zenpundit.com

[ 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.”

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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:

[Mark Safranski / “zen“]

As a form of amusement and also a bit of self-improvement, I decided to subscribe to a site, MasterClass.

In essence, Masterclass is an edutainment portal where celebrity practitioners in some field teach an online course and there’s downloadable materials and discussion forums – and in some instances, office hours – for those wanteing more connection or feeling of community. So you can learn chess from Gary Kasparov, politics from David Axelrod and Karl Rove, photography from Ann Liebovitz and so on in many different kinds of subjects. While some of these instructors may also be university professors, most are not so what you get is largely an idiosyncratic take on tips, techniques and procedures from some very accomplished person; some will dive deep into a meaningful level of their creative process for you while others will not, keeping it as a how-to for novices or interested amateurs. My primary interest in trying Masterclass was in writing and there are a large number and kinds of writers from which to choose. I decided to begin with the course by Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell, who is one of the most successful non-fiction authors of the past 10-15 years with such books as Outliers, Blink and David and Goliath all of which made the bestseller lists for long periods of time and remain regular sellers.  Sometimes, Gladwell, a journalist, is bashed by academics and scientists as a synthesizer and popularizer, an argument that echoes the familiar complaint from academic historians griping about the success and technical errors found in popular histories preferred by the reading public. I’m not at all troubled by synthesizers, synthesis being a critical intellectual tool nor do I expect the average layman to start reading dry, usually exceptionally narrowly focused jargon-laden papers published in academic journals (in fact, almost no one is reading them). Gladwell’s style of writing and research interests, it must be said, have very little in common with mine but that was the point in taking his course: to learn something new.

One of the things that has struck me is the extent to which writing is really a reflection of individual thinking. Gladwell breaks some of the “rules” which we are all taught or have drilled into us by editors or as kids by English teachers. He prioritizes being interesting (the real strategic goal if you want to be read) over constructing a conventionally perfect narrative or even proving one’s argumentative point. Secondly, Gladwell emphasizes again and again following curiosity over a systematic research or a writing objective. Curiosity is really, Gladwell’s epistemological theme or driver.

Gladwell also has had in his lecture series some useful insights. I liked this one, when opining on the reasons why libraries are more useful than Google in doing research, best:

“The physical construction [and organization of books on] of a library shelf teaches you how to think“

Which implies many things and tools we are using in the digital age are teaching us not to think as well as extending our capacity to think.

We are what we write. We are how we write

[ by Charles Cameron — nuke is about as fierce a military metaphor as you can use, though bringing on Armageddon may surpass it, while being grilled can’t be nice, eh, Kirstjen Nielsen? — but for unabashed cliché wizardry in the dark arts is hard to beat. And much more ]
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All in With Chris Hayes 3/6/2019:

Harry Littman:

It’s very kind of clock and dagger and ham handed, but just ham handed enough to be potentially a Rudi Giuliani signature move..

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Rachel Maddow:

possession of brains ..

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The Atlantic:

Will John Bolton Bring on Armageddon—Or Stave It Off?

Bolton is a sovereigntist,” John Yoo told me. “He thinks the U.S. should not be bound by international organizations, and we should not be ceding our authority to the United Nations or NAFTA.” After the Cold War, “the U.S. tied itself down with multilateral institutions, primarily run by Europeans, to constrain our freedom of action—to tie down Gulliver.” Every time the United States joins an alliance, or consents to arbitration on equal terms with, say, Latvia or Guinea, one more rope is lashed over Gulliver’s limbs.

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New Yorker:

Morning Joe 3/7/2019

/

grilled

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The Atlantic:

California Is at War With the Trump White House
Governor Gavin Newsom called President Trump’s border wall and immigrant bashing “a national disgrace.”

From the moment Donald Trump took office, California has been ground zero for the resistance against him and his administration, in terms of both grassroots citizen activism and legal and administrative action by its Democratic-dominated state government. But since the inauguration of Governor Gavin Newsom in January, the Golden State has often seemed to be in a state of total war with the White House.

At the same time, California’s once-mighty Republican Party—which gave the nation Earl Warren, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan—is at war with itself, and weaker than it’s been in decades. The GOP’s new state-Senate leader was once quoted as suggesting that California’s epic drought was divine punishment for abortion, and last weekend the party elected its first female and first Latina state chair, only after a bitter internecine fight that left its conservative wing enraged.

ground zero, the resistance, a state of total war, at war with itself, divine punishment for abortion, a bitter internecine fight..

