Category: Political Matters

Can a perv be a great leader?

Tanya Selvaratnam’s whole story of sexaul abuse by disgraced former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is creepy but feels timely.

For my money, though, these are the creepiest parts:

  • Three of my close friends told me to keep quiet because Eric’s work was so important to the progressive cause. “We need him,” one said.
  • The months since then have not been easy. I’ve dealt with rebukes from friends, family and strangers telling me I should have shut up or that it was my fault.

In a country where progressives rallied around Bill Clinton despite his predations, and where whit Evangelicals now variously accommodate or enthusiastically support Donald Trump, this kind of thing does not surprise me.

But it offends me.

It offends me partly because I remember how Schneiderman served the progressive cause: with lots of abusive lawsuits, jawboned in the limelight he so loved. Kamala Harris did the same thing on the other Left Coast, and how she’s obviously angling for the Presidency in 2020.

On the other side, Trump serves something-or-other (it’s nothing I’d call “conservative”) by nonstop lying and sociopathic cruelties, with a limelight-seeking narcissism that makes Schneiderman’s pale in comparison.

And it offends me, too, because I don’t think a pervert (“My bad, bad girl, Daddy’s going to rape you.”), constant liar or sociopath ultimately can be a fit executive, and I’m apparently a real outlier on that one, with few allies either Right or Left.

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Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Disrupting Goëbbels’ lunch

I was a bystander to an internet conversation that Alan Jacobs opened thus:

A word to the people whose political views I despise: I don’t want you to lose your job, and I do want you to be able to enjoy a meal at a restaurant in peace. I just hope you change your mind about a few things — a few extremely important things.

To my surprise at least, others jumped in to disagree, or perhaps I should be more explicit: they disagreed that, e.g., Sarah Sanders should be able to dine out unmolested (because she’s “simply lying to the American People – each and every day”).

One of them brought me up short on my reflexive support of Jacobs with an argument that I’d characterize as “this is ‘literally Hitler’ in the 20s and 30s” and which I found pretty plausible. (If that kind of argument never gives you a “Niemöller moment,” if you always blow it off as “Godwin’s law,” there’s something wrong with you.)

I’m deliberately providing no hyperlinks. The ethos of the platform where the discussion occurred seems to run counter to intense controversy, so I try (not always successfully) to take my obnoxious stuff elsewhere, and Jacobs, too, seems to have dropped out and posted this instead:

Now, a question for people who support confronting and challenging politicians at restaurants and other public places. What is your goal? Is it simply punitive, or do you believe that by doing that kind of thing you can change a politician’s mind? …

And no sooner had I read that from my RSS feed than I tabbed over to this from Caitlin Johnstone, also in my RSS feed, who probably is further to the Left than Jacobs is to the Right:

A radical change in human behavior away from its patterns … will necessarily involve a drastic transformation in humanity’s relationship with thought. I’ve been saying this over and over again in different ways for a long time now, and yet I still get criticisms saying that I have useful insights but I don’t provide any plan of action.

The transformation in human consciousness is the plan of action. I really don’t know how to say it any clearer than that. And I will go so far as to say that that it is the only plan of action which will pull us out of our destructive patterns and into a healthy state of collaboration with each other …

I understand the criticism, though. When people read about [big, entrenched problems] … they don’t want to hear a bunch of stuff about mass ego death and spiritual enlightenment, they want to hear about nationwide demonstrations or organizing the working class or forming a new political party or cryptocurrencies or ending the Federal Reserve, or something along those lines depending on where they believe the problem is localized. In general, they want a fairy tale about people coming together to effect drastic, sweeping changes and turn the status quo on its head, which they will do because something something reasons, cough cough.

Seriously, why do people think revolution happens? Why do they believe their ideas have a chance of winning out over the existing paradigm? …

It doesn’t seem like many proponents of revolution and change have really thought about this very much. They have a good idea, and they can envision a world in which that idea is implemented, but getting from the idea to its manifestation seems like it’s often a jumbled mess in a lot of dissidents’ minds, not unlike the “Phase 1: Collect underpants / Phase 2: ??? / Phase 3: Profit” model of the Underpants Gnomes from South Park. Most dissident voices I see are primarily interested in Phase 1, and to a much lesser extent in Phase 3. Phase 2 is what I’m interested in, and in my opinion it necessarily involves a drastic shift in human consciousness. …

She might disagree, but her “transformation in humanity’s relationship with thought” and mocking of “turn the status quo on its head, which they will do because something something reasons, cough cough” seems clearly to amount to “we need to change people’s minds first.”

