Jersey Boys: here and there and everywhere

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw a production of “Jersey Boys” recently in southern Maine at the Ogunquit Playhouse. It’s still going on, but apparently it’s sold out or almost sold out for the rest of the run—and no wonder, because watching it is a whole lot of fun for us codgers who were young in the 60s. In case you don’t know anything about the musical, it’s one of those sure-fire hits that traces the rise and fall and rise of a well-known rock group, in this case the Four Seasons.

I recall the Four Seasons and Frankie Valli, he of the extraordinary falsetto. But before I attended the show I couldn’t have told you, off the top of my head, the names of their hits. I knew that there were many, and I knew that I probably was familiar with an awful lot of them, but I couldn’t have conjured any of them up.

I didn’t read the program before the show, because I wanted to be surprised. But as they say, the hits kept coming. And coming and coming. And I knew all but one. Not just “knew” in some vague sense, but in the very specific sense of knowing all the words and all the intonations and rhythms of the originals.

From the evidence of the sing-along propensities of all the greyhairs surrounding me, so did just about everyone in the audience, too. The entertainers and the audience all seemed to be having a fabulous time, and so did I. If it wasn’t exactly being young again, it was something almost like it.

The actor who played Frankie Valli sounded extraordinarily like him, although this being 2018 the sound was ramped up past the point I would desire (and with more choreography and movement; the actual Four Seasons were usually more static when they performed). And of course, when I got home I went straight to YouTube, where I found this little sampler medley by the originals, the one-and-onlys. The guy at the keyboard, Bob Gaudio, wrote almost all their music:

The musical “Jersey Boys” was on Broadway from 2005 to 2017; that’s quite a run. Then it opened off-Broadway. But in the meantime it also went all over the world, including to places you wouldn’t necessarily imagine.

Here’s what seems to be the cast of the Japanese version. They have a little problem with some of the phonemes that don’t ordinarily occur in their language, but they still do a bang-up job:

Here’s a short clip of the production I saw, which sounded even better in person. It’s playing till October 28, but as I said, tickets are scarce:

This one’s about five years old. It’s about the search and audition process to find Frankie Vallis all over the world:

Election 2018: thinking about impeachment

The New Neo Posted on by

And the Democrats are indeed thinking about it.

If the blue wave materializes in the House—and it definitely might—the repercussions would be great. All the investigations the Republicans have launched into Democratic machinations in 2016 would end, and the full court press would be on to destroy the Trump presidency. Impeachment would almost certainly be on the table, as well, with the power to accomplish it without a single Republican vote.

Impeachment was never meant to be a party-line event. In fact, the Founders were very wary of its becoming a mere political tool of the legislature to destroy a president:

An early draft of the Constitution gave Congress the power to impeach and remove officers for “maladministration.” James Madison objected to this because the term was so vague that it would allow impeachment for any reason at all. As he put it, “so vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during the pleasure of the Senate.” The term “maladministration” was then deleted from the draft and replaced by the phrase “other high crimes and misdemeanors.” This shows that the Framers meant for the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” to signify only conduct that seriously harms the public and seriously compromises the officer’s ability to continue. If the phrase is given a less rigorous interpretation, it could allow Congress to influence and control the President and the courts.

A great many of the arguments about impeachment involve the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and what the Founders may have meant by that. But the phrase has come to mean pretty much anything a majority of the House members say it does, and therefore desisting from the use of impeachment for political reasons depends on their integrity.

Yes, integrity, which seems to be in short supply these days.

