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[ by Charles Cameron — running the gamut from Mike Pompeo a flailing, failing theologian, to ISIS, not that their theology is so great, ahem, but still around, with cat-herding visible unto the days of the grandkids ]
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Credo quia absurdum? Or, getting the original quote right, credibile est, quia ineptum est? That’s no inept as to be believable?

There’s actually a passage in Cicero’s Rhetoric for Herrennius that describes how to make objects of contemplation more memorable by choosing the most beautiful or ugly images as analogs / analogies to represent them:

We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud and smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily.

It may be that Tertullian — the Church Father who authored that phrase about believing something because it’s so incredible — was not so far in his thinking from Cicero — was accustomed to at least the concept of using the strangest, most strained analogies, and applied it to his contemplation of the unspeakable, unimaginable Godhead, since such disfigured analogies are both the most memorable and the least likely to be taken literally, and thus mistaken for the Reality to which they are intended to point.. but that’s pure speculation on my part.

But I’m sorry, No. Mike Pompeo may have been first in his class at Annapolis, and I may have been far from first in my class at Oxford, but at least my studies were in Theology — and No.

**

Here’s one for the liminal collection:

An island, you know, is something else. In a continent, the watersheds are important natural divisions, as are linguistic groupings and cultures. There’s arguably a cultural component of Brit-oriented Northern Irish, and they’re not enemy — but the naturalness of a united island Ireland seems pretty clear.

Islands:

History has time and again highlighted the importance of islands in establishing naval dominance.

That’s from Darshana Baruah, SISTER ISLANDS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN REGION: LINKING THE ANDAMAN AND NICOBAR ISLANDS TO LA RÉUNION

Through a ring of bases and naval presence on islands, the British essentially controlled the entry points into this crucial area. In the east it had Singapore and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, while Socotra and the port city of Aden provided access to the Red Sea and Bab-el Mandeb. With control of Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius, the Seychelles and, briefly, Madagascar, the empire turned the Indian Ocean into a “British Lake.” To consolidate its presence along the coast of Africa, the British Empire fought bloody wars to take control of Kenya, Uganda, and the island of Zanzibar. With these islands and coastal territories, the empire projected its power across the region and dominated the key chokepoints and shipping lines between Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Bloody, note the bloody. And dominance, note the British dominance. I’m not sure that bloody dominance is quite so well-supported any more, but a little less Biriths dominance and Ireland might be a little less bloody.

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Dan Nexon recommends a paper featuring an arc — yes, we’re collecting arcs — but not the MLK moral arc that may be long, but in the end “bends toward justice”..

If you want to be freaked out, read accounts of the arc of fascist and right-wing illiberal movements from the 1920s to 1930s. For a quick overview that feels uncomfortably familiar, see https://t.co/dBHiDKezGw

— Dan Nexon (@dhnexon) March 22, 2019

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JM Berger has been interviewed by Terry Gross — to be aired on Monday:

Stay tuned!

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All In, Chris Hayes:

Unh.

They’re [WH] basically blowing off a co-equal branch of government which gives a strong indication of how they plan to back-rush their way through anything damning from the Mueller report, when it comes.

In fact, there is such a swarm of criminality, prosecutions and pleas around the President and his ever-moving dynamic vortex..

A trial run, a warm-up inning..

Y’know, Mueller report ridiculous, but I want to see it is vaguely reminiscent of credo quia absurdum, or th more accurate quote in my own translation, see above:

That’s no inept as to be believable

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I can’t find the Jon Meacham quote on ceremonial trolling, so here’s one from India:

Rohit is to this series what trial ball is to gully cricket

Twitter went ahead with its ceremonial trolling of Rohit soon after he was dismissed. It’s become a routine of late for the right-hander to perish cheaply and be the butt of jokes on social media.

At least it’s a fun replacement, though for seriosity I’d have preferred the Meacham.

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Mr. President, seriously stop talking about Senator McCain.

— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) March 21, 2019

and btw:

#SundayThoughts

Religion is a bedrock for a moral society, because it shows us that morality is absolute, not relative or subject to popular cultural whims.

Religious people are far more likely to give to charity/volunteer than the non-religious, and give more as % of income.