That’s utterly congruent with Jacobs and seems like a refreshingly conservative way of being progressive.

We should all, whatever our political discontents, try to focus on Phase 2.

And, focusing on Phase 2, the objection “this is ‘literally Hitler’ in the 20s and 30s” proves too much, because if we are absolutely convinced of that, we should be doing something more than fecklessly disrupting Goëbbels’ lunch.

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Our lives were meant to be written in code, indecipherable to onlookers except through the cipher of Jesus.

Greg Coles.

Follow me on Micro.blog Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

More potpourri

1

  1. “We oppose the nomination of XX, a dangerous right wing extremist ….” (The gist of an actual progressive press release, where someone forgot to fill in the name of the actual nominee after the announcement. But they probably were the first out of the gate to oppose whoever-the-heck.)
  2. We oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, a dangerous right wing extremist …. (subsequent story, stable for a while).
  3. We oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh because this woman says he lewdly and drunkenly attacked her at a teen drinking party 36 or so years ago.
  4. We oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh because he dangled his dong in front of an extremely drunken co-ed at Yale, which nobody else present saw. Oh. Never mind.
  5. We oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh because he ran quaalude-fueled gang rape parties. We know because a client of Trump’s evil progressive twin says she attended lots of them and finally got raped. Oh. Never mind.
  6. We oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh because we believe all survivors. (11th-hour virtue-signaling theory, to which some still adhere despite the patent lack of corroboration.)
  7. We oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh because he got too hot under the collar after we threw all this crap at him and was very evasive about our questions and didn’t break down under questioning like someone on Perry Mason.

Am I the only one who thought “they’re playing Calvinball, not conducting a Senate inquiry”?

Calvinball is a game invented by Calvin and Hobbes. Calvinball has no rules; the players make up their own rules as they go along, making it so that no Calvinball game is like another.

Rules cannot be used twice (except for the rule that rules cannot be used twice), and any plays made in one game may not be made again in any future games. The game may involve wickets, mallets, volleyballs, and additional sports-related equipment.

There is only one permanent rule in Calvinball: players cannot play it the same way twice. For example, in one game of Calvinball, the goal was to capture the opponent’s flag, whereas in a different game of Calvinball, the goal was to score points by hitting badminton shuttlecocks against trees using a croquet mallet. Masks must be worn at all times in Calvinball; these are not allowed to be questioned.

Are there more than a dozen of us who are bothered by Kavanaugh’s excessive (and probably illegal) drinking as a teenager? Absent evidence that he has an ongoing problem, I wouldn’t disqualify him for it, but the halo is ill-suited to him.

2

Jonathan Chait and Andrew Sullivan, prophets:

3

I feel so affirmed that at least one other person in the cosmos thought that!

4

5

6

What do they teach children today?!

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Spiking the ball

 

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(I have not yet reached “broken glass” phase, but this débâcle has made me likelier to vote for candidates of my former party. Both parties deserve to lose, but the Republicans don’t affirmatively hate people like me and mine. That’s not nothing.)

 

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You might want to click the link to see what she was trolling.

 

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If there is one thin, bright light in all this, it is that the Kavanaugh vote will be bipartisan. Only in the narrowest possible sense, with one Republican senator — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — likely to vote no, and a lone Democrat voting to confirm. But a straight party-line vote would have been even worse and, these days, we have to count the smallest blessings.

Megan McArdle

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Ready to move on?

1

We seem to be at the end of a process that is legitimately important but has been hyped, manipulated and sullied to even greater prominence. I have no doubt that Brett Kavanaugh will forever carry the metaphorical “asterisk next to his name” in the minds of many until the day he leaves the court.

But I’m sure ready to move on now.

2

Adam Gopnik displays some world-class non-sequitur and false confidence:

[Brett Kavanaugh] became disqualified for the Supreme Court the moment that he accepted the offer from Donald Trump. At this stage in his Presidency, Trump, already described in reports from his own aides as unfit for the office, implicated by his former lawyer as an unindicted co-conspirator in a felony, and now alleged, according to the Times, to have benefitted from tax schemes that in some instances amounted to “outright fraud”—not to mention being a liar and a con artist—should not be allowed to appoint Justices for lifetime appointments.