Back when Clinton was impeached, there was minimal crossing of party lines on two of the counts which succeeded, and a lot of crossing for the Republicans on two more counts which failed. The Republicans controlled Congress at the time:

Clinton was impeached on December 19, 1998, by the House of Representatives on grounds of perjury to a grand jury (by a 228–206 vote) and obstruction of justice (by a 221–212 vote). Two other articles of impeachment failed – a second count of perjury in the Jones case (by a 205–229 vote) and one accusing Clinton of abuse of power (by a 148–285 vote)…

Five Democrats (Virgil Goode of Virginia, Ralph Hall of Texas, Paul McHale of Pennsylvania, Charles Stenholm of Texas and Gene Taylor of Mississippi) voted in favor of three of the four articles of impeachment, but only Taylor voted for the abuse of power charge. Five Republicans (Amo Houghton of New York, Peter King of New York, Connie Morella of Maryland, Chris Shays of Connecticut and Mark Souder of Indiana) voted against the first perjury charge. Eight more Republicans (Sherwood Boehlert of New York, Michael Castle of Delaware, Phil English of Pennsylvania, Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, Jay Kim of California, Jim Leach of Iowa, John McHugh of New York and Ralph Regula of Ohio), but not Souder, voted against the obstruction charge. Twenty-eight Republicans voted against the second perjury charge, sending it to defeat, and eighty-one voted against the abuse of power charge.

I did some research to discover why the Founders had set the bar so low—a simple majority in the House—for impeachment proceedings to begin. I was unable to find the answer. But that low bar makes the impeachment process highly susceptible to political motives. The fact that it’s relatively easy to impeach and quite hard to convict—the latter requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate—does act as somewhat of a check, but only if the House is practical enough and patriotic enough to realize that hampering a duly elected president with impeachment proceedings that will never go anywhere is not in the best interests of the country. That’s one of the many reasons I was not in favor of Clinton’s impeachment, and my opinion on that has not changed over time (I’ve written about all the reasons I think the Clinton impeachment was a bad idea, and I’m not going to take it up again right now).

Impeachments that cannot possibly end in conviction are (among other things) attempts at hurting a president, and the temptation to do so is great in our very bitter political climate. The Republicans could have done the same to Obama when they controlled the House during the latter part of his administration, but they did not, although a lot of people on the right were clamoring for them to do so. I was not one of those people.

The midterm elections are in approximately two and a half weeks. I’ve said before that I’m anxious about them, and I continue to be worried.

When fathers discover their children have a different biological father

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a disturbing article on a lot of levels, although it describes a phenomenon that’s not a great surprise: the fact that sometimes a man is married to a woman who cheats, and sometimes that cheating results in a child, and sometimes the man doesn’t know it’s not his biological child, and sometimes—now, with the advent of genetic testing—the man discovers the biological truth much later.

That’s a sad and difficult situation. The man can be devastated, and the child can be tremendously traumatized. The mother is ordinarily in big big trouble, although at least in that case it’s a trouble of her own making.

There is no simple or one-size-fits-all solution. Going to a really good family therapist could help, but really good family therapists are not so easy to find. If the family is religious, answers might be found there.

But the emotions that are stirred up can be explosive and exceptionally painful. For the man, the pain and outrage can go very deep. And with the growth of DNA companies and their use, this sort of situation is probably going to become more common.

But the particular story that’s tracked in the article I linked is disturbing for different reasons. The father, whose pseudonym is Christopher for purposes of the story, had long strongly suspected his wife had been unfaithful early in their marriage around the time their daughter (who was now 15) had been born. So for a decade and a half he had wrestled with the idea and even the deep suspicion that she was not his biological child.

That’s a bad situation to begin with, and one with which Christopher had obviously not made any sort of peace or gotten any resolution for an entire decade and a half. But before getting the test, he should have figured out exactly why he was requesting it, how it could change things, what he planned to do if the results showed the girl was not his biological child, and how it was likely to affect all parties involved, especially the completely innocent daughter. In his case, he had to know he was throwing a bomb into the mix, a bomb that might detonate. It’s very different, of course, when the DNA test is taken without any suspicion or foreknowledge of infidelity, and the news comes as a total shock, but that was not the case here.

