I’ve got to go do some errands now. But in the meantime I’ve been mulling over the vast and beckoning mystery that is Peter Strzok, and plan to write something later today. I’d also like to tackle the Trump announcement on Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, if I have time.
Till then I thought I’d put this open thread up so you can talk about those things (or whatever else you want), and to call your attention to this post on the first subject and this one on the second.
We keep hearing stories about sexual harassers who “everybody” in certain groups “knew about all along,” for years and years, and yet no one did anything about the situation.
A lot of people then condemn members of those institutions for their silence. So far they’ve tended to be liberal institutions that conservatives dislike, such as Hollywood and newsrooms. There’s also Congress, which everyone (liberal and conservative) seems to dislike, but I’ve heard fewer “everybody knew” claims about that.
But when you do read or hear that “everybody knew” about some sexual harasser or other, I don’t think that’s what’s literally meant. I think what is really meant is this: “Everybody (or at least a lot of people) heard stories, everyone heard gossip, everybody heard rumors, everybody suspected.” But only those who had themselves been victims of this perpetrator knew, although many thought they knew.
You may think it’s a nitpicky and lawyerly (unless the lawyer is Gloria Allred) distinction. Perhaps it is. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s important to point out that hearing a rumor is not the same thing as “knowing.”
Is gossip actionable? Are unverified stories? What do you do about either? They’re certainly important enough that you ought to be very careful around that person, and very observant. It is especially important to not allow yourself to be placed in a compromising or vulnerable position with that person, and probably even to warn others (that’s how it comes to be that “everybody” in a group “knows”). But what action is necessary? Do you fire someone, if you’re not their boss? Do you go to HR and repeat gossip? Do you tweet gossip? Do you go to the person and confront him (or her, as the case may be)?
I don’t think any of those things are necessarily appropriate, although sometimes they might be. What is appropriate—if you don’t really “know” from your own experience? What can a person do who just hears stories?
The one exception I can think of is for journalists. They could have done more about what they knew or what they just heard as gossip. They could have done, for example, what Ronan Farrow finally did with Weinstein—pursue the suspicions and stories they had heard and try to document them, and then write about it if the stories seem to pan out. But they didn’t do that.
By the way, I see some of the words of that Leonard Cohen song (which are well worth looking at) as ironic. He seems to me to be saying a lot of things (as Cohen often does), but one of them is that we don’t always really “know” what the vast majority of people think they know. Take this verse, for example:
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows…
About a year ago I discussed the number of spam comments I get here that are caught by the spam filter. It had been formidable for a long time, and then it had suddenly improved dramatically and the amount of spam coming here was markedly reduced:
I used to get tons and tons of spam that was caught by the spam filter…So every day I’d clear the spam filter, which usually had caught many thousands of spam comments””ordinarily between 2,000 and 10,000 spam comments a day. But then, just a little while ago…suddenly the flow of spam comments nearly stopped. Since then I’ve been getting maybe 100 spam a day caught in the filter. And it’s not that other spam is getting through, either; very little spam seems to be coming to the blog in the first place.
Well, that happy state of affairs lasted less than a year. A couple of months ago it started creeping up. At first it was just a few hundred more. But a few days ago—boom! I’m back in about the 5,000 range.
What happened? I think it’s one of those virus- or bacteria-type things where sometimes the tools we have to fight them off are in the ascendance, and then the foe (bacteria, virus, spam) figures out a way to break through the defenses and flood the host again.
In the case of spam, as long as the filter is operative it doesn’t really matter. It just means that when I clear the spam it takes a bit longer for it to happen, and I have to do it a lot more often. But it’s curious.
And yesterday my blog was down. You may have noticed. This happens now and then, but luckily it’s not often and when it does happen it tends to be just momentary (knock wood). Usually the problem is with the host—they’re doing maintenance or their servers got overloaded or some such thing. Yesterday there was no problem with the host. It was apparently the blog, but I don’t know the cause.