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) March 17, 2019

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D’oh.

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Clint Watts @selectedwisdom:

I really would like everyone to read that story ..

The whole idea is, everybody around the world knows that you can hire companies to crack into any one of these endpoints —

— and go through any of these communications ..

If you want to feel your communications are safe, don’t worry about government surveillance, worry about corporate guys-for-hire that are hired by all these companies ..

Here’s the article:

A New Age of Warfare: How Internet Mercenaries Do Battle for Authoritarian Governments

BTW another Clint quote from my day’s scan:

If we were to go after Wikileaks, it could lead to massive information dumps of US secrets around the world ..

In have the feeling I quoted an abbreviated version a while back, without that crucial “of US secrets” — good to have thee full version, in any case.

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Sigh:

Charles Lister, Trump Says ISIS Is Defeated. Reality Says Otherwise.

The ISIS of the future could be just as bad if not bigger and worse than the one we watched dramatically expand in 2014. In Iraq, nearly 20,000 ISIS detainees currently lie in prison and tens of thousands more who are accused of having maintained ties to ISIS lie in squalid camps surrounded by hostile security forces. A further 20,000 Iraqi ISIS prisoners and family members currently in Syria look set to be transferred back to Iraq in the coming weeks, all of whom will surely meet a similar fate: prison or secured camps. If that were not bad enough news, tens of thousands of Iraqi children born under ISIS rule look set to remain stateless due to Baghdad’s continued refusal to recognize their ISIS-produced birth certificates or to produce Iraqi replacements. All told, that may amount to at least 100,000 people in Iraq with ties to ISIS whose bleak futures will undoubtedly fuel long-term radicalization.

Enough.

[ by Charles Cameron — a quarter century of chyron and metaphor posts — Booker, 81 at Stanford, is now a legit sports metaphor for politics — finishing up with Beto and the Cult of the Dead Cow !! ]
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Ari Melber, the Beat 3/18/2019:

My notes on what happened which day are seriously confused at this point. I hope I can go back and rescue a chyron “Trumped” from the very start of this show, ami I right?

Quotes:

he sits at the center of a crime syndicate ..
John Flannery: to pin the tail on the donkey, the [ .. ] in the West Wing ..

Hardball 3/18/2019:

Cory Booker:

just another example of his moral vandalism ..

Ron Reagan:

What is it about John McCan that sets him off? John McCain was everything Donald Trump isn’t. John McCain wasa man ofn integrity and a man of great courage.

Meghan McCain:

My father waas his kryptonite in life, and is his kryptonite in death..

We now need, more than ever after this President, more than ever we need a revival of grace in our country, a revival of civic grace in our civic spaces..

I suppose this image is now a sports metaphor for politics

I got into Stanford because of a 4.0, 1600 — 4.0 yards per carry, 1,600 receiving yards..

at 27, not on my download to verify: I see this as whiffle-ball ..
at 38/9, sonny liston vs muhammad ali
40, we want to see some white smoke, some hope
40, the goose-eggs add up
59 steve king?

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Uncertain sources &c:

The house is just going to be a bear-pit ..
kasie:it’s a home game for him, not an away game
does he have what it takes to go the distance ..
i wasn’t born to run, but i am running ..
we are not trying to hide the ball here at all ..

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Three that I may have posted before, forgive me:

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And saving the best [??!!] for last:

As “PsychedelicWarlord,” O’Rourke spent most of his time posting thought-provoking essays, song lyrics from punk albums, and the occasional poem. At one point, he and another member interviewed a neo-Nazi. And in one post, he gave “The True Story of Cult of the Dead Cow,” in which he claimed authorship of the name..

Header for a Beto poem:

____________________________________

[by Charles Cameron — warning shot, square off, rattle, hit, roast, eviscerate ]
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CNN’s Situation Room first, because I see it while waiting for my seat in the dialysis clinic:

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Melber:

I’m crowding the Melber chyrons &c up at the top, not in any particular order, and will follow them qith Melber quotes.

If these {State] charges stick that itself could be check mate for Manafort’s strategy, and to the extent Trump is going along with it, whatever Trump hopes to get out of that.

