Meeting John Kasich in my New York Days

It was a Friday in ‘88 when I met a young John Kasich at a bar in German Village called Victory’s. Even then I followed politics enough to appreciate him as a fellow Alex P. Keaton, a conservative policy wonk who made it on merit and not hobnobbing - now, ironically, he spends his semi-retirement gabbing on feckless cable shows in between quixotic runs for president, a kind of X-ray inverse of his younger self. But he has certainly earned it unlike most of us. 

“Those were the days my friend...”. I had a crush on a local anchor named Carol Costello who later found fame on CNN. (Pardon the curse word. )  Ever the romantic, I wrote her poems about the Reds, our shared interest. I still have an autographed photo of her un-airbrushed self. Imagine there was a time before photoshop?  Of course she was beautiful sans touch up as all the young are. 

The star ascended on long drinking nights, stopped-time in the era before smartphones. A certain languor imbued, surely booze-aided, but the lack of viable alternative entertainments created an atmosphere of contentment or maybe a dreamlike reverie. Boredom was always near at hand, tis true, but so was the heightened quality of attention when juxtaposed against boredom. Feast and fast, as it was in medieval liturgical cycles. 

We’d play company softball games and then go to Planks Bier Garten, the avenue of evening bright with happy-go-lucky. Youth, so squandered they say but age is no less so in a time of ephemerals like politics and Facebook. Those summer eves, ripe with life, feel like they happened in a different century now. And so they did. 

I read the poetry of Diana Der Hovanessian, imprimatur’d by having been found at Gotham Book Mart, as well as New York novels heavy with longing like Bright Lights Big City. The bread at the end of the novel was Manhattan itself to me. I lapped up Woody Allen movies for the scenery and sophistication. Longing was ever a leitmotif; I never met a song as affecting as the The Impossible Dream from the musical Man of La Mancha and I was as smitten by the Kennedy Camelot myth as anyone. They all ran together, rhyming: Don Quixote, Christ, King Arthur, JFK in a romantic haze. 

McCarrick Report & Fox Left Turn

JD Flynn writes: "young Catholics..say that they prioritize the perceived personal integrity of leaders ahead of institutional affiliation."

Which doesn’t bode well for the Church these days. Indeed when I was younger I thought love alone was credible, meaning that Mother Teresa was credible and the Church hierarchy were not. She was a one-off who attained holiness independent of the Church (for I knew there were holy people outside the Church) and there didn’t seem an obvious statistical correlation between holiness and church membership.

St. Teresa exemplified heroic virtue far above our poor prelates (and my even poorer self).  So the temptation was to look at the end result (a saint) and try to reverse engineer. This was wrong on a few levels, most notably the implication that one can engineer one’s own holiness instead of understanding it’s a matter of grace.  Love is the result of God’s love. Another miss is to look at the human as essentially a widget, a manufacturing process (avoid mortal sin, the break in the mold that spoils the product) instead of a complexity made in the image of God -- as if one could add the correct inputs and expect the same output (Mother Teresa). Third it was too individualistic not recognizing the image of the Church as the Body of Christ, each member having their own role and in some ways saved together or hung separately. 

Flynn continues: “There is very little saccharine or romantic about following Jesus, especially when confronted with the sinfulness of the Church’s own leaders.” 

Stanley Hauerwas writes of this love: 

“We know what it means to love God only because of God’s love for us through the law and the prophets. This love can be harsh and dreadful, because to be loved by God is to be forced to know ourselves truthfully.

Jesus does not say that we will learn to love our neighbor only when we have learned to love ourselves; he says that we will be able to love ourselves only when we learn to love ourselves as God loves us and our neighbor. Neither Aristotle nor Jesus knew our modern distinction between egoism and altruism. That distinction has encouraged many to assume that the love Jesus recommends is complete self-giving altruism. Jesus’s combination of the two commandments, however, challenges the assumption that we know ourselves well enough to be capable of altruism. Rather, to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves requires that we learn to be befriended by God so that we will have selves sufficient for love.

To be a Christian is to be called to a life of love, but that calling is a lifelong task that requires our willingness to be surprised by what love turns out to be.”

Elsewhere, the Navarre commentary:

“When man is loved, St Thomas says, God is loved, for man is the image of God (cf. ibid., 22:4).

A person who genuinely loves God also loves his fellows because he realizes that they are his brothers and sisters, children of the same Father, redeemed by the same blood of our Lord Jesus Christ: ‘this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also’ (1 Jn 4:21).

