Not even slow sculpture

What is the act of understanding?

Can I make you understand?  How?  How would I do that?

I'm listening to Terry Gross interview the Rev. Rob Shenck about his anti-abortion activism, and how his opinions have changed.  He just said, in paraphrase, that he came to realize his activism was just leading to seeking one more victory, one more law, one more exertion of power (my words, there) over others, and in a long period of prayerful reflection he came to realize he was pursuing power, not the Gospel he loved.  Again, I don't mean to capture perfectly what he said but to focus on the nature of "understanding."  Shenck started with one version of understanding:  that abortion was wrong and must be opposed through law however possible; and ended with another:  that the choice of abortion is between an individual and God (he's still a Christian, after all).  And what he was describing in my poor paraphrase was the process of understanding that changed his, well....understanding.

So, what is the act of understanding?  And how can I make you change it?

I have a friend in ministry who just mentioned a church member, a "good guy," who has told my friend that he's started carrying a gun in case the "black kids" try to "start something."  "Ugh," my friend said.  I know my friend well; he is a good person.  I don't doubt this third party is a good person, too.  But how do you get him to understand he is wrong?  What is the act of understanding, in the first place?

Were I that man's pastor, I might preach about the power of powerlessness, about the faith in God that leads you away from fear of others, especially those you "other" by race.  Would that change his understanding?  I doubt it.  That would require him to understand as I do, and I don't quite understand why he thinks as he does.  Oh, I think I do.  I think I'm in a superior position to him, and he needs to "learn" to "understand" as I do, because my understanding is better than his.  If you've ever tried that with somebody, how did that work out for you?

What is the act of understanding?  As a pastor, I would feel compelled to try to understand that man's point of view, not to get him to understand mine.  I would still hold to mine, but how do I get him to understand it?  At what point does he?  Consider the example of the parables.  Most of them were taught to me as allegories.  It was a hermeneutic, a way of interpretation that was simple because it had the weight of tradition behind it, and because the interpretive work had already been done.  No need to re-examine the stories:  just take the explanation and move on.  So the story of the 99 sheep is a wonderful story about how much God loves us, and what God will do to save us (from dangers metaphysical or physical, depending on your theology).  Nobody worried about the insanity of leaving 99 sheep unprotected to rescue one.  What are the 99?  Chopped liver? If you think you're the one sheep, it's comforting.  Now think of yourself as one of the 99.

Or the woman who lost a coin, and burned lamp oil all night to find it rather than waiting for the sunrise.  Having found the coin (and used up the oil), she then throws a party, spending the worth of the coin in celebration (probably more than the coin's worth, if you count the oil).  Nobody ever pointed that obvious issue out to me.

Or the pearl of great price, which the merchant buys by selling everything he owns.  Now what?  You can't eat a pearl, you can't live in it, you can't trade it for clothes without losing the pearl.  What was the allegory again?  Something to do with attaining heaven, if I recall; although that's not in the parable at all, but it makes more sense than the parable does.

But the parables weren't meant to be understood; that's another hermeneutic, and one I find more applicable.  The parables weren't meant to be allegories, they were meant to be confounding.  They were meant to break understanding.  The kingdom of God is like a mustard plant that rivals the cedars of Lebanon:  except mustard was a weed, and it was a bush, at best, not a towering tree.  What the heck?  Worse, the kingdom of God is like an assassin who practices with the knife all night, then goes out at morning ready to commit the deed.  What?

What is the act of understanding in these parables?  That we don't understand?  That we can't understand?  That we need to move away from understanding as the source of our confidence, our comfort, our identity in the world?

What is the act of understanding?  Is it merely accepting what you find acceptable, what you've been told is acceptable, and rejecting (conversely) what you deem objectionable?  And how do you understand?  I can tell you as a teacher that I work very hard to make ideas understandable to my students; but whether or not they understand is up to them.  I cannot make them understand; I cannot force their understanding.  I cannot understand for them, or enter into their act of understanding and correct it or make it work for them.  It is a personal pursuit, dare I say an existential one?  Rev. Shenck understood the failure of his Christian humility (again, my terminology, not his) over time, and in prayerful reflection (his words there).  Could anyone have made him understand that?  Or did he have to understand it himself?

It can't be done for you.  You can only do it yourself.  And like love, you'll know it when you experience it.  But it is not the same thing as thinking you understand; and it is not an act of will.  If anything, it is a revelation, an insight you don't control, cannot wish on yourself, cannot make yourself have.

Think of it as the power of powerlessness.

"Let's All Be a Little Less Piggy"*

I'm always fascinated by these arguments, especially when they directly reference King and/or Gandhi:

People will behave better, Nussbaum argues, if we admit our vulnerability and work to create a society where everyone experiences less fear and uncertainty, and a greater sense of positive citizenship. She takes as her model the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, and advocates a “mandatory program of youth national civil service” of three years’ duration. One of this program’s purposes would be to expose citizens at a relatively early age to “the diversity of people in their country,” and foster the sense that we all have a stake in each other’s well-being. She knows that most people consider such a program “politically impossible,” but “if people don’t talk about it, it certainly won’t be possible. So, I put my cards on the table.” These are the moments when Nussbaum seems most out of touch with the nation she inhabits. Even the wokest young Berner clamoring for socialism would surely balk at this prospect.

Yes, we would all balk.  This was the ideal of Brown v. Board, a Supreme Court holding now honored more in the breach than in the keeping.  The idea was that, when black and white children went to school together, racism would disappear.  Instead, white parents fled into private schools, or neighborhoods black families couldn't afford, and solved the problem of Brown by continuing the problem of Brown, even though now we have no "separate but equal" schools in America.

Nussbaum's argument reeks of Rawl's "Theory of Justice:"  if we all just understood our proper relationship to each other, we'd all realize we're in the same boat with the same problems, and we'd rationally reach a conclusion that benefits everyone equally.  Which, of course, is not at all what King and Gandhi advocated.  To begin with, while neither King nor Gandhi spurned reason, they started from a religious viewpoint:  Hinduism for Gandhi, Christianity for King.  So if we take their model of nonviolent activism, we have to take their method for making that non-violence effective, and that involves religion.  If you are going to reference King or Gandhi and say "Oh, we should do what they did!", then you have to consider what they did, and how they did it.  It wasn't just that they were non-violent, but how they were non-violent, and why they were non-violent.

