July 18, 2018: Child 'president', Inferring from Uranus, Sad Embarrassing Wreck of a Man

Conservative columnist and former Republican George Will has just published an opinion piece in The Washington Post, and syndicated throughout the United States. Here is the summary of what can be rightly called an appraisal of the careful assessment of what is now left of established conservatism of the behavior of our very own Caesar Disgustus. Here, in part, is Will's considered judgment:

“America's child president”, writes Will, “had a play date with a KGB alumnus, who surely enjoyed providing day car. It was a useful, because illuminating, event: Now we shall see how many Republicans retain a capacity for embarrassment.

“What, precisely, did President Trump say about the diametrically opposed statements by U.S. Intelligence agencies (and the Senate Intelligence Committee) and by Putin concerning Russia and the 2016 U.S. Elections? Precision is not part of Trump's repertoire: He speaks English as though it is a second language that he learned from someone who learned English last week. So, it is usually difficult to sift meanings from Trump's word salads. But in Helsinki he was, for him, crystal clear about feeling no allegiance to the intelligence institutions that work at his direction and under leaders he chose...

“Speaking of Republicans incapable of blushing—those with the peculiar strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment—consider Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who for years enjoyed derivative gravitas from his association with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Graham tweeted about Helsinki: 'Missed opportunity by President Trump to firmly hold Russia accountable for 2016 meddling and deliver a strong warning regarding future elections.' A 'missed opportunity' by a man who had not acknowledged the meddling?

“Contrast Graham's mush with this on Monday from McCain, still vinegary: 'Today's press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by and American president in memory.' Or this from Arizona's other senator, Jeff Flake ®. 'I never thought I would see the day when our American president would stand on the stage with the Russian President and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression.' Blame America only.

“Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others might believe that they must stay in their positions lest there be no adult supervision of the Oval playpen. This is a serious worry, but so is this: Can those people do their jobs for someone who has neither respect nor loyalty for them?

“Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe's short story with that title, collusion with Russia is hiding in plain sight. We shall learn from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation whether in 2016 there was collusion with Russia by members of the Trump campaign. The world, however, saw in Helsinki something more grave—ongoing collusion between Trump, now in power, and Russia. The collusion is in what Trump says (refusing to back the United States' intelligence agencies) and in what evidently went unsaid (such as: you ought to stop disrupting Ukraine, downing civilian airliners, attempting to assassinate people abroad using poisons, and so on, and on).

“Americans elected a president who—this is a safe surmise—knew that he had more to fear from making his tax returns public than from keeping them secret. The most innocent inference is that for decades he has depended on an American weakness, susceptibility to the tacky charisma of wealth, which would evaporate when his tax returns revealed that he has always lied about his wealth, too. A more ominous explanation might be that his redundantly demonstrated incompetence as a businessman tumbled him into unsavory financial dependencies on Russians. A still more sinister explanation might be that the Russians have something else, something worse, to keep him compliant.

“The explanation is in doubt; what needs to be explained—his compliance—is not. Granted, Trump has a weak man's banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him. And, yes, he only perfunctorily pretends to have priorities beyond personal aggrandizement. But just as astronomers inferred, from anomalies in the orbits of the planet Uranus, the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer, and then find, still-hidden sources of behavior of this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man” (1)

Well stated Mr. Will. For once you are dead on.

“'An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison

___________________

1. Will, George. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-sad-embarrassing-wreck-of-a-man/2018/07/17/

September 28, 2015: Boycotting the Pope, Savaging the Pontiff, A Hopeless Apologist

 

Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz) announced, ahead of the visit by Pope Francis to Washington, that he intended to ‘boycott’ the Pope’s scheduled address to a joint session of Congress.  The ideologically driven Congressman said he would welcome an address about conventional moral issues, but when the Pope chooses to “act like a leftist politician” by addressing climate change and human exploitation “then he can expect to be treated like one”; with all the scorn and contempt usually visited upon the heads of those who dare deviate from the duly approved ideological imperative. 

