The astonishing appeal of candidate Trump

Personal factors reflected in many mirrors

By Moristotle

It appears certain now that Donald Trump wouldn’t have been elected President without help from Vladimir Putin of Russia and James B. Comey of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But even without winning in the Electoral College, Trump would still have gotten many millions of votes. How was that possible?

Correspondence: America has a tremendous fantastic president

By Moristotle

Who’s mutinying? I don’t see any impeachment quorum forming. “Trump’s Madness Invites Mutiny” [Charles M. Blow, NY Times, May 15]. Excerpt:

Correspondence: Je suis avec vous

By Moristotle

Moristotle, that verse you wrote about Trump retreating “to private room to grab your pussy,” has anyone commented that the verse presumes the generalized reader, which includes men, to have a pussy?

Correspondence: A few curious phenomena

By Moristotle

Will warmer weather bring the birds back earlier? That’s the question on many antsy birders’ minds. “How Different Spring Migrants Decide When to Head North” [Kenn Kaufman, Audobon, March 22]. Excerpt:

Correspondence: Happy St. Patrick’s Day

The South Lawn fountain at the White House
was dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day

Hooray for America’s Irish immigrants!

By Moristotle

The author of this article about Irish immigration, Fintan O’Toole, knows whereof he speaks – he is a columnist for The Irish Times. “Green Beer and Rank Hypocrisy” [NY Times, March 16]. Excerpt:

Correspondence: More Trumpery

Part of the “Evolution of Civilizations”
mural in the dome of the main reading room
at the Library of Congress

Edited by Moristotle

Good points by the outstanding NY Times conservative commentator David Brooks: “A Return to National Greatness” [February 3].
    We the People will have to “return to greatness” despite the Trumpestuous interference we are confronting. Excerpt:

Has the Republican Party humped itself?

From recent correspondence

Edited by Morris Dean

Thank you, Jake Tapper! “Jake Tapper asked Donald Trump if his judge attack was racist — then followed up 23 times” [Callum Borchers, Washington Post, June 3]. Excerpt:

Political quote of the week

From conservative columnist David Brooks’s August 23 opinion piece in The New York Times, “Ryan’s Biggest Mistake”:

It’s obvious why candidates talk about the glorious programs they’ll create if elected. It fires up crowds and defines values. But we shouldn’t forget that it’s almost entirely make-believe.

In the real world, there are almost never ultimate victories, and it is almost never the case (even if you control the White House and Congress) that you get to do what you want.

The sum of all fears

A friend recently expressed the wish that people could share their thoughts and feelings about religion without pushing their convictions onto one another "and getting into physical, emotional, intellectual, ethical, moral, or verbal shoving matches."
    Yes, that would be nice. But it appears that many, if not most humans are unable to do that. I think the main reason people push their convictions is that they need the reassurance of others' believing as they do, they are so frightened by the thought that God does not exist, that they will not live forever, that the good will not be rewarded and the bad not punished. They may be even more afraid that, without God, they and other people will not be good.
    Fear is a powerful emotion. It engages people's reptilian complex¹ and disengages their cerebral cortex, which must be engaged if people are to share as my friend would like.

Unfortunately, more is at stake than getting lovey-dovey about religion. Today in The New York Times, both primary op-ed columnists cite the ominous turmoil in America today.
    David Brooks, in "The Tea Party Teens," writes:

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy—with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.
    The tea party movement is mostly famous for its flamboyant fringe. But it is now more popular than either major party. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.

    And Bob Herbert, in "An Uneasy Feeling," writes:

One in eight Americans, and one in four children, are on food stamps. Some six million Americans, according to an article in The Times on Sunday, have said that food stamps were their only income.
    This is a society in deep, deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we’re facing....
    Just getting us back in fits and starts over the next few years to where we were when the recession began should not be acceptable to anyone....
    We’re not smart as a nation. We don’t learn from the past, and we don’t plan for the future....
    We keep talking about how essential it is to radically improve public education while, at the same time, we’re closing libraries and firing teachers by the tens of thousands for economic reasons.
    The fault lies everywhere...
    Now we’re escalating in Afghanistan, falling back into panic mode....

Fear, it seems to me, is the common denominator underlying the turmoil, the shoving and the pushing. It governs fearful people's thoughts and actions. This is understood well enough by Glenn Beck, that master of reptilian entertainment. (Google on "glenn beck fear" to see what I mean.)
    In a real sense, the one thing we have to fear is fear itself. Thanks to Mr. Beck for the apt phrase.
_______________

1. Jim Rix writes insightfully about the reptilian/cerebral dichotomy in his book about the criminal justice system: Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out. Particularly the chapter titled, "Catch-22: The Gila."

Maybe neither race nor "another type of conflict"?

"No, It’s Not About Race," writes David Brooks in today's New York Times about the recent demonstration in Washington against the Obama administration:

I was [at the Capitol] last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government "tea party" protesters...I noticed that the mostly white tea party protesters were mingling in with [some] mostly black family reunion celebrants. The tea party people were buying lunch from the family reunion food stands....
    ...These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum...Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them....

