Surprise! I’ve been traveling for close to 24 hours. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow or later tonight (well, not all about it, but something about it).
I still plan to post regularly during my trip, on the usual eclectic mix. But every now and then I may throw in a bit about where I am and what I’m doing. I’m not turning into a travel blogger, though.
Till later…
In certain times and places, the left and the religious fundamentalist right become closely aligned—if only temporarily, as they were during the Iranian revolution of 1979. Their togetherness was puzzling to me at the time, but I later decided that it was an alliance of convenience in which each group thought it was using the other to effect the downfall of the Shah, and each thought it and it alone would be the eventual winner.
Turned out the mullahs won that bet.
In a recent re-reading of Stephen Hicks’ Explaining Postmodernism I came across some passages that described other ways in which these two extremes—which appear to be opposites but in many ways are not—resemble each other. In this passage, Hicks isn’t discussing Iran (he was mostly speaking of Europe), but he writes:
What links the [collectivist political] Right and the Left is a core set of themes: anti-individualism, the need for strong government, the view that religion is a state matter (whether to promote or suppress it), the view that education is a process of socialization, ambivalence about science and technology, and strong themes of group violence, conflict, and war. Left and Right have often divided bitterly over which themes have priority and over how they should be applied. Yet for all their differences, both the collectivist Left and the collectivist Right have consistently recognized a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its limited government, its separation of church and state, its fairly consistent view that education is not primarily a matter of political socialization, and its persistent Whiggish optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups…
While the details are messy the broad point is clear: the collectivist Right and the collectivist Left are united in their major goals and in identifying their major opposition…
…liberalism did not penetrate deeply into the main lines of political thinking in Germany…By the early twentieth century, the dominant issues for most Continental political thinks were not whether liberal capitalism was a viable option—but rather exactly when it would collapse—and whether Left or Right collectivism had the best claim to being the socialism of the future.
Those last paragraphs are about Europe (and there’s much much more in Hicks’ book). But I think you can see that with a few tweaks they apply to Iran as well. And not just to Iran. Liberal capitalism—the Enlightenment, Locke and the rest—did not take hold in most of the world. It did take hold in much of the West, although to different degrees in different areas. I would say that although Britain was an early stronghold, the US surpassed it. It made advances in some former British colonies as well, to a very slightly lesser degree than in the US (Canada and Australia come to mind, with Australia beating out Canada). France and other Western European countries were devoted to a lesser extent, and Germany to a far lesser extent, as we can see from the events of the first half of the twentieth century. It is possible that eastern Europe, having had the Left collectivist experience forced on it, has now recoiled by becoming more liberal capitalist than some of western Europe.
In Iran the collectivist Left and the collectivist Right duked it out, and to the extent that liberal capitalism had been imposed by the Shah (and it was not very liberal, either) it died. There was very little fertile soil in which it might have rooted, but the collectivist Left and Right combined to destroy whatever buds might have been growing. Now? I think the youth of Iran have absorbed a certain degree of desire for liberal capitalism, gleaned from looking at the world as much as they’ve been allowed to. But there really is no strong tradition of it there, and that’s one of the difficulties.
..keeps on…trucking.
I never had a taste for whatever it is she does. But anyway, she’s still doing it. At nearly 60.
It was only 1984. And it was racial humor. But this Saturday Night Live classic is so much more gentle than today’s humor, and I think it’s genuinely funny. Murphy is mocking white people here, for sure, but he’s also mocking black people, albeit in a more subtle way. He was an equal opportunity mocker:
Did you first see that video when it initially came out? (I did.) Or did you first see it at some later point, but before today? If so, has your opinion of its humor changed between your initial viewing and now?
Another excellent article by Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review, this time on the way perjury traps are set. He starts out by talking about why Trump’s attorneys are saying that Trump shouldn’t talk to Mueller because of the likelihood that Mueller is laying a perjury trap for him.
But to me the most interesting part of the essay is when McCarthy discusses the perjury trap the FBI set for Michael Flynn. You already know the facts if you’ve been paying attention to Flynn’s story so far. But McCarthy says it so well that, even if you think you know it, it behooves you to read his piece. An excerpt:
…[T]he FBI and the Justice Department had an understanding of the Flynn–Kislyak conversations that was different from Flynn’s. That’s because they had recordings of the conversations — likely because the Russian ambassador, an agent of an adversarial foreign power, was being monitored.