 

Gosar is not alone.  “Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) – who, like Gosar, is Roman Catholic – sat down with Politico this week to flesh out his expectations for the papal address.

 

‘I’m hopeful that Pope Francis will speak to these two issues: One is the church’s unfailing and steadfast opposition to abortion, the position that life begins at the moment of conception and it ends at natural death, and the dignity of every human person. That’s a position of the Roman Catholic Church that’s really unassailable and I’m hopeful that that position will be reiterated from the floor of Congress next week. I’m looking forward to that.

 

Second component that is so strong among the Catholic Church is the position of marriage, and it being between a man and a woman.’

 

Or put another way, Steve King is “looking forward” to his church leader telling Steve King how correct Steve King is. The pope, the argument goes, should stay in the GOP’s lane: there are moral crises, as defined by Republicans that warrant Pope Francis’ concern. Nothing else need be mentioned.” (1)

 

Declaring threats to the natural world merely, in a word, ‘political’, the GOP has taken the position that morality, a commodity wholly owned by the Republican National Committee, is a limited set of values revolving around the nuclear family and sexual behaviors.  All else, in their view, is ‘mere politics’.  And, since they have been about the business for at least two generations of doing their level best to reduce political life to the lowest intellectual and cultural denominator, the term has taken a pejorative meaning.  To contend, by these lights, that an issue is ‘merely political’ is a way of dismissing it out of hand. 

 

“In the culture-war debates”, writes Steve Benen for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s blog, “the right routinely argues that policymakers should heed the appeals from religious leaders.  More generally, conservatives express alarm about the left trying to push voices from the faith community ‘out of the public square’.  It’s the religious leaders, the GOP argues, that should help guide public debate”.  Unless, of course, one expands the discussion of morality and virtue beyond the narrow confines of Republican understanding.  Then one risks being ignored.  Representatives Gosar and King were hardly alone.  Three members of the United States Supreme Court, all Roman Catholics, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito likewise skipped the event.  It’s always best, when one has singular possession of truth, not risk such certainties by exposing them to alternative points of view. Justice is indeed not only blind, so it seems, but ignorant.

 

But the Pope, in coming to Washington, risked not only being ignored but being vilified.   The wrong-wing echo chamber that is Faux News and Talk radio went ape-shit crazy.  Wrong-Wing talk show host and beacon of malignant ignorance Michael Savage had this lead-in to the Pope’s visit.

 

“He [Pope Francis] has been selected - hand-selected - by the New World Order. He is the first non-European pope in twelve hundred years. The same people who gave us Obama gave us this pope. The same people who gave us Obama and the pope are giving the world a good beating. He is from an area where Marxist theory was used to rule over the people. The pope is a danger to the world. Yes, I'll be very clear on that. He knows about as much about weather as my -- well, let's put it to you this way. The only thing the pope knows about meteorology is that when it rains his highly-paid aides in the Vatican take out umbrellas and open them for him. The man knows nothing about climate. And for a religious man to do this is incomprehensible. How the Catholic people can put up with this, I don't know. And by the way, if he hates capitalism so much and wealthy people so much, I think the pope ought to begin with an example by selling off some of the great art in the Vatican.

And I think this pope, this deceiver -- what do you think because someone wears a holy robe, they're holy? Are you people nuts? How many imams are terrorists? Oh, you're willing to go along with that, aren't you?

 

Well, the pope is a Marxist. I stand by those words. He is a wolf in pope's clothing, he is an eco-wolf in pope's clothing. He is a stealth Marxist in religious garb.

[...]

The man sounds like the false prophet in Revelation. He sounds just like the false prophet in Revelation -- an ecumenical spiritual figure directing mankind to worship the Antichrist. The man is a false prophet. How could you buy this garbage? How in the world can you buy this? The world is cooling off, and the man is pushing this to attack capitalism?