I take it back:  Nussbaum's argument reeks of "Kumbayah."  You know, we all hold hands around the campfire and sing and the whole world will be healed.  Except that experience doesn't outlast the campfire, much less change hearts and minds.   I'm a bit of a cynic in the matter, actually, as I'm not sure what does change hearts and minds except relentless effort to be changed.  Dr. King described the process of his followers admitting their vulnerability:

We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Who among us is willing to do even that much?  Only a few people did when Dr. King was alive, but they were enough.  He died, and the non-violent movement he led died, too.  There is a huge amount of effort behind those simple words "We began a series of workshops on nonviolence."  Who among us would attend those diligently?  Much of the problem here is that Dr. King was promoting the power of powerlessness; and even the "young Berner" (Bernie supporter, I guess?) is interested in power, not powerlessness.

And the "mandatory program of youth national service."  Yeah, that'll work.  We already have a mandatory program involving youth:  it's called "public school."  I teach the products of that program every year.  Most of them appear rigidly resistant to it, and barely touched by it.  They haven't been shaped into people with open and curious minds, eager for knowledge and new ideas.  Mostly, they are resistant to even more education, even though, at the college level, education is no longer mandatory.  I know people who went through the Peace Corps; but they volunteered for that service, and were accepting of the challenges it posed to them.  Some people go to church voluntarily, and probably even today some do not (children).  Some are changed by the experience; but some are not.
Some realize, with or without church, that we have a stake in each other's well-being; some do not, and never will.  I'm not sure how we nurture that ideal, except on a very individual basis.  In the meantime, the product of a mandatory program of youth service is the very Trump supporters Nussbaum is concerned about.

If we're going to do this, we have to return to basics.  Western philosophy really began with Socrates, the teacher of Plato.  Interestingly, Socrates never espoused a program of thought that could be applied to everyone (Plato did that).  His approach was entirely personal, wholly individual.  The best dialogues are Socrates in conversation with one other person (well, except for the "Apology," where he takes on all the men of Athens; and he only persuades them to sentence him to death).  If you take his statements in "Crito" as valid, you could argue that Socrates saw himself as "work[ing] to create a society where everyone experiences less fear and uncertainty, and a greater sense of positive citizenship." (No, not Nussbaum's words, so I'm being a bit unfair to her.)  But Socrates did that on a personal basis, not on the basis of a described ideal everyone would subscribe to once they heard it.  In the "Euthyphro" Socrates destroys the idea that there is an "ideal" which can be known by all (or by anyone), and yet in "Crito" he avers that every individual must have an ideal that is the raison d'être of the individual's life.  But that is for the individual, not for the community.  But must we all follow the example of Socrates in order to live a just life in a just society?  And how would we do that?  How would we change our hearts and minds order to be as ironic as Socrates?  No, that certainly wouldn't work out well:

Irony...has no purpose, it's purpose is immanent in itself, a metaphysical purpose. The purpose is none other than irony itself. When an ironist exhibits himself as other than he actually is, it might seem that his purpose were to induce others to believe this. His actual purpose, however, is merely to feel free, and he is through irony....

With doubt the subject constantly seeks to penetrate the object, and his misfortune consists in the fact that the object constantly eludes him. With irony, on the other hand, the subject is always seeking to get outside the object and this he attains by becoming conscious at every moment that the object has no reality. With doubt the subject is witness to a war of conquest in which every phenomenon is destroyed, because the essence always resides behind the phenomenon. But with irony the subject constantly retires from the field and proceeds to talk every phenomenon out of its reality in order to save himself, that is, in order to preserve himself in his negative independence of everything....

For irony everything becomes nothingness, but nothingness may be taken in several ways. The speculative nothingness is that which at every moment is vanishing for concretion, since it is itself the demand for the concrete...The mystical nothingness is a nothingness for representation, a nothingness which yet is as full of content as the silence of the night is eloquent for one who has ears to hear. Finally, the ironic nothingness is that deathly stillness in which irony returns to 'haunt and jest' (this last word taken wholly ambiguously.)(Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, tr. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington, Indiana; Indiana University Press 1968, 273-75)

"Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation."  And irony is certainly not about whole sight; but religion, arguably, is.  It doesn't have to be; it is certainly used to be exclusive as much as it is used to be inclusive.  But the statement "let us reason together" is radically exclusive, as "reason" in that phrase is a highly restricted term. The reasoning of Aquinas is not the reasoning of Russell (as Wittgenstein well understood, though Russell didn't). Can religion bring us together? No; it can bring some of us, but certainly not all of us. But then, bring us together to do what? Wield power over Trump supporters? Or to effect the power of powerlessness?  The latter is more likely to increase the positive sense if our nation's diversity and foster a sense that we actually are all in this together. But how do you see that the first will be last and the last first outside of a vision of the basileia tou theou and the God of Mary's Magnificat who will reveal the hearts of the proud and cast the mighty from their thrones?

*Richard Nixon's Council of Economic Advisors pitiful attempt to rein in inflation by appealing to the angels of our better nature.

Compare and Contrast

I have confidence that Kim Jong Un will honor the contract we signed &, even more importantly, our handshake. We agreed to the denuclearization of North Korea. China, on the other hand, may be exerting negative pressure on a deal because of our posture on Chinese Trade-Hope Not!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2018

From CNN:

“It doesn’t trouble me because, he himself, secretary Pompeo said great progress was made, and I take his word before I take an unnamed source or before I take the north Korean foreign ministry’s assessment,” [Steve] Cortes [Member of President Trump's 2020 Re-elect advisory council] maintained.

Vinograd noted that Trump tweeted that the threat was gone and asked if Cortes believed Pompeo or Trump. Cortes agreed that the threat was gone, again, because North Korea “isn’t firing missiles into the ocean.”

Also from CNN:

On Tuesday, CNN reported that Secretary of State Mark Pompeo, who’d helped oversee Donald Trump’s meeting with King Jong-un, thinks that his own meeting with the North Korean officials had not gone according to plan.

According to sources, Pompeo said it went “as badly as it could have gone.”

Oh, and also this:

"Look, this is a decades long challenge, getting the North Koreans to make a fundamental strategic decision, which is that the nuclear weapons that they possess today frankly present a threat to them and not security," Pompeo said.

Now Pompeo just needs to talk to the President.....

Oxygen is flammable

What a dangerous thing for this "president" to do, giving oxygen to ultra right militia who don't respect the law or the constitution and present a danger to the Republic. Bad things will flow from this. https://t.co/yWK2qslL30

— John Weaver (@JWGOP) July 10, 2018

I prosecuted some of the "sovereign citizen"/"Militia" folks; they are dangerous people who threaten judges and police and would not submit to the jurisdiction of the courts

The President should be working against those who are avowed enemies of the Constitution

— Joshua A. Engel (@joshuaadamengel) July 10, 2018

I’ve noticed the president working against the constitution for some time now. He is sowing chaos and lawlessness (see Sherriff Arpio) - exactly what Putin wants.