This is Christopher speaking. He had wanted the test in order to find out whether his daughter was his biological child, although the daughter had no idea that was the motivation:

I knew my ex-wife was having affairs back then, and I couldn’t catch her. When I bought the test, my daughter went and told her mom [that they were taking the test; the daughter had no clue why her father wanted it], and then an hour and a half, two hours later, in the middle of the night, my ex gets up and she says, “I need to talk to you ’cause I had an affair. I think it was a two-year-long affair.”

The worst was to see the reaction of my daughter. She just cried and cried. It was like a nuclear bomb going off. It changed the dynamic for a long time between my son and her.

The marriage ended, as well.

When asked if the results of the test changed his relationship with his daughter, Christopher answered this way:

On the day that I found out, I was like, I wanted to reject her, because I said my boundary was I will not raise another man’s child from an affair. My mom put me straight. She was like, “She’s innocent in this. Don’t blame her.” So I consider her my daughter.

I commend Christopher for getting over the hump, because if he hadn’t, his daughter (and she is his daughter; he’s been her father her entire life) would have suffered even more than she already has. But there’s a remnant of his original thinking in the terms he still seems to use to refer to the fathers: biological father and birth-certificate father.

I’ve never heard that latter term before. It would make sense if we’re talking about an infant, a baby with whom the non-biological father has never really bonded, and hasn’t raised. But a fifteen-year-old? As Christopher’s own daughter said, “He just created me, but you’re my dad.”

Historically, the difficulty of knowing for certain who the father of any child is has made for some customs that restrict the movement of women and particularly their sexual behavior. Those days are gone, but even before their demise, there was always the possibility of infidelity and passing off another child as a man’s own. Now the opportunities are even greater, and the fear of this happening can be great as well. On top of all that, we have the ability as never before to actually determine whether a child is the biological offspring of a particular man.

This makes for a potential powder keg, and if anyone steps into it knowing (as Christopher knew) that the chances are good that the child is not his, he needs to prepare himself in advance for the consequences, and consider how the entire thing will affect the child he has nurtured all these years. It is a supreme act of slefless fatherhood to be able to put that child’s needs first.

I don’t have the answer to what’s best—each father must decide that for himself—but I do know that in a case like that, preparation is key.

Who was Khashoggi?

The New Neo Posted on by

See UPDATE at end of post.

[NOTE: I use the past tense for Khashoggi because the consensus is that he is dead. This is certainly more likely than not. But I am not convinced of it, because it has not been proven. In fact, no evidence has been offered at all except the word of unnamed Turkish officials. That’s not nearly good enough. I have stated before that I doubt we’ll ever know the truth about this, and so far that continues to be my opinion. The groups relating the tale so far—the Turks and the Saudis—both have reasons to be lying, and very clear agendas that have to do with their own power and the forms of Muslim extremism they each espouse: Muslim Brotherhood for the Turks, and Wahabism for the Saudis.]

A helpful reader has called my attention to this article in the NY Post, which I think presents a very plausible picture, one that has been corroborated by other news reports previously. But I think that this particular article pulls it all together in a very clear and succinct manner, as well as a very alarming one:

…characterizations of [Khashoggi] in the media are not fully accurate. He’s depicted as a “reformer,” a “democracy advocate” and a “journalist.” Yet these are half-truths that obscure the political role Khashoggi played.

Before anything else, he was a regime insider. He was a close associate of senior members of the royal family who were eclipsed by the new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Khashoggi was not merely a pen for hire. He represented a particular political perspective. An Islamist, his views on major issues consistently tracked with those of the Muslim Brotherhood…

“Saudi Arabia,” Khashoggi said, “is the mother and father of political Islam.” But the Saudi government was forsaking this tradition. “Today,” the kingdom has turned against its very nature and is “fighting political Islam.” As a consequence, its “compass is lost.”

A Turkophile, Khashoggi hoped instead that the new crown prince would follow in the footsteps of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who supports the Muslim Brotherhood across the Arab world. Khashoggi envisioned a grand alliance between Riyadh and Ankara.