So the love of neighbor - or flawed churchman - rests not on their merit but their mere creation.

I did not believe this decades ago. I put a Mother Teresa or a Padre Pio in one category, the rest of us in another.  Partially because I was under the vague impression that God’s action in our creation wasn’t as meaningful or “real” as God’s action in making us saints. In other words, the underlying thinking was that I was created by my parents and God was a Deistic bystander - but Mother Teresa or the Apostles after Pentecost, well, wow!, whoa, there’s God in action! I wanted THAT kind of action (of course, they all suffered greatly so there’s a downside to that type of holiness). 

So the root cause was a lack of faith in the special creation each of us experiences at birth, partially due to absorption of theories of evolution that seem to diminish man, that he was just the result of natural processes. 

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So a lot of news to digest lately. First of which being the long delayed McCarrick report which came out with a whimper instead of a bang. I could be wrong, but before the report we knew that there was a lot of smoke but not a lot fire, a lot of rumors about McCarrick but little hard evidence, and that Pope John Paul II was used to fake reports of clergy sex abuse in Poland during the Soviet era.. 

After the report we now know that there was a lot of smoke but not a lot fire, a lot of rumors about McCarrick but little hard evidence and that Pope John Paul II was used to fake reports of clergy sex abuse in Poland during the Soviet era.

We did learn a few dead or disgraced NJ clerics lied on McCarrick's behalf, if without learning their motives. And if Pope John Paul II was used to spurious allegations from Communists disinformation specialists, what was the Catholic hierarchy but a nest of disinformation specialists!? True enough I suppose, but he believed the vipers.

We learned that McCarrick’s fundraising and sources of money were not determinative, check. No reputations of the living were sacrificed other than Vigano who had it coming as he’d confessed, check. And whatever influence McCarrick had on the conclave or in the Francis era was not clear, check.  

It was not as big as the “big reveal” that the Apple MacBook event this week, although slightly more than the Geraldo opening the Capone vault.  It makes one cynical, politics and religious politics, but that only mirrors the truth of what the Irish said of the world: they will break your heart. And “Look not to princes...” the psalm goes, but it didn’t feel quite as tangible to me as it has the last decade or so. People will disappoint you, leaders will disappoint you absolutely. 

Ultimately, given human nature, I suspect that an organization that hires itself as the investigator has a fibber for a client.  It’s a conflict of interest the size of Jupiter. The most helpful summary of all comes from John Allen, who explains the math of church influence: 100 lay people = 10 priests = 1 bishop.  Pretty hard to override the lies of 3 or 4 bishops. And it’s kind of circular: “we couldn't take McCarrick rumors as trustworthy because everyone lies in the hierarchy so there has to be proof beyond shadow of a doubt.” Which is damning in itself.

____

The second news item - infinitely smaller game to be sure - is the intriguing development of Fox News making a sharp left at the election corner. Telegraphed in small ways, mostly: a dictate to never speak ill of George Soros on air, a cutting off of a presidential news conference on the grounds it was fake news, a farcical debate performance from Chris Wallace who grandiosely considered himself “in the arena” to borrow from Teddy Roosevelt, and a conspicuously early call on Arizona for Biden.  

The most obvious answer is simply that they Roger Ailes died, the conservative helmsman of Fox, and the last link to the groundbreaking idea that the media didn’t have to run the gamut from center-left to left. Now the network is running on the last fumes of its original capital. As Gregg the Obscure says: “Conquest's Second Law: ‘Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.’” And Fox has declared its independence from being explicitly right-wing. 

____

And there’s the controversial election results. Distrust of the numbers is the predictable and inevitable outcome of Democrats insisting on loose voting laws and Republicans in state legislatures and Congress capitulating in response. How could the train wreck any other way?  An irresistible force (the Democrats wanting to cheat) meets a very fluid object (the Republican surrender monkeys). Tucker Carlson sharply says that conspiracy theories are the inevitable result of the vacuum created by leaders lying to us. Yes. 

Meanwhile Ross Douthat piles on, with a column appreciative of the possibility of a return to “normalcy” and “calm” in the Biden era, which of course implies that the Trump era wasn’t. Which is precisely the opposite of the truth. Only in an era of unusual calm, of no wars or economic crises, could a media have such leisure to gin up fake dramas like Russian collusion or make the latest Trump tweet sound like the beginning of Fascistic America. 

