Roundup
(1) Kamala Harris has finally managed to put up a policy page. It sounds as though it’s about what you’d expect: sparse, to the left, and heavy with anti-Trump material.
(2) I think it’s obvious to any thinking observer that the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was disastrous. Now the House has issued a report, and the news is being covered as basically Republicans pounce. You may recall, however, that it was this withdrawal that caused a segment of the US public to turn on Biden; that’s when his polls fell.
(3) Is Keith Ellison on Kamala’s short list for attorney general? You be the judge.
(4) The BBC hates Israel and reports very unfairly on it. But you already knew that.
(5) This obviously isn’t meant to be a pro-Trump cover, but it’s in the eye of the beholder:
This is quite possibly the first cover of @TheAtlantic magazine ever (in 167 years!) to be published without a headline or typography describing the stories inside. Here is The Atlantic's October cover: pic.twitter.com/wpIpKL0oXU
— Adrienne LaFrance (@AdrienneLaF) September 9, 2024
On tomorow’s debate
I plan to have a thread tomorrow to discuss the debate. But I just want to say now that, in addition to my usual dislike of debates, I have a special layer of anxiety about this one. Way too much is riding on it – way way too much, and those running the debate would obviously like Kamala Harris to do well. Plus, debates are not Trump’s strong suit.
Because this is probably the only presidential debate there will be this cycle, it takes on added significance despite the fact that – as is always the case – debates are not necessarily a good reflection of much of anything except sound bites and emotional perceptions including perceived attractiveness. Yes, debates do show a person’s ability to think on his or her feet and be clear about answers. But so much of a viewer’s take on that that depends on the manner in which questions are asked, what questions are asked, and the format (including the possibility of a favored candidate getting the questions in advance), as well as the way a biased and activist press talks about the exchanges afterwards and “fact checks” them.
Venezuela’s opposition candidate flees to Spain …
… and has been granted asylum there:
Former Venezuelan presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez arrived in Spain on Sunday after fleeing into exile in as part of a negotiated deal with Nicolas Maduro’s government that dealt a major blow to millions who placed their hopes in his opposition campaign.
The surprise departure of the man considered by Venezuela’s opposition and several foreign governments to be the legitimate winner of July’s presidential race was announced late Saturday by Venezuelan officials who just a few days ago ordered his arrest. …
“His life was in danger, and the increasing threats, summons, arrest warrants and even attempts at blackmail and coercion to which he has been subjected, demonstrate that the regime has no scruples,” [opposition politician] Machado said on X.
“Let this be very clear to everyone: Edmundo will fight from outside alongside our diaspora.” …
But on the streets of Caracas on Sunday the mood was one of despair ….
Well they might despair. Venezuela, once a fairly prosperous country, voted itself into permanent leftist control decades ago and now those in charge will not relinquish their tight grip on the country even if the suffering citizens reject them. “Our democracy” isn’t democratic unless it serves the left’s cause. And since Gonzalez remained a threat as long as he was in Venezuela, he had to be threatened till he left the country.
The Venezuelan people have seen this play before:
Gonzalez joins the swelling ranks of opposition stalwarts who once fought Maduro only to throw in the towel and seek asylum abroad in the face of a brutal crackdown. In Spain, he joins at least four former presidential hopefuls who were imprisoned or faced arrest for defying Maduro’s rule.
Spain has been a major point of exodus for Venezuelans, particularly of those leading opposition to Maduro’s regime. They include Leopoldo Lopez, who fled to Spain to reunite with his family in 2020, and Antonio Ledezma, who left in 2017.
In addition:
Ever since the vote, he and Machado have been in hiding as security forces rounded up more than 2,000 people, many of them young Venezuelans who spontaneously took to the streets to protest Maduro’s alleged theft of the election.
Will they be treated better or worse than the J6-ers?
The entire article is worth reading. Here’s another especially interesting part:
Attorney General Tarek William Saab, a staunch Maduro ally, sought González’s arrest after he failed to appear three times in connection with a criminal investigation into what it considers an act of electoral sabotage.
Saab told reporters the voting records the opposition shared online were forged and an attempt to undermine the National Electoral Council.