Whatever the effect of this truth on vote-counting congressional Realpolitik, it is the moral ground upon which all subsequent argument has to begin. Trump’s purpose in appointing Kavanaugh to the Court was clearly to provide himself with a protective vote for whenever one issue or another arising from his misbehavior makes its way there ….

I don’t particularly disagree with anything Gopnik said about Trump, but his conclusions do not remotely follow, and to my mind they are the deranged fury of a liberal who thinks conservative justices are as outcome-oriented as progressive justices.

Be it noted, however, that not all spittle-flecked un-thought come from the left.

Most of us are relatively naïve, ready to believe what our news outlets put forth. We have open minds and were ready and willing to listen to Ford’s testimony and consider for ourselves if it was believable. It was not. Her testimony was obviously scripted, practiced, massaged, and fabricated out of whole cloth.

Patricial McCarthy at The American Thinker (which consistently fails to live up to its name).

I think a case could be made that McCarthy’s article actually gets worse from there.

3

I’ve faulted Rod Dreher’s recent preoccupations, mildly because I like him, but here he could be said to read my mind on the omens for Kavanaugh’s confirmation:

Of course I am relieved by this outcome — not so much that Brett Kavanaugh is going to the Supreme Court, but that a nominee was not brought down by unsubstantiated, last-minute accusations, and media bullying, and that logic, evidence, and due process won the day. Even so, I don’t feel triumphalistic …

I don’t think our country is going to be better off because of any of this, though. We will only be less worse off than we would have been had the Left won this clash by using these malicious tactics.

(“Here” in my lead-in excludes the matters I elided. That’s why I elided them.)

4

The U.S. Chamber is running political ads against Joe Donnelly’s re-election.

Oh! No! How could I have been so wrong!? They’re running educational ads asking us to call him and tell him to stop siding with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren by voting against middle-class tax cuts for Indiana’s “hard-working employers and families” and to support the the Permanent Tax Cuts for Americans Act (break out the band for a chorus of God Bless America).

I’m so ashamed of my mistake.

(Yes. That’s how the game is played. A lot of advocacy groups have decided that tendentious “education” is less hassle and more lucrative than maintaining a PAC, a Political Action Committee, for the purpose of explicit endorsements and financial support of candidates.)

5

Trump supporters who imagine that they’ve found a straight-talking champion who will drain the swamp while using his business acumen to make America great again have been suckered, bigly.

Paul Krugman, who I rarely quote (or even read, but who accurately summarizes the major New Yok Times exposé here, executive summary of sorts here, and podcast discussion here).

The Times does not, so far as I’ve seen or heard, dispute Trump’s boast of $10 billion net worth, but I frankly doubt that. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s characterization of Lillian Hellman, “Every word he utters is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

Were Trump not the boss of the boss of the IRS, he and his siblings might soon be paying tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and penalties on wealth swelled by tax fraud.

Grant me to accept with serenity the things I can’t change, Lord.

 

6

[I]f you apologize to a manipulator for something they will never, ever let you forget it and will bring it up any time you step out of line. For normal, empathetic people, apologies are a way to improve relations with each other and avoid hurting one another in the future; they’re a way of saying “I understand that I did a thing that hurt you, and I’ll try really hard not to do it again in the future.” Narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and other chronic manipulators don’t see them that way, since they don’t care if they hurt other people and only care about getting what they want. For a manipulator, an apology is a weapon to use against the person making it, which is why you never see them making apologies of their own.

Caitlin Johnstone.

 

7

I cannot recall the last time I so thoroughly agreed with Peter Leithart (it’s probably more than 22 years ago):

God has given the United States over to divisive blindness and stupidity.

…

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a soap opera.

…

As my friend Mike Bull said, the Spirit has departed, and we’re back to Babel, where no one can speak to his neighbor. God has delivered us to divisive blindness and stupidity, to the force René Girard identified as “Satan.”

It’s not as if he didn’t warn us. Paul writes that ungrateful idolaters become “futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” Isaiah saw it happening in Judah: Idolaters “do not know, nor do they understand, for He has smeared over their eyes so that they cannot see and their hearts so that they cannot comprehend” (Isa 44).

This doesn’t mean we’re helpless. Or, better, our helplessness can drive us to seek justice in a higher court. We can shatter the idols that bind and blind us, and turn to God in prayer ….