 

This is unbelievable to me. We are living in global tyranny right now. We are living in global tyranny where the Big Lie is told over and over again. [Cumulus Media Networks, The Savage Nation, 6/16/15, via Rightwing Watch]” (2)

 

Such savage treatment was hardly confined to “The Savage Nation”.  Rush Limbaugh, demonstrating in one breath that he knows as little about Marxism and Catholicism as he does about birth control said “that if it weren’t for capitalism, I don’t know where the Catholic Church would be” , concluding “this is pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope.”.  In one foul breath the Icon of Ignorance conflates Catholicism with Marxism by simply overlooking the mere historical fact that Catholicism predates by nearly two millennium the advent of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. 

 

From Limbaugh down the corridors of the conservative echo-chamber the voices of greed, gluttony and avarice pontificate.  Faux News’ Brian Kilmeade dutifully weighed in with the observation that the Pope “doesn’t like Capitalism” and “should stay home”.  Faux News’ “Senior Judicial Analyst” Andrew Napolitano “called Pope Francis a "communist" and a "Marxist" for linking the European refugee crisis to global poverty.”  Similarly, the often erudite and always wrong mainstream conservative columnist George F. Will observed:

 

“Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convert's indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary. They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak -- if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.” (3)

 

Never mind, George, that given that half the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day, how the poor are so currently well off as to be ‘devastated’ by the Pope’s remedies.  Calling the Pope’s ideas demonstrably false and deeply reactionary is yet another vacuous characterization lacking even a feeble attempt at documenting falsehood or reaction.  In any case it’s rich coming from an established oracle of the status quo to disparage anyone for being ‘reactionary’.   George Will is the quintessential reactionary.

 

But George Will, whatever his shortcomings, and they are many, is a gentleman sitting at the bar in this den of thieves.  Will, with an air of pompous condescension, simply choses to dismiss the Pope saying:

 

“He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation's premises.” (4)

 

It is not only comfortable but profitable to pander to the desires of the masses, regardless of the global consequences.  Conversely it is unprofitable and unpopular to make your audience uncomfortable, best stick to the “tried and true”, the platitudes and bromides of spent dreams.  Such are the scribbling of an old political hack, a hopeless apologist for a fast-fading order. 

_______

 

(1)  Benen, Steve.  “GOP to Pope: Stick to Religious Issues (as defined by the GOP). http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/gop-pope-stick-religious-issues-defined-the-gop  9/22/15

 

(2)  http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/09/21/a-marxist-who-should-stay-home-the-worst-of-con

 

(3)  Ibid.

 

(4)  Ibid.

October 2, 2008: A Question of Will, Exile on Main Street, Victims of Property and Standing

Once, when writing about his youth, political columnist George F. Will described growing up in the plains of central Illinois. His friends, he said sadly, were St. Louis Cardinals fans, and grew up to be happy and liberal. Will tells us that he became an ardent Chicago Cubs fan and grew to be, in his words, “bitter and conservative”. Baseball can do that to a man.

There are two subjects about which George F. Will writes passionately and convincingly. The first is poverty in the South Side of Chicago and the second is the Cubs. While his remedies about the insufferable conditions that plague both his major interests remain suspect, his description of their plight is deeply moving. No one in America writes as lucidly as Will about what it is to grow up in Chicago's tenements. No one in America writes as lucidly as Will about the “lovable losers” who have not been champions of baseball since well before they took up residence at Wrigley Field. Over a quarter century ago Will wrote about the hapless Cubs sounding very much like a boy writing about a drunken or absent father; a boy bonded with his 'hero' but nevertheless brought to the awful reality that Dad had not accepted the responsibilities of adulthood. There is something about naming a team after an immature animal, he opined. Think about it: Bronco's, strong, fast; Boilermakers, huge manly biceps; Lions and Bears, fast, strong, ferocious: Cubs, warm, friendly, playful. Chicagoans regularly and lovingly refer to the Cubs as the “Baby Bears” and they have lived up to that moniker.

It has now been a century since the Cubs were last champions of their sport. A lot has come and gone in the interregnum. Many years later Will would write bitterly by counting the number of Presidential administrations since the last Cubs' championship and pointing out that there have been two world wars, a Great Depression, and numberless other events marking the intervening years, finally proposing a one game season so that the Cubs would never finish any more than one game out of first place.

To be a Chicago sports fan in general, and a Cubs' fan in particular, carries with it a weight of significance transcending sports. The word “Fan” is, of course, a contraction of the word “fanatic”. To be a true fanatic one must hold that the object in question—be that his beloved Cubs or conservative political philosophy—embodies untarnished “goodness”. It follows then that one's opponents therefore represent the forces of “evil”, all that is bad and sullied about the world. To be, therefore, a Chicago sports fan one must at a tender age come to grips with the awful reality that the forces of “Evil” almost always prevail. A persecution complex emerges hardening over time into a bedrock conservatism. George Will became, in his own words, “conservative and bitter.”

You're out of time my baby
my poor discarded baby
'cause baby, baby, baby, you're out of time” -- The Rolling Stones “Out of Time” (1)

Corey Robin in an essay entitled “Out of Place” quotes the opening statement of Ronald Story and Bruce Laurie's “The Rise of Conservatism in America, 1945-2000” that 'the central story of American politics since World War II is the emergence of the conservative movement'. “Yet”, writes Robin, “for some reason Will still feels that the travails of his political kinsmen are insufficiently appreciated and recognized”. Robin continues: “Will is not the first conservative to believe himself an exile in his own country. A sense of exclusion has haunted conservatism from the beginning when emegres fled the French Revolution and Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre took up their cause. Born in the shadow of loss—of property, standing, memory, inheritance, a place in the sun—conservatism remains a gathering of fugitives. (2) Buckley and his cohorts saw themselves at “out of place” with their badge of exclusion making them just about the “hottest thing in town” (2)

“Plato's guardians were wise”, writes Robin, “Aquinas's king was good; Hobbes's sovereign was, well, sovereign. But the best defense of monarchy that Maistre could muster in “Considerations on France” (1787) was that his aspiring king had attended the 'terrible school of adversity”. Similarly Edmund Burke in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) would describe Marie Antoinette “dragged 'almost naked' by 'the furies of hell' from her bedroom in Versailles and marched to 'a Bastille for kings' in Paris'. “Marie Antoinette”, Robin continues, “ was a particular kind of loser, a person with everything who finds herself utterly and at once dispossessed. Burke saw in her fall an archetype of classical tragedy, the great person laid low by fortune. But in tragedy, the most any hero can achieve is an understanding of his fate: the wheel of time cannot be reversed; suffering cannot be undone. Conservatives, however, are not content with illumination or wisdom. They want restoration.” (2)

What we have here, according to Robin, is the truly “bizarre” nature of modern Conservatism: a ruling class that for the first time rests its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood asking “us not to obey them but to feel sorry for them—or to obey them because we feel sorry for them.” Whereas other political movements must persuade “the disenfranchised that they have rights and power”, the modern conservative poses a novel justification: “they are aggrieved and entitled—aggrieved because entitled—and already convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victor with a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine, making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection.” (2)

This, in large measure, explains the tone of our national political conventions. For the most part, red meat to the party faithful aside, the Democratic conventions offer visions of hope with Obama leading his convention into a packed outdoor arena and an audience of 85,000 telling the country that we are in this together. The Republicans echoing the pattern of Goldwater and Buchanan gathered in the confines of a Minneapolis arena to grouse about what has been taken and what they fear is about to be taken from them. It was an exercise in the politics of bitterness, the politics of victimhood. At no time did they speak to the economic crises facing the working and middle classes; instead embracing novel ways to continue the business of unraveling the New Deal. No the conservative conscience knows neither intelligence nor compassion; to embrace either would simply impede the restoration.

There are many roads that lead to the miserable place called the Republican Party. Some have been laid low by fortune and find themselves backsliding into the indistinguishable masses and are embittered by the experience. Victims of property and standing. Others, with far less pretensions, simply embraced the wrong team.

Footnotes:

1.http://www.lyricsmania.com/lyrics/rolling_stones_lyrics_278/flowers_lyrics_1416/out_of_time_lyrics_62959.html

2. Robin, Corey. “Out of Place” The Nation June 23, 2008 pages 25-33