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The Atlantic:

A hideous DoubleQuote from Eliot Cohen, Socially Acceptable Anti-Semitism
It is the religion of people too lazy to accept the complexity of reality.

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The Atlantic:

nuke, wizardry in the dark arts

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How to Cheat at Xi Jinping Thought
A newly mandatory app is eating up Chinese workers’ time—so they’re finding ways around it.

The origin of the app has some obvious parallels to Cultural Revolution-era drives to study Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. For example, the first two characters of the app’s logo are written in Mao’s calligraphic style. Mao once encouraged youths to study hard and make progress every day, while Xi has highlighted several times the importance of study in a digital era of media.

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And this one’s for the liminal, borders and walls collection:

When the Frontier Becomes the Wall
What the border fight means for one of the nation’s most potent, and most violent, myths.

n Election Day, 2018, residents of Nogales, Arizona, began to notice a single row of coiled razor wire growing across the top of the city’s border wall. The barrier has been a stark feature of the town’s urban landscape for more than twenty years, rolling up and over hilltops as it cleaves the American town from its larger, Mexican counterpart. But, in the weeks and months that followed, additional coils were gradually installed along the length of the fence by active-duty troops sent to the border by President Trump, giving residents the sense that they were living inside an occupied city. By February, concertina wire covered the wall from top to bottom, and the Nogales City Council passed a unanimous resolution calling for its removal. Such wire has only one purpose, the resolution declared—to harm or to kill. It is something “only found in a war, prison, or battle setting.”

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Some final notes:

Ali Velshi 3/7/2019:

Jennifer Rubin:

We’re going to see sort of what he does when he’s finally looking at years and years in prison, is he then kind of sober up, and decide well maybe I should be cooperating with these people after all, or does he just at this point go down for the count, and take whatever secrets he has with him..

Hardball:

Malcolm Nance:

I would make it clear there are more chips in the bag of the Special Prosecutor

All In:

Eric Swalwell:

As a former prosecutor, I think you’re seeing a white collar, white-washing sentence here [ .. ]

We learned a lot about the Trump code, that people like Paul Manafort and others know the code, that Donald Trump speaks to them in the code that they’re supposed to talk to him. And when the lawyers saying words that mimic or parrot what Donald Trump is saying, it’s as if the fix is in, and Paul Manafort knows if he just keeps quiet, a pardon is coming his way [ .. ]

I saw someone [DJT] who games the system ..

Rachel Maddow:

That was supposed to be the start of a whole new Paul Manafort, right? Coming clean, pleading guilty, admitting guilt on the charges on which they didn’t retry him, right? At that moment, when he decided to plead and become a cooperator, that was him joining Team USA .. joining Team USA, joining the prosecutors, admitting his guilt .. the cooperation aspect of Paul Manafort’s case is another fascinating curve-ball..

team USA, curve-ball

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And here’s another border and liminality header:

Belfast Shows the Price of Brexit

I took a guided tour of some of the scenes of the Troubles. The tour was led by a former IRA paramilitary, now working with an association of former prisoners partially subsidized by EU funds. A few hundred meters to the north, former Loyalist paramilitaries lead tours on their side of the defensive barrier that still separates predominantly Catholic from predominantly Protestant neighborhoods. The EU helps underwrite those tours, too.

[ by Charles Cameron — CPAC and Fox, Kushner and the Judiciary Committee, India and Pakistan, even a mention of epistemology, still plenty going on ]
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Misc:

BrownPundits:

It puts India and Pakistan on the same moral plane, right?
You talk about India and Pakistan being rivals. It’s just both sideisms of the most mendacious kind.

??:

No doubt Trump‘s dealing with Cohen and Kim are leading stories about now, so this headline deserves to lead this post, but — wait for it —

— it’s the bit about muscling reality into submission that caught my attention. Just muscling into submission would be metaphor enough for me to take notice — but when it’s reality itself that’s being wrestled down, we’re clearly in epistemological territory, perhaps of the variety Michelle Goldberg: talked about the other day:

..The epistemological terrorism that the Trump administration practices on us every day to keep us in this state of kind of derangement and feeling slightly off-center and not being able to get your bearings in this moment.

Terrorism? Not in the usual natsec sense — but hang on, terror itself is a framing of reality, located in the mind-heart-brain complex, and that’s the stage par excellence on which epistemological experience plays…

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If I could access it, there’s a dueling breaking news chyron at the end of Bryan Williams’ 11th hour for February 26th.