Put this in context. Investigations are generally handled by FBI field offices, not headquarters. Normally, the FBI sends a line agent to interview the subject of the investigation, and the questioning commences only after the subject is informed of the purpose of the interview. But Flynn’s case was run out of headquarters, with the FBI’s top brass in consultation with the acting attorney general. To conduct the interview, the bureau dispatched to the White House Peter Strzok, the FBI’s top counterespionage agent, who generally worked on intelligence cases, not criminal probes. In his fourth day on the job as national-security adviser, Flynn had every reason to believe Strzok was there to talk business, not because Flynn was a suspect. Flynn did not have a lawyer present. We do not know whether Strzok advised him of his Miranda rights (which is often done even when, as in Flynn’s situation, it is not legally required because the suspect is not in custody). Here’s what we do know: The Justice Department and FBI were so hot to make a criminal case on Flynn that they used the Logan Act — an unconstitutional blight on the penal code that has never been used to convict anyone in over 200 years — as a pretext to investigate him.
And what did they ask him about? Conversations of which they had recordings. Why on earth would it be necessary to interrogate someone — let alone a top government national-security official — regarding the details of conversations about which the FBI already knew the details? Why conduct an investigative interview, carrying potential criminal peril, under circumstances in which the FBI already knew (a) it was Flynn’s job in the Trump transition team and as incoming national-security adviser to consult with foreign counterparts and (b) Flynn had not floated any arguably corrupt quid pro quo to Kislyak (e.g., sanctions relief as a reward for Russia’s support of Trump’s presidential bid)?
We don’t know for certain that the Flynn interview was a perjury trap. But it sure looks like one.
You would have to rack your brain to come to any other conclusion. There are so many outrages and violations here that it’s hard to know which is worse. But the entire picture is abominable.
And recall that the only fruit of this investigation of Flynn, in terms of crimes discovered, was this supposed “lying to the FBI” itself—which could easily be explained (and was explained by initial investigators at the FBI) as mere errors spoken with no intent to deceive.
I’m a lover of poetry, as you can probably tell from the number of posts listed in that category on my right sidebar (as I write this, it’s 161). But the poetry of the last twenty or thirty or even forty years leaves me cold, for the most part. Oh, there are some poets I think are decent, but they represent a small percentage of the whole, and there are none I think compare with the poets of the earlier part of the 20th century.
Of course, back then the world took poetry more seriously. And poets generally took their mission as poets very seriously indeed.
And it was even more so in a still-earlier time. Here’s Shelley, for example, in “A Defense of Poetry,” written in the early 19th Century:
“A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth . . . the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator.” The task of poets then is to interpret and present the poem; Shelley’s metaphor here explicates: “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”…
To Shelley, poetry is utilitarian, as it brings civilization by “awaken[ing] and enlarg[ing] the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”…concluding with his famous last line: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
These days a lot of poets still take themselves and their mission quite seriously, but it’s a very different mission, and the circles they move in are very very small. Most of the time they are only important to themselves and to each other, and to the universities that are their usual stomping grounds. Much recent poetry reads like prose broken into lines that resemble poetry to the eye but not to the ear. And a tendency to pretentious and seemingly deliberate incomprehensibility makes much recent poetry accessible only to the academics who seem to make up the vast majority of those who write it, publish it, read it, and analyze it.
As for larger, non-academic venues for poetry, I can’t say I even knew that The Nation published poetry. The New Yorker, yes; as a former three-decades-long subscriber and faithful reader (I canceled around 2003, when I could no longer take their ubiquitous liberal slant), I knew they published poetry. But I’ve never been a Nation aficionado.
So I had initially missed the brouhaha about a poem entitled “How To” that was published there. Go here and scroll down till you get to it, and read. The poem is quite short, and quite accessible compared to a lot of poems written today. The furor seems to have come because it was written by a white guy in a voice that uses urban black syntax. Also, it’s got a political message (as does a lot of recent poetry) but it’s an interesting and perhaps incompletely-PC one, I think: instructions on how to get money from people in the street by begging. It ends with these lines:
…If you’re crippled don’t
flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough
Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,
say you sin. It’s about who they believe
they is. You hardly even there.