The press wanting normalcy is like a man who beat his wife to death and afterward saying, “I’m looking forward to a period of calm and normalcy with my next wife.”  Well, yeah, I guess...

The only drama of the last four years were riots caused by a cop who killed a black man, and the same thing happened in Ferguson under Obama. This one was heightened by the preceding lockdown but in the end has about as much to do with Trump as my dog Max has with world peace.

Four Years Ago Tiday

Everyone started out so chipper and energized, especially George Stephanapolous, but grimness started to set in.  Terry Moran said the unthinkable: that this was starting to look like the Brexit vote which he covered in London, adding that he's having a "bad sense of deja vu" and then by repeating himself, self-correcting by removing the telling adjective "bad".  As he was saying this, panelist Matthew Dowd crossed his arms in an "I don't want to hear this" gesture and Jonathon Karl frowned and looked down at his paper.  Moran picked up on it of course and said, "I'm not saying that's happening...".

Jonathon Karl was the comforter-in-chief on the set, reminding the panel constantly over 20-minute intervals that there was this magic cache of Broward County votes that could put Hillary on top there (despite the uncounted Panhandle votes).  Wishful thinking in action.

Strategist Alex Castellanos was the sharpest knife in the drawer, seeing very early on that Trump was going to have trouble in Colorado but do better than expected in Michigan based simply on how folks were voting in Florida.

When the race was revealed to be close in Virginia, a state Hillary was expected to carry without a problem, Karl had to admit that this one was closer than he thought it would be.  Stephanapolous grew concerned that his comforter wasn't doing his job, so he swung it out to Clinton shill Donna Brazile, who offered many reassuring words about "long lines" in Detroit and uncounted votes and how confident she felt.  Stephanapolis pushed back, saying he had reports of weakness in Flint and Detroit, but Brazile said these type of voters vote late in the day, after 4 or 5pm.  But she still seemed a bit tight-faced and forced-smiling.

Virginia seemed to put the fear of God in everyone, causing even Charles Gibson to speak for the first time (prior to this he was the Clarence Thomas of the panel).

Dowd offered an unlikely scenario where Clinton could win popular vote by a whopping 5% and still lose if these tight races fall for Trump.

At 10:52 George recognizes the gravity of the situation (it felt like the dawning doom of the men on the Edmund Fitzgerald), saying if Trump wins Michigan or Pennsylvania and holds on to the other leads he has a "real possibility right there. Incredible."

He swings it to Cokie Roberts who makes her debut chime-in. "This is very different from what we were seeing earlier this evening... rural voters ready to show their distaste for the current country."  Charlie Gibson followed up with how dismaying the polarity is of the groups, of how divided this country is by sex, race, geographical location, etc...

Rebecca Jarvis announces the Dow futures down 500 points and the Mexican peso is down, further signs of the Edmund Fitzgerald's demise.

States of Confusion

The more I read about this election the more confused I get.  My comfort level with the ’20 election stats evaporated when I realized that Trump won a larger percentage of votes in ’20 versus ’16 in OH, IN, MI, PA, WI (among many others) and still he lost the last three of those states. I don’t know what to believe, like this wild stuff concerting Bedford’s Law.  I don’t know Bedford or that he had a law. Probably fake news given the preponderance of advertisements on the page but...

The voting pool was bigger this time of course.  Ohio picked up about 5.5% new voters this time versus in ’16 while Michigan picked up an astounding 14+%.  Both are Midwest battlegrounds ostensibly but very different outcomes. One might say suspiciously so as Ohio’s voting system is far more locked-down and reliable than Michigan’s, so there’s that.  

Someone Tell Noonan the GOP Is No Longer the Party of Noblesse Oblige

Yup, it was telegraphed: 

“The race is well within the margin of cheating and Democrats are much more inclined to cheat. That’s why they are against voter ID, against signature matching, for cheat-by-mail and don’t want Republicans to watch the votes being counted.” (Alex Marlow)

Peggy Noonan is resigned: 

“‘Landslide Lyndon,’ ‘Vote early and often for Curley’—these are part of our political vocabulary for a reason. JFK [won]…with the votes of the dead. A certain amount of misbehavior is in our genes, and in democracy’s. Elections are human enterprises.”

Interesting that all the examples she brings up - LBJ, JFK and James Curley - were all Democrat politicians. It seems that particular vice is mostly in Democrats’ genes.

