Saying a tearful good-bye to Reid and the filibuster

The New Neo Posted on by

Harry Reid is leaving the Senate, and in this interview with Politico he evaluates his tenure and makes predictions. He thinks he did just fine, and that the future for the Democrats looks just fine, too:

“They have Trump, I understand that. But I don’t think the Democratic Party is in that big of trouble,” Reid said in a half-hour interview with Politico on Wednesday, one day before he’ll deliver his farewell address. “I mean, if Comey kept his mouth shut, we would have picked up a couple more Senate seats and we probably would have elected Hillary.”

Well, what did you expect from Reid? And who knows, he may even be correct that the Democrats will rise again. Stranger reversals have happened, such as the unexpected triumph of the GOP that we’re experiencing right now.

Does anyone mourn Reid’s leaving, even the Democrats? He has really been a nasty piece of work, even for a politician.

This statement of his in the interview caught my attention [emphasis mine]:

Reid’s most controversial move as leader ”” invoking the “nuclear option” on Senate confirmations ”” will leave his party essentially powerless to halt Trump’s Cabinet selections.

Reid insisted that it was the right thing to do.

“I don’t know if it’s my biggest achievement, but I’m satisfied we did it. We had to. Look at why it was done,” said Reid, who turned 77 this month. “We got almost 100 judges approved ”¦ we saved the integrity of different agencies of government. No, think of what our country would’ve been without that.”

Reid predicted that the 60-vote filibuster threshold for legislation and for Supreme Court nominees will ultimately disappear altogether ”” calling it a natural evolution of the chamber.

The rules are “going to erode, it’s just a question of when,” Reid said. “You can’t have a democracy decided by 60 out of 100, and that’s why changing the rules is one of the best things that has happened to America in a long time. It’s good for us, it’s good for them.”

Small point—I think he actually might have meant: “you can’t have a democracy blocked by 41 out of 60.”

The larger picture is that Reid is trying to cast himself re the filibuster not as the autonomous agent of change, but as a mere cog being carried along by the wheel of history. The filibuster (actually, the earlier filibuster plus the adoption in 1917 of the rule about how many votes are necessary for cloture) had been in operation since 1837, with plenty of motivation to change it along the way. But despite this both sides had decided—till Reid came along—that it was in their best interests to keep it as a sort of insurance policy against the day when they might be on the outs in the Senate. The idea of the entire thing was to prevent simple majority rule in that legislative body, and to generally keep government moving at a slower pace and with more compromises necessary for it to move at all.

That’s not Harry Reid’s preference. His preference is to say, “we’ve got the majority and so we’ll do whatever we want, even in the Senate, and you shouldn’t be able to stop us.” That’s why he speaks of “democracy,” even in the Senate which has not functioned as a simple democracy for a long time, and which has traditionally been dedicated to preserving the rights of the minority party, and which was established as a specifically republican (small “r”) body to counteract the more democratic (small “d”) House.

I think Reid is well aware of this history. He just pretends he’s not, because it suits his purposes right now. And when the filibuster suited his purposes, he didn’t hesitate to use it.

I was never exactly sure what Reid thought he was doing when he ended the filibuster in 2013 in order to get those nominations approved. But he seems to feel it was worth it. My guess is that he thought the appointees would fundamentally change the country (and in particular its judicial system) in a way that would have enormous long-term effects that would keep Democrats and the left winning indefinitely in the institutional sense and the electoral sense, and that it was unlikely to come back to bite them. Judges’ decisions are enormously influential. Or maybe he thought the GOP would be too wimpy to use the power he gave them. I also have a hunch that Reid didn’t think it at all likely that the GOP would take control of both the Senate and the presidency in just a few short years.

But that’s what has happened, and now the Democrats are reduced to being the party of No!. Thanks to Reid, their ability to yell “no” as loudly and effectively as before has been attenuated.

Trump appointment news

The New Neo Posted on by

Retired general John Kelly is Trump’s choice to head the Department of Homeland Security:

Kelly retired from the Marine Corps earlier this year after leading U.S. Southern Command for three years, during which he was involved in the oversight of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

He served three tours in Iraq, and holds the somber distinction of being the most senior military officer to lose a child in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. His son, Marine 2nd Lt. Robert Kelly was killed in November, 2010, in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Known as an outspoken but loyal commander, Kelly will be first to lead the department who is not a lawyer and the fifth overall.