I think the possible relevance to our own situation is obvious. The supposed crimes for which Gonzalez was being investigated include “conspiracy, falsifying documents, and usurpation of powers.” And then we have this:
Maduro asked the country’s high court to audit the electoral process. The Supreme Tribunal of Justice, stacked with Maduro loyalists, concluded on Aug. 22 that the vote counts published by the opposition were false and certified Maduro’s victory.
It has a certain familiar ring – or perhaps it’s a portent of things to come for the US. I sincerely hope not, but that’s my fear.
[NOTE: This article was written prior to the election, and it touts how secure the Venezuelan elections are. And if you read it you can see that the process of voting and checking IDs in Venezuela is a gazillion times better than ours. There are other vulnerabilities, however, which the government almost certainly exploited, having to do with authenticating the vote counts. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Open thread 9/9/2024
The camera’s perspective those last few seconds is daunting:
Giselle’s spinning spirit
A famous moment in the ballet Giselle occurs towards the beginning of Act II. In the first act of the ballet, Giselle – a peasant girl – has fallen in love with Albrecht, a nobleman who is disguised as a peasant. He is toying with her and has no intention of leaving his royal life and his noblewoman fiance. When Giselle learns of his betrayal, she dies of a broken heart, a heart that was already known to be somewhat weak. Then we go to Act II, in which Giselle’s spirit is about to join the Wilis, the ghosts of maidens who were betrayed by false lovers and who died before their wedding days. They are forced to lure men into their clutches and then dance them to death. Giselle’s loving nature triumphs over that grim mission and she ends up saving the man who betrayed her.
It’s a lot to unpack, I know. But it’s a great ballet, giving the lead dancer room to express earthly innocence and joy in the first act and mature transcendent otherwordly love in the second.
In the “spirit spinning” sequence I’m about to show, Giselle has already died and is “coming out” for her first evening as a Wili. The Queen of the Wilis, Myrtha, is calling her forth from the grave, and then commands her to dance. Giselle’s frenzied spinning at the beginning is not of her own volition; an outside force is pulling her around and around like that. It’s difficult for the dancer playing Giselle to hide the impetus for the movement and make it seem as though it’s coming from outside.
Some dancers are especially good at giving this impression and others are not. The same is true for Giselle’s subsequent jumps, which are supposed to be weightless, which means that no physical effort can be shown.
Enjoy:
Tucker Carlson: Pat Buchanan squared
I guess it’s time for me to tackle the Tucker Carlson brouhaha involving the soapbox he gave to previously-obscure WWII “historian” Darryl Cooper, who appears to suffer from a bad case of CDS. That’s Churchill Derangement Syndrome.
You can read about Tucker’s interview with Cooper in this piece by Brendan O’Neill. I didn’t watch the interview myself, but I got to the point long ago of not being able to stomach Carlson or his guests when they talk about anything foreign-policy related. I long ago decided he was basically Pat Buchanan on steroids, and although I suppose now and then Carlson gets something right (particularly if he’s talking about domestic issues), on foreign affairs he’s been spending a great deal of time giving a platform to people who are wrong. And it’s a big platform because he has a huge following.
Here’s what O’Neill has written:
What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.
For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted, was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony, but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.
Cooper’s shameless saluting of Nazi Paris cuts to the heart of the Hitler apologetics that have spread like a pox through the Very Online right. These people are in the grip of a deranged fantasy: that Europe in the Nazi era was better than the new Europe of genderfluidity, mass immigration, Islamist terrorism or whatever. They scurry like the abject moral cowards they are from the undoubted problems of the present into an utterly fictional past. A past where Hitler was a peacemaker, Europe was calm (until that rotter Churchill came along), and ‘Western civilisation’ remained intact. Overlooked – wilfully – is the war, savagery and unprecedented programme of extermination unleashed by the Nazis, all of which added up to the most violent and egregious assault on Western civilisation in history.
Much more at the link. O’Neill doesn’t pull any punches. He calls the group who like this sort of thing the “batshit right,” for instance. He’s not talking about the right as a whole, but he is talking about a small but loud segment who – and this is the reason I mention it at all – are very useful to the left. If the left wishes to promote the fiction that the right – and all Trump supporters – consist of neo-Nazis, secret or overt, then giving Cooper a bully pulpit feeds right into that fiction. And that fiction is very much believed by plenty of Democrats who are not leftists, and contributes mightily to their TDS.