— Alan McCall (@ChickDante51) July 10, 2018

Alan Dershowitz thinks the Supreme Court should decide what a "high crime and misdemeanor" is for impeachment purposes.  His argument is absolutely laughable:*

“The decision by the framers to have the chief justice preside over the trial of a president may suggest that the decision was not intended to be entirely political. Indeed, it would be wrong for the chief justice to participate, much less preside over, an entirely political process. Judges are required to stay out of politics,” Dershowitz writes.

The impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, over which then Chief Justice William Rehnquist presided, was not a trial conducted according to any rules of procedure formulated by any court, and was not subject to Federal Rules of Evidence (the Senate may have agreed to follow such rules, but the Court could not have negated a conviction on the grounds the Senate chose not to.  This is part of a well-established doctrine that the House and Senate conduct their Constitutionally established business according to rules of their making, and the courts do not interfere in that process or the application of those rules.).  The charge of perjury was laughably unsound as a legal matter, and in any court of law probably would have resulted in a directed verdict for the defendant on the grounds of lack of evidence or materiality of the misrepresentation (how was a man denying a sexual encounter with a woman not his wife material to any investigation?).  It was an entirely political proceeding whose conclusion was a surprise to no one.

His argument is sheer moonshine, in other words (or the end of the constitutional republic, one or the other).  But would violation of one's oath of office constitute an impeachable offense?  The oath is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and yet Trump has pardoned people with no observable sense of the validity of the Constitution.  He vilifies the federal government as a "deep state", castigates law enforcement agencies as "corrupt" and their investigations are "rigged witch hunts."

On its face, that's a violation of his oath of office.  If Trump is not going to faithfully carry out the duties of his office, why is he allowed to stay there?

And on the issue of the pardons, where this all started, the sage words of Mr. Charles Pierce:

In related news, the Hammonds walk free while a few thousand children are still in federal custody for the crime of stepping over a line on a map. That is unspeakable.

Let the people say:  "Amen!"

*More reasonably the Chief Justice is assigned to oversee the impeachment trial in the Senate because the Chief Justice is the only position, besides President, created for an individual in the Constitution, and the Chief Justice presiding makes the trial an act of the full Constitutional government, not a judicial trial subject to the rules of evidence and procedure and appeals.  The office of President is not a Constitutional right to any person, although removal can only come through the electoral process or impeachment.  But impeachment does not need to follow all the requirements of due process and equal protection because if arguably it doesn't, what's the remedy?  To be restored to office, despite the clear Constitutional intention that conviction in an impeachment trial shall lead to removal from office, and no other outcome (criminal proceedings are allowed separately, but cannot be a part of the impeachment conviction)?  There is no provision in the Constitution for that outcome, and every reason to argue it is not provided for.

And there's actually legal precedent for this argument, and against Dershowitz':

In the Judge Nixon case, the Court held that a claim to judicial review of an issue arising in an impeachment trial in the Senate presents a nonjusticiable “political question.”  Specifically, the Court rejected a claim that the Senate had departed from the meaning of the word “try” in the impeachment clause by relying on a special committee to take evidence, including testimony. But the Court’s “political question” analysis has broader application, and appears to place the whole impeachment process off limits to judicial review.

Please note there is no distinction between a Presidential impeachment and the impeachment of a federal district judge.  And the argument Nixon (the judge, not the POTUS) raised was whether evidence taken by a special committee, rather than the full Senate, was sufficient to "try" the case in the Senate.

Dershowitz is trying to sell a book to the ignorant, nothing more.

The Very Model Of A Modern Major Elitist

Huh?

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, shared a Facebook post Monday claiming that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) was being falsely accused of lying about his knowledge of rampant sexual assault while coaching wrestling at Ohio State University.

“Jim Jordan is under attack, with false accusations, because he threatens the elite,” she wrote on the post with the video below.

Only 9 people at any one time sit on the Supreme Court.  Once appointed, they are all there for life.  It is the very definition of "elite."  It has vast power over the lives of everyone in America, and often beyond America, and is the last word in law in the American judicial system.

You can't get more elite than that.

So, is Jim Jordan threatening the Supreme Court?

"Children Just Want To Be With Their Parents"

Watched the documentary on Fred Rogers over the weekend, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"  It was all about children, of course, and it strikes me now that even the title is ironic in the light of the current news.  Did you know Mr. Rogers was the reason our children are now spoiled brats?  That was a small part of the story, but it stuck with me.  I could have sworn that was Benjamin Spock's fault and my generation that suffered, but no, Fred Rogers did it to the next generation past the Boomers.  That, at least, was a vogue for awhile. Mr. Rogers wanted children to know they were loved, and apparently that made them weaklings.  There's something painfully American in that criticism, and something entirely wrong with it.

But they were still children, and that makes them precious. Interesting watching that movie while we're still putting children in cages, can't find their parents after we separated them, and sent 19 of their parents out of the country while we kept the children here.

Tonight I was watching "The Doctor Blake Mysteries." Set in 1950's/'60's Australia, this episode concerned an orphanage with aboriginal children. Dr. Blake utters the line in the title at the end, explaining the drama of the story. Odd timing, to have that story just now, especially with part of the orphanage story being children taken from their parents by the state.

Not so odd, really: children are inviolable in our culture. They are the only innocents. Well, not black children; we consider them dangerous. But that's why Trump keeps mentioning MS-13. He wants us to be afraid of brown children, too. Only that's not working, and it's not going to work.  Meanwhile, in the immigration courts of this country:

A 1-year-old boy in federal custody who appeared in immigration court without his parents in Phoenix briefly played with a ball, drank from a bottle, then “cried hysterically” as he was about to leave the courtroom Friday, according to The Associated Press.

But he was eventually granted a voluntary departure order so the government can fly him to Honduras, where his father has already been sent.

The little boy, identified in court only as Johan, was one of the children who appeared in the Arizona court Friday without parents. One boy held up five fingers when the judge asked him his age.

Judge John Richardson said he was “embarrassed to ask” if Johan understood the proceedings, AP reported. “I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” he told Johan’s attorney.

In family law courts, where it is not uncommon for the child to have both parents present, children can be appointed guardians ad litem, adults who report to the court about the status of the child and argue for the best interests of the child, and even an attorney ad litem to represent the child's legal interests apart from the parents. In immigration courts, the child is lucky to have an attorney present.  But that's not the worst part of it:

Some 3,000 migrant children remain in government custody after being separated from their parents, and about 100 of them are under the age of 5, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The New York Times has reported that some records on the separated families have been lost or even destroyed, raising the possibility that some children may never be reunited with their families. In addition, the U.S. has already deported at least 19 parents of children under the age of 5 and in federal custody.