She then goes on to applaud Nixon for not contesting the 1960 election and suggests Trump should do the same. She says fighting for the election can lead to fighting in the streets. In other words, the Republican role is to be the adult in the room and enable Democrat bad behavior. That’s been the modus operandi for many a year, with Republicans taking the role as gracious losers. Noblesse oblige. But now the parties are realigning and the working class is drawn to Republicans (more specifically, to Trump), and they aren’t much into that noblesse oblige because they aren’t that privileged. 

I’m just hoping the Democrat effectiveness at cheating will bleed into effectiveness at governance though there’s certainly been no history of that. 

Slummin’ in Politics

So it now seems pretty obvious that minus the virus and with the March economy Trump would’ve won handily. No matter what happens it at least shows the outer limits of media power and made for a decent experiment.

A close election gives one permission, so I tell myself, to glory in the storyline and to endlessly slum in politics. It’s addictive, with all sorts of plot twists like a hundred thousand Biden ballots showing up in the dark of night, or Fox News calling Arizona before it called Florida, or how they quit counting votes in one state due to “a lack of printer ink”. My kingdom for printer ink!

And the pollsters! They are like Nostradamus minus the accuracy. Think polls in ‘16 were bad? ‘20 said, “hold my beer”.

Meanwhile old Joe’s not worried. He’s like, “Let Trump wear himself out campaigin’. I’ll just print me up some ballots in the basement.” So THAT’S where all the printer ink went. I’m picturing a Schoolhouse Rock video on how a Democrat becomes a president: “when no one looks / add ballots on the books”.

Oddly, I seem more invested in Biden losing Arizona and thus making Fox News be forced to retract than rooting Trump across the finish line.  With a GOP Senate one can relax greatly and I fear that whoever wins the presidency is going to rue it given the virus, economy, etc...

But with Fox News....after Chris Wallace and the debate debacle and now this. Experience teaches that most right-leaning institutions (and SCOTUS justices) turn left over time. So when Fox sits on Florida and then jumps all over Arizona it’s like I’m experiencing David Souter PTSD.

I'm kind of amused by how the networks treat it as so scientific - pure math - in determining when to call an election. But for Fox News the head quant was a proud Democrat who voted for Hillary. Better yet, he’s been friendly and talked often with his counterpart at the AP according to a story published before the election. Collusion with the AP! Math can never compete with ambition and political bias. 

Something Other Than Politics

Was startled by beauty recently in the form of a red fox meandering along our fence line. I love the wildlife we see in our own backyard. I called the dogs but the fox was long gone. A beautiful animal, almost like a mirage or a firework - there for a second and then disappearing.

Naturalist Hal Borland writes of the “incredible wealth of beaten gold” beneath the maples, the fallen leaves (have I ever consciously connected “Fall” being called so because of the fall of leaves? Surely when I was a kid.) 

Borland writes of how dependable the movement of the stars each fall:

There is eternity in those star patterns. They have been substantially the same in each October, each April and June as well, since man invented the calendar. Caesar saw those same stars in the same places as we see them, and so did the earlier Pharaoh. The Stone Age caveman saw them and was awed by them. And they will still be there 10,000 years from now. Look at the sky, these October evenings, and see the certainty of forever. 

___

Meanwhile days list in the meager desert of politics befitting no man. The vice of the quarter-educated as Russell Kirk said. But I cling to Chesterton’s line about religion and politics being the only things to talk about... 

A wanderlust invades if only because the lockdown impends. Sure, the virus, maybe, but as much as anything the chains of really. cold. weather.  Reality has tided now, with tomato plants overnight sickened by frost. Thirty degrees with a twenty mph wind in these parts, not fit for man nor beast. Only nordic dogs and eskimos go out in the windblown frost. 

Italo Calvino: 

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

Suzanne Noffke, OP:

     The Greek word mysterion was translated into Latin by two terms: mysterium and sacramentum. In later usage the term sacramentum emphasizes the visible sign of the hidden reality of salvation which was indicated by the term mysterium.

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Let us now speak of famous Christians. 

I have a soft spot for Eugene Peterson, the Bible translator and Presbyterian pastor who recently passed.  Part of it was not knowing much about him and thus having the bliss of ignorance. I found where a couple years ago Peterson said he would officiate a gay wedding.  No wonder Bono loves him.  A day later he backed down after the hubbub. And not due to a high view of Scripture, as he explained. 