Seems fine to me.

DHS also involves immigration enforcement, and Kelly has some experience with that, as well.

People are still eagerly awaiting Trump’s announcement for Secretary of State, which has been drawn out and has garnered enormous and varied speculation, as Trump interviews contender after contender (it reminds me of the fairy tales in which a king questions suitor after suitor vying for the right to wed the princess). As I’ve written before—and probably will write again—Trump certainly knows how to maximize publicity.

Speaking of which (Secretary of State, not princesses and fairy tales), today Trump discussed the rumors that he was only considering Mitt Romney for the SOS post in order to humiliate him:

After being named Time’s “Person of the Year” on the “Today” show Wednesday, Trump said Romney is still in the running despite several other people who have worked their way into contention in recent days.

“I’ve spoken to him a lot, we’ve come a long way together,” Trump said. “We had some tremendous difficulty, but we’ve come a long way together.”

Trump denied stringing Romney along as revenge for some of the comments the 2012 GOP presidential nominee made about him…

“It’s not about revenge, it’s about what’s best for the country,” Trump said.

Well, for what it’s worth, I’ve maintained right along that this isn’t about revenge, and that Romney’s a real candidate. It seems Trump agrees—at least, for public consumption.

I continue to think that Trump’s even considering Romney for the post at all was another brilliant PR move, one of many (beginning with Trump’s victory speech in the wee hours of the morning after the election) that signaled that, contrary to expectations, Trump was not going to do a whole lot of stomping on his former enemies.

I was very cheered by the signal, and similar signals make me guardedly hopeful. It Trump chose Romney to be SOS, I’d be even more hopeful. But even if he doesn’t (and I have no idea if he will), I have never seen Romney as humiliated and won’t see him as humiliated then. He’s what they used to call a gent, and has a natural dignity that has not deserted him and that would be likely to stand him in good stead in the post, or in most anything he chooses to do.

[NOTE: Here’s an interesting article at Vox on the Kelly appointment, and Trump’s general habit (pun intended) of appointing military men to Cabinet positions.]

Time and the Black Swan: no question whatsoever…

The New Neo Posted on by

…about this choice for “Person of the Year” by Time:

For those who believe this is all for the better, Trump’s victory represents a long-overdue rebuke to an entrenched and arrogant governing class; for those who see it as for the worse, the destruction extends to cherished norms of civility and discourse, a politics poisoned by vile streams of racism, sexism, nativism. To his believers, he delivers change””broad, deep, historic change, not modest measures doled out in Dixie cups; to his detractors, he inspires fear both for what he may do and what may be done in his name.

But after that, Time actually says something I think is basic, important, and not always recognized:

Yet [Trump’s] victory mirrors the ascent of nationalists across the world, from Britain to the Philippines, and taps forces far more powerful than one man’s message.

We can scarcely grasp what our generation has wrought by putting a supercomputer into all of our hands, all of the time. If you are reading this, whether on a page or a screen, there is a very good chance that you are caught up in a revolution that may have started with enticing gadgets but has now reshaped everything about how we live, love, work, play, shop, share””how our very hearts and minds encounter the world around us. Why would we have imagined that our national conversation would simply go on as before, same people, same promises, same patterns? Perhaps the President-elect will stop tweeting””but only because he will have found some other means to tell the story he wants to tell directly to the audience that wants to hear it.

That’s what Dick Cheney was saying in the video I posted yesterday. And that’s what Richard Fernandez is saying in this essay:

What is emerging may not be the foe the Left fears. But it is conscious and therefore they are afraid: because the Left knows what they themselves would be capable of to others. Perhaps they are right to be frightened. As Ken Watanabe noted in Godzilla, nature often creates one monster to destroy another. Monsters are bad for everyone.

Still the old frameworks may be missing something important. As Dilbert’s Scott Adams notes in his blog all the old ploys are failing because they have unintended consequences in the 21st century that may not have had in the last. Consensus is no longer adequate for pronouncing on the truth and bureaucracies are no longer capable of enforcing edicts from on high.