…Like Erdogan, Khashoggi was hostile to the Sisi regime in Egypt and opposed Mohammed bin Salman’s rapprochement with Israel…

The picture is pretty clear: friend of Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood, enemy of Israel and the Saudis in power, although a friend of some Saudis who used to be in power. In other words, allied with the Turks and out to destroy the current Saudi rulers, and in favor of Islamic rather than secular rule. The only disagreement is which form of Islamic rule will come out on top.

And using the WaPo as a bully pulpit from which to write his pro-Turk anti-Saudi propaganda:

Khashoggi found an influential perch at The Washington Post, from which he launched attacks on the crown prince. One of his recent columns, for example, calls for the end of the war in Yemen, which he portrays as an abject failure. He presents the Saudi government as an indiscriminate killer of fellow Muslims and blames the failure of peace talks on its obstinacy and incompetence.

These arguments hit the crown prince where it hurts most: They implicitly attack his Islamic legitimacy, essentially placing him in the same category as slaughterers of Muslims, such as the Syrian and Russian leaders, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.

Why was he allowed to have this “perch” at the WaPo? It’s not too hard to figure out the probable reasons:

In presenting himself to his American friends, Khashoggi fashioned himself less the Islamist and more the democratic reformer. He made a tactical alliance with former Obama officials who seek to depict Trump’s pro-Saudi and anti-Iranian policy as a disaster.

Trump, in this view, is the enabler of a young, impetuous crown prince. Conflicts such as Yemen result from Saudi recklessness rather than Iranian expansionism.

Far from erasing this picture from the US media, Khashoggi’s disappearance has strengthened it. Given the opposition of former Obama officials to Trump’s strategy, they have an interest in stoking outrage at Khashoggi’s death. Their goal is to harness it in order to resurrect Obama’s outreach to Tehran.

Obama and his helpmates are eager to undermine Trump’s policies as much as they can, and they would not hesitate to use any means possible to do so.

If you wonder why Khashoggi was writing for the WaPo in the first place, or why the Khashoggi incident has become a cause célèbre (after all, governments kill people and even journalists in that part of the world rather often, and Khashoggi was not an American), this article describes a situation that makes more sense than anything else you might have read so far.

It still doesn’t tell us whether the whole thing is a scam or whether Khashoggi really was murdered—and, if the latter, who actually did it. There are certainly a lot of possible candidates.

ADDENDUM: Pompeo denounces US media’s “fake news” on many aspects of the Khashoggi story. A must-read, but here’s part of what Pompeo has said:

Curiouser and curiouser.

UPDATE 11:59 PM:

The Saudi government has made an announcement:

The case of the disappearance of the citizen Jamal bin Ahmed Khashoggi drew the attention of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the highest levels…[which dispatched] a security team to Turkey on 6 October 2018 to investigate and cooperate with counterparts in Turkey.

That was followed by the formation of a joint security team between the Kingdom and the Republic of Turkey, with a permission given to the Turkish security authorities to enter the Consulate of the Kingdom in Istanbul and the residence of the Consul, for the Kingdom’s keenness to clarify all the facts…

The Public Prosecutor has already investigated a number of suspects on the basis of information provided by the Turkish authorities…the preliminary investigations conducted by the Public Prosecution showed that the suspect had traveled to Istanbul to meet with the citizen Jamal Khashoggi as there were indications of the possibility of his returning back to the country.

The results of the preliminary investigations also revealed that the discussions that took place with the citizen Jamal Khashoggi…did not go as required and developed in a negative way led to a fight and a quarrel between some of them and the citizen Jamal Khashoggi, yet the brawl aggravated to lead to his death and their attempt to conceal and cover what happened.