So those children go where?  Into foster care systems in Texas?  Pennsylvania?  California?  New Jersey?  Where?  And why?  Because the Administration is so incompetent it fails at the most basic governmental function of all, keeping records on people?

I would say this is Trump's Katrina, or Trump's Japanese internment camps, but this horror show is unprecedented.  This is slavery, where families are separated by law and government action (or at least approval under law) and no records are kept about the members of the family unit.  This is not comparable to the Nazis; this is all-American, through and through.  This is a return to the worst part of our history.

What is that doing to the children?  What is it doing to us, that we would treat children this way?  This is painfully American; it is also entirely wrong.

We need to be aware of that; and we need to remember that.  Which will be more damaging to our culture, to our national psyche?  The next Supreme Court justice?  Or how we treat other people's children?

Also updating:  this is simply not acceptable:

Justice Department attorney Sarah Fabien said that while only two children out of the 102 the government has identified have been reunited so far, she believes another 54 can be returned to their parents by Tuesday’s deadline. As for the rest, she claimed, three were brought by someone who is not their biological parent, three have parents with serious criminal records that bar reunification, five have parents with something on their record that requires further investigation, 12 have parents either in local or federal criminal detention who must serve time before being transferred to ICE, 18 have parents who were lost by the administration after their deportation or release into the U.S., and four have been approved for release to a non-parent sponsor.

As for the last of the 102, Fabian said, “We’re still trying to track down what information we have about that parent. To my knowledge we do not have any information.”

3 children, or 102 children:  the government has a responsibility, if it takes a child, to keep track of that child and their parents.  3 children are not disposable goods you toss in the trash because you got more from Costco than you could use.

My experience at restaurants: I ordered take out at a Greek restaurant. When I arrived, the owner saw me & threw in a free baklava (one of my favorite desserts). He said he appreciated what I was doing. I guess that's what happens when one opposes ripping kids away from parents.

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 9, 2018

Cui Bono?

The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other Country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable. While these countries have been increasing their contributions since I took office, they must do much more. Germany is at 1%, the U.S. is at 4%, and NATO benefits.......

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2018

...Europe far more than it does the U.S. By some accounts, the U.S. is paying for 90% of NATO, with many countries nowhere close to their 2% commitment. On top of this the European Union has a Trade Surplus of $151 Million with the U.S., with big Trade Barriers on U.S. goods. NO!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2018

What was it Orwell said about the hardest thing to do is seeing what's right in front of you?

Josh Marshall:

The more obvious conclusion is that, for whatever reasons, President Trump is hostile to the very concept of our primary alliances in Europe and Northeast Asia, in which we do pay substantial sums to be the guarantor of security in those regions. He simply hasn’t reconciled that with his braggadocious clamoring for higher military spending which, whether he knows it or not, assume those continuing commitments.

Jonathan Chait:

It is often said that Donald Trump has had the same nationalistic, zero-sum worldview forever. But that isn’t exactly true. Yes, his racism and mendacity have been evident since his youth, but those who have traced the evolution of his hypernationalism all settle on one year in particular: 1987. Trump “came onto the political stage in 1987 with a full-page ad in the New York Times attacking the Japanese for relying on the United States to defend it militarily,” reported Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The president has believed for 30 years that these alliance commitments are a drain on our finite national treasure,” a White House official told the Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin. Tom Wright, another scholar who has delved into Trump’s history, reached the same conclusion. “1987 is Trump’s breakout year. There are only a couple of examples of him commenting on world politics before then.”

What changed that year? One possible explanation is that Trump published The Art of the Deal, which sped up his transformation from an aggressive, publicity-seeking New York developer to a national symbol of capitalism. But the timing for this account does not line up perfectly — the book came out on November 1, and Trump had begun opining loudly on trade and international politics two months earlier. The other important event from that year is that Trump visited Moscow.

The question is the old one:  cui bono?  Why should Trump despise NATO and wish to destroy it, the very thing NATO leaders fear he might do?  It doesn't benefit Trump, who has no business dealings involving NATO.  It doesn't benefit the U.S., who uses NATO to maintain a stability in the world that is really quite strong for the most part.  Who does it benefit?  Vladimir Putin and Russia, is the only credible answer.  And why would Trump want to do that?  "For whatever reasons"?  Or for reasons that are so plainly in front of the collective nose we strain to see it?

(And just to clarify:  as JMM points out, the U.S doesn't "spend far more on NATO" than any other "Country."  We spend more on our military than any other country, and use that military in bases that girdle the globe for stability and to extend our military power (most significantly right now, to keep North Korea from trying unify the peninsula under its dictatorship, simply by our military being there).  The bases in Germany support efforts as far away as the Middle East.  The value of this to the U.S. may be debatable, but the funding of NATO is not.  Does Trump know this, or even care?  Wrong question.  Why is Trump using his lies to undermine NATO, is a much more important question.)

ADDING:  and not to put too fine a point on it:

NATO has found renewed purpose since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, sending battalions to the Baltics and Poland to deter potential Russian incursions.

Ahem:

President Donald Trump left the door open to recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, telling reporters that such a move would be up for discussion when he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin next month.

“We’re going to have to see,” Trump told reporters Friday on Air Force One when asked if the U.S. would accept Russia’s claim on the territory it seized from Ukraine in 2014. 

Cui bono?

More Reasons Harvard Should Distance Itself from Former Professors

So Alan Dershowitz is shilling a book.  The first I heard of this, it was because he said on the Sunday Morning gabfest somewhere in the ether that even if Trump pardoned someone in order to cover a murder he committed, he can't be held accountable for obstructing justice in issuing the pardon.

Because Alan Dershowitz said so in his new book.

Now, I vaguely remember the hierarchy of sources a legal argument can refer to (I've forgotten so much I used to know; it's kind of liberating), but I do remember that the apex was court cases on point with your argument from high courts (not trial courts), and the power of the authority descends from there.  Somewhere at the bottom are law review articles, although everyone always points to the exception that proves the rule, a law review article which established the concept of "penumbral rights" relied on in the majority decision in Roe v. Wade.  Even there, the law review article was largely dicta.

Somewhere below law review articles as legal authority are books by law professors grinding their own ax, usually for the publicity and book sales (Martha's Vineyard is expensive, even on a Harvard Law pension!).  So Dershowitz's argument is slightly less authoritative than mine.

It's my blog, and my rules.