…Exclusivity which was once an advantage has been supplanted by connectivity. Once connectivity rules there can be no Elect…

…[T]he emerging challenge to the Left will consist not of something like itself, but different from it. They have been conditioned to expect a like of themselves because that is what 19th and 20th century technology could support. What they [are] unprepared for is something disinterested in its vanities or the insusceptible to its old categories; something now viable because there is now the technological means to support it.

It’s not just the Left, either, that doesn’t know what to expect. We know what we hope for—at least in general terms—but we don’t know what we will get. No one does, and that’s nothing new. We go forward into the future as best we can.

Fernandez’s essay is entitled, “Suppose It is a Black Swan?” Black swans are neither bad nor good, they are “either” or sometimes “a mixture of both.” What they are is unpredictable.

Remember Pearl Harbor: 75th anniversary

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. The generation that reacted to it by mobilizing and fighting World War II is on its last legs. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”

I was reminded of this while watching one of those Oliver North “War Stories” TV shows, about Pearl Harbor. It featured some of the elderly participants reminiscing about that long ago day. Before each one spoke, there was a photograph of him back in 1941: young, vibrant, handsome, full of life. Now they were ancient, and most only vaguely resembled their former selves. But they still transmitted great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery as they told their stories.

At this writing there are still quite a few WWII veterans alive:

The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t have data on veterans of individual battles, and an alumni association for the battle disbanded in 2011, at the 70th anniversary, when it believed just 8,000 of the 84,000 uniformed Americans on Oahu during the attack remained alive. Since 2011, roughly half of veterans of World War II who were alive then have died, according to VA projections, leaving fewer than 700,000 alive today. Roughly 400 American WWII veterans die each day. The VA projects fewer than 3,000 veterans of WWII will survive to the 100th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and that may be optimistic…

A couple of facts: it’s become fashionable to believe that FDR knew about the attack in advance and let it happen anyway. But those 12/7-truthers are almost undoubtedly wrong. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war, and he knew a Japanese attack was coming at some point, and informed his generals to that effect, but he knew none of the particulars in advance.

This idea of a government in cahoots with the enemy, willing to let innocent Americans die, keeps coming up again and again. A certain not insignificant segment of the population appears to favor such conspiracy theories, probably because we don’t like feeling vulnerable to sudden attack.

Here’s a post I published nine years ago on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated. Will and resolve in war remain extremely relevant these days. There are indications it may be on the upswing now, as it hasn’t been in a long long time.

Here is just a little bit of Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor speech, in case we need reminding of what American resolve used to sound like:

”¦No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

Here’s the speech itself:

The memorable phrase that began FDR’s address, “a date which will live in infamy,” wasn’t in Roosevelt’s earlier draft. It reads “a date which will live in world history.” That sounds like a high school essay; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and added “infamy” in his own hand. He also changed “simultaneously and deliberately attacked” to “suddenly and deliberately attacked.”

Wise choices.

[NOTE: This is an updated version of a previous post.]

Trump tweets again

The New Neo Posted on by

Just a few years ago it would have seemed extraordinarily odd if you had learned that in 2016 a great deal of discussion would center around a president-elect’s or president’s tweets.

“What’s a tweet?” would have been your first question.

“Who’s the president?” would have been your second. And if the answer you received was “Donald Trump,” you would have dismissed the speaker as nuts.

But I digress.

It is indeed the case that a great deal of discussion these days centers around president-elect Donald Trump’s tweets. As Dick Cheney put it recently:

Note the sly smile.

So, the pattern this has taken is that each day or couple of days there’s a new TrumpTweet that the press gets up in arms about. Thus, the press is actually amplifying the effect of Trump’s tweets rather than diminishing them.

The latest tweet has to do with this:

“Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!” the president-elect wrote on Twitter.

“The plane is totally out of control. It’s going to be over $4 billion for Air Force One program and I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump elaborated in brief comments to reporters at Trump Tower. “I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number. We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money.”

As I heard someone recently say (I believe it was Jonah Goldberg) on some TV cable news station or other, Trump has a flair for drama. Exactly.

