There’s not much new to say about Senator Cory Booker’s performance this week. The proud-yet-fake defiance of Senate norms and rules, the preening, and the bro-bravado (“bring it!”) — most commonly associated with dudes who know that their friends over by the keg will hold them back and barking poodles confident that they will not be let off their leash — have been well documented by numerous observers (including yours truly). But as a longtime admirer of the “World’s greatest deliberative body” (stop laughing!), I look to the wisdom of the great senator Mo Udall, who famously observed, “Everything’s been said, but not everybody has said it.”
So once more let me don my kicking boots and give this dead horse another whack, not simply because Booker deserves it or because I take joy in it, but because there’s a lesson here for everyone. … For those of you who don’t know, Cory Booker heroically® (according to his P.R. operation) defied Senate rules and risked expulsion from that chamber in order to release confidential documents that the American people desperately needed to see. The people needed to understand what the dangerous bigot whom Trump nominated to the Court had written in an email about racial profiling while working in the Bush White House after 9/11.
There were only a couple of problems: The email in question was already cleared for public release (and Booker knew it), and the substance of the email revealed that the Monster Kavanaugh opposed racial profiling. It was as if Cory Booker — once a famous, if choreographed, good Samaritan — saw a mugging, leapt out of his car, tire-iron in hand, to save the day only to stop 20 feet from the assailant in front of some TV cameras, and proceed to smash the makeshift weapon into his own crotch. “I am Spartacus! Ow! I am Spartacus — Ooof!”
Like so much of life today, it all gets dumber. Booker is like the dweeby model student (treasurer of the chess club, three-years running!) who was “radicalized” by the edgy kids at theater camp and became determined to be a rebel for his senior year. The only problem: Booker seemed to have picked up his idea of being a bad boy by watching Saved by the Bell and various after-school specials. “Greetings fellow cool people: Check out my pleather biker jacket!”
On TV, Booker insists that he did in fact break the rules (“I am breaking the rules.”) but in committee, when it seemed like the Republicans believed him, he couldn’t stand his ground — even though he wanted to — and insisted that there was no rule that he had moments earlier boasted of violating. It was as if he were dragged before the principal and asked if he really had toilet-papered the math teacher’s house (as he had told people in study hall) only to confess that he was simply taking credit for it. Now, he’s back on TV reverting to his original story with a “How dare you ask if my awesome earring is a clip on?” tone.
Perhaps the most telling sign that Booker cannot commit to his bad-boy routine is the actual quote so many people are inaccurately summarizing. Booker didn’t say, “I am Spartacus!” He didn’t even say, “This is my ‘I am Spartacus moment.’” He said: “This is about the closest I’ll probably ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment.”
One of my ancient grievances about the pre-Orb GOP was the tendency of Republican politicians to read their stage directions rather than just play the part they wanted to play. George H. W. Bush literally read, “Message: ‘I care’” out loud. Bob Dole told an audience, “If that’s what you want, I’ll be another Ronald Reagan.”
Booker’s “this is about the closest I’ll probably ever have” formulation does something similar. His base wants a Spartacus. He desperately wants to be their Spartacus. But he can’t actually commit to being Spartacus because he has no idea how or it’s just too scary, requiring an authentic and sincere commitment that he only knows how to fake or pay lip-service to. He might as well have said, “My super-model girlfriend in Canada — who can’t make the prom — says I’m like Spartacus all the time.”
I’m also pretty sure that Booker has a thumbless grasp of what saying “I am Spartacus” even means (even though he didn’t say it).
While I was listening to one of the quirky, obscure podcasts that I sometimes dabble in, John Podhoretz reminded me that the “I am Spartacus” line from the 1960 Kirk Douglas movie was written by Dalton Trumbo, a committed Stalinist, who pushed the Soviet line at every turn. (When Stalin signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler, Trumbo dismissed concerns by saying, “To the vanquished all conquerors are inhuman.”) Howard Fast, the author of the book the movie was based on, was also a Communist. I supposed I should note that Kirk Douglas tried to take credit for the line, but that that’s unlikely. I could also point out that Karl Marx considered Spartacus the “finest fellow antiquity had to offer.”
But, like so much of the universe these days, none of this matters. The whole point of the “I am Spartacus!” scene — which is great – is that Spartacus’s comrades showed existential solidarity with the real Spartacus. Crassus wanted to execute the leader of the slave rebellion, but Spartacus’s comrades were saying, in effect, “Take me!” It’s been suggested that the scene was inspired by the apocryphal story of the Danes donning yellow stars in solidarity with the Jews in Nazi-occupied Denmark.