The idea that a President can use the pardon power to protect himself from criminal prosecution is a question that's never come before the Courts (anymore than the "right of privacy" asserted in Roe v. Wade had, although most agree the right is set, it's the regulation of abortion that's been argued since Planned Parenthood v. Casey).  George H.W. Bush flirted with it, pardoning the Iran/Contra defendants on his way out the door.  There's little doubt Poppy was covering his own ass with those pardons, effectively ending a prosecution that would look too closely at just how "out of the loop" he actually was (go ask your grandfather, ya punk!  And get offa mah lawn!).  There's also little doubt he wouldn't have been quite so bold had he not lost to Clinton, because the consequences might have been very serious for a sitting President to pardon people who might have implicated him in criminal activity, even though that activity was before he was President (again, ask your grandpa, I'm busy!).  Actually, Dershowitz waffles on what he makes sound like a flat assertion of Presidential power:

“You cannot question a president’s motives when the president acts. If the president pardons, that’s it,” Dershowitz vehemently stated. “If a president fires, that’s it. You can’t go beyond an act and get into his motive or into his intent.”

Pressed by host Stephanopoulos if a pardon was part of “covering up a murder,” Dershowitz didn’t bend.

“It doesn’t matter,” the layer shot back. “A pardon is a pardon. The covering up of the murder may be an independent crime. The pardon can’t be the actus reus  [action or conduct that is a constituent element of a crime, as opposed to the mental state of the accused] of a crime, because you have a actus reus of a crime that is a constitutionally protected act.”

He's right, the pardon cannot be made illegal; but the use of the pardon can.  The pardon wouldn't be undone by a charge of obstruction; but it could lead to a criminal prosecution of the President, either while he was in office or after he left office.  Would that happen as a matter of politics?  Will, if it was covering up a murder, I'm certain it would.  Dershowitz is making a weasel argument here.  But he wants to hide that:

DERSHOWITZ: You cannot question a president’s motives when the president acts. If a president pardons, that’s it. If a president fires, that’s it. You can’t go beyond the act and get into his motive or into his intent.

That’s -- no president has ever been --
STEPHANOPOULOS: -- is pardoning someone to cover up a murder?

DERSHOWITZ: It doesn’t matter. The pardon is the pardon. The covering up of the murder may be an independent crime, the pardon cannot be the actus reus of a crime because you cannot have an actus reus of a crime that is a constitutionally protected act.

He steps on his own argument because he knows it doesn't make sense as a legal argument.  He can't sustain it beyond a sentence or two.  First he says "You cannot question a president's motives when the president acts," which is baloney anyway (there is a presumption of innocence, not a presumption of impossibility of culpability), then he realizes obstruction is the actus reus which does not negate the legal act of a pardon, but can create grounds for a criminal prosecution independent of the pardon.  He wants to argue the pardon makes the coverup legal, but he can't do that.  That's Nixon's argument, that when the President does it, it's legal.  L'etat, c'est moi, in other words.   The cover up is, indeed, the independent crime.  Ask Nixon, who might have claimed executive privilege (Giuliani raised that issue today discussing a possible interview of Trump by Mueller) but couldn't use that to hide his conspiracy to cover up crimes committed under his authority.  Dershowitz knows this, too, so he squirts squid ink and runs away. (Knowing he's stepped in it, a few minutes later Dershowitz claims investigating a president's motives is a "slippery slope" we don't want to slide down.  Except, of course, President's are judged on their motives 24/7 by lawyers and voters and most of the waking world, including but not limited to political opponents and world leaders.)

But wait, there's more!  Remember the book?!  He started out shilling the book (but no one took him up on it):

ALAN DERSHOWITZ, LAW PROFESSOR: Yes, because there is something to worry about, obviously. In the end, if the president sits down with Mueller, he may be walking into a perjury trap. If he is unwilling to sit down, he may be subpoenaed, then probably they’ll be a year or so of litigation. But in the end, probably he’ll have to appear in front of a grand jury. His great vulnerability is a perjury trap, a perjury rap, because as I argue in my book, you need to commit a crime to be impeached.

And if he’s committed previous crimes -- there’s no evidence of that -- that won’t work. But if he commits the crime of perjury, he’s in Clinton-land. (emphasis added)

Bollocks.  Art. I, Sec. 2, clause 5 of the Constitution states:

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Section 3 of the same article, clauses 5 and 6:

6: The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

7: Judgment in Cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

And then Article II, Sec. 4:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now; who decides what are "high crimes and misdemeanors"?  The Chief Justice may preside at the impeachment trial of the President, but the Supreme Court does not review the results of that trial.  An acquittal is an acquittal, a conviction is a conviction, and the only outcome is removal from office.  Any more than that is a judicial action which the Supreme Court could review.  But not the impeachment:  high crimes and misdemeanors are what the House says they are.  Once they have said so, the matter goes to the Senate.  Whether it is a crime as defined by Alan Dershowitz matters as much as how far you can spit against a hurricane.

Frankly, did Clinton commit perjury in his sworn testimony?  The non-lawyers might think so, but no prosecutor was ever going to charge a witness in a civil case with perjury on those facts.  Perjury is a very serious crime.  That means it requires a strong showing of the elements of the crime, and as most lawyers will tell you, that's seldom worth the effort.  It's kind of like a death penalty case.  Far easier to prove manslaughter (negligence) than prove the elements of intent necessary to put someone to death.  Even then, the crime is usually heinous, and that factor helps move the jury to find the intent it is so hard to prove.  Is it perjury where a man is trying not to admit an affair with someone not his wife?  It's almost too petty to call "misrepresentation."  Whenever I had a deposition with testimony I was sure was false, I didn't demand a criminal action; I used it to impeach the witness and help my client's case.  Perjury is, I'll grant you, a "high crime."  But is what Clinton did perjury?  No, I don't think that was proven.

Not that the Chief Justice gave the jury of the Senators instructions subject to review by a higher court, as a trial court would do.  It wasn't a trial in any sense of the words except the loosest.  It was closer to the trial in Alice in Wonderland than in reality, and it ended as it did as a foregone conclusion, not because the evidence was so weak, the prosecution so out of line with the law on fraud and lying under oath.

And Dershowitz knows that; at least, he should.  Impeachment trials are not trials of law; they are political acts.  Elements of crimes and dissection of legal principles have no place in impeachments.  The only consideration is what the market will bear, what the voters will approve, what the next election cycle will remember.  If any civil officer is ever impeached and removed from office and Alan Dershowitz thinks no crime was committed, will anyone care?  Will the impeachment be reversed?

What do you think?

Sure, that's normal.....

Jordan repeated this distinction between 'locker room talk' and a formal complaint. Bret Baier caught and pressed him about whether he heard things in locker room talk. Jordan denies it. pic.twitter.com/Qi3v80KSMg

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 6, 2018

Locker room talk about "banging women" or looking at naked women or almost anything to do with women (crude, but that's why it's "locker room talk") would, I should think, go largely unnoticed.