The source added that while the investigations are still ongoing into the case with the 18 Saudi detainees, the Kingdom expresses its deep regret at the painful developments that have taken place and stresses the commitment of the authorities in the Kingdom to bring the facts to the public opinion, to hold all those involved accountable and bring them to justice by referring them to the competent courts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

So the Saudis are saying that they have worked together with the Turks on solving this. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

The Saudi claim is that unnamed “suspects” traveled to Turkey in order to get Khashoggi to come back to Saudi Arabia alive (abduct him? convince him? beat him senseless and then transport him back unconscious?), but then some sort of accidental death occurred as a result of a brawl. Or perhaps, as a result of this brawl escalating (was Khashoggi just trying to defend himself and/or escape from this team of “suspects”? or was this an actual fistfight that wasn’t planned?), he died or was murdered by an overzealous “suspect.”

Very murky indeed. It doesn’t have the ring of truth, either, but it has the possible ring of semi-truth. Reading between the lines, my leading theory at the moment is that some Saudi elements decided to drag Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia to either be questioned or to face some sort of other music, didn’t intend to kill him or didn’t intend to kill him quite yet, and he resisted in some way and they (or one of them) killed him either purposely or accidentally.

It’s not impossible that a person dies accidentally during a fistfight, by the way. I actually knew two people who did. One was a student at my junior high school; he was fighting with another boy on the sidewalk, and fell and hit his head, which caused his death. The other was a friend of my parents’ who owned a store and tried to fight off an irate customer, and had a fatal heart attack in the process. So although I’m well aware that such things can happen, I don’t actually think it very likely that Khashoggi’s death was an accident.

As for the Crown Prince’s involvement or lack thereof, I haven’t a clue.

In the competition to see who can be most hateful towards Republicans…

The New Neo Posted on by

…without actually doing them physical harm (that’s a different competition), Google executive David Hogue is going for the gold.

I’m not going to reproduce what he wrote; it’s just too hateful. Follow the link and you’ll get the picture.

I observe, however, that it’s an odd type of virtue-signaling competition that features people trying to outdo each other in expressing the most hateful hate. And the quasi-religious imagery Hogue used would seem odd at first glance, particularly on behalf of a movement (the left) that for the most part detests religion. However, if you reflect that leftism has replaced religion for the majority of leftists, it’s not really surprising that leftism might borrow some of the most terrifying of old-fashioned (and mostly abandoned) religious imagery.

I’ll add that, had Hogue expressed the same sentiments against a group such as blacks or women, he would have been fired from Google so fast he’d just be a blur in the rear-view mirror. But Google (like Georgetown University before it) thinks statements like that have no bearing on his ability to do his job fairly and impartially:

A Google spokeswoman told Fox News: “What employees say in their personal capacity has no bearing on the way we build or operate our products.”

Remind me again: why did James Damore lose his position at Google? Compared to Hogue, what he wrote was extraordinarily mild.

Google can hire or fire whoever it wants, but there is clearly a double standard here. Google’s official problem with Damore was as follows:

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a note to Google employees…[which] read “to suggest a group of our colleagues [females] have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK” …

…an internal NLRB memo found that his firing was legal. The memo, which was only released publicly in February 2018, said that while the law shielded him from being fired solely for criticizing Google, it did not protect discriminatory statements, that his memo’s “statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected”, and that these “discriminatory statements”, not his criticisms of Google, were the reason for his firing.

And what had Damore written that was so very “discriminatory”? This:

Calling the culture at Google an “ideological echo chamber”, the memo says that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences. Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait). Damore’s memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women’s representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.

These are ideas that could—and should—be discussed and even debated, if people want to refute them. But apparently even the expression of such heretical (I use that word purposely, for its religious connotations) ideas are verboten.

But it’s not a problem at all for Hogue to say what he said about Republicans. Maybe Google doesn’t think there are any Republicans working at Google, and therefore his comments wouldn’t make anyone at Google feel uncomfortable. Maybe they’re even correct in the assumption that no Google employee is a Republican. One thing I strongly suspect is that, if there are any, they’re deeply undercover.