I could discuss the ins and outs of whether Trump’s statement was in error or not (for example, was it really 4 billion dollars, or was that a misstatement?), all the ins and outs of the statement’s effect on the Boeing stockholder, and whether it was advisable at all, but you can follow the arguments at those links I just gave. For me, this tweet of Trump’s and so many of his tweets and activities lately have been for the most part in the service of sending a message to the public about who Trump is, rather than about any particular policy with a particular company. In this case, the message is, “I drive a hard bargain, and I will cut the fat.”

As I’ve said many times before: we’ll see.

[NOTE: What about Trump’s meeting with Al Gore, a get-together that has drawn a lot of ire from the right? As I’ve said before, I look at every single position and statement from Donald Trump as mutable. Who knows what he really thinks about AGW? Not me, not you, and perhaps not even Donald Trump.

To find out what I’m talking about when I say “perhaps not even Donald Trump,” read this, and please read it carefully. It seems that, long before the meeting with Gore, Trump was fairly agnostic on human-caused climate change.

I also believe that—as with the subject matter of this post—Trump’s Gore meeting had a symbolic meaning above all. That meaning is a message to the middle and the left: “See, I’m not an AGW-denying troglodyte; I have an open mind, and I’m not going to be a target for you in this respect.”

When Trump becomes president, it will become more clear what he will actually do. Till then, all is mutable and all is also symbolic.]

Michigan recount hits a snag

The New Neo Posted on by

And it’s quite a large snag:

One-third of precincts in Wayne County could be disqualified from an unprecedented statewide recount of presidential election results because of problems with ballots.

Michigan’s largest county voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts during a countywide canvass of vote results late last month.

Most of those are in heavily Democratic Detroit, where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662.

According to state law, precincts whose poll books don’t match with ballots can’t be recounted. If that happens, original election results stand.

“It’s not good,” conceded Daniel Baxter, elections director for the city of Detroit.

He blamed the discrepancies on the city’s decade-old voting machines, saying 87 optical scanners broke on Election Day. Many jammed when voters fed ballots into scanners, which can result in erroneous vote counts if ballots are inserted multiple times. Poll workers are supposed to adjust counters to reflect a single vote but in many cases failed to do so, causing the discrepancies, Baxter said.

Even so, Baxter said it’s unlikely all 392 of the city’s precincts with mismatched numbers will be disqualified from a recount. The city is in contact with elections officials at the state of Michigan and Baxter predicted the numbers will match when the ballot boxes are re-opened for the recount, which starts Tuesday in Wayne County at Cobo Center.

It took me a moment to figure out what this was actually saying, because I’m unfamiliar with the way votes are counted in Michigan. It appears the voters fill out paper ballots, which are then fed into optical scanners to be counted. They are alleging that it’s the latter process that went awry, as well as human error by poll workers (harried? purposeful?) who failed to adjust for the broken scanners.

So were ballots counted multiple times that were “inserted multiple times”? Inquiring minds want to know. And if poll workers see that many scanners are broken, shouldn’t the ballots be hand-counted right off the bat, and the scanners ditched?

The paper ballots do still exist in Michigan, though, and they could all be counted in the recount. But the law states that they should not be counted if this discrepancy exists—and boy, does it ever exist. To me, it also seems logical to suspect that, if they all were to be recounted, Hillary Clinton’s totals would actually drop, because the multiple recording of votes in these heavily Democratic districts would be corrected.

[NOTE: Many of you probably remember horrors of the Minnesota recount of 2008 that put Al Franken in the Senate. But that was a much closer contest to begin with than the one in 2016 in Michigan, in which Trump is currently ahead by close to 11,000 votes statewide. In the Franken case, the constantly-changing difference between the two candidates always numbered in the hundreds, and sometimes even the low hundreds. With that sort of margin, it’s much easier to pull some shenanigans, although the “ballots ‘found’ in a car” situation apparently wasn’t as bad as legend has had it.]

At some point today…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the folks who host this blog are switching it over to a new server. They say that it will cause about a 20-minute disruption. So don’t be alarmed if that happens; it should be very temporary.

And after that they say the blog will load faster.

Tragedy in Oakland

The New Neo Posted on by

The Oakland fire death toll rises. It is almost unutterably sad when young people die, and death in a fire is so horrific it is hard to even contemplate.

I grieve for all the people lost, and for their families and friends.

So, what happened and why? We don’t know yet. But here’s some information:

The structure was last permitted for legal use as a warehouse, officials said, and it did not have the permits necessary for people to live in the building, known as the Ghost Ship.