What I think is called the “back end” of the blog is a busy place. Wars go on all the time, and I get notice of some of these “attacks.” Bots and/or people try to break in for various purposes, and they come from all over the world. There are various tools the blog has for fighting them off (note I’m being purposely vague, but my vagueness also stems from my own relative tech-unsavvy). I have no idea what was going on yesterday, but so far the good guys won. I’ll try to keep it that way.
You may also remember that a while back I said I was working on a redesign of the blog. Nothing too dramatic, but something that will make it more viewable and allow it to load better on cellphones. What happened? Well, the person who used to do that sort of thing for me is no longer on the case, and I’ve been trying to do it myself (with a tiny bit of help). I’ve been so busy I haven’t gotten around to it yet, and I guess it’s not my top priority. But I still intend to do it.
That’s probably enough inside baseball for today.
[ADDENDUM: When I first published this post I had just cleaned out my spam filter. In the twenty-nine minutes since then, my filter caught 223 spam comments. I just deleted them. That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. That would be a rate of 10,704 spam comments a day.]
No, I don’t hate men. I’m talking about the song from “Kiss Me Kate” by Cole Porter, sung by the actress playing Kate (the Shrew) and Lilli (the actress) in the musical-within-a-musical version of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew.”
Porter was a clever lyricist and he knew how to make the song an amalgam of wit, charm, and rage—just enough rage to make it spunky and just enough tongue-in-cheek charm to make it funny.
The song’s stage originator was Patricia Morison (I wrote about her here and included a video of Morison still alive and kicking at 100).
Here, she’s singing this except on some TV special or other. Morison is a perfect blend of sultry and charming, angry and graceful, all at the same time. And boy, does she pound on that table with conviction!
When I first watched that, something about Morison fascinated me, and I realized afterwards that it was because of the way she moved and stood—that’s what gave her performance its combination of gravitas and sexiness. It reminded me of something—but what?
Suddenly it hit me: modern dance pioneer Martha Graham. Morison is performing some moves reminiscent of a kinder, gentler version of a Graham contraction, which takes place mostly in the torso. And sure enough, when I looked it up, I discovered this: “[Morison] also studied dance under Martha Graham.” Bingo!
Before I watched that Morison video the only version I’d seen of “I Hate Men” was Kathryn Grayson in the 1953 movie. You may notice that the Grayson version is light and airy, and sports some cleaned-up lyrics for those delicate 50s sensibilities (“maiden” for “virgin,” for example, and “deigned to marry” for “had to marry”):
The original “Kiss Me Kate” production with the classy Morison was in the 1940s. The movie version and Grayson reflected the lightness and sexual restraint of the 1950s. Fast forward to recent versions, and what do you get?
Coarse, charmless, harsh, yelling, mugging. To me they seem repellent, and they make me sad. These women really do seem to hate men (not the song’s original intent or tone), and what’s more I don’t see why the audience should like the singers, either.
Same shtick here. This woman has the requisite looks, but spoils the picture with the same broad and heavy touch:
Notice also the body language of those last two—heavy-footed, slumpy, awkward. Contrast that with Morison, who got the force across while managing to keep the charm.
I wanted to find a video that showed the torso contractions of Graham technique that I think are key to what Morison’s doing in her clip. But I was surprised to discover I couldn’t find any video that quite illustrated what I wanted. This is the closest I could come:
And I’ll throw this last one in, too, although it has nothing to do with lightness and nothing to do with “Kiss Me Kate.” It’s a video of one of the most frightening dances I’ve ever seen, by a character who certainly Hates Men (she’s a woman scorned, after all). The dance shows a Medea-esque figure whipping herself up to a psychopathic rage in order to murder. I’ve never seen anything quite like this level of sheer destructive craziness in a dance. How the dancer manages to convey this I’m not sure, but torso contractions are part of it:
The twistings and turning of what we could call the case against Donald Trump are not easy to follow. But what has been revealed so far is a tangled web of interrelated actions on the part of investigators that indicate bias at the very least and arouse deep suspicion of more than that.