Mark Judge: the other casualty

The New Neo Posted on by

And perhaps the more wounded one, at least in personal terms. After all, Kavanaugh still has a job, at least:

The Kavanaugh confirmation circus is over and the fighters have gone back to their corners, but not before drawing massive amounts of blood. The Kavanaughs were injured, but they now have Secret Service protection and secure employment for life. There’s someone else, though, who was beaten and bloodied and left for dead on the side of the road.

Mark Judge, the other man accused by Christine Blasey Ford, has lost his job and his home. He is raising money on a GoFundMe alternative site called Funding Morality and has received $48,549 to date. Judge is a cancer survivor and Catholic writer.

Where does he go to get his reputation back? Since Judge is a private citizen and not a public figure—at least, he wasn’t a public figure before the Kavanaugh battle—he could have a lawsuit against Christine Blasey Ford and several others.

It would be difficult to win, though, because he’d have to prove that the defendants’ statements about him were factually false, although the proof would only need to meet the “preponderance of evidence” standard rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. The exact rules are on a state-by-state basis, and sometimes negligence is necessary as well.

In addition, I believe that Ford’s statements might come under a “qualified privilege” rule, which exempts defamatory statements made during legislative hearings. However, since Ford had originally made the defamatory statements under her own free will in a letter to legislators (see this; I’m almost certain that Mark Judge is the man whose name is replaced with “redacted” in Ford’s letter to Feinstein), rather than in a hearing, that exception might not hold.

It’s complicated, as you can see.

The beauty—if that’s the correct word—of Ford’s story is that it’s extremely difficult to prove or disprove, since it was about events so long ago. The named witnesses didn’t remember it, and could not corroborate it, but that’s not the same as proving it false. Let’s just say there’s zero evidence that it happened other than Ford’s say-so, and that she has been found to have made several misrepresentations of fact during her testimony.

Lawmakers such as Feinstein are immune from defamation prosecution for what they say on the Senate floor. and they may even be immune from prosecution for any statements they make in the course of their office. Feinstein was probably being extra-careful to completely protect herself when she redacted Judge’s name from the letter Ford wrote.

I wish Judge would sue—the discovery process could be fascinating—but I very much doubt he will. I don’t think he wants to draw any more attention to himself and I must say I cannot blame him. What an ordeal it’s already been! The fact that the lawsuit would probably be a difficult one to win, despite the fact that it’s likely that he was defamed, is a sobering thought because it points out that members of Congress and private citizens like Ford can say almost anything about anyone as long as it’s difficult to prove or disprove, and as long as the accusers can assert that they thought it was true, and particularly if they have some sort of legal privilege. Sexual misconduct allegations, especially older ones, are absolutely perfect for this task.

The caravan moves on: from illegal immigration to the Rubaiyat

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not at all sure the Democrats are pleased about the timing of this:

More Honduran migrants tried to join a caravan of several thousand trekking through Guatemala on Wednesday, defying calls by authorities not to make the journey after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cut off regional aid in reprisal.

The caravan has been growing steadily since it left the violent Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Saturday. The migrants hope to reach Mexico and then cross its northern border with the United States, to seek refuge from endemic violence and poverty in Central America.

These are illegal immigrants, of course, and no doubt most if not all of them will ask for asylum status if they manage to cross the US border. The sad thing—and it is a sad thing—is that there are an awful lot of what someone or other once called “shithole countries” around the world, and many of the people in those countries would indeed dearly love to come here. Some of them would even make good citizens if they did; perhaps this woman is among them:

“We’ve lived in neighborhoods where our children have seen disaster after disaster,” said Daisy Turcios, resting briefly outside a school. “We have seen dead bodies thrown in front of us. So that’s my goal, in truth, to reach a country where life can change for my children.”

Or perhaps she wouldn’t be a good citizen. But whether she would or wouldn’t, she is subverting the lawful immigration process, and there is no doubt whatsoever that some of fellow caravaners would not make good citizens.

And it is a fact that every country on earth should have the right to make its own rules about who comes into it and who does not, and the US—as the most-desired nation on earth in which to live—cannot take all comers or even nearly all comers. The economic and social burdens would be too high.

