come under attack and is currently being trolled by a number of people in the transgender community and their supporters. We felt it was time to make an official statement. Because it seems whenever we try and explain what happened and our stance on this issue, it only serves to inspire more hatred, we will not be replying to comments.

Bloodroot and her owners are not transphobic – far from it! Bloodroot has always welcomed and respected everyone – especially people who might feel uncomfortable in a public space. Whether that be people from other countries, people of color, people of every type of sexuality, and yes, people who are transgender. Our long-time customers know that, many who are transgender, which is why they have been rallying to our defense.

One of our relatively new customers was enthusiastically telling us about a space in Massachusetts that catered to trans people and asked if we knew about it. We didn’t but since we are not trans, it wasn’t all that interesting to us personally and stated that for us, we prefer women only spaces. This comes from our history. When Bloodroot first started in the 70’s we were trying to create a space specifically safe for women, since there were so few places like that at the time. Of course even back then we were open and welcoming to everyone, not just women. This customer misunderstood what was really an off-hand comment and perceived that to mean that we were anti-trans. She then wrote a post slamming us. That post was seen and shared. Then some in the trans community – most of whom have never been to Bloodroot – started trolling us. We find it ironic that of all the many businesses that you probably buy things from, it’s hard to imagine any of them being as supportive of not only trans people, but all people who are “different” from societal norms as Bloodroot has been and continues to be. But Bloodroot, a Vegetarian (mostly vegan) Restaurant and Feminist bookstore, that has been in business for 40+ years and is owned and run by two lesbians aged 73 and 83, is the place they decide to attack. Women who through their activism as second wave feminists help pave the way for the rights and freedoms that the trans community today enjoy!

You couldn’t make it up. Not angry men making violent threats; not angry men carrying out violent actions; not racists; not fascists; not anti-abortion fanatics terrorizing women seeking abortions; not homophobes, not gay-bashers, not pussygrabbers, not rapists – but two feminist lesbians who have have run a vegetarian restaurant for 40 years. Yeah, kids, let’s attack them, because that will be easy and won’t take any courage!

Some of these “activists” are posting hostile reviews on Yelp, in hopes of harming Bloodroot’s business.

Imagine for a minute if hundreds of people who don’t know you started to attack you online, spewing lies about you that go against your core values, and trying to destroy you. Better yet, imagine them doing that to someone you love – your mother or grandmother for example. We understand this is a subject matter that many people are passionate about, but we feel this anger is misguided and misplaced.

Regardless of how you feel about Bloodroot’s stand on this, we will continue to be a welcoming space for all types of people, including those that are transgender, and treat everyone with respect. If you feel our explanation and response is inadequate for you, then you should not patronize us.

But, more urgently, you should also learn who your real enemies are. They are not Bloodroot and they are not Selma and Noel.

Benjamin Wittes looks at Trump’s war on the Deep State so far, and finds it fulfilling dire predictions but also not as bad as it could be if Trump were more competent.

The first few weeks of the Trump administration raised the question of the degree to which Trump’s malevolence would be tempered by his incompetence. In the first year of the Trump presidency, the answer to that question was that incompetence did a lot of tempering. Trump blundered from crisis to crisis. The lawyering around him was comically dreadful—as was the broader executive functioning. Taking on established democratic institutions and wrecking them actually takes a certain amount of focus and energy—and Trump just isn’t very good at it. His heart may be in it, but Vladimir Putin he isn’t. And the United States isn’t a fragile new democracy with weak institutions either.

He’s got the rage but not the talent, the venom but not the discipline, the greed but not the dedication.

Trump has another personality liability for the project at hand, one that fewer people notice: He is ultimately a wuss. He talks about his boldness all the time, and a lot of people—including his enemies—lap up the self-description. He likes to talk in sweeping, grandiose terms about the things he is going to do and the things he has done. In practice, however, he’s actually very cautious most of the time. Think about it this way: Leaving aside Trump’s words and claims about himself, do the actions of his first year in office generally bespeak boldness? Yes, he left the Paris Climate Agreement. And yes, he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And yes, he did the travel ban. But think about all of the bold things Trump has promised and backed away from: scrapping NAFTA and waging a trade war against the Chinese, ditching the Iran deal, walking away from Europe, draining the swamp, and confronting conservative orthodoxy on taxation.

The boldest step Trump has taken, the firing of James Comey, was an accident. Trump actually appears to have believed that this move would be popular, because Comey had angered Democrats during the 2016 campaign. Most of Trump’s supposed boldness is just tweets and bombast and things he says. It’s a big part of his self-image, but the self-image is mostly a game of dress-up. When push comes to shove, he’s pretty paralyzed by circumstances much of the time.

Well, unless there’s some pesky Balkan head of state in his way.

On the other hand, Wittes goes on, he could do a lot of damage just by hollowing out the federal bureaucracy, and that he is in fact doing. (It doesn’t take much boldness.)

All of which is to emphasize that we are emphatically not out of the woods. The situation remains dangerous, because Trump’s personality is so fundamentally incompatible with the nature and demands of the office he holds. His impulsiveness can get us into trouble any day. As his political situation, or his legal situation, continues to degrade, he could lash out and change the equilibrium at any time. Moreover, chipping away at institutions slowly, both by institutional and budgetary evisceration and by leadership attrition—one Chuck Rosenberg a few months ago, one James Baker last month, one Andrew McCabe in March—will take a big toll over time.