O’Neill adds:
The crank right – with its war on the past, its philistine assault on truth, its vile obsession with race – is a mirror image of the woke left. Both rage with curious ferocity against Churchill: the woke leftists of the BLM era were vandalising Churchill statues years before Tucker had a Churchill hater on his show. Both relativise the Holocaust. The online right does it by suggesting the deaths of all those Jews was kind of unintentional; the crank left does it by calling everything it doesn’t like in the here and now, including Israel’s war on Hamas, ‘another Holocaust’. The former robs the Holocaust of its murderous intent, the latter robs it of its uniqueness: a right / left pincer movement of woke denialism that obscures the truth of what the Nazis did to the Jews.
And both seem hell-bent on upending our common history. On violating the truths and wonders of our past. On scrubbing away the wins of our civilisation that shape who we are. The online right’s intellectual lynching of Churchill is in many ways its 1619 moment.
I agree with that observation.
I’ve seen plenty of defenses of Cooper and Carlson in comments around the blogosphere, and many of them take the form of saying something like it’s important to be allowed to question the usual version of history, and people aren’t being allowed to do that.
However, of course people are allowed to do it. But if they make up a history that doesn’t match the actual facts and/or the nature of the people involved, and ignores or distorts what they had planned and what they actually did, there’s no reason to take the trouble to spread their thoughts further and further while leaving their assertions unchallenged. A host such as Carlson picks and chooses his guests, and unless he spends the time debating what a guest is saying (he did not debate or challenge Cooper to any appreciable extent, apparently) then we can assume he thinks the guest’s message is worthwhile.
As time has gone by, fewer and fewer people are alive who actually lived through World War II, and some day there will be none. Those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it, and we need to do our best to keep to the truth.
NOTE: If Brendan O’Neill isn’t your cup of tea, here’s Victor Davis Hanson discussing Cooper’s appearance on Carlson’s show:
Because of the size of the audience Carlson introduced him to, and because of the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods, his assertions deserve a response. …
It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941.
The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East. …
As for Cooper’s claim that the Allies were to blame for starting a world war, nothing could be further from the truth. Hitler may have been frustrated that Britain and France declared war on him after his unprovoked invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. But he had been warned by some advisers that the two allies would be finally forced to war, given that he had broken almost all his prewar promises to them about ceasing his serial territorial acquisitions.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the article is available only to paid subscribers.
Will the left finally forgive Dick Cheney, now that he’s endorsed Kamala?
One thing that occurred to me when I first heard about Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris was, wow, Cheney’s still alive. Twenty-five years ago, when he was on the verge of becoming Bush’s VP, I didn’t think Cheney was long for this world, because his heart disease was so bad at the time. But due to the wonders of modern medicine, Cheney got a heart transplant in 2012 and is apparently still going strong at 83, making him the oldest living US ex-VP.
And now, thanks to his Harris endorsement, he won’t need to have any discord at the Thanksgiving table when he gets together with daughter Liz.
Cheney’s Harris endorsement may surprise those on the left who haven’t followed the Bush contingent and aren’t aware of the depth of their hatred for Trump, but it’s formidable and hardly new. Cheney is a very unpopular figure on both sides, so his endorsement is one of those things that I doubt will have a lot of effect on anyone, although the newspapers and Democrats will try to make some use of it. But at least he and Bush have some personal reasons for their deep antipathy, reasons I outlined in this piece I wrote that originally appeared in October of 2015. The gist of it is that Trump had a ton of negative things to say about Bush and company during the Bush administration, including (for example), during a 2008 interview with Wolf Blitzer, in which Trump said that Bush should have been impeached for lying us into the Iraq War and another time when he said that Bush was “probably the worst president in the history of the United States.” [NOTE: The original links are now broken, but you can still find the quotes here and here.]
However, Cheney’s endorsing Harris is a whole ‘nother ballgame from simply not endorsing Trump or criticizing Trump. Here’s the reason Cheney gave:
In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.
As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.