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Dom Donilon:

North Korea of course is the combination of a cult and kind of a mob operation

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A Day of Reckoning for Michael Jackson with “Leaving Neverland”

It is admittedly difficult, while watching “Leaving Neverland,” to hold in mind two contradictory but equally imperative ideas: that victims should be believed, and that the accused are innocent until proved guilty. The first is wildly crucial if we wish to protect the disenfranchised from egregious abuses of power. The second remains the crux of the American criminal-justice system. Can these two ideas coexist? Right now it feels as if they have to, which means that we are sometimes required to make personal choices about how we accept or dismiss the information made available to us.

The ability to hold in mind two contradictory but equally imperative ideas is a strong version of F Scott Fitzgerald‘s definition of genius — strong because Fitzgerald didn’t insist on the ideas in question being imperative.

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There’s a lot of balancing, even mirroring, going on here:

Postpone Brexit? Maybe Get a Do-Over? The Negotiations Enter a High-Stakes Game-Theory Stage
By Amy Davidson SorkinF

Brexit, at the moment, is an exercise in game theory. This week, both Prime Minister Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, grudgingly agreed to open the way for options that could help to break the current deadlock over the terms of Britain’s exit from the European Union. In May’s case, the option was a possible vote in Parliament to delay Brexit, which is now scheduled, ready or not, for March 29th; in Corbyn’s, it was a new referendum that might overturn Brexit altogether. Both May and Corbyn were acting because of rebellions within their own ranks, which escalated last week—when both Labour and Conservative M.P.s resigned from their parties—and threatened to spread. May reportedly made her offer because three members of her cabinet were about to quit, taking a dozen junior ministers with them.

Z
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3-4-2019 MSNBC, a few items

MTP:

Pres Trump:

Russia, if you’re listening ..

Katy Tur:

It suredoesn’t seem as though the Russians thought it was a joke ..

43: RT is starting their propaganda campaign that mirrors WikiLeaks which then mirrors what Donald TYrump is saying..

Melber, The Beat:

Paul H:

We’re not at Impeach yet, but we’re definitely on the road, the car is on the road. And this is the gas for that car, this investigation.

Paul, if this is a car a lot of people thought Bob Mueller was driving it. Thelasttime people remember an Impeac hment proceeding,we had prosecutor Ken Starr now driving it. ARe you suggesting that Jerry Nadler is now really in that

[more — Clift, Hommer, Prius]

Eleanor Clift:

He knew the game was over ..

The document demand:

Ari:

That’s just Kushner..

Richard Painter:

We don’t haveconclusive proof that the President is a Russian mole, but it sure seems like it .

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Hardball:

Sen Klobuchar: Rail, class one rail, down to four companies, the same number we’re seeing on the Monopoly board. And this consolidation that we’re seein in our country cries out for tougher action on anti-trust.

Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead.

Chris Matthews:

Chris M:

Who’s the toy here, the Presidentt? or Fox?

Chris M:

Why is the President of the United States working for Fox?

Jane M:

Despite the discouragement, Falzone kept investigating, and discovered that the National Enquirer, in partnership with Trump, had made a “catch and kill” deal with Daniels—buying the exclusive rights to her story in order to bury it. Falzone pitched this story to Fox, too, but it went nowhere. News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.

All In

Ken Liu:

We want to connect the dots and really put out a narrative of what happened, why it happened, and how we prevent this from happening again

Wajahat Ali:

That’s my slight concern about Biden and Bernie Sanders and Trump, that 2020 is like going to be the ticket of Bengay vs Vick’s Vapor Rub vs Metamucil .

Last Word, O’Donnll:

Frank Rich:

Well, look, everything that Trump is guilty of, he’s accused somebody else of doing — so he’s accused Hillary of having all the questions when he had them, he accused Barack Obama of playing golf all the time when he plays golf all the time, and many worse sins than that

Anita Kumar:

They don’t like her policies, but they say she (AOC) has political game

Katy Tur:

Is she going to be the white whale?

Seb Gorka:

That’s why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced the New Green Deal: it’s a watermelon, green on the outside, deep, deep, Communist red on the inbside.

Brian Williams:

One of his legal ppl:

I think she’s showing rmarkable patience. One day, Brian, Roger Stone will be a convicted felon, and this judge will be the one who decides how long he goes to jail. He’s playing a short game, she’s playing a long game.