The story so far is one that would take a very lengthy post to explain, and I’m somewhat pressed for time today and won’t be writing that post now. Perhaps in the next few days. For now I’ll just point out one of the most startling things revealed lately: the way the name of Peter Strzok keeps cropping up, over and over.
The Strzok story as we first knew it began with a mysterious firing:
In August, ABC News reported that Strzok was removed from the investigation. The news came one week after agents executed a search warrant on the Virginia home of Trump’s now-indicted former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
The reason he was taken off the probe was unknown at the time, as he was well-respected in the industry as a law enforcement officer working counterintelligence cases. He was deemed to be one of the top investigators in the probe. ABC News reported that Strzok was taken off the Russia investigation and was sent to work in the F.B.I.’s human resource office, deemed a demotion within the agency.
A little over one month after Strzok’s departure, ABC News reported that F.B.I. lawyer Lisa Page also left the special Russia investigation…
While the departure of the two officials was well reported, they weren’t ever linked until now [“now” being the last few days].
The linkage turned out to be that the two were having an affair, and in their text messages they had exchanged anti-Trump statements. So they were relieved of their Trump-investigatory duties back in August, although we just learned that explanation very recently.
That news would have been enough by itself to taint the investigations at least somewhat, although I must say that there are probably many more people involved in these investigations who have political biases against Trump (and some for him, for that matter) and aren’t careless enough to have expressed them in text messages, or at least not in text messages that have been caught up (and therefore revealed) in the web of another investigation, as the texts between Strzok and Page were—a DOJ inspector general had connected them through an investigation of the FBI investigation of the 2016 elections.
So, it was a DOJ investigation of an FBI investigation (are you still with me?) that led to the uncovering of the Strzok/Page texts about Trump.
And now a group of other facts about Strzok’s involvement have been coming out. This guy was everywhere, a regular one-man band.
It turns out that it was Strzok who had interviewed Mike Flynn and thus set up
the basis for the charge that Flynn lied to the FBI, which is the substance of the plea deal Flynn recently made.
It turns out that we have yet to see a transcript of the interview. Does one exist?
It turns out that Strzok was the number 2 person heading up the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails, and he was one of several agents who interviewed Hillary Clinton in a three-hour session.
It turns out that Strzok changed and softened Comey’s original description of Hillary’s email set-up from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.”
It turns out that “there are reports” that “there was ‘documentary evidence’ that Strzok was purportedly obstructing the House probe into the [Trump] dossier.”
It turns out the Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton were interviewed by Strzok during the email investigation, are known to have lied in those interviews, and were never charged with lying to the FBI.
There could even be more, but that’s plenty already. All this should rouse suspicion even in the minds of anti-Trump Democrats, although it probably won’t. It certainly rouses suspicion in me. The Strzok story also is interesting in terms of how the FBI works. Apparently the same higher-ups work on a host of interrelated cases, so that if bias exists in some of those people (and I have no doubt it often does, not just with Strzok) then that bias will have maximum effect.
Somehow I missed the latest British royal news: Prince Harry is engaged to a woman named Meghan Markle. And here I thought I kept up with these things. But I see now that I have fallen sadly behind.
It turns out that Markle is an American actress, another thing of which I wasn’t aware. The minute I looked at her it struck me that she markedly resembles her brother-in-law-to-be’s wife, Kate Middleton.
The resemblance is hardly exact (and Markle is part African-American), but they have the same type of slender, long-haired brunette, clean-cut looks. If this doesn’t resemble Kate Middleton…well, you be the judge:
Compare and contrast:
Harry and Meghan met on a blind date. How do you get a blind date with a prince? You gotta know somebody.
I hope you’ve been reading Andrew C. McCarthy’s take on the Mueller investigation right along. Once again, he offers a must-read analysis.