Locker room talk about banging boys, or eyeing naked boys, or anything to do with boys, on the other hand.....

Maybe because those are the people who would work for him?

Pruitt resignation letter. pic.twitter.com/rPkWBlmsV4

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 5, 2018

I apologize for being so crude, but it's the only way to put the question. Why does everyone in Trump's cabinet feel the need to suck his dick in public?

LBJ once said he wanted someone (I forget who) to kiss his ass in the window of Macy's at high noon and tell him it smelled like roses. But these guys go beyond that, for reasons I just cannot grasp.

Your Crazy Uncle Is In The White House

The OPEC Monopoly must remember that gas prices are up & they are doing little to help. If anything, they are driving prices higher as the United States defends many of their members for very little $’s. This must be a two way street. REDUCE PRICING NOW!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2018

And he thinks this is how it works. Or, alternatively, that what really matters is the attention this will get from the media.

Either way....

Winter Is Coming

That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

--Willie the Shake, during the off season

This is basically a long comment to this post; so you might want to read that before reading this.

I like Rahner's metaphor of "winter" as it relates to Christian faith.  It's an apt one.  But if you're going to establish the metaphor of the long season of death (or near death; winter always implies spring, and resurrection. Probably why Christmas comes in December, and Easter in April.), you have to stick with it.  Which is the problem with this recommendation:

It is a source of never-ending concern to Rahner that much of what people hear in the preaching and teaching of the church draws on a primitive idea of God unworthy of belief[**],rather than communicating the reality, the beauty, the wonder, and the strange generosity of the mystery of God.  The average sermon, along with the popular piety it encourages, has a basically retarded notion of God, he judged, acknowledging neither the absolute difference of God from the world nor the marvelous truth that God's own self has drawn near as the inmost dynamism and goal offered to the world.  All too often sermons work with the tired ideas of modern theism, reflecting a precritical mentality that sees God as someone whom we can calculate from our formula of how things work, thus replacing the incomprehensible God with an idol. They fashion the Holy in the image of our own concerns, our neurotic fears, our puny hearts, rather than honoring the impossible outpouring of love by which God not only sets up the world in its own integrity but, while remaining radically distinct, gives the divine self away to the world.  They neglect to inform us of the most tremendous truth, that we are called into loving immediacy with the mystery of God who self-communicates to us in unspeakable nearness.  After listening to such dismal sermons can we really say that the world "God" brightens up our lives?   Unfortunately Rahner wrote, it is more often the case that the words of the preacher fall powerlessly from the pulpit,  "like birds frozen to death and falling from a winter sky."

I don't disagree with this critique, but popular piety is an implacable stone that is not moved easily; and sermons are hardly the unstoppable force beating against it.  It isn't just the average sermon that has "a retarded [sic] notion of God," it's the average pew sitter.  Those who want a more challenged and challenging notion of God usually have their own ideas what that is, and will eventually feel slighted by the preacher enough to leave.  Those who like the popular piety will also be insulted, but they are more likely to have a rounded stone quality to them:  the rivers of tradition have washed over their beliefs so long, shaping them and even creating them, that the generic God of piety and 19th century sentimentality ("I Come To the Garden Alone") is a comfort to them.  Like rounded stones they lay flat and form the river bed.  The jagged stones of prickly particularity don't stick together, and don't even conform with other jagged stones.  Church is, at heart, a voluntary community; people don't volunteer to join a community that doesn't suit their interests, either in providing comfort, or in conforming to their preferences for particularity.

I agree with what I consider to be the more Jewish/Hebraic theology of God:  God was Other, God as Creator whose relationship to us is based in that fundamental act, as well as a relationship chosen by God and not created by us.  The "mystery of God who self-communicates to us in unspeakable nearness" "while remaining radically distinct," and "gives the divine self away to the world."  But honestly, what does that communicate to a mother grieving the death of her babe in arms?  What does that communicate to a broken soul seeking comfort and raised in the pieties of "Jesus loves me, this I know"?  God drawing near "as the inmost dynamism and goal offered to the world" may be a better theology than the misbegotten interpretations of John 3:16 that put atonement as the be all and end all of Christianity, but neither one offers much comfort in a funeral service, or to a couple considering divorce, or to abuse victims, or teenagers just trying to figure out how to be adults.  It isn't particularly meant to, but how do you replace centuries of Christianity, from sentimental pietism to the harsher cruelties of atonement and doctrines of original sin, without realizing you can't just wipe those things away, and the fact that preaching really isn't the most important work a pastor does?  Indeed, the emphasis on the sermon is the emphasis on "This is what we're here for."  It's a very Protestant emphasis, and it may actually be the problem of modern Christianity is the emphasis on the Word, rather than the praxis.

Two communities which tried to reimagine Christianity in modern times are Taize and Iona Community.  Whether they are still going strong, or have faded away, I have no idea.  Certainly neither "reformed" Christianity, nor did they mean to.  If anything, the accepted with metaphor of winter Rahner posits, and responded to it positively.  But I don't recall hearing any great preaching coming out of either community.  No one posted their sermons on-line (then again, neither group was ever associated with a U.S. presidential candidate).  I don't know of any real sense of preaching coming from either group.  Prayer and singing, yes; preaching?  Not so much.  I don't mean preaching was disdained; but the preaching of the Word, an emphasis of Protestant (especially Reformed tradition) churches, doesn't seem to have been central to either group.

In seminary we learned to "exegete" worship spaces.  There was an old German E&R (now UCC) church in the town where I first had a pulpit.  The original pulpit was in the back wall of the sanctuary, high above the pews.  It was a church with a balcony on three sides, not just at the back as a choir loft.  Built in the days before PA systems, it was also meant to put the preacher above the people, so all could hear.  But it emphasized the place of the Word in worship.  The sacrament of communion was probably practiced 4 times a year, not monthly as is the modern Protestant practice, nor weekly, as is the practice of Episcopalians/Anglicans and Lutherans (among the Protestants).  The Word was the center point of the service, the focal point of the worship space.  It is not at all unusual to find old Protestant churches where the pulpit is in the center of the chancel, or a chancel without an altar at all, merely a table to hold, occasionally, the communion elements.  The main thrust of the Reformed movement, to distinguish themselves from Catholic practice, was to center worship on the Word, rather than the eucharist.  Even the altar, meant to represent the place of sacrifice, was transformed to a table, meant to hold the food for the meal.