David Corn:

It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax. I mean, they’re both really gigantic stories..

Ainsley:

You are not pardon proof ..

More..

Caroline Fredrickson:

I think this is like a Russian nesting doll, and you keep opening one and you find another Russian nesting doll, and another one inside, and we’re going to find who’s at the very center oof this, and it might be the President.

Melber:

It’s fascinating, and you could reverse the nestying dolls, and say you have Mueller and Andrew Weissmann, but now you also have SDNY, Berman and Khuzami, and then you now have Cy Vance. So you also have prosecutor nesting dolls, no

Caroline:

D’oh!

Hardball:

Betsy Woodruff:

Trump joins an ignominious group of people. As soon as he hired Paul Manafort, he basically joined a League of Bond Villains as far as the people who Manafort had represented prior to Trump. Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Jonas Savimbi, an Angolan warlord who used child soldiers, Sonny [..], who did torture for the Marcos, who literally stole billions of dollars from the people of the Philippines, and now Donald Trump is also part of that pantheon.

[ see also Manafort’s long and sordid history of working for the world’s worst people ]

He’s gotta be Moses to get through this thing [ Manafort, sentence upon sentence ]

Rep Raja Krishnamoorthi [re Matt WHitaker]:

I heard Mr Whitaker was a body-builder; he’s been doing some heavy lifting for the President.

Chris M:

What do you think about Obstruction of Justice as heavy lifting?

Sen. Claire McCaskill

We’ve got a guy in the Oval Office who listens to nobody but himself and the mirror

Chris M:

Three strikes you’re out, Mr President ..
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All In Chris Hayes:

Natasha Bertrand:

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By keeping the pardon on the table.. that is something that has been refrained throughout this entire ordeal is that we’re not discussing this now, but we’re not taking it off the table. That’s nothing short of a wink and a nod..

Harry Littlam:

People often draw the analogy to the mob and Goodfellas, but I’ve been struck it’s more like Married to the Mob. These are a bunch of real kind of nickel and dimeing kind of — shysters would be the formal legal word. And yes, it really is at times a kind of burlesque. There’s no dignity in Presidential crime any more, it seems.

A mobster comes before me, Your honor, my client here, when he said “sleep with the fishes” he meant that the deadd man in question booked a room next to the aquarium. Like, we understand the code..

Rachel Maddow TRMS:

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Nicolle 3/14/2019:

What may be happening is less of a grand finale and more of a relay race, handing of batons .

Church Rosenberg

The angels’in the details..

You’re right, we like patterns, because patterns evince intent, and intent is how we convict

David McCraw:

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Fake news is an evil genius, as a bit of politicala theater, because it seems like a search for truth when it’s the opposite ..

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Well, that’s more than enough, and I have more to come..

[ by Charles Cameron — from propensity to act, and from individual act to outbreak ]
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The NYT the other day had a stunning, terrifying and or terrific piece by Thomas B. Edsall titled No Hate Left Behind. That’s almost pure slick-bait. The sub-title gives us the sense that we’re talking now and soon, that the article is both a current assessment and a warning: Lethal partisanship is taking us into dangerous territory.>

This article will likely interest Zenpundit readers.

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Let me offer a quick personal side-note before addressing the substantive issues Edsall‘s piece raises.

Edsall quotes Steven Pinker as saying:

Certainly there is a tribal flavor to political polarization. Men’s testosterone rises or falls on election night, depending on whether their side wins, just as it does on Super Bowl Sunday.

American politics, in other words, is like American football — like enough, IMO, to richly justify the use of football metaphors to describe political outcomes — and vice versa. I’ll return to this theme in the tail-end of this post.

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Okay, No Hate Left Behind.

Edsall‘s article is a grim one — grim not because the writer is grim by nature, although that may or may not be the case, I’m no psychiatrist — but because it contains statistical evidence, measurable scientific evidence, of our propensity towards a violent response to the 2020 elections — a propensity which is:

stronger in well informed voters than in those less so

currently stronger in the Democratic electorate than the Republican

and which on election night will be

stronger in the supporters of the victorious candidate than those of the other party

Oy.

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Edsall‘s piece in turn draws on the paper Lethal Mass Partisanship: Prevalence, Correlates, & Electoral Contingencies by professors Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason.