Deride it as “thoughts’n’prayers in its Sunday best” if you like, but I think you’re deluded if you fancy that only one of the major parties is at fault and we need only vote them out.

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No peace I find

1

[O]ur brains did not evolve to understand the world but to survive it. Reality is software that doesn’t run well on our mental hardware, unless the display resolution is minimized. We therefore seek out stories, not because they are true, but because they reduce the incomprehensible into that which is comprehensible, giving us a counterfeit of truth whose elegant simplicity makes it seem truer than actual, authentic truth.

Gurwinder Bhogal.

 

2

I spent days laconically poking at this blog, trying to get to the bottom of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford. But I can’t come up with a story (see item 1) that persists for more than 24 hours.

I wouldn’t call my experience “oscillating wildly,” but “oscillating around equipoise” would be fair.

Under the circumstances, it would be presumptuous and vain beyond the usual measure to confide my present conviction, as it seems likely to be swayed yet again. Because my current conviction is related to a recurring “even if” conviction I’ve had about this matter, I may have finally found a resting place, but I’m not at all sure. I’ve stripped out some quotations that now seem beside the point.

Yes, I do think that the Kavanaugh matter in some ways is “signal,” not “noise.” It involves two (or more) looming varieties of damage to one of our nation’s most important governing institutions, and that seems to matter legitimately to citizens even if I could once and for all dismiss it sub specie aeternitatis.

 

3

“Tell me again why we shouldn’t confront Republicans where they eat, where they sleep, and where they work until they stop being complicit in the destruction of our democracy,” tweeted Ian Millhiser, justice editor at ThinkProgress.

“Because it is both wrong & supremely dangerous,” replied Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett. “When one side denies the legitimacy of good faith disagreement over policy — as well as over constitutional principle — the other side will eventually reciprocate. Neither a constitutional republic nor a democracy can survive that.”

Hugh Hewitt

4

Donald Trump doesn’t understand George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light,” and that may be his most telling vulgarity. Barack Obama didn’t get it, either.

There was never a time that I didn’t get it.

As has been pretty well documented, though, those points of light have been vanishing since Tocqueville commented on them and even during my own (soon) 70 years. And that may be part of our death sentence as a free people.

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Tangential Miscellany

1

Riveted by the proceedings, I felt at times I should have looked away rather than play voyeur to the humiliation of two fine people — stripped of dignity and emotionally exposed before the world.

Kathleen Parker.

This was a predictable response of decent people. Unlike political pundits, I had no obligation to watch, so I didn’t. That limits how much I can comment with integrity.

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I didn’t watch Thursday’s hearing because I didn’t expect to come any closer to warranted belief by watching (and I expected to be slimed — see above). I think I called that right. Except that most Kavanaugh backers found Ford a powerful witness, Thursday seemed to function as Rorschach Test.

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I’m pretty disgusted with both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times coverage. The Times is more blatantly partisan, dishing up wave upon wave of shockingly tendentious commentary and “news,” but I also have trouble crediting most of the Journal’s arguments for Kavanaugh.

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Lindsey Graham’s display of rage seems a bit amnesiac. Despicable power grabs in confirmation context started with the proto-Borking, but the penultimate power grab was the GOP’s grab and tabling of Merrick Garland’s confirmation hearing. The GOP brought a pen knife, the Democrats brought an AK-47, but it’s the same street fight.

2

Regarding Presidential politics more generally:

I just don’t understand it. Why aren’t parents more concerned about what their children are hearing about the President’s behavior? … I am left to conclude from these opinions that our greatest problem is not in the Oval Office. It is with the people of this land! We have lost our ability to discern the difference between right and wrong.

…

As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world! Nevertheless, our people continue to say that the President is doing a good job even if they don’t respect him personally. Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. In the Book of James the question is posed, “Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring” (James 3:11 NIV). The answer is no.

… Nothing short of a spiritual renewal will save us.

Dr. James Dobson.

Those words are as true now as they were when Dr. Dobson first wrote them — about Bill Clinton, of course. Surely you didn’t think that an Evangelical® would say such a thing about Donald Trump, God’s anointed!

3

When you strip away the blind, fawning hero worship of his supporters and the shrieking, garment-rending hysteria of his opponents, instead examining the actual behavior of this administration, the sitting president looks an awful lot like a fairly conventional Republican scumbag with about as many differences from Obama as Obama had from Bush.

And, to be clear, that is a bad thing. Both Trump supporters and Trump haters get upset whenever I say that this president is not significantly different from his predecessors in any meaningful way outside of rhetoric and narrative, Trump supporters because they believe he is a populist hero and Democrats because I’m disputing the narrative that he’s Literally Hitler. But I don’t say this because I like upsetting everyone, I say it because it’s extremely important to be absolutely clear about what is happening here if we ever want to turn things around for the fate of our species. Trump’s election did not represent the arrival of a new Hitler-like monster, the monster was already here. The call is coming from inside the house..

I’m getting used to Caitlin Johnstone, and trying to figure out the (seeming) conspiracy theory she believes — as I think she’s also doing. Sometimes, Donald Trump appears as one of the plutocrats who’s controlling this all; other times, he’s beholden to those plutocrats.

But she does rack up a lot of points as she careens about the pinball table.

4

If journalism is the first draft of history, history editors have pretty good job security well into the future — assuming we have a future and that people there will want to read history instead of just consulting their feelings.

5

Today is the 20th anniversary of my Father’s repose in the Lord. He was one of the most level-headed people I know, or at least he created that impression by not blathering.

That obviously is a recessive trait, or perhaps one acquired on mine sweepers in the South Pacific and not hereditable.

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What was the right demeanor?

Judge Kavanaugh’s defiant fury might be understandable coming from someone who believes himself innocent of the grotesque charges he’s facing. Yet it was also evidence of an unsettling temperament in a man trying to persuade the nation of his judicial demeanor.

New York Times editorial

Had he not been as forceful, his opponents would have said he looked guilty. Because he called the Democrats out for their character assassination, the critics now say he lacks the right temperament. The truth is that there is no answer, and no demeanor, that Brett Kavanaugh could offer that the left would credit. Their goal isn’t the truth. They want to destroy Judge Kavanaugh.

Wall Street Journal editorial on Thursday’s Kavanaugh’s hearing.

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The redder pill

Every so often, someone comes along and says something sufficiently arresting that it makes all the usual commentary on the events of the day seems as superficial as I occasionally suspect on my own, unbidden.

No, it’s not Rod Dreher. He says he took the Red Pill, but I think he’s still in The Matrix. (I really need to watch that movie some day instead of just alluding to it randomly.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Caitlin Johnstone:

A think tank is an organization wherein highly-paid academics pour their collective brainpower into coming up with convincing arguments that it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid.

(Medea Benjamin Shows America What Real Resistance Looks Like)

In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it’s pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won’t impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push.

(Trump’s “Opposition” Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsense)

I’ve encountered the latter theme in Fredrik deBoer, but Caitlin brings her views to life with things like free verse, not just vivid prose. I consider them complements, and Caitlin is more prolific as Fredrik battles some thorny personal issues.

I thank Eric Mader of Clay Testament for “introducing” us.

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Potpourri (mostly political) 9/25/18

1

I apologize if I’ve quoted this before, but I’m a retired lawyer, I’ve watched SCOTUS for decades, and I can’t stop mulling this over.

Here goes:

I can imagine two operative standards for a nominee in Kavanaugh’s shoes. One is what we might call the minimally convincing standard—which we can loosely define as a showing just powerful enough to align the few uncommitted Republicans with the already-declared Republicans and thus assure confirmation.

The other let’s call the no-asterisks standard—that is, a showing sufficiently powerful that a reasonable person will not spend the years of Kavanaugh’s service mentally doubting his integrity or fitness for the role he is playing. It is a showing sufficient for a reasonable pro-choice woman to believe it legitimate—if not desirable—for Kavanaugh to sit on a case reconsidering Roe v. Wade, or for a sexual-assault victim, whatever she may think of his views, to believe it legitimate for him to hear her appeal.

…

Putting it all together, Kavanaugh’s task strikes me as an unenviable one. He needs to prove a negative about events long ago with sufficient persuasiveness that a reasonable person will regard his service as untainted by the allegations against him, and he needs to do so using only arguments that don’t themselves taint him.

Benjamin Wittes in the Atlantic.

I have called this article “clarifying,” and I particularly had these passages in mind. But now I’m wondering.

We’re all aware of the high levels of polarization in the country. Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono says she disbelieves Kavanaugh’s denial of Dr. Ford’s accusation because she doesn’t like his ideology. On the other side, we have Donald Trump predicting he could shoot someone in Times Square and get away with it.

Consider Hirono and those blasé Times Square bystander archetypes. Where is the archetypal “reasonable person” (or “reasonable pro-choice woman”) who hasn’t already made up his or her mind on the Kavanaugh nomination, or whose opinion of his qualifications (not some political calculus) has materially changed because of the accusations against him?

If you were already inclined to trust Kavanaugh, the evidence against him is weak enough to justify rallying to his side. (“How dare these liberals engage in dirty tricks against this smart, decent family man who’s devoted his life to the law!”) But if you were already inclined to distrust him, the evidence against him is strong enough to justify feeling vindicated. (“You mean the guy who seems eager to gut women’s reproductive rights shows a pattern of misogyny and violence againéé women? No kidding!”)

Damon Linker.

Who thinks that they’ll watch Dr. Ford or Kavanaugh without a glimmer of confirmation bias?

Can any justice be confirmed in this toxic atmosphere without an asterisk by his or her name? (“Hey! I’m reasonable! I think he’s guilty as hell! He’s just the type!”)

Can any conservative man be confirmed without accusations of sexual improprieties? If it comes from an old acquaintance rather than a total stranger, won’t it always come packing an asterisk?

There’s an aphorism about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s on my mind these days.

2

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray recently told an audience that there must be a way that cryptographers hadn’t thought of yet to securely guarantee that law enforcement could unlock encrypted devices. He proclaimed “We put a man on the moon” in trying to make the point that if mathematicians and scientists could do that, surely they could find a way to build a secure encryption backdoor. But after decades of research and debate, the experts overwhelmingly agree: trying to build a secure backdoor would be like asking NASA’s to safely land a human on the sun. It’s not possible.

Robyn Greene

3

If Trump fires Rosenstein, he gets rid of the guy who has been Robert Mueller’s main protector at Justice. Yet firing him on charges of insubordination means believing that the Fake News got the story about Rosenstein’s 25th Amendment musings right. This may be the ultimate Trumpian dilemma.

Bret Stephens, in conversation with Gail Collins.

4

The clear implication of the [ad’s] sumptuous red lipstick and the impossibly tall high-heel is that a woman’s womb, ovaries, and breasts are recreational equipment which it would be unthinkable to waste on nurturing a new human being. Maybe when these organs are older and starting not to work so well, they can be used for making and nourishing babies—after a few rounds of chemical fertility treatment, of course. But right now, it’s party time. It’s me time. It’s little black dress time.

Because sex is fun, right? And it’s even more fun when there’s an edge of risk in it, which is why we end up with “emergency contraception” ads in the Underground and an epidemic of STDs. But what’s the purpose of all these cocktails and clubbing? Why do people devote so much of their lives to finding someone with whom to rub bodies if they’re not interested in what body-rubbing was designed to create?

Or take for example this WebMD article about “emergency contraception,” which suggests a woman might want to use it if she had sex and “something went wrong.” Could you run that by me again? In what other instance do we describe body systems accomplishing their intended functions by saying “something went wrong”? ….

G. Shane Morris, If You Don’t Want Kids, Don’t Have Sex (or Get Married).

Caveat: Do not ever think that my quoting something from Shane Morris implies that I agree with him more than about half the time. Some day, I may even unload on him about something in the other half.

5

… I despise Ted Cruz. That is “D-e-s-p-i-s-e,” in case I haven’t spelled out my loathing clearly enough … Because he’s like a serpent covered in Vaseline. Because he treats the American people like two-bit suckers in 10-gallon hats. Because he sucks up to the guy who insulted his wife — by retweet, no less. Because of his phony piety and even phonier principles. Because I see him as the spiritual love child of the 1980s televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Because his ethics are purely situational. Because he makes Donald Trump look like a human being by comparison. Because “New York values.” Because his fellow politicians detest him, and that’s just among Republicans. Because he never got over being the smartest kid in eighth grade. Because he’s conniving enough to try to put one over you, but not perceptive enough to realize that you see right through him. Because he’s the type of man who would sell his family into slavery if that’s what it took to get elected. And that he would use said slavery as a sob story to get himself re-elected.

Otherwise, you might say I’m his No. 1 fan.

Bret Stephens, in conversation with Gail Collins.

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