Seems to me the poem is about the hypocrisy the speaker believes exists in people who give money to beggars, and could be summed up as “they’re virtue-signaling rather than actually caring.” It’s also about the tactics used by those begging in order to play on the motives of people giving them money.
Apparently this poem caused quite the social media uproar, so much so that the poetry editors of The Nation decided to issue a joint mea culpa. And what a mea culpa it is! As leftist and PC as the editors almost certainly are, apparently they weren’t PC enough for some readers. And, unlike in the Soviet Union, neither torture nor the threat of death was involved in generating their confession. But apparently being excoriated on social media is an ordeal nonetheless, enough to have put the editors in that Soviet-show-trial-confession frame of mind [emphasis mine]:
…as brigade commander S. P. Kolosov whose final fate is unknown expressed it in an anything but timid letter in 1937: “I am afraid to open my mouth. Whatever you say, if you say the wrong thing, you’re an enemy of the people. Cowardice has become the norm.”
Stalin had won the struggle for power and was now dealing death blows to the opposition by organising uncontrolled terror at every level of society. The purges carried out within the party, the army, among members of the scientific community, artists and prominent cultural figures came to be known as the Great Terror. The term is actually bizarre; terror is hardly a rank great or small but absolute: once it has taken root in a social system it spreads and acquires a life of its own.
Here is the note from the Nation editors on their later, “corrected” thoughts concerning their decision to publish the poem that so offended [my comments can be found in brackets]:
On July 24, 2018, The Nation and its poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, made this statement about the poem below, which contains disparaging and ableist [apparently a relatively recent word popular on social media] language that has given offense and caused harm to members of several communities [“several communities” keeps it vague so that everyone feels included in the apology, and note also the language of groups rather than individuals, because good little leftists think in identity groups]:
As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received [so, they hold themselves responsible for what readers perceive; what an extraordinary notion, but it’s one that is quite common in academia and activism today—the postmodernist idea that fault lies in what other people perceive rather than in an objective evaluation of what a person actually has said and done and whether it was wrong]. We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem “How-To.” We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities [there are those vague “many communties” again] affected by this poem. We recognize that we must now earn your trust back [on our knees, groveling]. Some of our readers have asked what we were thinking. When we read the poem we took it as a profane [“profane” means “to treat (something sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt”—but what is it the editors thought was so sacred here? The disabled community? The black vernacular? “Profane” also can mean “to debase by a wrong, unworthy, or vulgar use,” so maybe that’s what they’re talking about] over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups [there are those many groups again] are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization [the work of marginalization equals what? begging for money? being ostracized? “Marginalization” is another piece of jargon that seems fairly impenetrable unless you’ve spent the last few years on a college campus or social media, I suppose]. We can no longer read the poem in that way [so because some people on social media attacked you, you will abandon your point of view and in the future you will be performing crimestop in order to avoid being guilty of thoughtcrime)].
We are currently revising our process for solicited and unsolicited submissions. But more importantly, we are listening, and we are working. We are grateful [they must thank their accusers to show the proper respect] for the insightful critiques we have heard, but we know that the onus of change is on us, and we take that responsibility seriously. In the end, this decision means that we need to step back and look at not only our editing process, but at ourselves as editors [ironically, “ourselves as editors” echoes one of those final lines of the poem: “It’s about who they believe/they is..” The editors have apparently been shaken to their leftist cores by the fact that they have transgressed.]
Who are the editors? The two names listed are Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith. Looking them up, I see that the first is transgendered (male to female, but the photo looks like a man) and the second is Hispanic. They may have thought that their identities as members of these communities would have protected them from SJW wrath. But if they thought that, they were wrong, and lacked appreciation for the history of the left as well.