3/5/2019 Brian Wms:

Gen McCaffrey:It’s amazing what’s available through unclassified commercial satellite photography [***** ourob][ .. ]

We’re being played by the North Koreans, and President Trump is negotiating with himself [ .. ]

Let’s .. talk about those exercises. The President now openly referring to them as war games –

Holding back the “war games” during the negotiations was my request because they are VERY EXPENSIVE and set a bad light during a good faith negotiation. Also, quite provocative. Can start up immediately if talks break down, which I hope will not happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 17, 2018

— [Brian contd] It is possible he did not know that that phrase existed until now

[ by Charles Cameron — Netanyahu parallel’s Trump on witch-hunt defense and many other things ]
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All In, Chris Hayes:

Michael Cohen clip:

There’s just so many dots that all seem to lead to the same direction

Elijah Cummings

When we’re dancing wth the angels, the question will be asked, in 2019 what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact.

Chris Hayes to Ro Khanna:

What is your response when they try to sort of gaslight us all that way?

Ro Khanna:

You don’t have to believe a word Cohen says, he has smoking gun evidence

The barrage of lies is so constant, creates a kind of noise, a sort of noise, it sort of can hollowv out peoples memories ..

Michelle Goldberg:

..The epistemological terrorism that the Trump administration practices on us every day to keep us in this state of kind of derangement and feeling slightly off-center and not being able to get your bearings in this moment..

Michael Steele:

Even hustlers have strategy.Even hustlers have strategy [ .. ]

Again, if you wantto deconstruct the administrative state, it starts with deconstruct the way you think and the way that you perceive reality [ .. ]

You throw a little more miasma in the miasma, and you’re ready to go [ .. ]

You don’t want to be the Democrat out there swinging from that limb, to have it sawed off, not by Republicans but by other Democrats

Michelle:

You might go out on a limb to say, Let’s indict him for being a Russian asset, but you’re not going out on a limb to say he was part of a criminal conspiracy involving campaign finance reform and that he probably wouldn’t have been elected President absent this crime

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Returning you to your usual programming:

Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu is about to be indicted for fraud and bribery — a man whose father was the great historian Benzion Netanyahu, author of the monumental Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, while his elder brother was the IDF officer who commanded the Sayeret Matkal commandos in the 1976 Entebbe raid, and its only casualty.

Impeachment discussion:

Dan Froomkin:

.

I’m really disappointed in the coverage of the tpic of impeachment in the mainstream media. They tend to cover it as a sort of horse race, as a political story about optics

A few other random items:

Ari Melber to Hardball:

You’ve got the baton

Unsure, but good:

You don’t punish rich people. They just go on longer vacations and buy Picassos.

Metastatic zing

AM Joy:

Gabriel Sherman:

The problem is, the Republican party has been taken over by this cult of personality of a reality TV show.

Joy:

It’s incredible and extraordinary this is not like hair on fire, the top story all day every day everywhere.

Language! Shocking!

Alexi McCammond:

You can say a lot without saying a lot of words

Virginia Heffernan:

They’re intoxicated by the idea of his presence, they’re intoxicated by the possibioity that you’re doing something larger than yourself, that you might change the world if you hang out with Trump.

I think Michael Cohen supplied us, if nothing else, a way out of that kind of slavery to Trump’s vision.

Most of us who haven’t gotten close to him think, I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. He looks line, Michael Bloomberg said, he looks like a con man when he’s just on the dais, but then there’s people who get nearer him and suddenly turn into smithers..

Backing up this quasi-cultic analysis, here’s a quick quote from “I’m Sorry for the Tweet That I Sent”: Inside the Bonkers Michael Cohen-Matt Gaetz Apology

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide, relayed to me a piece of advice that Roger Stone offered him when he entered Trump’s circle. “Roger warned me, ‘you need to be careful. I’ve seen it many times. When people start hanging around Trump, they start thinking they are Trump,’” he recalled. “You start thinking you can do the things he does — try to intimidate people, do outlandish things against them — and you won’t face consequences. He might not face consequences, but you’re going to. Everyone could become a kamikaze for him. Just look at Michael [Cohen].

Kamikaze reference too, btw>

**

Okay, one chyron from Rachek Maddow:

and a quote from Trump’s CPAC speech, indeed maybe the heart of his Presidency:

You know, I don’t know, maybe you know. You know, I’m totally off script, right … You know, I’m totally off script right now. And this is how I got elected, by being off script. True. And if we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks. ’Cause we have to get it back.