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[ by Charles Cameron — we only got to see one in three of cohen’s days before congressional committees — but what a history-making day — part 1 of 2 ]
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Header:

Shocked barely causes a ripple these days. Earth-shattering, on the other hand, is about as strong a term as any I’ve chronicled here, as in a different register is flabbergasted.

As a source told Emily Jane Fox,

Some things that are earth-shattering are right in front of your nose, and the reason you don’t know that they’re earth-shattering is because they’re right in front of you

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That was yesterday. Today, Michael Cohen testified for seven hours before the House Oversight Committee.

Meet the Press:

Chyrons:

Quotes:

Elijah Cummings:
16: I lived in the inner city of Baltimore, and when yoiu call somebody a ratthat’s one of the worst things you can call them, because when you go to prison, rat means a snitch ..
19: And hopefully, this part of your destiny will lead to a better Michael Cohen, a better Donald Trump, a better United States of America, and a better world, and I mean that from the depth of my heart. When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked, in 2019 what did we do to make sure to keep our democracy intact..
We have got to get back to normal ..
Kasey Hunt:
This was akso a very human day ..

**** amash clip[ 32-33 ****

Chuck: You don’t say it, you say it ..
34 Ben Wittes: the direction without direction .. for Michael Cohen, when to lie ..
39 Cummings: we have strayed so far from normal ..
44/5 these were my exact words: I’ll nail you to the cross ..
55 [ Sam Nunberg re Matthew Calamari ] he was a security guard and was beating somebody up and Trump hired him, saw him at the US Open ..
Carol Leonnig: eccentricities of accounting ..

Ari Melber, the Beat:

Chyrons:

[ 59 chyron: Cohen checks .. ]

Quotes:

Cohen: I did the same thing that you’re doing now, for ten years. I protected Mr Trump for ten years. I can only warn people the more people that follow Mr Trump as I did, blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I am suffering ..
Maya Wiley: his points about Donald Trump’s wink, wink, nod, nod, in terms of the Trump Moscow Tower ..
Ari; The most ominous thing for Trump has apparently been playing out in plain sight, in public, with this new chapter today that is legally gigantic even though it might have been understandably overshadowed at times by other fireworks and passion, scandal and drama and intrigue in that hearing ..
Maya Wiley: How can you save a client who’s not telling the truth? You can’t. I thought we were going to go old school, Houdini? A friend?
Flannery: This whole gang of Pinocchios can’t be trusted to tell us anything that’s truthful. I do credit the performance, if you will, by Cohen today for giving the sense of being a man who is eating ashes and as close to being transparent as he could possibly be, perhaps in his entire life ..

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I am going to break here, after Ari Melber‘s The Beat and before Chris Matthews‘ Hardball, because this is enough for one bite of an exceedingly rich day.

[ by Charles Cameron — beating the drum, dancing around, clapback, bracing, blocking, curve-ball, armed to the teeth, showdown, passion play, game-changing, end-game — and some appalling religious hate ]
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Quotes:

Rachel Maddow: that new curveball in the Manafort case coming up next — stay with us ..

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Chyrons, ok:

Prosecuting Trump:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC:

Then there’s this set of three horrific sub-captions, drawing distinctions between three major religions..

One on the National Emergency question:

And a game-changer screen-grab re Elizabeth Warren:

I chose these grabs for their wording, not their politics — bracing, clapback, massage, blocking, game-changing, hellscape — and those three stunning alt-right subtitles.

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Quotes, continued:

Ari Melber:
04/5 Rob Rosenstein was sort of dancing around it [indicting Trump] when he spoke about the normal rules for non_presidents, so to say..
We’re now in this interesting period of a kind of an end game ..
We’re in this interesting end-game, and everyone is thinking, Who’s going to do what?
07/8 David Frum: Special Prosecutors seek prosecutable offences. This js a drum I’ve been beating since early in 2017.. There is a real risk that in this highly legalistic culture, that we look to Bob Mueller to do things that it’s really up to Congress to do ..
08 Frum: We’re not at an ending, we’re at the beginning of the game ..
Rep Joe Neguse: We’re not at the end-game, we’re at the beginning ..
Ali Mystal: Southern District of New York is the bear of the Trump vs Leonardo DiCaprio and this time we’re not sure the bear is going to let him 29: go..
It’s Don Junior and Ivanka who, to my mind, are going to be the first people over the falls ..
32 [SDNY]: If they have to play a role in this passion play, I’d set them up to be the Avengers ..
41 Bernard-Henri Levy: there is a massive attack, today, onbthe very udsea of truth ..
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Hardball, Chris Matthews:
17 Charlie Sykes: That would be the smart play ..
53: he needs to be a little more strategic about this — time your hits, do them in the right way..
towards end: We could be looking at a showdown between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in New Hampshire .. This could be what amounts to an elimination contest between the two of them ..
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All In:
He thinks he’s Teflon Don ..
Why he holds his cards so close to the vest .. he has another hand to play ..
He had an opportunity to show his hand, and he didn’t show his hand ..
32: Republicans came to the table armed to the teeth ..
?40 Elizabeth Warren: We are going to play by some rules that are way past now ..
55 Neera Tanden: .. changed their calculus on this ..
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Singing: In short, in matters quasi-international and criminal / [?Kusmani?] is the model of a modern major-general..
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53: the big/?/great reveal ..

