Thursday Potpourri

We continue murdering furriners

Acting on orders from President Donald Trump, the U.S. military has murdered Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, popularly known as Niño Guerrero, a Venezuelan drug trafficker and leader of the Tren de Aragua crime syndicate.

This was—and ought to be treated as—a straightforwardly criminal act on the part of the American president and those who have carried out his illegal orders … Guerrero Flores may very well be everything the Trump administration says he is and more—though under the Trump administration the word of the White House is no more reliable than the word of a South American drug dealer—but, even if that were the case, there is no legal authorization for the preemptive extrajudicial killing of crime suspects. …

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was known by his childhood nickname, “Caligula,” meaning “little boot,” because as a child he liked to play dress-up and pretend to be a soldier. Trump has a similar puerile fondness for military pomp and martial posturing—and, more to the point, his pretensions include both the divine and the monarchical. And, deepening the unfortunate trend originating with earlier presidents, he has leaned into the constitutionally undefined notion of the president as “commander in chief,” or, as the Romans would have put it, imperator.

Which is to say: This is not really about Niño Guerrero. This is about the United States of America, what kind of government we mean to have, and what kind of nation we mean to be. The question is not: “What would we do if faced with a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who attempts to stay in office when voted out?” The question is: “Now that we have a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who already has once attempted to stay in office when voted out, what are we going to do?”

I suppose we could sit around and wait for the great patriots and constitutionalists such as Sen. Ted Cruz to rediscover their manhood, but that is a long wait for a train that ain’t coming.

Kevin D. Williamson, We Should Probably Stop Murdering People (bold added)

Behind the scenes of the Iran deal

Kushner and Witkoff have worked through an extraordinary mediator, Ali Al Thawadi, minister of strategic affairs in the office of Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the widely respected prime minister of Qatar. Al Thawadi has brought a rare understanding of the Middle East and its culture. He has traveled to Tehran, by one count, four times in the past 10 days to nail down the peace framework. Al Thawadi, though almost unknown to the general public, was a key emissary in the Gaza peace talks, on Venezuela, and a half-dozen other projects of the Trump White House. He also worked on mediation efforts with the Biden administration.

“The main message we need to keep in mind is that we have a country that has been isolated from the world for the past 47 years, and individuals that literally don’t have any communication outside of their circle,” a source close to the mediation team explained. “We need to show them that there is a much bigger world, and they could be accepted in it.”

David Ignatius, Inside the Iran deal: Zigzag bargaining and a final framework.

This makes me more hopeful that there’s a real, meaningful deal, though I still say Trump left us weaker, Iran stronger, in the long run. I should always read Ignatius.

“Demotic spirit”?

The conservative writer Marc Thiessen tried to depict Trump’s lurid festival [the UFC fights for his birthday] as a sign of his demotic spirit, opening the White House to the sort of people who go to motocross rallies and monster truck shows. “If you’re offended by that, you may be an elitist snob,” he wrote. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that Thiessen once clucked that Barack Obama was failing to maintain “presidential dignity.” By this standard — that U.F.C. brawls, which John McCain once called “human cockfighting,” belong in the White House because lots of Americans like them — there can be no standards. Like Ultimate Fighting, porn is extremely popular, but I somehow doubt Thiessen would defend a Democratic president who invited a bunch of OnlyFans creators to the Oval Office while he was losing a war.

Michelle Goldberg

Today’s Tocqueville

Quotidian American life has suddenly been made fresh when seen through a visitor’s eyes.

Sometimes it takes a foreign observer to remind Americans of the bounties and blessings they too often take for granted. The gold standard for such observations came nearly two centuries ago, in the 1830s, when the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the young republic and located its genius in ordinary institutions: township meetings, jury duty and local newspapers.

As the nation’s semiquincentennial approaches, Tocqueville’s reflections on America’s frontier spirit are particularly resonant: “America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement … No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.”

Now America has Freddy from Germany [a visitor drawn by the World Cup], and while his prose can’t keep up with Alexis’s, his marveling at what he finds is no less heartening. For the better part of a decade, Americans have been instructed by their politics and their social media feeds that their country is something to apologize for, that it is a nation in decline. It doesn’t feel like decline when you readily encounter free refills and ice at fast-food restaurants, travel on a 46,876-mile interstate highway system with no border checks, visit the birthplaces of the blues, jazz, country and hip-hop, and patronize a diner chain so reliable that the federal government monitors natural disasters by whether its restaurants are still open (yes, Freddy does love a Waffle House).

Danielle Shapiro, Freddy the viral German soccer fan is bringing what America needed (gift link)

America’s Industrial Might

By the end of the first year of American involvement in the war, American arms production had risen to the same level as that of Germany, Italy, and Japan put together. By 1944, it was double that amount. By the end of the war, the United States had turned out two-thirds of all the military equipment used by the Allies combined: a staggering 280,000 warplanes, 100,000 armored cars, 86,000 tanks, 8,800 naval ships, 2.6 million machine guns, 650,000 artillery pieces, millions of tons of ordnance, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. Accomplishing all this, while putting into uniform 11 million soldiers, 4 million sailors, 700,000 marines, and 240,000 coast guardsmen, meant drawing into the industrial workforce a great many women and minorities, on an even greater scale than occurred in World War I. Depression-era unemployment rates were now a distant memory, as the factories of the nation whirred with activity.

Wilfred McClay, Land of Hope.

All of this may well be true, but I can’t let pass any hint that the U.S. uniquely defeated the Nazis — not after reading Anthony Beever, Stalingrad, I can’t.

Shorts

In The Times, Nitsuh Abebe marveled at the marketing behind “PepsiCo’s denuded ‘Simply NKD’ Cheetos and Doritos, ‘now reimagined without any colors or artificial flavors’ — as if freshly picked from the Dorito bush and crisped in an elderly doritero’s brick oven.” (Via Frank Bruni)
It makes me ill that the Mavs had Jalen Brunson AND Luke. (An anonymous Dallas-area resident, to whom I’m related by blood and a shared bedroom with for much of our childhood.)
Andrew Jackson’s tyrannical instincts threatened the wholesome freedom of the American experiment. (Mark A. Noll, America’s God). (And to which former President is Trump oftenest linked?)
Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way.(Michelle Goldberg on the White House’s human cockfight in celebration of Trump’s 80th birthday.)
Ortega was right when he said that in the old societies people had customs, proverbs, stories, and sayings; today they have opinions, which they quite sincerely believe to be their own. What they do not know, however, is that they owe these opinions to the ideology that surrounds them, not to their independent intellectual efforts. (Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy)
[T]he outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington … Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur. (Bret Stephens)
Anthropic sees itself as the A.I. company that’s most attuned to safety issues and eager for democratic oversight, but each move from the Trump administration has prompted the company to shout, “No, not like that!” (Ross Douthat)
If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. (L.M. Sacasas)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.