Shelly Mack, 58, a former tenant who lived at the Ghost Ship for several months two years ago, described it to The Associated Press as a ramshackle structure where water and power were sometimes siphoned from neighbors and where a generator once exploded.

Mack said that she was told to describe it as a 24-hour work space for artists ”” rather than a dwelling ”” and that when inspectors dropped by, tenants hid their belongings…

In a Facebook post, a musician who said he had performed at the Ghost Ship said such spaces were the product of artists across the country being “pushed to the periphery, if not wholly exiled, by real estate speculation.”

“Artists will perform in the few spaces made available to us, and audiences will go to those spaces they feel comfortable, even if those are spaces are totally dangerous,” the post said.

In a city like San Francisco, Oakland used to be an affordable (although crime-ridden) place. As San Francisco became mostly unlivable for anyone except the very rich, Oakland has been gentrified and real estate and apartment prices are now astronomical there, too, by all but San Francisco and New York City standards. Those of you who aren’t familiar with Oakland may not realize how vibrant and attractive much of it is, but I’ve spent many a happy hour there and am quite fond of it.

You might say that people—artists or otherwise—who can’t afford to live in a place shouldn’t be living there. But these are young people and aspiring artists, who aren’t necessarily the practical types and want to be in a happening place and are willing to live in a certain amount of squalor. Who among us didn’t take risks when we were young? I know I did, and I’m not one of the world’s biggest risk-takers.

From what I’ve read so far, I don’t think the majority of the dead were living there, I believe they were just at the concert. Plus, a lot of people who attended this concert probably thought that the city had inspected the building and that safety standards were in place; I think I would have assumed it, as well.

Rescuers are being put at risk, too:

For us as firefighters, working under a wobbly, potentially collapsing exterior wall is extremely dangerous,” said Oakland Fire Battalion Chief Melinda Drayton. “We will not put our firefighters in danger at this point and we will not put Alameda County sheriff’s [personnel] in the precarious situation with us.”

Thirty-six bodies have been recovered, but officials halted recovery operations just after midnight when a crew that was surveying the destruction from a neighboring rooftop noticed that the front wall was leaning 3 inches toward the center of the building, Drayton said. Most of the bodies have been recovered in the center of the building…

Kelly said the Alameda County district attorney’s office has sent a team of criminal investigators to work alongside the sheriff’s arson task force and the Oakland Police Department…

The investigators, including a property and land-use expert, are working to uncover any potential criminal activity that may have led to the blaze…

Officials have said the warehouse had been the subject of a city code enforcement investigation at the time of the fire due to complaints about health and safety issues. Some former residents described it as a cluttered “death trap” lacking fire sprinklers.

I imagine there are other places in Oakland like this. And not just in Oakland, either.

[ADDENDUM: The place was a maze. No wonder people had trouble getting out. (Hat tip: Althouse.)]

Ben Carson for HUD Secretary

The New Neo Posted on by

Carson’s resume and background, as well as his support of Trump, made him Trump’s almost inevitable pick for the job:

Carson is a former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University. In an interview with Fox News, he cited his childhood in Detroit and his experience treating inner-city patients as qualifications for the job of HUD secretary.

“I grew up in the inner city,” he said, “and have dealt with a lot of patients from that area and recognize that we cannot have a strong nation if we have weak inner cities.”…

“His health-care experience, that’s one of the areas I’m personally excited about,” said Terri Ludwig, president and CEO of Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that finances and manages affordable housing. “All the evidence and research is showing that a healthy home, a healthy community can dramatically affect the trajectory of a child’s future.”

Mel Martinez, who led the agency under President George W. Bush, said Carson won’t be the first HUD secretary to have a steep learning curve.

“Did I know everything about HUD the day I walked in? No. Was I able to learn? Yes,” Martinez said. “You go to school, you learn a lot, but you also surround yourself with good people.”

“It’s terribly important to have a good, strong general counsel to make sure you keep yourself in the lanes. It’s a place with a lot challenges,” Martinez said. “It’s a very vast bureaucracy.”