How exactly, you might ask, is this remotely comparable to releasing publicly accessible emails exonerating Judge Kavanaugh of the insinuation that he supported racial profiling under the pretense that you’re breaking the rules? (No cheating off Marco, people.)
Take your time. I’ll go sculpt a model of Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes in order to figure out where the alien ship will land while you bust out the grease board to connect those dots.
Need help? Well, it’s a trick question. Because, on one level — the level Booker thinks he’s working on — it makes no sense whatsoever.
But on another level, it actually makes some sense. Here’s a hint: The heroism involved in saying “I am Spartacus” lies in the fact that it was a lie. Those guys weren’t Spartacus; they were pretending to be at great personal sacrifice.
Booker’s close-to-an-I-am-Spartacus-moment line was also based on a lie, but it was decidedly not in the form of tragedy — it was farce. Which is why the spectacle of all of those Democrats joining Booker in fake solidarity about a fake issue was so perfect. They were all shouting, “I’m Cory Booker!” and “Expel me too!” in the hopes his bravery would rub off on them, when there was none to rub off in the first place.
Booker wants to be president, and he thinks — rightly — that the base of the Democratic party wants a heroic rebel who will fight the Caesarian Trump at all costs and by any means necessary (yes, I know there were no emperors in the time of Spartacus, but shut up: I’m on a roll). The problem is that Spartacus lost, and all his fellow gladiator-slave compadres who said, “I am Spartacus” were martyred for a lost cause, too. Obviously, this effort to defeat Kavanaugh was a lost cause.
But the greater irony is that the Resistance is likely to be a lost cause, too — if it keeps going in this direction. Trump’s greatest vulnerability in 2020 stems from the fact that he never stopped being a chaos agent. Many current and formerly Republican-leaning voters hate all the drama that sustains the GOP base and radicalizes the liberal base. These voters — particularly college-educated white women — may like many of Trump’s policies and appointments, but they feel like they’re overdosing on crazy pills or trying to elude a monkey that escaped from a cocaine study. The more Democrats act like would-be Spartacuses, the more the craziness on both sides of the equation cancel each other out. That leaves a (presumably good) economy and the devil they know in the White House as a potentially preferable option to the devils promising “socialism” and a left-wing culture-war agenda.
As I wrote earlier this week, liberals are increasingly desperate to live in an alternate reality in which calling themselves “the Resistance” isn’t ironic but heroic. For example, this week we literally saw Handmaid’s Tale cosplayers pretending they weren’t making fools of themselves, playing make-believe to own the cons.
We’ve seen this before, of course — just not on this scale. Naomi Wolf and her crowd were utterly convinced that George W. Bush was Hitler. It never dawned on them that if Bush were Hitler (or even Mussolini or, heck, Woodrow Wilson), people like her would never be allowed to say so. It’s bravery on the cheap. I don’t think anyone who reads this “news”letter needs to be reminded that I am not big booster of Donald Trump. But the guy isn’t Hitler, for any number of reasons, the most important of which is that Americans aren’t Nazis. We’re not even Germans. Hitler’s rule was possible because there was a market demand for a Hitler and a wider tolerance for a Hitler.
By all means, let us ridicule and ostracize the Tiki-Torch Brigades and their alt-right sympathizers. But cherry-picking your enemies and holding them up as representative of millions of Republicans and Trump voters isn’t merely slanderous, it’s incredibly stupid, and not only because it’s wrong morally and factually — it’s also wrong because doing so fuels radicalism on both sides.
(Let me head-off the Whataboutist assault: The same is true of many on the right who play the same game leftward. The Democratic party may have been the party of the Klan, but it’s not today. By the way, the weird overlap between left-wingers and right-wingers who think my book, Liberal Fascism, “proved,” or tried to prove, that contemporary liberals are Nazis is both dismaying to me and flatly wrong.)
The Nazi philosopher Carl Schmidt famously said, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.” I despise Schmidt, but he was brilliant nonetheless, and this aphorism has deep insight behind it. Whether you want to consult evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, or the literature on negative polarization, we live in an age in which many of us define who we are by who — or what — we hate.
This is a big enough problem on its own, but it gets monumentally worse when you liberate yourself from the shackles of reality. What tactic isn’t justified if you convince yourself that your opponents are “literally Hitler”?
Here’s what Senator Booker said when Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, an eminently qualified judge who would have been on any Republican’s shortlist including, by the way, John McCain’s.
This “has nothing to do with politics” but with “who we are as moral beings.”
“I’m here to call on folks to understand that in a moral moment, there is no neutral. In a moral moment, there is [sic] no bystanders,” he said. “You are either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.”