I’m only going to offer an excerpt, and I urge you to read the whole thing:
Bottom line: If the FBI had a collusion case of some kind, after well over a year of intensive investigation, Flynn and Papadopoulos would have been pressured to plead guilty to very serious charges ”” and those serious offenses would be reflected in the charges lodged against Manafort. Obviously, the pleas and the indictment have nothing to do with collusion because Mueller has no collusion case…
Since there is no collusion case, we can safely assume Mueller is primarily scrutinizing President Trump with an eye toward making a case of obstructing an FBI investigation. This also makes sense in light of the pleas that have been taken…
The theme of such a prosecution is that the investigative process must be protected, not that some terrible underlying crime (like an espionage conspiracy) has been committed. Witnesses such as Flynn and Papadopoulos would therefore not be made to look like they had gotten a pass on serious offenses; they would look like they had owned up to corrupting the process and are now helping the prosecutor against the principal corruption target…
I continue to believe that this is the real danger for President Trump: A report by the special counsel, either through the grand jury or some other vehicle, concluding (a) that the president had obstructed the FBI’s investigation of Flynn and of Trump-campaign collusion with Russia, and (b) recommending that the matter be referred to Congress for consideration of next steps, potentially including impeachment and removal.
I also tend to trust Alan Dershowitz on legal matters, although not on politics. He’s one of those liberal Democrats who often goes against the prevailing party line, particularly when he’s talking about law. So many people on both sides just hop on the meme du jour for their side and then justify it, even if they have to turn themselves into pretzels to do it. That’s much more rare with Dershowitz than with most, and I value that.
So I was not surprised to see his viewpoint on Flynn and Mueller:
As the president-elect, Donald Trump was constitutionally and politically entitled to try to protect his ability to broker a fair peace between the Israelis and Palestinians by urging all members of the Security Council to vote against or delay the enactment of the resolution. The fact that such efforts to do the right thing did not succeed does not diminish the correctness of the effort. I wish it had succeeded. We would be in a better place today.
Some left-wing pundits, who know better, are trotting out the Logan Act, which, if it were the law, would prohibit private citizens (including presidents-elect) from negotiating with foreign governments. But this anachronistic law hasn’t been used for more than 200 years. Under the principle of desuetude ”” a legal doctrine that prohibits the selective resurrection of a statute that has not been used for many decades ”” it is dead-letter. Moreover, the Logan Act is unconstitutional insofar as it prohibits the exercise of free speech.
Dershowitz, who was no Trump supporter and who as far as I know has voted the straight Democratic ticket for most of his life, is just getting warmed up. He continues:
The second question is why did Mueller charge Flynn only with lying? The last thing a prosecutor ever wants to do is to charge a key witness with lying.
A witness such as Flynn who has admitted he lied ”” whether or not to cover up a crime ”” is a tainted witness who is unlikely to be believed by jurors who know he’s made a deal to protect himself and his son. They will suspect that he is not only “singing for his supper” but that he may be “composing” as well ”” that is, telling the prosecutor what he wants to hear, even if it is exaggerated or flat-out false. A “bought” witness knows that the “better” his testimony, the sweeter the deal he will get. That’s why prosecutors postpone the sentencing until after the witness has testified, because experience has taught them that you can’t “buy” a witness; you can only “rent “ them for as long as you have the sword of Damocles hanging over them.
So, despite the banner headlines calling the Flynn guilty plea a “thunderclap,” I think it may be a show of weakness on the part of the special counsel rather than a sign of strength. So far he has had to charge potential witnesses with crimes that bear little or no relationship to any possible crimes committed by current White House incumbents. Mueller would have much preferred to indict Flynn for conspiracy or some other crime directly involving other people, but he apparently lacks the evidence to do so.
Not much more to add on that today, except to say that I agree with McCarthy that the Democrats are determined to impeach and/or remove Donald Trump from office and that’s been clear from the start. That’s one reason the 2018 Congressional elections are so important.
Order. Please. Thanks.