It’s actually rather commonplace for someone without specific experience in a certain arena to be appointed to a Cabinet post in that area. The theory is that running something is running something, and it’s the advisors who inform a person. If that person is smart and has leadership and organizational skills, then he/she is probably good for the job.

That won’t stop some Democrats from criticizing Trump’s choice of Carson, of course. Nor will his minority status or his story of growing up in the inner city help him with them, because he’s a conservative:

Trump’s appointment of the retired neurosurgeon, who has no housing experience, drew quick condemnation from some Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called him “disturbingly unqualified” and People for the American Way said he was “dangerously unfit.”

But many Republican and Democratic housing advocates said Carson’s name recognition and close ties to the president-elect could raise the bureaucracy’s public profile at a critical time.

“Out of the last five or six HUD secretaries, you could really only point to two of them who had direct housing experience,” said Brian Montgomery, HUD assistant secretary under President George W. Bush.

He sounds like a good choice to me.

Presidents as constitutional scholars

The New Neo Posted on by

All else being equal, it’s a good thing to have a president who understands the Constitution. It’s even a good thing to have a president who understands the Constitution really, really well.

My guess is that President Obama understands the Consitution very well.

But understanding the Constitution is not the same thing as respecting and abiding by it. A president can use his/her understanding of the Constitution to work around it or undermine it. Nor do all constitutional scholars—or SCOTUS justices, for that matter—agree on what “understanding” signifies in terms of constitutional interpretation, and of the extent of the powers possessed by the different branches of government.

This year we had a chance to elect a bona fide brilliant constitutional scholar, as well as someone who respects the Constitution: Ted Cruz. But that horse has left the barn. For now we have president-elect Donald Trump—who would not be called a constitutional scholar by anyone, anywhere, any time, by any stretch of the imagination. Au contraire.

And one of the most contraire of all is Evan McMullin, who lets us know what he thinks the problems are with Trump and his attitude towards the Constitution in this op-ed in today’s NY Times:

On July 7, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, met privately with House Republicans near the Capitol. I was present as chief policy director of the House Republican Conference. Mr. Trump’s purpose was to persuade the representatives to unite around him, a pitch he delivered in a subdued version of his stream-of-consciousness style. A congresswoman asked him about his plans to protect Article I of the Constitution, which assigns all federal lawmaking power to Congress.

Mr. Trump interrupted her to declare his commitment to the Constitution ”” even to parts of it that do not exist, such as “Article XII.” Shock swept through the room as Mr. Trump confirmed one of our chief concerns about him: He lacked a basic knowledge of the Constitution.

Now, I yield to no one in the concerns I’ve voiced about Donald Trump many many times, and among them are his lack of constitutional knowledge and possible lack of constitutional respect. But I’m singularly unimpressed by what McMullin has written there. Trump cited an article that didn’t exist? Hey I studied the Constitution in great detail, but I haven’t memorized it (and my knowledge is many decades old), and so I am fully capable of citing the wrong number of an article or even one that doesn’t exist.

Much more important to know would be what point was Trump trying to make when he discussed the phantom “Article XII.” What was he talking about, and why did he cite it? Did anyone ask him what he meant, or did they just note the error in order to discredit him later in an op-ed? These aren’t snarky questions on my part; I really would like to know some of the content of what Trump said, besides the fact that (as McMullin describes it) he “declare[d] his commitment to the Constitution.”

Ah, so he declared his commitment to the Constitution? Trump could be lying about that, of course. If so, he wouldn’t be the first president to do so. Obama certainly said something similar, and his presidency showed it was a false promise. Presidents generally will take as much power as they can, unless their commitment to the Constitution is unusually deep and they have an unusually conservative take on it.

My point is that knowledge of the Constitution and commitment to its principles are not necessarily connected, and that the knowledge part is much easier to repair. That’s one of the reasons presidents have advisors and Cabinets.

McMullin adds:

There is still deeper cause for concern. Mr. Trump’s erroneous proclamation also suggested that he lacked even an interest in the Constitution. Worse, his campaign rhetoric had demonstrated authoritarian tendencies.

I’ve voiced this exact concern about Trump’s authoritarian (and even tyrannical) tendencies many times. But not because Donald Trump cited the wrong number article in the Constitution when trying to say something. That’s an absurdly pedantic point that McMullin is making. Nor does Trump’s citing an incorrect number indicate anything about his interest in the Constitution; it’s a mistake that people with an interest in the Constitution could make.