On the one hand, if you’re not Catholic and you’re ok with contraception then it’s hard to see what logically is bad about gay sex from a reason point-of-view. Both are orgasms divorced from reproduction. But from a faith alone/Scriptural point-of-view it’s easy because there are passages against homosexuality if not contraception. So Peterson isn’t quite as “Bible alone” as his fellow Protestants, he wants to use reason, and that got him in trouble. He’s a man without a country on that one. 

I also ponder the meaning of Bishop Barron endorsing the infamous Fr. Martin’s book on prayer. A Twitter cynic said that they made Barron a bishop to compromise him. I wonder if the leftward drift of hierarchy like himself and Cardinal Schonberg are out of a familial duty to “follow Peter.”  Barron’s starstruck meeting with the pontiff certainly was eye-opening to me at least. The pope is Bono for Barron. 

Prayer implies discernment, something Fr. Martin would seem to lack. (But who am I to judge!?) But the mystery of a “holy boldness”, if not “sin boldly”, holds within it something attractive.  As (Protestant) Eric Metaxsis said in his book on another Martin (Luther, who was another inexplicably self-confident heretic): 

“It was far better that someone try to understand God and truth with the possibility of getting some things wrong than to depend on others to understand these things. Freedom with God, with the possibility of growth and death, was better than the safe fetters of childhood.” 

The Catholic would argue that the pasture is wide open for the sheep to wander theologically, with only the far cliffs denoted by warning signs. 

Using My Algorithm to Predict the Result

So back here I tried to come up with a prediction model for winning the presidency. Tomorrow (or next week or month or...) it will get put to the test. 

I think in the modern era (1960s on), there are three components. 

 1) A feint in the opposite political direction. (Works for popes too since many thought Bergoglio was a conservative when he feinted that way years ago.) 

2) Comfort with television and/or telegenic. 

3) A lack of experience. Theoretically people’s thirst for a lack of experience must eventually find a bottom, though hopefully before we amend the Constitution and start electing pre-teens. Some would argue our current occupant is a pre-teen but that’s off topic.

So using this criteria: 

1) Biden has not impressively feinted in the opposite direction. He gave the VP slot to a California radical instead of someone like Amy Klobuchar. There has been no Bret Baier or Tucker Carlson interview, no Biden appearances outside the bubble. Trump is different as he has feinted a bit in the opposite direction, trying hard to woo Black voters by criminal justice reform and funding Black colleges. And of course he’s gone on leftwing outfits (see “60 Minutes”).  So I give this one to Trump.

2) Trump is of course supremely comfortable with television. Biden less so, although he didn’t come off as poorly as anticipated during the debates. (Short-term anti-senility drugs work!) Advantage Trump.

3) Both candidates have experience now. Trump has had four years in presidency and Biden has had 4,781 years in D.C.  So this is a push given that it feels like Trump has been in office for 4,781 years. 

So the advantage goes to Trump 2-0-1.  It’s possible this model will not work this time due to the unprecedented advertising campaign of NYT, CNN, ABC, etc...  For the model to be proven ineffective I think I need to predict correctly only about 85.7% of the time so it will live to see another day regardless of outcome. But I may need to tweak it to add a “propaganda factor” in which I acknowledge the power of Pravda. I would use the combined ratings of ABC-CBS-MSNBC versus that of Fox News and compute a rough factor of media influence. 

C’mon Man

It’s kind of humorous to see some American bishops bending over backwards to try to justify potential votes for Biden. I mean, “c’mon man!. That doesn’t pass the smell test. Or the “laugh test”. 

John Martignoni pointed out the obvious, that is: 

“Let’s say that instead of supporting abortion, a candidate was a staunch supporter of laws that allowed for the lynching of a million black men a year. Could you still vote for that candidate? Would their position on healthcare or immigration outweigh their position on lynching?”

Hell no. 

Everybody would be a single issue voter if a million 10-year old Americans were killed every year due to laws recognizing the right to kill 10-year old kids. It’s the invisibility of the unborn that dooms them. Would Bishop Barron honestly say that you could vote for a candidate who supported killing a million ten-year old kids annually, just as long as you had some other reason to vote for that candidate? 

I can think of a few reasons why we’re continuing the fiction: 

1. Gov’t monies and funding for Catholic charities require Democrat help. 

2. Evangelistic outreach to nones in Democrat party; we don’t want to have one party associated as the “religion party” and the other as the non-religious party. 