So here we can add dancing around, beating the drum, armed to the teeth, showdown, passion play, end-game ..

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Previous Metaphoric Snow posts:

One delicious ouroboros and miscellaneous chyrons &c

I have a huge dose of chyrons and a great ouroboros

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons, ignore unless interested

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons, ignore unless interested 2

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons, ignore unless interested 3

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons, ignore unless interested 4

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons, ignore unless interested 5

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons 6

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons, ignore unless interested 7

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons 8

It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons, ignore unless interested 9

Second Civil War? It’s snowing metaphoric chyrons 10

[ by Charles Cameron — continuing our probing of borders, and liminality, with hints of mirroring and parallelism ]
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Let’s start with a “borders” video for your consideration:

That’s worth viewing, though it’s no more the final word on the subject than Robert Frost‘s poem, Mending Wall:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
…

Walls here, I’d, suggest, are liminal as forming borders between one part of the neighborhood and another — but those gaps are likewise liminal, separating if you will one section of all from another. As this (minor) reading suggests, the situation is more complex than a simple statement that walls are bad / good.

Indeed, as here, poetry is often deployed in the service of nuance..

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We’ve had earlier Zenpundit posts on liminality and borders, among them:

Of border crossings, and the pilgrimage to Arbaeen in Karbala

Violence at three borders, naturally it’s a pattern

Borders, limina and unity

Borders as metaphors and membranes

McCabe and Melber, bright lines and fuzzy borders

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My interest here is first drawn in by succinctly stated patterns of mirroring and parallelism found in an Atlantic article, What Does It Mean to Be a Canadian Citizen? The first comes from JFK, and may indeed be his most frequently quoted utterance:

Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country

That’s the mirroring example.

The parallel universes example suggested here is no less succinct:

The time-honored saying “No taxation without representation” does seem to imply, as a corollary, “No representation without taxation.”

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Okay, those are the two quotes that caught my eye for reasons of formal symmetry. The rest of the article, I’d suggest, is extremely interesting for what it says about borders, nationalities and Canada in particular. Here’s one of the writer’s crucial observations:

About 24 percent of immigrants from Hong Kong return to the territory after acquiring Canadian citizenship, as do 30 percent of immigrants from Taiwan.

You can see the appeal. Hong Kong’s economy is growing much faster than Canada’s. Its income-tax rates top out at 17 percent. Canada does not tax the foreign-source income of nonresident citizens, in effect creating a geopolitical arbitrage opportunity too attractive to miss: the protections of Canadian nationality at low Hong Kong prices.

And this, from the concluding para, will give you an idea of the questions the article leaves us with:

Is citizenship a kind of subscription service, to be suspended and resumed as our needs change? Are countries competing service providers, their terms and conditions subject to the ebbs and flows of consumer preference? Edmund Burke long ago articulated an ambitious vision of society as a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Does any of that still resonate? Or is it a bygone idea of a vanished age, dissolved in a globalized world?

[ by Charles Cameron — more noise by far than reality, but still enough reality to be troubling — your opinions sought! ]
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Here’s the promised special chyron issue on the concept of a Second Civil War

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I’m featuring this quote from Nicolle Wallace first, because it suggests that Trump has already engendered a war — whereas the other materials I offer here will suggest that the war arises in response to Democratic actions against Trump — a difference in emphasis worth noting:

It’s a war. He permitted, he green-lit a war in this country around rce. And if you think about the most dangerous things he’s done, that might be it..

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Chyrons:

Rush Limbaugh:

You might even get away with saying that we are on the cusp of a second Civil War. Some of you might say that we are already into it, that it is already begun, however you characterize it though, we are under attack from within.