Yesterday’s post on stage musicals vs. movie musicals led somehow to me watching video after video on YouTube with great pleasure, and one of the greatest of those pleasures was to learn that Patricia Morison is still alive and kicking at 102.
You probably have never heard of Morison. I never saw her perform in person; at least, I don’t think so. But she features greatly in my musical memory because she’s the voice of the lead character (“Lilli”) on the original cast recording of “Kiss Me Kate,” just about every note and lyric of which I remember. She had a deep and rich and vibrantly expressive voice that I found wonderful even as a child, and seeing her on video (there are only a few such offerings on YouTube, although she’s got a huge body of work), I find that she doesn’t disappoint in the acting and beauty departments, either.
Here she is with Alfred Drake (also on my record). In case you’re not aware of the plot of “Kiss Me Kate,” it involves a musical within a musical within a play. These two play an acting couple starring in a touring musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and the overarching musical “Kiss Me Kate” also follows all their (and others’) backstage shenanigans. So they are Kate and Petruchio as well as Lilli and Fred.
Here Morison and Drake are reminiscing about a schlocky show they’d once played in (“something about a bar….”), and then they sing a mocking version of the Germanesque song they’d sung in the show: “Wunderbar.” You can tell a great deal about their relationship through this song—their competitiveness, their mutual hamminess, their frisson of conflict. But towards the end (around 4:37), the pace changes and they sing the song more seriously for a few moments, and you can see their passion and the bond behind it.
It’s not easy to pull off, but they do a great job (despite the ad that’s unfortunately plastered in the center of the video, but it’s possible to ignore it):
Now for another big treat—Morison at 100. This woman is phenomenal—listen to the strength of her voice, and see how beautiful she still is:
It makes me think of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium“:
…An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
I’ve just posted a piece with a length of close to 2400 words.
It occurs to me that that’s the equivalent of the term papers I used to write in school. And it also occurs to me—not for the first time—that for some strange reason I’ve voluntarily taken on the task of disgorging that sort of thing with some regularity.
It took me about three hours to squeeze that particular one out. Well, I can console myself that it used to take me a lot longer to write those term papers—sometimes, anyway; I also had a bad habit of writing them last-minute and under pressure.
But on occasion I wonder why I’m doing this. I’m not saying that to solicit comments like “Oh, we appreciate it so much!” from my readers (although I value such comments, of course, as I value my readers). But I mean something deeper: what drives me to digest and then spit out my own commentary on events so many others are talking about, too? In my—let’s just call them mature years—why do I feel the need to pipe up and add my voice to the larger chorus?
After all, it’s Saturday. I’ve got a lot of other things I could be doing. I’ve got a lot of other things I should be doing. So, why did I just write a term paper?
Well, I’m interested. I’m reading about the story anyway, and as I read I get more and more curious. The more I read, the more thoughts I generate. The more thoughts I generate, the more connections I see.
Sometimes those connections don’t seem to have been made by other people writing on the topic, and so I want to make them.
I want to make them for myself, to clarify my own thoughts on the matter. I find that when I can do that, I can often take future stories that relate to the same event and put them into a framework of knowledge so they make more sense. I guess I’m just a curious person who likes to make as much sense of the world as I can, although I realize I’m never going to achieve the kind of understanding I’d like.
But I’m not just doing it for myself. I’m putting it out there in the world, too. And if I reach people, that’s even better. I don’t reach millions or hundreds of thousands, but I reach more people this way than if I was just mulling it all over in my metaphoric garret (I used to have an actual garret, but now I work in my kitchen, which doubles as an office).
There’s also a slight element of OCD. We’ll leave it at that.
So folks, happy Saturday! Hope your weather is better than mine. Not a whole lot of sun here, although the snows haven’t come yet. And we’re nearing the earliest sunset of the year, which occurs on one of the next few days depending on where you’re located. Then it all starts to turn around again, and I look forward to that day.
There are several intertwined stories here that fit together to form a fascinating picture. So let’s try to untangle them, starting with the more trivial and leading to the most important. Continue reading →