McMullin’s concerns about possible tyranny are valid, but they are a separate issue. Concerns about whether Trump will listen to his advisors, or his team of lawyers and Attorney General, when he’s contemplating moves as president is a different issue, as well. But those issues would be present even if a president can cite chapter and verse of the Constitution (as I assume Obama could if he wanted to).

Trump is president-elect now, and we will soon find out whether he is going to respect the Constitution. We’ve already learned who some of his advisors will be—or at least, who he wants them to be—and there’s no cause for constitutional alarm there. We don’t yet know if he’ll listen to them and if so how much, although I’d like it if this turned out to be the model.

What’s more, isn’t our system to designed to check the presidential lust for power to which most chief executives fall prey to? So, what about those checks and balances? I would much rather they were not so strongly tested, of course. But if they can’t stand the test then we are at grave risk, because Donald Trump is not the only president who will be straining at the bit to challenge them.

Libeling Mr. Turner

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back I watched the movie “Mr. Turner,” a lengthy 2014 biopic about J.M.W. Turner, the great British painter. Turner is a big favorite of mine for his sublime use of light, both in his early period and in his late, and in everything in-between:

turner

Movies about famous personalities are a funny thing. They’re not documentaries, but they masquerade as documentaries even though they don’t call themselves that, because they use a real person’s real name and the basic facts of the person’s life to tell a story that purports to be that person’s story, and yet often takes liberties with the truth as it’s known. Of course, the details of the lives of few public figures are so well-known that a moviemaker doesn’t have some blanks to fill in. But there are ways to do that that seem true to the person’s life and ways to do it that are sensationalistic and basically libelous.

Mike Leigh, the writer/director of “Mr. Turner”—which is in many ways a fine movie, particularly its cinematography and use of light and Turner’s own paintings—has chosen the sensational, libelous route. Not that Turner wasn’t a difficult and controversial figure who was seemingly mean to a lot of people. But the way Turner is portrayed in this movie by actor Timothy Spall (and it’s a real tour de force; he won several prizes for the role) is as a pig, and I mean that almost literally—a grunting, bestial, grasping animalistic taker who also has a caring and romantic side he mostly keeps very well hidden.

I’m not alone in being struck by this. Here’s one British reviewer:

Spall coughs and shambles about the place like a moulting, phlegmy Gruffalo, eyes bright and hungry, bottom lip jutting proudly forward like the spout of a custard jug.

You think that’s hyperbole? It’s not. And he means it as a compliment.

The movie features a scene of rape—or forced sex, if you want to call it that—which is remarkably repellent, not only for the situation itself but for Turner’s incredible repertoire of grunts which often enter the realm of the lowest tuba-like frequencies accompanied by a deathlike rattle that is almost literally sickening. What’s more, there’s no basis whatsoever for this incident, as director Mike Leigh has conceded. So there is no historical justification for putting that scene in there, a scene which will probably become a Turner Truth for much of the movie-watching public who saw the film, and will be forever linked with his great art:

But when asked for the factual basis for Turner’s sexual attacks on his housekeeper, Leigh’s answer was along these lines: “Well, we knew that she had been living with him as his housekeeper for thirty or forty years, and.. it just felt right.” There was, Leigh admitted, no hard evidence, that Turner had regularly forced himself on the woman.

To Leigh, that seems to make no difference.

The motivation is probably what motivates a lot of movies these days: sensationalism. Who cares if an actual historical person’s reputation is sullied in the process?

I feel this way about all biopics that do that sort of thing. If you’re going to write something fictional, don’t use a real person’s real name. And if you’re going to make stuff up, don’t go so far afield. It’s true that Turner was called “uncouth” by certain of his contemporaries, but back then the word didn’t necessarily refer to being a rapist or literally sounding like a pig.

Today’s art—both fine and literary—is often so degraded that many people in the arts seem to get their jollies from trashing the greatness of yesteryear, and invite you to trash it too. That probably makes their own dubious achievements seem more special. But as I said, the film “Mr. Turner” already had enough going for it without needing to do this.

[NOTE: The film also does a number on the art critic John Ruskin, who is portrayed as a clone of Elmer Fudd.]