However, it’s interesting to note that the comments to their mea culpa at The Nation are uniformly criticat not of the editors’ decision to publish the poem, but of their decision to apologize for it. For example, here was one of the first ones I saw (I couldn’t find a way to link to it):
As a long-time subscriber of (and former reviewer) for The Nation, I am extremely upset that The Nation’s poetry editors felt they had to apologize for this poem, and that the poet felt forced to apologize too. First of all, it’s a perfectly fine poem, and secondly, since when did editors (especially Nation editors!) apologize for their choices?! I took part to some degree in the furor that broke out on Facebook over the poem, and then felt so sickened by all the unsupported assumptions about the poet and the lack of understanding of the poem, that I took a day off Facebook, and thought a whole lot about the lack of civility (and critical thinking!) in this Trumpian Age. I could say more but I think Grace Schulman, The Nation’s former poetry editor, said it all in her opinion piece in The New York Times today: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/opinion/nation-poem-anders-carlson-wee.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
It’s certainly a good development that every one of the comments I read is a ringing defense of the poem and the poet’s right to speak, and a condemnation of the editors’ decision to issue their apology. Since I doubt any of these people are conservatives, it’s encouraging that they don’t like the direction this is going in (although I doubt they’ll be doing anything to stop it).
Note, however, the phrase in that one comment I quoted: “in this Trumpian Age.” My, my, my; the strength of the urge to bring Trump into it and to believe he is the root of all evil is impressive. Now, even the left’s long-established propensity to eat its own is blamed on Trump. And the “Trumpian Age”—I had no idea that Trump had generated his very own era, much like Pericles or Queen Elizabeth I.
Caroline Glick has been mostly bullish Trump’s on foreign policy moves so far, although she’s not completely optimistic; she has some caveats. Here’s what she has to say about Trump’s offer to talk with Iranian leaders like Rouhani:
In July, Pompeo spoke explicitly in favor of the Iranian people now protesting against the regime. He signaled clearly that the U.S. supports efforts by the Iranian people to overthrow the regime in Tehran.
So when Trump offered to meet with Rouhani without preconditions, it did not mean that he does not expect Iran to change its behavior. It meant that he was willing to meet with Rouhani while leading a policy whose goal is the fundamental transformation of Iran (to borrow a phrase from Barack Obama).
Trump would be happy if that transformation comes in the framework of a massive change in regime behavior. He would also be happy if it comes through a revolution that overthrows the regime.
As for the Iranians, their behavior in recent days probably gave Trump reason to believe they may be desperate enough to at least consider the former option.
Much more at the link.
I also think that if Trump’s offer falls on deaf Iranian ears, and even if the regime isn’t in as much trouble as we might hope, he still should get a small point or two for at least sounding like he’s in favor of diplomacy and making Iran the party refusing to make nice.
Not that Trump’s constant critics will ever award him those points. When he’s a hardliner, he’s a warmonger. When he offers to talk, he’s a naive imbecile. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for much less than this.
I’ve never read anything by Bret Easton Ellis before. One reason is that I don’t like fiction all that much unless it’s fabulous, and I definitely don’t like violent fiction, which by all accounts American Psycho (Ellis’s most popular novel) is:
American Psycho…[was] published in 1991. The story is told in the first person by Patrick Bateman, a serial killer and Manhattan businessman. The Observer notes that while “some countries [deem it] so potentially disturbing that it can only be sold shrink-wrapped”, “critics rave about it” and “academics revel in its transgressive and postmodern qualities”.
Most definitely not my cup of tea.
And that was the sum total of what I knew about Bret Easton Ellis until today, when this Rolling Stone interview with Ellis caught my eye.
This is not what I expected to see:
Q: You tweeted that you were done discussing politics with liberals at dinner. Is it because everyone plays the role of knee-jerk shock and outrage?
A: Completely. I live with a Trump-hating, millennial socialist. I am not, as my boyfriend will tell everyone, political. I’m interested in the theater of it, how each side plays the game, and how the media has morphed with it. I have never seen liberals be more annoying than they are now. These last few weeks really were a flipping point for me, with the depression over the Supreme Court and the way the detention centers were being spun by the liberal media. It’s obviously a game. Here’s Rachel Maddow crying on TV, and pictures of Trump detention centers. My stepfather, who is a Polish Jew, had his entire family wiped out when he was an infant. Throwing around words like Nazi, Gestapo and comparisons to Weimar Germany is like, “Really guys? You’re going there?” I’ve had enough. I think there’s a reason why the #WalkAway movement is getting it’s ten seconds of fame, because there’s a real reaction toward the stridency of how Democrats are expressing their disappointment. It’s turning a lot of people off.
Q:As a gay man, what if your right to marry is suddenly taken away? Doesn’t that anger you on a primal level?