But Trump simply cannot look back on the last year and be satisfied with the success of his war on the Deep State. His battle to remake it in his image has been largely unavailing—and has come at far greater cost to his presidency than to the institutions he is trying to undermine.

But the blot on our record is there forever.

Deborah Cameron has a shorter and of course vastly better list of some good reads.

• Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto.
• Emma Jane, Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History.
• Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and tumblr to Trump and the alt-right.

About the Nagle, she says

Before anyone was talking about the ‘alt-right’, Angela Nagle was investigating the online subcultures from which it emerged, tracking the people involved, the platforms they used, the political positions they espoused and—from a linguist’s perspective most interestingly—the evolution of their distinctive communication style. This isn’t as distinctive as we might think: it has much in common with earlier celebrations of transgression (‘kill all normies’ is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s ‘il faut épater les bourgeois’), and its emphasis on men rebelling against the domesticating influence of women recalls the leftist counter-culture of the 1960s (think Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).

Yesssss – and other “transgressive” fiction before that. I remember noticing it decades ago when reading something late 19th century, I can’t remember what – it was all about the surging genius of the male protagonist and the determination of the castrating woman he had the bad luck to fancy to tie him down to domestic wharblegarble. I remember reading it and scowling and noting what a familiar pattern it is. Man has dreams, woman wants to put an apron on them.

Another item to put alongside Jack Nicholson versus Nurse Ratched is Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould versus Hotlips Houlihan, in which the dudes get their revenge on the uptight nurse by gathering everyone on the base to watch and then tearing down the curtain behind which Houlihan is taking a shower. Haw haw haw, naked lady in front of all those laughing fully clothed men. So transgressive.

Cameron then offers some shorter reads.

Unsurprisingly, 2017 produced many reflections on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, and one issue some of these reflections addressed was the role played by gendered language in shaping responses to the candidates. Among the most intriguing approaches to the question was a dramatic experiment asking ‘What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had swapped genders?’

Must read that.

Oh goody, a list. On the other hand it’s a pretty odd list. It’s Robert McCrum’s choice for The 100 best nonfiction books of all time – in English, though that’s not stated, and the last one is the bible which was not written in English. But that’s the only translation as far as I could tell, unless Popper wrote The Open Society in German, which I don’t think he did.

But McCrum includes poetry and drama in non-fiction, which seems like cheating. It lets him include the First Folio, which by all means, but non-fiction, really?

Anyway the contemporary and modern choices seem pretty meh to me – more most popular or most familiar than best. Naomi Klein’s No Logo? Top 100 of all time? Come on. And the Oliver Sacks book that was translated into a movie, when there are others that are such gems.

22. A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)
This powerful study of loss asks: “Where is God?” and explores the feeling of solitude and sense of betrayal that even non-believers will recognise.

23. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)
Dorothy Parker and Stephen King have both urged aspiring writers towards this crisp guide to the English language where brevity is key.

No no no.

41. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)
The original self-help manual on American life – with its influence stretching from the Great Depression to Donald Trump – has a lot to answer for.

Indeed, but that doesn’t make it one of the best.

73. Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (1807)
A troubled brother-and-sister team produced one of the 19th century’s bestselling volumes and simplified the complexity of Shakespeare’s plays for younger audiences.

Again, doesn’t make it a best.

93. Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk by Sir Thomas Browne (1658)
Browne earned his reputation as a “writer’s writer” with this dazzling short essay on burial customs.

Now you’re talking. Urn Burial is extraordinary. You can find it online, too, and it’s not really a book, more a long essay.

100. King James Bible: The Authorised Version (1611)
It is impossible to imagine the English-speaking world celebrated in this series without the King James Bible, which is as universal and influential as Shakespeare.

But it’s hardly non-fiction now is it?!

Got any nominees?

Originally a comment by Jeff Engel on Still never.

President Clinton would have made for a glorious 4-8 years of moaning and crying from the right, able to pick on every peccadillo and declaim about the moral superiority of the Republican Party who – they’d be happy to say – ultimately rejected Trump while the Democrats embraced Her Satanic Majesty. So yeah, it’s not that expensive being a Never Trumper from the op-ed pages.

Still – I don’t believe I can take fully seriously the complaints about Trump’s character combined with the delight in his policies. Bullying, pettiness, aggressive ignorance – these are the same things that will underlie the preferred conservative society of “ordered classes”, people “knowing their place”, and the eager trampling of every protection against well-understood environmental threats. Crassness, bigotry – again, where else do you suppose the dismantling of minority protections comes from? Toadyism as the form of public service – this is what comes of the tireless elevation of business culture as the model of efficiency to which government should aspire, and setting the lobbyists to work drafting the regulations for their industries.

There could be conservative political virtues. There’s a lot to be said for preserving working institutions and reforming them carefully, rather than replacing them wholesale; for insisting on genuine character in leaders and for acknowledging it respectfully regardless of policy differences; for regarding society as an organism more than a mechanism and treating governance as more the work of a doctor than an engineer.

Bret Stephens really could have had all of that with a President Hillary Clinton. He wouldn’t have the policies he’s crowing about, precisely because those come from the vices he supposedly condemns.