    I'm not sure that Mr. Brooks's inability to discern any tension settles the matter. I've noticed that people often instinctively make nice when they come face to face with particular persons from groups they feel negatively towards. But be that as it may, Brooks writes that "It's not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old...for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers" [emphasis mine]:

What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates...to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates...to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

There could be something to this; David Brooks has a way of seemingly effortlessly making a reasonable case. But I'm not sure it's all about either racism or populism, as Brooks's otherwise thoughtful piece seems to assume. Racism and populism are only two available possibilities, if attractive ones for writers to embroider (as Brooks has just done with populism and as Maureen Dowd did recently with racism, in "Boy, Oh, Boy").
    But any particular protest will likely have more immediate provocation: a perceived threat to one's tax bill, one's small business, one's access to health care, one's safety on the streets or in one's home, and so on.
    Of course, if someone is a racist or perceives "the educated class" as some sort of elitist enemy, then the person's feelings about that could modulate the specific threat into a racist or populist key. And I grant that the racist and populist strains are ripe for exploitation by the Rush Limbaughs and Lou Dobbses of the world—and by our political parties.
    To tease out just what motivated the recent protesters at the Capitol, I wonder whether, with adequate preparation, it might have been possible for a statistically significant sample of the "tea party" protesters to be surveyed soon after the event with a carefully designed set of questions. The resulting op-ed column might have been as good a read as David Brooks's and probably more informative.

Realist's reply to a poll on Sarah Palin

I’ve been asking people if anyone they know has owned up to liking Sarah Palin (as a candidate). So far, only one person has owned up. In fact, he told me he “LOVE[S] Sarah Palin!” [exclamation mark his] (That besotted, he may hang out with the likes of David Brooks and William Kristol.)

But here's why I’m back to log. To report the following reply to my poll question:

None of my friends or acquaintances has expressed admiration for Sarah Palin. I think it’s only in the last 3 weeks that I’ve been convinced Obama will win. She’s pretty obnoxious, accept she’s sort of like an unreconstructed high school cheerleader type, breathlessly optimistic and impermeable to reason or facts. I suspect she does a better job in Alaska and doesn’t pontificate on junk she doesn’t understand. It’s hard to believe any serious, conscious person with a high school education or better would think she could possibly be qualified to be president. The interview with Katie Couric was devastating; it’s weird that they still let her come out in public, but she’s a quick study and bounced back to perform acceptably in the debate with Biden: i.e., she appeared, answered questions, usually managed to talk in sentences [sic], repeated herself with variations (kind of like modern jazz or Ravel’s Bolero), and didn’t faint or pee in her pants. All Barack’s campaign should do is run various videos [of] her trying to answer several of Couric’s questions, then ask: Do you want this person up at 3 a.m. trying to decide our nation’s future?

"Comments are no longer being accepted"

This morning and the other day, for the first times, I noticed the statement, "Comments are no longer being accepted," posted atop the comments section of a couple of op-ed pieces in The New York Times. I saw the first one on Friday, the morning after the vice presidential debate, warning any further readers from trying to comment on David Brooks's op-ed piece, "The Palin Rebound." Brooks's piece was so mind-bendingly, fawningly complimentary to Palin's showing in the debate that I felt an urgent need to ask Brooks whether he'd been smoking dope. Alas, after searching all over for the place to comment, I saw the notice. And this morning I saw the notice again, above William Kristol's equally fawning piece, "The Wright Stuff." Within only a few hours, enough ridicule had already been heaped on each of these right-thinking gentlemen, thank you. Enough is enough! The only question is:

Did Brooks and Kristol throw in the towel themselves, or did their editor call the fight to protect their dignity and their possibly injured ability to meet the paper's deadline for their next pieces?

I don't remember how many comments Brooks had suffered before further comments were disinvited, but Kristol (or his editor) threw in the towel before even 200 comments had been posted. While it's fun to wonder who stopped the fight and precisely why, I regret that "Comments are no longer being accepted" meant what it said. Even still fairly early this morning, I was already too late to ask Mr. Kristol whether, for example, Palin hadn't bewitched him? (Her voodoo pastor's incantation was intended, presumably, to protect her, not people on whom she herself might practice.) Not that similar questions hadn't already been asked by the hundred and eighty some commenters who'd gotten through. Like #23, by LGG of Orange County, California:

It's so heartening, Bill—may I call you Bill?—that you are so concerned with Obama's now-renounced pastor and church affiliation. I have no doubt, then, that you will as vociferously investigate and report upon Palin's associations with Muthee, the African witch hunter. Curious, isn't it, that we get 24/7 coverage of Wright's inflammatory comments, but one has to go to Yyoutube to see Palin being exorcised of witches by Muthee. Why is that, do you think? The clip of Palin being exorcised is certainly not a fake as evidenced by the fact that the pulpit upon which Muthee stands and behind which Palin stands is identical to that which multiple other clips show Palin speaking from when addressing her church's congregation. Things that make you go "Hmmmm."

10-7 Flash

I see that the number of comments on Kristol's column has now reached 525, which indicates either that several hundred comments were still being "moderated" (approved for posting) when the spigot was turned off...or that the floodgates were reopened, the editor maybe having decided that Kristol deserved comments like, say, #523, from Peter in Indiana:

Oh, Bill, there you go again, looking to the past instead of to the future! (By the way, did you happen to ask Palin about McCain's association with that economic terrorist, Charles Keating, or her own association with the witch-exorcizing priest? Or is sauce for the goose not sauce for the gander?) Here you are, being bamboozled by some pretty-face, Gidget-goes-to-Washington type who talks outside of both sides of her mouth, whose talk (when it's possible to understand it) is mostly vacuous, who spouts off baloney about the Constitution's take on vice president (but fails to comply with a Constitutionally valid sub poena), and your take is that the drivel is mostly the fault of her handlers instead of her inherent lack of understanding. Even the latter is a sign of the classic Republican who yaps about accountability and responsibility except when it comes [to] them—then it's always someone else's fault.