A: That is suggesting that I believe in identity politics, and that I vote with my penis. It’s suggesting that immigration, the economy and other policies matter so much less than whether I can marry a man. It’s not something that I worry about, or is on my mind. That’s the problem with identity politics, and it’s what got Hillary into trouble. If you have a vagina, you had to vote for Hillary. This has seeped into a bedrock credo among a lot of people, and you’ve gotta step back. People are not one-issue voters. I am not going to vote as a gay man, and I don’t think the idea of us not being allowed to marry is going to happen. Pence has his issues, but Trump is not an anti-gay president in any way, shape or form. I also have gay friends who support and voted for Trump, based on certain policies. It’s not just about being gay and being able to marry.
Refreshing common sense. But common sense seems much less common these days than it used to be.
I said it wasn’t the sort of thing I expected to see, and that was because although I knew very little about Ellis except a vague recollection of reviews of his book and the movie based on it, I’m so used to people in the arts toeing the complete liberal/left line. He’s in the arts. But he certainly doesn’t toe the line. Nor does he seem to be any sort of Trump supporter, either (although he’s a bit cryptic about that, saying only this: “yes. Bateman [Ellis’s fictional serial killer] adores Trump, and his idol is president.” Doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement, though.
But thinking about it further, maybe that “transgressive” aspect of his work is responsible for Ellis having the “f-you” attitude that allows him to speak his mind without worrying about the PC crowd. As he says in another part of the interview, “My work really rubs people the wrong way, and my social persona has rubbed people the wrong way. I have to be true to myself.”
Interesting.
Thomas Friedman instructs his fellow journalists (I use the term advisedly) on how best to hurt Trump.
It reads like unintentional parody. He thinks the way to best hurt Trump would be to cover him thoroughly, letting America (and especially the moderate Republicans) know just how awful Trump is.
It’s certainly not a bad idea for the press to do its job and cover Trump thoroughly, but for the press to do it because they wish to harm Trump politically is a bit surprising for Friedman to acknowledge. Of course, just about everyone knows that’s what they are in fact trying to do, and that they’re pretty proud of it. But of course, it’s also not as though Americans are unfamiliar with Trump, his tweets, or his rallies at this point.
But it’s nice to hear someone actually admit the motive of the press is to swing the election to the Democrats. Of course, Friedman himself is an opinion columnist (see? it says so right under his name), so he gets to take sides and to do it openly. But he’s not addressing his fellow opinion columnists; he’s addressing news reporters.
Friedman is also forgetting something. During the 2016 primaries, the strategy of news reporters in the MSM and on cable TV was all Trump all the time, almost from the start of the campaign season. Quite a few of his rallies were televised in their entirety, and his every word was reported as though it were issuing from the mouth of a sort of reverse Delphi oracle. The original idea was to hurt him—actually, to demolish him—with the GOP primary voters. When that didn’t happen (and it became clear almost immediately that it wasn’t happening), the networks and the papers switched to covering him equally assiduously in order to make sure he defeated the other GOP candidates and become the nominee of the pathetic Republican Party.
Oh, what a farce that would be, if Trump were the GOP nominee! What a guarantee of a Hillary win! We all know how that turned out. But the MSM cannot believe the result even now, and they are hoping the very same strategy as back then will do quite the opposite now.
Who knows; perhaps they’re right. I continue to fear a Democrat-controlled House in 2018, and if that happens I know one guy named Friedman who probably would love to take some credit.
I keep trying to get away from it, but something about this story keeps gnawing at me. So here are some more details of Gates’ testimony against Manafort [emphasis mine]:
On the stand, Gates testified that he and Manafort knowingly committed several crimes. He said that at Manafort’s direction, he didn’t report 15 foreign financial accounts they controlled to the US government, even though they knew that was illegal. He also testified that Manafort directed him to send millions in foreign cash as phony “loans” to his US companies, so he could avoid paying taxes on them…
But the defense team has made its strategy clear: They hope to pin as much of the allegations against Manafort as they can on Gates instead. Defense lawyer Thomas Zehnle focused much of his opening statement last week on attacking Gates, claiming Manafort had merely “placed his trust in the wrong person,” accusing Gates of embezzling, and calling Gates the “foundation of the special counsel’s case.”…
Gates testified Monday that on all these fronts, Manafort knew exactly what he was doing. He testified that to the extent he helped, he was doing so at Manafort’s instruction. And he testified that both of them knew full well that what they were doing was illegal.