Perhaps Cheney’s former conservatism was mere “partisanship,” because it certainly doesn’t seem to have been principled. After all, Trump actually left power peacefully, and his use of power during his presidency was less than that of the Biden administration of which Harris has been an integral part, and certainly less that what the left has planned for a Harris presidency. In addition, if anyone tried to “steal the election using lies” it was the left – or perhaps the word “rig” is more to the point.
Oh, and the answer to the rhetorical question I posed in the title of this post is “No, but they’ll try to use him if they can.”
Open thread 9/7/2024
This has long been one of my very favorite poems, and recently I stumbled on this haunting musical rendition in song:
No sentencing for Trump till after the election
How very magnanimous of Judge Merchan to wait till November 26 to sentence Donald Trump in the ludicrous records falsification “hush money” trial. Here’s the reason he gave:
“The public’s confidence in the integrity of our judicial system demands a sentencing hearing that is entirely focused on the verdict of the jury and the weighing of aggravating and mitigating factors free from distraction or distortion,” Merchan said in a letter Friday.
“Unfortunately, we are now at a place in time that is fraught with complexities rendering the requirements of a sentencing hearing, should one be necessary, difficult to execute. Thus, in accordance with certain of the grounds submitted by Defendant and the reasons for adjournment provided by the People coupled with the unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in, the decision on the [motion] and the imposition of sentence will be adjourned to avoid any appearance – however unwarranted – that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching Presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate,” Merchan said.
Earth to Judge Merchan: at least half the public has zero confidence in the integrity of our judicial system, and you have had a significant role in that loss of confidence. And there’s a sort of bleak humor in the idea that this postponement could do away with the suspicion – however unwarranted, ha ha – of an attempt to influence the election. As though the constant cries of “convicted felon!” haven’t already affected the election – although not entirely as the left had hoped.
The entire enterprise has been nothing else but an attempt to influence the election and to punish Trump for the unforgivable crime of having won the presidency in 2016.
Braver Angels: helping loved ones divided by politics
Braver Angels is a group dedicated to helping people from opposite sides of the political spectrum be able to talk rationally and calmly about politics. Good luck. I think it’s a laudable but very difficult goal.
I noticed that they have videos at YouTube that feature marriage and family therapist Bill Doherty doing sessions with some volunteers – not actors, but real people with political disagreements with loved ones that have been heated enough that they feel they need help. You might be interested in taking a look; here’s the playlist.
The Georgia school shooter’s father has been arrested and charged with homicide
The case seems similar to the Crumbley case in Michigan. I’ve written six previous posts about the Crumbley case, because it alarmed me and I thought the parents either should not have been charged or were way overcharged. From this previous post on the Crumbleys:
No, of course it won’t be “run of the mill parents” who are charged. But in these school shooter situations, there are often warning signs that go unheeded, or that are not dealt with properly. Hindsight is 20/20, and as I said before, these particular parents don’t seem to have exercised good judgment. But they are not guilty of any crime. And finding them guilty of a crime opens the door to the state using the precedent and the tool as it sees fit, in particular to punish parents who might espouse positions it doesn’t like.
From the Georgia case:
Authorities charged Colin Gray, the father of the Georgia school shooter Colt Gray, with four counts of manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.
Colt is accused of killing two teachers and two students. He faces four counts of felony murder.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) Director Chris Hosey didn’t confirm Gray gifted the gun to his 14-year-old son.
Hosey said Gray “knowingly allowed” his son “to possess it.”
According to reports, Gray gave Colt the gun for Christmas only a few months after the FBI interviewed the family about online shooting threats.
The FBI didn’t seem unduly alarmed, nor did the school system. Of course, more might emerge in time about the parents’ negligence – it’s very very early yet and I’m sure I don’t have all the facts. But whatever emerges I doubt it rises to the level of homicide charges to the parents. The murders are absolutely horrible, of course. But wouldn’t the FBI and the school system be at least as culpable as the parents? And if the 14-year-old son is being tried as an adult (which he is), why are the parents considered responsible for murder instead of some sort of negligence? Unless the father put the gun in the boy’s hands and told him it would be a great idea to go to school and kill someone, I just don’t see that murder is an appropriate charge.