Chyrons again:

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That’s a whole lot of very-very-right and Trump-circle-right messaging about a Civil War, and that quote, I vote, and I buy guns, is chilling, with the example of Lt Hasson and his arsenal driving the point home. Another point about Hasson is that he stated his intention to have five such stashes of weaponry…

Fair enough, there are extremists putting together weapons stashes, some of them using them in infrequent but deadly terror operations. Fair enough, by no means everyone on the right, and by no means everyone who supports Second Amendment gun rights, is liable to join in any attempt at a civil war. But fair enough too, on the whole those on the right may well be better armed than those on the left

Fair enough again, many of those on the left have their grievances sharpened, much as many on the right do.. and grievances may in the end turn out to be the most significant of weapons, since they provide the motivation for mayhem, whether verbal or martial. And it should be admitted that threats and physical violence are intimately connected, and rhetoric can indeed incite to harm.

That’s my poor, off-the-cuff attempt to get some of the nuances of the situation stated, and no doubt some “on one side” would put their emphasis in some places and de-emphasize or deny others, and vice versa.. but my overall point would be something along these lines:

there’s enough rage simmering in the American body politic — and possibly in many other nations — for sporadic outbursts of violence and attempted civil war to occur — but at least in the States we are far from the full-blown CW2 that Rush Limbaugh seems to relish — and although I’ve heard the opinion expressed that Berkeley should be nuked, on the whole we don’t have the same sort of battle lines as were available (I think, being a Brit and no historian) in the North / South divide of CW!.

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Zen tweeted today:

I’m not certain that this is true or not. What I do know is that historically when radical movements fail or end- be it 19th C Narodniki or 20th C antiwar & 68’er protests – an inner core turns to extreme violence and terrorism (People’s Will, Baader-Meinhoff, Weathermen…) https://t.co/hH5vbGO9Sb

— mark safranski (@zenpundit) February 23, 2019

That fits with my impression. And Zen is a (or an) historian.

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As an Oxford man, though, I was impressed with the fact that the street named North Parade runs south of the street named South Parade in that city, and the explanation that during the English civil war, the Roundheads gathered at South Parade while the Royalists faced them at North Parade — a pleasant fantasy, according to Wiki and its footnotes.

But that was a lo-o-ong while ago..

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Opinions?

{ by Charles Cameron — dishes, grills, tightens gag, silences, burns, pretends, plays — a mixed bag — wait for the next post to drop! ]
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I’m hurrying through this post to get to the next, which will be a special chyron issue on the concept of a Second Civil War

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Gagging Stone chyrons:

Misc chyrons:

Mueller end-game chyrons:

And a couple of headers:

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Quotes:

Nicolle Wallace:

In Vietnam time he’s going to have his first day of meetings scheduled so far with Kim Jong Unon Wednesday. Wednesday night in Vietnam 9s going to be the morning here in Washington when Cohen is testifying, so if Trump is going to be paying attention to that Cohen testimony, he’s not going to be getting much sleep between his first night and meeting with Kim Jong Un and his second day of meetings with Kim Joh Un on Tuesday.

It could be quite a split screen moment for the President [in Vietnam when Cohen testifies

The New York Attorney is expected to charge Paul Manafort, seemingly check-mating him ..

Heidi Przybyla: Islamic terrorism is more promoted in oress releases by the Department of Justice than these incidence of home grown white nationalist domestic terrorists ..

Eugene Robinson: When the reality is exactly the opposite; the reality is exactly the opposite, the real threat is from white nationalist hoke grown terrorists..

It’s a cult of personality ..

Ari Melber, The Beat:

We’ve talked about staying in lanes ..

Hardball, Chris Matthews:

04 I think once Paul Manafort left the Trump campaign, there were all these questions about him specifically, so I think he was a little bit radioactive ..
08 Kristof: I don’t know if the sentencing memo is going to connect those dots for us ..
NK: the dots are all over ..
Manafort has been double-dealing*** with the prosecutor ..
Noah Rothstein: The President will be just one dot in those many dots ..
He might just be a bit-player*** ..
[57: chyron or clip: kamikaze: ]

All In, Chris Hayes:

Was there any talk about this [??] during the Nixon days? I wonder whether this is a strategy that has been worked out before, or war-gamed before..
Elie Mystal: Southern District of New York is coming at Trump like syphilis. It’s going to make him crazy, and it’s never going away ..
Rutger Bregman at Davos: It feels like I’m in a fire-fighters’ conference, and no-one’s allowed to talk about water ..