Gates is there to testify to Manafort’s state of mind. As far as I know, the rest of the evidence the prosecution introduced as to Manafort’s state of mind consists of tax documents and testimony about those documents (for example, from Manaforts’ accountant), which certainly might lead a person to conclude that Manafort must have known or should have known. But apparently there is nothing other than Gates’ testimony that tells anyone what Manafort actually did know or did intend. Only Gates gives that information, and that information is supposedly necessary in order to find Manafort guilty.
One of the most important facts about Gates is not just that, if what he says about Manafort is indeed true, then Gates is just as guilty as Manafort of the same crimes Manafort is being tried for, although that is true. A more important thing about Gates, IMHO, is that Gates was betraying Manafort by embezzling money from him. That doesn’t just demonstrate that Gates is a liar and a crook, it demonstrates that, despite being Manafort’s partner (and, apparently, his protege), Gates had no reluctance to screw Manafort over. None whatsoever. And that was before Mueller even got to Gates or Manafort. So Gates was a viper in regard to Manafort even before they were caught. How on earth can an objective observer that think Gates would have a single moment of reluctance to lie about Manafort and stab him in the back, now that Gates can get out of a potential 100-year prison term by doing so?
Of course, that doesn’t mean Gates is lying about Manafort. He may be telling the truth. That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?
This is also quite interesting, although of course its meaning can be interpreted in several ways:
Manafort reportedly stared directly at Gates, while Gates avoided eye contact with Manafort.
If you read this, too, it really appears that Gates was handling the bulk of Manafort’s paperwork, supposedly (according to Gates) doing all the shady stuff only at Manafort’s request.
I think that this headline summarizes it rather nicely: “Rick Gates says he lied for years at Paul Manafort’s request and stole from him in the process”:
In his first hour on the witness stand, Gates catalogued years of crimes, saying most of his wrongdoing was committed on behalf of his former boss, Paul Manafort, while other crimes were for his own benefit, including the theft of hundreds thousands of dollars. Gates also made clear he was testifying against Manafort in the hopes of receiving a lesser prison sentence, having pleaded guilty in February as part of a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller…
For most of his testimony, Gates did not look at Manafort, while the defendant stared intently at his former business partner…
Gates, 46, testified that he had embezzled from other employers as well and that he volunteered that information to investigators once he began cooperating.
So Gates is a habitual liar and criminal, defrauding multiple people (not only Manafort) and not at Manafort’s request. And yet certain crimes—the ones for which prosecutors wish to convict Manafort—Gates says only committed at Manafort’s direction.
One could certainly conclude, though, that Gates needed no such encouragement or direction.
And I think that this is really the heart of the matter [emphasis mine]:
Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, tried to undercut the prosecutors’ case by getting Laporta [the accountant] to concede that Manafort’s finances were complicated, and that Gates was deeply involved in the process.
How Manafort’s New York properties were classified on his taxes changed some years, and she agreed that keeping track of those changes was “difficult to follow.”
How much control did Gates have over the process? How “deeply involved” was he, and how involved was Manafort?
Gates was a habitual criminal. Do we have any indication Manafort was a habitual criminal, doing things like this even before he met Gates? I don’t think so; at least, I’ve never read anything to that effect (and failing to register as a lobbyist does not count in terms of habitual criminality).
In conclusion,I have to say that Gates reminds me a bit of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, minus the ‘umbleness:
Uriah Heep’s scheme is this: he is a law clerk for Mr. Wickfield. But he knows that Mr. Wickfield is depressed over his wife’s death and has a severe drinking problem. So, Uriah Heep encourages the drinking. Slowly, he takes over more and more of Mr. Wickfield’s daily affairs, until Mr. Wickfield relies on Uriah Heep completely (even though Mr. Wickfield never really likes or trusts him – he feels that he has no choice).
To make the trap even harder to get out of, Uriah Heep starts showing Mr. Wickfield receipts for crazy investments and loans with Mr. Wickfield’s name attached to them. Mr. Wickfield can’t remember signing them, but he also can’t explain the evidence of his own financial wrongdoing that Uriah Heep has shoved in his face.
So, Uriah Heep blackmails Mr. Wickfield into signing Uriah Heep as a partner of his law office…
It certainly doesn’t match perfectly, but Uriah is what comes to mind for me.