3. Don’t want to lose 501c3 tax exempt status. 

4. Hoping to protect religious liberty by not upsetting Democrat leaders. 

5. Bishops want to maintain the delusion of power, of having influence over elected leaders.

6. Millions of American Catholics proudly vote Democratic and it would be ill-advised to piss them off. 

I get that, so there’s a prudential case to be made on that basis. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to suspend disbelief.

Morality in CoronaLand

Billy Cunningham of WLW radio fame asked Gov Dewine a blunt question: “My producer says covid overblown. He says over 99% of people don’t die from it and he’s going to live his life the way he wants. What do I tell him?” Dewine says, “tell him it’s not about him. If someone wants to get in a car and do 90mph on a deserted road and they get in a wreck, that’s okay, that’s their choice. But if they do it with children in the car that’s different.”

It’s an interesting question because you could look at it two ways: one is the DeWine way, that you should want to protect others by protecting yourself. The other way though is compelling too - it is that other people should not be so afraid of death and that you are not responsible for that overblown fear and that preserving one’s life on earth is not the most important thing.

My own selfishness is mostly that I don't want to get the virus for myself, alas. Not the most noble of reasons.

Missing the Pre-Internet Amnesia Days

Meyers-Bridges has me as INTJ, the J for “judging”. That seems a particularly bad fit in the internet age because I can easily get stuck with nursing injustices simply by the transparency of google searches and social media. The evil thrive, the psalmist says, but before the ‘net I could always assume that justice had been done and I’d missed it. It’s hard to imagine now, but one couldn't simply type into a computer and find out, for example, how the career of Cardinal Farrell is going after his being mentored and living with disgraced Cardinal McCarrick and proclaiming he hadn’t a clue about McCarrick’s proclivities (answer: swimmingly, Pope Francis’s right hand man). Or how Cardinal Toobin of “nighty, night!” fame can be googled and found immediately that he says, “hey you can vote for Biden with a clear conscience!”. Or you could obsess (er, I could obsess) over how it was that Epstein got the sweetheart immunity deal which let him off the hook for years and abused countless other young girls. The people most responsible for that, of course, are doing just fine as Google search will attest. Pre-Google I could assume they were living a chastened, austere life in the metaphorical equivalent of upper Siberia.

So there’s an upside to the forgetfulness that the old media environment induced. A little amnesia is a good thing. Because justice in this world is rare enough, and my own thirst for justice isn’t a good thing for a Christian who believes in forgiveness. One translation of a line in Romans 3 is: “God sacrificed Jesus on the altar of the world to clear that world from sin.” And another translation Rom 2:1: “So, friend, if thou canst see thy neighbor’s faults, no excuse is left thee, whoever thou art; in blaming him, thou dost own thyself guilty, since thou, for all thy blame, livest the same life as he.”

Bottum's Twitter Exchange

Interesting to see two bigtime journalists for bigtime publications sneer at Jody Bottum on Twitter:

Wesley Yang: “Interesting to see Joseph Bottum writing for the Epoch Times”

Joseph Bottum: “They asked.”

Graeme Wood: “Do you ever say no?”

Joseph Bottum: “Never to the outlet. Sometimes to the topic, if I can’t see an approach. Often, if it pays little. And always to the take proposed, if I don’t believe it. Is that bad? Maybe, since I’m still an unsuccessful writer, scribbling away at pennyeach pieces at my rickety deal desk.”

(Later):

Joseph Bottum: “They are pushing, I think, toward an attempt to measure the ad-hominem fever of the age: Must we appear only among those we agree with on most everything?  You can see it in the lack of support for @nypost in battle with Twitter: Political sides are more important than fellow journalists. Even "fellow" has a dated and outmoded feel. These days, it’s more like “If you ain’t got the right politics, you ain’t no fellow of mine.”

The Journalism Mafia Wins: or Don’t Fight With Those Who Buy Ink by the Barrel

Looks like the Hunter Biden story is not going to have much of an impact. Most voters are kind of resigned to politicians getting rich by making contacts and doing favors. Rounding error difference between what Biden did and what Bill Clinton did by giving speeches for millions. My initial gut instinct was that this wouldn’t be a big enough story and I could’ve trusted my gut. 

The National Review editors all gave the story a 3 on a scale of 1-10 as far as political impact. Part of that is due, of course, to the mainstream media not touching the story.  They say Trump could kill a guy on Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters; similarly Biden could sell state secrets for millions and it wouldn’t bother his reporters.