Maybe it's merely time to swing back to emphasis on the act of worship (liturgy, common prayers, singing), rather than on the observance of worship (listening to a sermon or, worse in my eyes, watching a performance presented as worship, and all you have to do is enjoy the band and the singers, and not be too disturbed by the "message").

I am a great fan of worship as an encounter with the living God, an encounter terrible and unworldly when it occurs.  I treated worship not as a battery recharge, filling up your spiritual tank with enough God to get you through the week before it was time to return to the filling station of the church; but as the time when you were most likely to encounter the reality of God, an encounter that would put the rest of your week (at least) in perspective.  If some pastors secretly affirmed "vulture theology," the idea that sooner or later (for weddings, funerals, crises), you had to "come back to church," then mine was akin to "eat a live toad first thing every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you all day."  I didn't mean my doxology (philosophy of worship, loosely stated) to be quite so cynical, but I did mean to turn the emphasis around from what God can do for us, to what we can do having experienced God.  Had I been a better pastor overall, it might have actually led somewhere.

So if I disagree with Rahner (well, as presented by Elizabeth Johnson), in the end, it is a disagreement with the assumption that Protestantism as we have known it will always be with us, and will always be essential to Christianity.  Even the Southern Baptists, the most reformed of the Reformed tradition (with the exception, perhaps, of a few small and virulently Calvinist denominations), are trying to rediscover Advent and even Lent to give their worship year a bit more of a structure than just Christmas Even and Easter Sunday.  Southern Baptists will never become liturgical, and I encountered enough resistance to my "Catholic" style of worship to last me a lifetime, or to make me think all Protestants will ever agree on anything.  I agree with Rahner that winter is coming; but I'm also convinced no shift in preaching is enough to assuage the pain of the losses winter brings.  Then again, winter always leads to spring, and even winter is a time for joyous holidays.

MAGA by working with foreign companies to crush American companies?

Now that Harley-Davidson is moving part of its operation out of the U.S., my Administration is working with other Motor Cycle companies who want to move into the U.S. Harley customers are not happy with their move - sales are down 7% in 2017. The U.S. is where the Action is!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2018

So Harley-Davidson was punished in 2017 for actions it took in 2018?  Was their customer base followers of Nostrodamus, or did they all have access to the same time machine?

And why is the President of the United States bragging about protecting U.S. trade by working with foreign motorcycle companies to replace sales Harley-Davidson is losing because of Trump's tariffs? I mean, I've read some of the Twitter feed responses to this, and Trump's supporters are clearly idiots.

But Trump is clearly the Idiot-in-Chief.

Not just for breakfast anymore

In the lead up to a story about Brexit (a lesson politicians should have learned eons ago:  never bet the ranch, or the country, that the vox populi will say what you want them to), they mention how Brexit was sold:  as an improvement in trade which would reap windfalls for Britain, who had the whip hand in such matters and could not but be stronger.

Sound familiar?

It should, as the architect of Brexit was ideological bosom buddies with Trump, and visited America shortly after Trump won the election.  Now, NPR tells me, manufacturers warn darkly they may have to leave the UK in order to stay competitive and trade in Europe on a level playing field.  Turns out the sun does set on the British Empire in the 21st century.  Who knew?

Again:  sound familiar?

I have to dampen the schadenfreude by acknowledging "free trade" was sold as the painless panacea for all our ills, too.  There is no such thing as a painless panacea, and free trade is as fraught with problems as protectionism.  Still, Britain has sown dragon's teeth and is now reaping the whirlwind, from what will happen at the Irish border to what will happen to British manufacturing to "where are the lollipops, Clarence?"

Which, in the near future, is going to sound very familiar, indeed.

My Brother's Keeper...or not.

The philosopher and author, as the PBS Newshour identified him, said a society like ours is driving itself to disaster by creating intractable inequality.

This is actually an old argument carried out across many fields. A legal scholar described the "Rule Against Perpetuities," the idea that the law abhors a dynasty.  Property, in simple terms, should not be held by a small number in perpetuity. The problems of such a static society should be apparent. The age of this argument should be apparent, too. It is the Hebraic idea of the Jubilee, resetting property ownership every 70 years to prevent the injustice of unequal gain. It is the argument against the static society of feudal Europe, where property was more important than people, and keeping it in the hands of the "right" people was society's primary purpose. It is the argument of anti-trust laws and Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel Of Wealth.  It is the feudal society, the philosopher argued, that we are creating. And we are doing it with the best of intentions.

We are doing it, he didn't say but I do, because we are so easily content to be self-centered. His argument seemed to me to be both self-evident and obtuse. It was what I learned in seminary (any society not organized to make the first last and the last first inevitably comes to this). It was not new, and immediately put me in mind of this quote from Wallace Shawn.

The prisoners of the jails in my country are not hung upside down and tortured; our poor do not die of cholera or plague.  But my relation to most of the people in the world just cannot be described as exactly the one which morality would demand.  And this is why I realize that as long as I preserve my loyalty to my childhood training I will never know what it is to be truly comfortable, and this is why I feel a fantastic need to tear that training out of my heart once and for all so that I can finally begin to enjoy the life that is spread out before me like a feast.  And every time a friend makes that happy choice and sets himself or herself free, I find that I inwardly exult and rejoice, because it means there will be one less person to disapprove of me if I choose to do the same.

As I write these words, in New York City in 1985, more and more people who grew up around me are making this decision; they are throwing away their moral chains and learning to enjoy their true situation: Yes, they are admitting loudly and bravely, we live in beautiful homes, we're surrounded by beautiful gardens, our children are playing with wonderful toys, and our kitchen shelves are filled with wonderful food.  And if there are people out there who don't seem to like us and who would like to break into our homes and take what we have, well then, part of our good fortune is that we can afford to pay guards to man our gates and keep those people away.  And if those who protect us need to hit people in the face with the butts of their rifles, or if they need perhaps even to turn around and shoot, they have our permission....

The perfectly decent person who follows a certain chain of reasoning, ever so slightly and subtly incorrect, becomes a perfect monster at the end of the chain.

--Wallace Shawn

Since Shawn wrote those words our country has engaged in torture, and justified it.  Our current President has called for more of it, from time to time.  Now we separate families at the Mexican border for no other reason than they are not American citizens, with absolutely no concern for those children or those families.  They aren't Americans, after all.  Neither were the people we tortured.  We were monsters long before Paul Solman was shocked, shocked! to find out the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Nothing has changed since 1985; we've simply become more completely who we always were.  Age does that to you; you grow into who you always were, and it's seldom who you meant to be.

The argument is about the horror, the inhumanity, of selfishness. Yes, inhumanity; we are not doomed to be selfish, only prone to it. Shawn is not saying we are selfish and we can't escape that.  He is saying there is a moral code that we either all uphold, or there is no morality.