More here about the politics of the caravan and what might await it:

“Hard to believe that with thousands of people from South of the Border, walking unimpeded toward our country in the form of large Caravans, that the Democrats won’t approve legislation that will allow laws for the protection of our country,” Trump said on Twitter on Wednesday.

The Honduran government has urged citizens not to join the caravan, calling it politically motivated. On Wednesday morning near the Guatemalan border, authorities could be seen stopping Hondurans still hoping to join, with police in riot gear at one checkpoint halting buses carrying at least a hundred people…

Mexico said anyone who enters the country with a Mexican visa can move freely, while those without proper documents would be subject to review and could be deported.

“This measure responds not only to compliance with national legislation, but particularly to the interest of the Mexican Government to avoid that such people become victims of human trafficking networks,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

NOTE: For me, the word “caravan” almost immediately conjures up the poem “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” a work I had to read in high school and very much loved. Here are the “caravan” references in the poem:

Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way…

One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste—
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Starts for the dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!…

A Moment’s Halt—a momentary taste
Of BEING from the Well amid the Waste—
And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach’d
The NOTHING it set out from—Oh, make haste!…

Do high school students read the Rubaiyat anymore? By the way, FitzGerald’s masterful translation of the poem apparently used the original Farsi merely as a springboard from which to work his own creative magic. Today it’s probably considered an act of cultural appropriation. But if it is, I say “bravo!”

There are many quatrains in the poem that are favorites, and so it’s hard for me to pick a favorite favorite. But perhaps this would be it:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

NOTE II: The title of this post comes from this Arabic saying.

Kavanaugh wasn’t merely borked

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of pundits referring to what happened to Kavanaugh as his having been borked. But that’s not entirely correct.

In the earlier part of the hearings, he was indeed borked. In other words, his judicial record was criticized and distorted in a way that could be described as deceptive and alarmist. But he seemed to sail through that section of the hearings, so the opposition had to up the ante.

After that he was Clarence Thomased, only more like Clarence Thomas Squared. That doesn’t fall as trippingly off the tongue as “borked,” but it’s what happened, although of course it’s hardly a perfect analogy. Anita Hill’s charges against Thomas were relatively mild and fairly specific compared to what was launched against Kavanaugh by three women in a series of escalating and ever-less-believable stories, although only one of those women testified publicly.

With Thomas, Anita Hill described events that she alleged had happened about ten years earlier. With Kavanaugh, Ford described an event that she claimed had occurred over three times further back than that. Hill alleged acts that would have occurred when Thomas was a mature man, but Ford alleged events from when Kavanaugh was in high school and had not reached adulthood.

Ford’s accusations were both more serious and more preposterous, and were even harder to disprove than Hill’s because of the antiquity and vagueness of the Ford accusations as to place or time, or even how many people might have witnessed them.

So the plan for Kavanaugh, if necessary, was a kind of one/two punch—first the borking and then the Thomasing.

One big difference between Bork and Thomas was that Thomas was confirmed and Bork was not. Why was Thomas confirmed? I’m not sure, actually, because at the time the Senate was controlled by Democrats. However, it seems that enough Democrats felt uncomfortable about refusing to seat him.

That may have been because Thomas was a black nominee and the Democrats who ultimately voted to confirm him came from states with very sizeable black populations. If you look at those eleven Democrats who voted “yea” on Thomas, you’ll see that most of them came from the South and one from Illinois, all states with very sizeable black populations. The only other Democrats who voted yes on Thomas were from Nebraska and Arizona, and I don’t have a theory about them:

The final floor vote [on Thomas] was not strictly along party lines: 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats (Dixon (D-IL), Exon (D-NE), DeConcini (D-AZ), Robb (D-VA), Hollings (D-SC), Fowler (D-GA), Nunn (D-GA), Breaux (D-LA), Johnston (D-LA), Boren (D-OK), and Shelby (D-AL) now (R-AL)) voted to confirm while 46 Democrats and 2 Republicans (Jeffords (R-VT) later (I-VT) and Packwood (R-OR)) voted to reject the nomination; John Glenn was particularly vituperative in his rejection. Ironically Packwood himself would later be engulfed by sexual harassment allegations which ended his Senate career.