The whole fraught relationship of Republicans to the media goes like this: Reporters are the mafia guys who do nothing in the neighborhood but collect some “protection” money. You give them their due, some attention, a story now and then, don’t get out of line in your politics, and they’ll slant your coverage only a little. Keeps them honest more of the time. 

But, as usual, people get greedy. The “arrangements” get more pricey. Eventually the Republican voters (if not officeholders other than maybe Newt Gingrich) decided they’d had enough of the racket. They got themselves a fighter who wouldn’t pay any protection money. And it worked enough to get him the presidency, no small thing, although with help from a media that was blindsided. 

But what happens when you get uppity and refuse to pay protection money? You get killed. Or you go to the police and the bad guys get put in jail. Of these two scenarios the second was never going to happen. There’s no check on bad journalism and in fact it’s rewarded. 

So back in ’16 the Trump win was a pyrrhic victory, a thumb in the nose of the do-nothing bully on the corner. And now we Republicans get to pay the piper.  If Trump loses, the Republican officeholders will crawl on their knees to their mafia dons, ask forgiveness, and pay a much steeper price for the trouble they caused.  

Scoring Your Confirmation Battles, Scully & Sasse

I'm working on an algorithm to determine how difficult a given confirmation battle will be. Kavanaugh's situation was basically a perfect storm while Amy Coney Barrett's a comparative romp in the park. 

So let's award points based on the political landscape. A score over 10 makes for a difficult journey while under 5 is a breeze. 

Are you male? Add 3 pts. Sexual harassment by a woman is much less believable, thus removing a tool from the progressive arsenal. 

Are the GOP votes lined up prior to start of confirmation? Subtract 2 points if so.  Barrett gets -2 while Kavanaugh had fence-sitters like Sen. Collins which encouraged desperate Democrat tactics. 

Are there Democrats on the Judiciary committee currently running for president? Add 3 points for each one. Kavanaugh adds 9 points while Barrett none.    

 Is there a Spartacus in the building?  Add 2 points. Both ACB and Kavanaugh add 2 points.   

So overall Kavanaugh scored 17 points while Barret sat at 0.Sen 

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So Sen. Ben Sasse, talked about Trump in a (self-leaked?) phone call. His gripes, and he has a few, are perhaps numbingly familiar and unpersuasive to most non-liberal voters. You can say he's heroic in the Kasich mode for that, or politically tone-deaf.  Here is a breakdown of his complaints: 

1. "Trump mishandled the coronavirus." Well Trump was mediocre on it but I'm not sure a "C" grade represents "mishandling". The course of covid runs through individual actions, not government actions. The fault, dear America, lay not in the star (of the Apprentice), but in ourselves. For a conservative like Sasse to expect Big Daddy gov’t to "handle" a novel virus is Sad!

2. "Kisses dictators’ butts" Well, who cares? Does not kissing dictators’ butts change the behavior of dictators one iota? Does it bother Sasse so much that some foreigner the senator doesn’t like is getting his/her butt kissed? This is a primo example of a nothing burger. 

3. "Sells out our allies." I'd like a bit more specificity on this one. It's certainly possible but I'm hoping this doesn't simply mean "we're making our NATO partners pay their fair share". 

4.  "Spends like a drunken sailor". My understanding is that Congress is in charge of the budget. To the extent he signs expensive bills, so did Obama and G.W.Bush. Unlike Bush, Trump actually had a mandate to spend because the American people voted with the understanding he would not cut spending. See "the fault, dear Brutus..." above. 

5. "Mistreats women." Some women yes. Some men too. He's got character flaws no doubt. I understand my local garbage collector also mistreats women sometimes. Should we fire him? 

6. "Trash-talks evangelicals behind their backs." Who cares? He’s done more in actions for evangelicals than evangelical George W. Bush. Is this actually supposed to be persuasive? Everyone in Washington and in media trash-talks evangelicals.  

7. "Flirts with white supremacists."  He's also condemned them numerous times but is understandably annoyed liberals never get called out for flirting with black supremacists. 

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Steve Scully I hardly knew ye! The ghost of Brian Lamb is quaking, only Lamb's not dead (bring back Lamb!).  

The mini-scandal is interesting on a number of levels. 

First, who knew that someone so placid and with such admirable self-control when taking crazy calls on C-Span (what a poker face!) was taking himself so seriously that he had to ask Anthony Scaramucci for advice? I mean there's the real scandal. 