And every time a friend makes that happy choice and sets himself or herself free, I find that I inwardly exult and rejoice, because it means there will be one less person to disapprove of me if I choose to do the same.

Yet how determined we are to deny responsibility, to be surprised that our actions might have unintended consequences. We are not monsters.  We are reasonable people.  The screen shot of Mike Huckabee above is from a FoxNews interview where he argued that all the sins of the present, from social violence to government ineptitude, is the fault of the Democratic party.  

“You cannot just stop governing and gum up the works like the Democrats are. The worst thing is calling people  racist because they don’t like the way your believing and practicing a government,” Huckabee told Hilton during Sunday’s show.

The sign over his left shoulder is surely ironic:  "Come Let Us Reason Together."  But whose reasoning?  His?  The reasoning that everything you do is wrong, and as soon as you acknowledge I am right, then you are being reasonable? As the article points out, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner publicly announced their opposition to Barack Obama moments after he was first elected, and Mitch McConnell exercised the power of his Senate position to block Obama from replacing Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.  Yet, in the World As Reasoned by Huckabee:

“Our founders gave us the most magnificent gift. A government that we have the power to change when we didn’t like it. The manner in which we change it is through the ballots, not the bullets,” Huckabee said, seeming to imply that protests were the same as shooting someone.

He went on to say that every two years, Americans have an opportunity to change their government if they don’t like it. 

McConnell and Boehner, among others, decided if they couldn't change the government, they'd oppose its every effort for 8 years.  Which apparently was reasonable, if you reason as Mike Huckabee does; and if you don't, well, you're just unreasonable.  Mike Huckabee is sure he is the standard by which "reasonable" is measured.  Indeed, how could he not be?  And undoubtedly he acts with what he considers are the best of intentions.  But the goodness of his intentions are all aimed, as his Bible would tell him if he listened, at his own comfort, and not at justice:

Woe to him who says,
"I shall build myself a spacious palace
with airy roof chambers and
windows set in it.
It will be paneled with cedar
and painted with vermilion."
Though your cedar is so splendid,
does that prove you a king?
Think of your father: he ate and drank,
dealt justly and fairly; all went well with him.
He upheld the cause of the lowly and poor;
then all was well.
Did not this show he knew me? says the Lord.
But your eyes and your heart are set on naught but gain, set only on the innocent blood you can shed,
on the cruel acts of tyranny you perpetrate.

Jeremiah 22: 14-17 (REB)

Like I said, this isn't at all new.

But the behavior of selfishness, of self-interest, of "reason" that is "my reason" and yours is banished, this is ordinary and acceptable behavior.  It has been in our national politics at least since Bill Clinton was elected President.  Actually it predated that, as it was reasonable to ignore the civil rights of African Americans, and reasonable to segregate by race, and reasonable to punish homosexual behavior  and deny women anything more than the right to a husband, for most of my life.  Part of what we are facing now is a reaction to the "new reasonable," a rejection of it that still insist on snapping the rubber band back into place.  That it is coming from Boomers is no surprise to me (Huckabee is a few months younger than me).  They are the ones, in my experience, most prone to defend the past against the future.  Millennials may get old enough to do that, one day.  This is reasonable, in the way the PBS interviewer seemed to understand reason.  He was positively surprised and concerned to learn that his ordinary and acceptable behavior might make him culpable regardless. Not really a surprise, but it was not so long ago Christian churches reminded us of our responsibilities, of our sins.  We grew tired of that, decided we didn't need to hear that any longer. Not that we were better then, more cognizant of our duties to each other. But without even that reminder, who now is going to listen to the philosopher?  And what surprise is it that his words are presented as a revelation?

Do we remember a father who upheld the cause of the lowly and the poor, who dealt justly and fairly?  Or do we just remember the lowly and the poor as minding their place, and justice and fairness meaning we were comfortable, no matter who was not?  Maybe that's the problem; we don't have a model.  But when have we ever had a model?

How many times can we start over again, and get no further than we were the last time we started over?

This is how you do it

This is the Yorktown Heights (very nice area) home @Ocasio2018 grew up in before going off to Ivy League Brown University.

A far cry from the Bronx hood upbringing she’s selling. pic.twitter.com/xyOtZzVJII

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) July 1, 2018

Hey John,

1. I didn’t go to Brown or the Ivy League. I went to BU. Try Google.

2. It is nice. Growing up, it was a good town for working people. My mom scrubbed toilets so I could live here & I grew up seeing how the zip code one is born in determines much of their opportunity.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) July 1, 2018

3. Your attempt to strip me of my family, my story, my home, and my identity is exemplary of how scared you are of the power of all four of those things.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) July 1, 2018

Better than worrying about offending Trump supporters.

Don't Really Care What His Supporters Think...

Dear @realDonaldTrump: The "dumbest" law you refer to is called the United States Constitution. Specifically the 14th Amendment which provides due process to all persons, not just citizens.

You took an oath to the Constitution at your relatively small inauguration, remember? https://t.co/T2yGDC1Nt2

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 1, 2018

The President is an idiot.

Res ipsa loquitor, y'all

I never pushed the Republicans in the House to vote for the Immigration Bill, either GOODLATTE 1 or 2, because it could never have gotten enough Democrats as long as there is the 60 vote threshold. I released many prior to the vote knowing we need more Republicans to win in Nov.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2018

meanwhile, 3 days ago...

HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL, KNOWN AS GOODLATTE II, IN THEIR AFTERNOON VOTE TODAY, EVEN THOUGH THE DEMS WON’T LET IT PASS IN THE SENATE. PASSAGE WILL SHOW THAT WE WANT STRONG BORDERS & SECURITY WHILE THE DEMS WANT OPEN BORDERS = CRIME. WIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2018

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW???!!!???

Getting Personal

When people come into our Country illegally, we must IMMEDIATELY escort them back out without going through years of legal maneuvering. Our laws are the dumbest anywhere in the world. Republicans want Strong Borders and no Crime. Dems want Open Borders and are weak on Crime!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2018

It's not our laws that are the dumbest in the world. It's the man who swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend those laws and doesn't seem to have a clue what that means.

And the basement in the pizza parlor....

The shooter in Maryland is reportedly refusing to give his name and carried no ID.

Will it be a surprise if he turns out to be a "sovereign citizen"/white supremacist targeting "fake news"?

I know I won't be.  Gonna be hard to tag this on Rep. Maxine Waters or the Red Hen staff.

So funny to watch the Fake News, especially NBC and CNN. They are fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea. 500 days ago they would have “begged” for this deal-looked like war would break out. Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018

Yeah, nothing to see here.

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

Or here.