Their abstract notes that historical accounts of partisanship “recognize its contentiousness and its inherent, latent threat of violence,” but that “social scientific conceptions of partisan identity developed in quiescent times” and “have largely missed that dangerous dimension” in their researches. Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason aim to “rebalance” that tendency. Their findings can be found in detail and with appropriate nuance in the body of their paper, but it is their Conclusions that I will note here>

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The authors open their conclusions with a deft touch of historical background:

Two and a half centuries ago, American founders worried about the lethal consequences of partisanship and hoped to avoid the pernicious development of parties. After ultimately founding parties themselves, their worst fears were realized in the extraordinary partisan violence of the American Civil War and the lesser violence before and after, carrying body counts in the hundreds rather than the rebellion’s hundred-thousands.

They continue by describing how their own work explores the propensity for political violence in our own times::

We conceptualized and measured three aspects of lethal partisanship: 1) partisan moral disengagement that rationalizes harm against opponents, 2) partisan schadenfreude in response to deaths and injuries of political opponents, and 3) explicit support for partisan violence.

Them’s fighting measures to put to scientific test.

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Selected quotes:

The challenge for democracy, as always, continues to be how to procure the political goods that parties provide while staving off partisanship’s most sanguinary pitfalls — the ones identified by Madison but seemingly forgotten in modern behavioral scholarship.

Madison seems to be the name that keeps popping up as the father of essential American wisdom..

Here are three paragraphs worth considering, each in turn bringing us closer to en understanding of how the propensity to tolerate violence “comes to the boil” in action, either on the individual scale — incidents of mass shooting — or in an uprising somewhere between civil unrest and war:

In two nationally representative surveys, we found that large portions of partisans embrace partisan moral disengagement (40-60%) but only small minorities report feeling partisan schadenfreude or endorse partisan violence (5-15%). Even so, their views represent a level of extreme hostility among millions of American partisans today that has not been documented in modern American politics.

Ultimately, these results find a minority of partisans view violence as acceptable acts against their political opponents. Many times more embrace partisan moral disengagement, which makes the turn to violence easier if they have not made it already. As more Americans embrace strong partisanship, the prevalence of lethal partisanship is likely to grow

Finally, experimental evidence showed that inducing expectations of electoral victory led strong partisans to endorse violence against their partisan opponents more than expectations of electoral loss.

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Let’s end on a lighter note.

I said above that American politics is sufficiently like American football to justify metaphorical use of one to describe the other — and just as the Republican and Democratic parties holds primaries and National Conventions to determine each party’s candidate in the Presidential election, so the respective American and National Football Conferences hold games culminating in championships to determine each conference’s contenders in the Super Bowl.

Perhaps, indeed, the President-elect should face off against the Super Bowl MVP in a grand culminating match to establish the testosteronic Super-Person. Heaven alone knows where such a match would be held, but the opportunity to discover whether football is a more passionate and partisan sport than politics should not be missed..

2019: Super Bowl MVP Julian Edelman vs sitting President Donald Trump?

[ by Charles Cameron — we’re talking Beto and sharp knives, Dem contenders and their clown car, Amazon and knee-capping, the Founders and game shows — loyalty above brains — & ending with the Brexit endgame ]
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Peggy Noonan said on MSNBC Friday morning, quite unexpectedly, to work is to pray — known to me in Latin as laborare est orare, a graceful phrasing indeed.

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“HE’S NEVER REALLY BEEN HIT FROM THE LEFT BEFORE”
Progressives are ready to paint O’Rourke as a lightweight elitist, a poseur who is out of touch with the crucial Democratic-primary electorates.

Hitting is one thing, running, sharpened knives and Achilles heels are quite another. And then there’s lightweight.