Let's recall more about the sage of New York that Scully called upon. Scaramucci was let go by Trump two weeks into his term for attacking Reince Priebus, calling him a "paranoid schizophrenic" in a conversation with a reporter, and after also directing profanity-laced insults at Steve Bannon that are too spicy to post on a Catholic blog.  

Then Scully doubled-down, with the hackneyed lie, "I was hacked!". A very subtle hacking based on his timeline. 

The larger issue is that Trump is an unwitting revealer of character - just ask the many "journalists" who have been outed as frauds and hacks by him. You could call Trump a one-man honest-broker detector, a tester of character, like whether your house can stand up to really strong winds. In Catholic parlance, Trump is a near occasion of sin for reporters.

Reading the backstory, it appears that Trump got under Scully's skin by accusing him of not being objective which, ironically, led to Scully outing himself as not objective. But that's exactly the human condition. Our idols smash us. Mine do all the time. 

Biden's coming victory, despite the semi-hidden (by some media) corruption inherent in his fabulous wealth on a modest salary and his son's play-for-pay scheme that apparently required him to dole out some of the dough to "the Big Man", shows that it's more important to hide your flaws than that they be easily seen. He who hides them best, wins. I would argue that Trump's flaws are so transparent that he is less to be feared than the many ambitious pols who are more subtle. The devil's lies are subtle, not like the jester's lies. 

Ultimately the story goes: in 2015 and 2016, those conservatives wise in their own estimation were shamed by the simple, by the mass of Republican primary voters who gave their vote to Donald Trump. 

Excerpt from Peggy Noonan Column

 The Barrett hearings were almost as strange. They were, as usual, not really about her and her views but the senators and theirs. But it seemed to me that slightly more than usual they treated her like a piece of furniture. There were bizarre questions. From Mazie Hirono of Hawaii: “Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?” No, Judge Barrett said. Ms. Hirono says she asks this of all nominees, but it would have been nice if she’d said it with a hint of doubt.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse delivered a Rachel Maddow-style monologue on “dark money.” His data board linking “phony front groups” was wonderfully John Nash-like. The not-funny part, the sadness of it, actually, is that you could do a mirror-image chart of Democratic activism and money surrounding court nominees, and it would have been a public service if he had.

I don’t know Judge Barrett’s deeper thoughts on the Second Amendment, but by the end of the hearings I was hoping she’d pull out a gun. 

As for her Republican supporters, some of them went on about her large family and motherhood in a way that seemed, subtly, to obscure the depth of her intellect and the breadth of her command of the law. I think some of them couldn’t quite grok a mother of seven who’s their intellectual superior, so they reverted to form and patronized her. And competed with her. Sen. John Kennedy seemed especially eager to save the drowning woman, not noticing she wasn’t drowning and appears, as a lawyer, to swim better than he. 

They lauded her large family in a way that lacked finesse, by which I mean at times they sounded like Mussolini advancing pro-natalism as a matter of state. If Judge Barrett were single and childless like David Souter, she would still be a deeply impressive nominee. If she were married and the parent of nine like Antonin Scalia, she would be impressive. It is not irrelevant that she is bringing up seven children. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions,” said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and every child is a new experience. But when you focus on the personal at the expense of the public, you wind up with Mr. Kennedy asking, “Who does the laundry in your house?” I remember when a senator asked Scalia that and Scalia laughed in his face. Oh wait, no one ever asked Scalia that. 

Guys, did you not notice the immediate recall with which she summoned, and the depth with which she analyzed, the history of American jurisprudence? Say thank you, God, and move on. 

She will be confirmed. Having spent a long time reading of her and her decisions, what strikes me is a story she told last spring, at Notre Dame. It is personal but sheds light on her thinking. She and her husband had suddenly received a call saying a baby had come up for adoption. But she had just found out she was pregnant with her fifth child. She threw on a jacket, took a walk, and wound up on a bench in a cemetery. She thought, “If life is really hard, at least it’s short.” They adopted the baby. 

There have been many men on the court who seemed deep and were celebrated for their scholarly musings but were essentially, as individuals and in their conception of life, immature. But this is not a child, a sentimentalist, an ideological warrior. This is a thinker who thinks about reality.

She’s not what you expect when you open your handy box of categories. People who understand conservatism in a particular, maybe limited way—they don’t know what they just got. 

Modern, a particular kind of Catholic, a woman, with a lived emphasis on people in community—this is not a “standard conservative.” In her independence from partisan politics, in her lived faith in higher persons, spirits and principles, this is rather a dangerous woman.

And she’s sane.