I also find this interesting:

Some of the public statements of Thomas’ opponents foreshadowed the confirmation fight that would occur. One such statement came from African-American activist attorney Florynce Kennedy at a July 1991 conference of the National Organization for Women in New York City. Referring to the failure of Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork, she said of Thomas, “We’re going to ‘bork’ him.

So that expression was used approvingly by Florynce Kennedy, describing the plan for Thomas’s hearings. And then there was this, another resemblance to what awaited Kavanaugh and what the political issues were for each nominee:

Under questioning during confirmation hearings, Thomas repeatedly asserted that he had not formulated a position on Roe v. Wade, or had any conversations with anyone regarding the issue

A significant amount of this behavior on the part of Democrats apparently comes down to their fear of losing Roe, and of course of losing SCOTUS cases in general.

Now this, this is how you bork someone—no holds barred. Note the first allegation in the list:

Is it a case of “give them enough rope”?

The New Neo Posted on by

Suddenly, a lot of Democratic candidates are getting really really stupid.

Now, you might say they’ve been stupid for a long time. But I don’t mean “stupid” as in “thinking they’ll never run out of other people’s money,” or something like that. I mean “stupid” in the sense that Republicans have so often been stupid.

Stupid about campaigning. Stupid about tactics. Stupid about timing. The kind of stupid we recall seeing from “I am not a witch” Christine O’Donnell and “you can’t get pregnant when you’re legitimately raped” Todd Akin, who was on track to unseat Claire McKaskill until his unfortunate remark.

Shoot yourself in the foot, foot in mouth (mixed metaphor?) stupid.

On Monday I wrote about Elizabeth Warren:

I used to think that Elizabeth Warren was smart. I disagreed hugely with her politics and her tactics, but long ago she seemed intelligent. I can’t say I’ve been paying all that much attention to her in recent years, but today’s DNA caper seems an indication that if she ever was smart, being in DC so long has caused her to lose whatever savvy she may once have possessed.

In other words, why on earth would she think that releasing these DNA test results would help her cause? On the contrary, the move makes her look like an absolute fool…

And then yesterday I read about Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota’s doxxing of alleged sexual assault survivors who never gave permission for their names to be used and who claim they’re not even sexual assault survivors. And all in the service of a pretty weak campaign ad, an attempt by Heitkamp to overcome the backlash against her “no” vote on Kavanaugh. The ad made little sense even if the all names had been correct and permission had been given (which apparently was the case with most of the names she used): why double down on the anti-Kavanaugh mess when it’s just not a popular stance in your state?

You might call that a rookie error—but Heitkamp’s not a rookie.

Heitkamp isn’t alone:

Why is all of this happening? Is it a simple case of “give them enough rope”? Perhaps, at least partly. But I continue to think that it’s due to something I discussed yesterday, the fact that Trump is a knuckleballer.

Now you may think that analogy of mine isn’t a good one. After all, isn’t the knuckleball a junk pitch? Not when it’s done right. A superlative knuckleballer is highly skilled at what he does, and it’s not something most pitchers can master and throw with any consistency or effectiveness. But the best knuckleballers can regularly make the batters who face them look like fools. The batters swing wildly, usually trying for the stands, because the knuckleball pitch looks so big and fat and juicy and slow that they’re sure they can knock it right out of the park. Then they end up looking like one of those cartoons of baseball players taking a big swing and missing, corkscrewing their bodies in the process, and then having to unwind.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the election this year in terms of the results. I confess to being very anxious about it. Then again, I’m almost always anxious about elections these days. But I know that if I were a Democrat I’d be very, very frustrated right about now.