And there’s an extraordinarily rich mix of metaphors in this para — and article:

It’s been a decorous war so far. Sure, some criminal-justice reform advocates have dinged Senator Kamala Harris for her years as a tough district attorney and state attorney general. And Senator Amy Klobuchar continues to absorb shots from anonymous former staffers about her abusive management style. But the 12 declared candidates themselves are still gushing respect for one another. That’s partly because it’s early in the game, and they are focused on building their own name recognition; partly it’s because President Donald Trump is such a massive target and villain. “In 2016, Hillary versus Bernie was a wrestling match,” a senior adviser for one of the leading 2020 contenders says. “And in a wrestling match, you have to size up your opponent and think about your strengths in relation to their weaknesses and vice versa. This one is truly a race. But in a race with, like, 35 cars coming up to the starting line, it is about staying in your lane and going faster than everybody else.”

**

Also:

“WHY THE HECK NOT?”: DEMOCRATS AREN’T DONE PACKING THE 2020 CLOWN CAR
Brown is out, but Swalwell and Moulton still want in. Can they break out of the pack or will they be lost in the shuffle?

Virality, that magic elixir that made Beto O’Rourke into a household name, is unpredictable. Democratic voters, who are caught in a tug-of-war between the party’s left and centrist wings, are still undecided.

Clown car is a spectacular Shriner ref, eh? And there’s a pack and a shuffle in the subtitle, but I’m thinking the pack is a pack of hounds, not the kind of pack you shuffled.

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I’m thinking nepotism is a variant on the ouroboros — serpent-dad bites nephew-serpent‘s tail, or vice versa — only in this case, it’s son-in-law..

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I have only the briefest of notes from my dialysis session 3/8/2019:

Meet the Press :

MTP had a chyron regarding Cohen & credibility @ m38.
there’s a good segment @ m47.
two quotes:
President Trump, the Projector-in-Chief ..
m51: the longer he’s not in the line of fire {Biden] ..

There was mention of this Axios header with its ouroboros overkill:

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Melber:

Amazon .. is not going to be knee-capping everyone ..
They bully towns, cities, states, all around tthe counrty ..
The problem is the hunger games ..
The problem we’ve got right now is a revolving door between Wall Street and Washington ..
the kill zone

Hardball

Chris M:

You know, when you’re winning a game of eight-ball in pool, don’t scratch ..

A bit obvious, but for the record, race:

Chris M:

You’re not winning if you’re playing defense ..

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All In Chris Hayes:

Carol Lam:

On the one side people dangling the possibility of a pardon and on the other side people angling for the possibility of a pardon ..

Chris:

You can’t help but feel that we’re watching in public these flags being sent back and forth..

Ian Bassin:

And the Presiudent is essentially treating pardons like some sort of reality show prize, right? But this is not The Apprentice, and the Founders did not intend the Presidency to be a game show

game show *****

Jamie Raskin:

.. public tweets and statements he [DJT] was making, which were like little valentines sent to Paul Manafort ..

There’s a fox for every hen-house in Washington ..

Jane Mayer:

There’s such an open kind of a feedback loop there, I don’t actually think that that’s going to change because Bill Shine is leaving ..

Alex Witt 3/9/2019:

I’m actually borrowing chyrons from two versions of Witt’s program here:

Anon: I am of the opinion that only Jesus should be signing Bibles ..

The authorship of the Bible — ta biblia, the books, in Greek — is a vexed question: was it written by God, or men — or maybe angels? Was the Torah / Pentateuch written by Moses, or by the so-called Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly writers? Were the Gospels written by the authors to whom they are attributed? John certainly differs notably from the “Synoptics” — Matthew, Mark and Luke.. and each appears to have different audiences and emphases..

To cut a long story short, the authorship of the Bible can be attributed either to a cluster of dead men or to an ever-living God — but in neither case is Donald Trump the author: not even close.

The pardon playbook might have come into play with Cohen, or perhaps Manafort? And this next one’s for Rep. Ilhan Omar:

Anon: There’s no question but this [anti-Semitism, anti-Israel, anti-Netanyahu &c] is a political minefield ..

John Harwood:

Donald Trump is the White House Communications Director, and the revolving cast of characters is just the people he brings in to do some of the ministerial duties below him ..

I didn’t capture it, but there was a “Simmering frustration” chyron towards the end ..

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Misc oddment: war of words .. — there’d be plenty of examples.

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MSNBC LIVE Up with David Gura 3/9/19:

A devastating sequence:

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Let this be our endgame for the day — personally, I’d like to end Brexit now: