Wehner on Will

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everyone's face but their own, which is the chief reason for the kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.--Swift 

Dinner at PGC with some interesting people but no better food.
Hartleib was throwing 98 easily last night.

The New York Police Department shot 341 people in 1971 and just 19 in 2017. 

David Glass and his family on Friday announced the sale of the Kansas City Royals to an ownership group led by local entrepreneur John Sherman in a deal expected to be worth about $1 billion.

Is a Mohawk haircut cultural appropriation?

The late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan invented the anchor-baby policy out of whole cloth and snuck it into a footnote of an opinion written in 1982. Yes, this ancient bedrock principle, this essence of “Who We Are,” dates all the way back to the Reagan administration.The Brennan footnote was not part of the decision. It does not have the force of law. No U.S. Congress or Supreme Court ever debated and then approved the idea that children born to mothers illegally present in the country should automatically become citizens. Consequently, any president or Congress could simply state that children born to illegal aliens are not citizens. If only we had a president or Congress that would do so.--Mean Ann Coulter

There’s no argument about Baltimore being a violent place with failed governance—except when Donald Trump says so.--letter to editor

States have all sorts of crazy ideas that will impact the environment. The Northern river reversal or Siberian river reversal was an ambitious project to divert the flow of the Northern rivers in the Soviet Union, which "uselessly" drain into the Arctic Ocean, southwards towards the populated agricultural areas of Central Asia, which lack water. Research and planning work on the project started in the 1930s and was carried out on a large scale in the 1960s through the early 1980s. The controversial project was abandoned in 1986, primarily for environmental reasons, without much actual construction work ever done. According to Alexey Yablokov, President of the NGO Centre for Russian Environmental Policy, 5–7% redirection of the Ob's water could lead to long-lasting changes in the climate of the Arctic and elsewhere in Russia, and he opposes these changes to the environment affected by Siberian water redirections to the south. (wiki)

There is a fascinating fight between the Babylon Bee and Snopes. Snopes has been fact-checking the Bee's satire for "fraudulent intent."

"When Primo Levi arrived in Auschwitz parched after a brutal train journey, he reached for an icicle to slake his thirst. When a guard yanked it away from him, Levi asked "Why?" The guard replied, "Hier ist kein warum" (Here there is no why). The death camps were an extreme form of -- perhaps the logical culmination of -- what Whitehead calls a "culture of impunity."

When some people have unrestricted and unreviewable power over others -- when no one can be compelled to answer for his actions when asked: "Why?" -- some of those with power will behave like beasts simply because they can." From Will's review of "The Nickel Boys"

Political leaders in Australia, Canada, and much of western Europe have been punished heavily in terms of political support after having endorsed and implemented policies increasing the cost of conventional energy. Is there a reason to believe that the political outcome in the US would prove different? 


On thus day in 1997, Princess Diana was killed.

                              Wehner on Will

(This is from Wehner's discussion with George Will about his new book and President Trump)

"Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.”

Trump supporters argue, I told Will, that the president may be a little rough around the edges, that his tweets might be over the top now and then, but those things are mostly inconsequential and ephemeral. What matters, they say, is what Trump does, not what he says, and what he has done is advance conservative policies and appoint conservative judges.

Will replied that he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics, and our civic discourse is ephemeral.

Trump’s supporters on the right “misunderstand the importance of culture, the viscosity of culture, and I think they are not conservatives, because they don’t understand this,” Will said. “Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries were surreptitious; that is, they were done in secret because they were unacceptable to the country, and once exposed, they were punished and the country moved on. What Mr. Trump has done is make acceptable, make normal, a form of behavior that would get a third grader sent to the principal’s office or to bed without dessert.” Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is, What does Trump bring that’s distinctive?” Will said. “And it’s all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.”

.....

“The answer is in the terms themselves,” Will replied. “The norms, that is, what are normal and what are normative, cease to be normal. And cease to be normative.” His point is that Nixon, for all his crimes, evaded norms; he didn’t challenge them. He didn’t dispute them. He didn’t degrade them. In fact, he was ultimately done in by them. Donald Trump promised when he ran for president that he would overturn our norms, Will has said, and that’s one promise he’s kept.

.....

“The American nation’s finest political career derived from Lincoln’s refusal to allow his country to be seduced into thinking of itself in an unworthy way,” Will wrote 35 years ago. He added that the civic virtues that Madison and the other Founders believed were essential for a free republic to survive “must be willed. It is folly to will an end but neglect to will the means to the end. The presuppositions of our polity must be supplied, politically.”

He added, “To revitalize politics and strengthen government, we need to talk about talk. We need a new, respectful rhetoric—respectful, that is, of the better angels of mankind’s nature.” The reason, he said, is that “mankind is not just matter, not just a machine with an appetitive ghost in it. We are not what we eat. We are, to some extent, what we and our leaders—the emblematic figures of our polity—say we are.”

Today, the most emblematic figure of our polity is Donald J. Trump. Which is a problem.

.....

The most important of all revolutions, Edmund Burke said, is a “revolution in sentiment, manners and moral opinion.” What conservatives like Will and me believe, and what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in, the enormous cultural and social blast radius of his presidency. Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying ,and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.

There was a time when Republicans and conservatives more generally insisted that culture was upstream of politics and in many respects more important than politics; that leaders needed to take great care in cultivating and validating standards of decency, honor, and integrity; and that a president who destroyed rather than defended cultural norms and high standards would do grave injury to America. But now Republicans are willing to sacrifice soul and culture for the sake of promised policy victories."