I bring up John McCain for a reason. We’ve just been through a melancholy riot for the lost world of John McCain, in which every establishment Democrat openly pined for McCain’s style of bipartisanship. Well that cuts both ways. McCain can’t be a hero for refusing to demonize his opponents while it’s okay to claim that anyone who disagrees with you about Kavanaugh is complicit in “evil.”
Booker’s you’re-with-the-forces-of-good-or-you’re-with-the-forces-of-evil shtick surely plays well with the base of his party, as does Donald Trump’s similar garbage rhetoric on the right. But that’s the point. They’re opposite sides of the same sh***y coin.
And say this for Trump: He seems to honestly believe it. Booker’s playing a role precisely because the politics of this craptacular moment demand it, and, like a leaf on the wind, he’s going where the strongest breeze takes him.
I very much doubt Booker will ride those winds to the White House, because he’s a fugacious firebrand, and the script we’re stuck in demands the real deal to the play the role. The sincerest form of flattery is imitation, and the Democrats now want their own Trump knock-offs (which is great news for celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti).
That’s always been the greatest danger of Trump’s corrupting influence on the GOP and the country: that his violations of norms would invite return fire, only more intense (just as Obama’s violations invited Trump). The next Democratic president (in 2020 or 2024 or whenever) likely won’t talk like Trump, but if we stay on the track we’re on, he or she will also act like a war president, where the real enemy isn’t a foreign power but fellow Americans the base doesn’t like. That’s the inevitable consequence when you define yourself by a caricature of your enemy.
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No comments on ‘Spartacus’: Greek for ‘left-wing windbag’
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Today in 1962, the BBC banned playing the newly released “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett on the grounds that it was offensive. To use vernacular of the day, uncool.
Eleven years later, the BBC banned the Rolling Stones’ “Star Star,” but if you play the clip you can hear why (really):
The Kinks had the number one song today in 1964:
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Today in 1926, Radio Corporation of America created the National Broadcasting Co. …
… which later returned to RCA’s parent, General Electric Co. (from whose name came the famous NBC chimes), and now is part of what used to be Universal Studios …
… and is part of Comcast cable TV.
The number one single in Britain today in 1965:
Today in 1971, five years to the day after John Lennon met Yoko Ono, Lennon released his “Imagine” album:
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Today in 1956, Harry Belafonte’s “Calypso” went to number one for the next 31 weeks:
Today in 1965, Daily Variety included this ad:
Madness! Running parts for four Insane Boys age 17-21.
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Hollywood Reporter on news about an actor I’ve written about here and here:
Burt Reynolds, the charismatic star of such films as Deliverance, The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit who set out to have as much fun as possible on and off the screen — and wildly succeeded — has died. He was 82.
Reynolds, who received an Oscar nomination when he portrayed porn director Jack Horner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) and was the No. 1 box-office attraction for a five-year stretch starting in the late 1970s, died Thursday morning at Jupiter Medical Center in Florida, his manager, Erik Kritzer, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Always with a wink, Reynolds shined in many action films (often doing his own stunts) and in such romantic comedies as Starting Over (1979) opposite Jill Clayburgh and Candice Bergen; The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) with Dolly Parton; Best Friends (1982) with Goldie Hawn; and, quite aptly, The Man Who Loved Women (1983) with Julie Andrews.
Though beloved by audiences for his brand of frivolous, good-ol’-boy fare, the playful Reynolds rarely was embraced by the critics. The first time he saw himself in Boogie Nights, he was so unhappy he fired his agent. (He went on to win a Golden Globe but lost out in the Oscar supporting actor race to Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting, a bitter disappointment for him.)
“I didn’t open myself to new writers or risky parts because I wasn’t interested in challenging myself as an actor. I was interested in having a good time,” Reynolds recalled in his 2015 memoir, But Enough About Me. “As a result, I missed a lot of opportunities to show I could play serious roles. By the time I finally woke up and tried to get it right, nobody would give me a chance.”
Still, Reynolds had nothing to apologize for. He was Hollywood’s top-grossing star every year from 1978 through 1982, equaling the longest stretch the business had seen since the days of Bing Crosby in the 1940s. In 1978, he had four movies playing in theaters at the same time.
Reynolds’ career also is marked by the movies he didn’t make. Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholson and Bruce Willis surely were grateful after he turned down the roles of Han Solo, retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove and cop John McClane in Star Wars, Terms of Endearment and Die Hard, respectively. He often said that passing on James L. Brooks’ Endearment was one of his worst career mistakes. (Nicholson won an Oscar for playing Breedlove.)
Reynolds also indicated he was Milos Forman’s first choice to play R.P. McMurphy (another Nicholson Oscar-winning turn) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “backed away” from playing Batman on TV in the 1960s and declined the part made famous by Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.
In John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), based on a book by James Dickey, Reynolds starred as macho survivalist Lewis Medlock, one of four guys from Atlanta who head to the wilderness for the weekend. Filmed by Vilmos Zsigmond along the Chattooga River near the Georgia-South Carolina border, it was an arduous production that Boorman shot in sequence.
“When I asked John why, he said, ‘In case one of you drowns,’” Reynolds wrote.
He had good reason. When Reynolds saw test footage of a dummy in a canoe going over the falls in one scene, he told Boorman the scene looked fake. He climbed into the canoe, was sent crashing into the rocks and ended up in the hospital. “I asked [Boorman] how [the new footage] looked, and he said, ‘Like a dummy going over the falls,’” Reynolds wrote.
Deliverance, infamous for its uncut 10-minute hillbilly male rape scene (“squeal like a pig”), was nominated for three Academy Awards but came away empty. It lost out to The Godfather in the best picture battle.
“If I had to put only one of my movies in a time capsule, it would be Deliverance,” Reynolds wrote. “I don’t know if it’s the best acting I’ve done, but it’s the best movie I’ve ever been in. It proved I could act, not only to the public but me.”
Three months before the movie opened, Reynolds — once described by journalist Scott Tobias as the “standard of hirsute masculinity” — showed off his mustache and other assets when he posed nude on a bearskin rug for a Cosmopolitan centerfold in April 1972. (Seven years later, he would become the rare man to grace the cover of Playboy.)
The Cosmo issue sold an outlandish 1.5 million copies. “It’s been called one of the greatest publicity stunts of all time, but it was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made,” he wrote, “and I’m convinced it cost Deliverance the recognition it deserved.”
A running back in high school and college who talked with legendary coach Bear Bryant about attending Alabama, Reynolds put his gridiron skills to use in Robert Aldrich’s The Longest Yard (1974), playing Paul “Wrecking” Crewe, who leads his rag-tag team of prison inmates in a game against the guards. He later starred in Semi-Tough (1977), another football film.
Smokey and the Bandit (1977), written and directed by his pal, the legendary stuntman Hal Needham, grossed $126 million (that’s $508 million today, and only Star Wars took in more that year). Reynolds, who stars as Bo “Bandit” Darville, hired to transport 400 cases of Coors from Texas to Atlanta in 28 hours, noted that, unbelievable as it sounds, Smokey was Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite movie.
Reynolds drives a sleek Pontiac Trans-Am in the film, and after the picture opened, sales of the model soared. (His black car is mentioned in Bruce Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch,” and the Tampa Bay Bandits, a U.S. Football League team in which he had an ownership stake, were named for the movie.)
Smokey spawned two sequels, and Reynolds went on to work again with Needham in The Cannonball Run (1981), another fun-filled action film that spawned another franchise. His other high-octane films included Sharky’s Machine (1981) and two movies as ex-con Gator McClusky.
In Smokey, Reynolds starred alongside Sally Field, and the two were an item for some time. He also had relationships with the likes of Dinah Shore (20 years his senior), Inger Stevens and Chris Evert, and he talked about dating Hawn and Farrah Fawcett in his book.
Reynolds was married to British actress Judy Carne (famous for NBC’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In) from 1963-66 and then to Loni Anderson, the voluptuous blonde best known for the CBS sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, from 1988-93. Both marriages were tempestuous, and his divorce with Anderson was particularly messy.
After a string of big-screen failures and the cancellation of his ABC private detective series B.L. Stryker, Reynolds rejuvenated his career by starring in the 1990-94 CBS sitcom Evening Shade, created by Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.
He won an Emmy Award in 1991 for best actor in a comedy series for playing Woodrow “Wood” Newton, a former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback who returns to his small-town home in Arkansas to coach a woeful high school team.
Burton Milo Reynolds Jr. was born on Feb. 11, 1936, in Waycross, Georgia, and raised in Florida’s Palm Beach County. His father was an Army veteran who became the police chief in Riviera Beach, Florida, not too far from the Everglades.
“My dad was my hero, but he never acknowledged any of my achievements,” he wrote in his memoir. “I always felt that no amount of success would make me a man in his eyes.”
Then known as Buddy Reynolds, he played halfback at Palm Beach High School, where his teammate was future New York Yankees manager Dick Howser, then suited up at Florida State, where Lee Corso, later a college coach and ESPN analyst, played on both sides of the ball. But he suffered a knee injury as a sophomore, and that was it for football and Florida State.
Reynolds enrolled at Palm Beach Junior College and appeared in a production of Outward Bound, playing the part handled by John Garfield in the 1944 film adaptation, Between Two Worlds. That led to a scholarship and a summer-stock stint at the Hyde Park Playhouse in New York. He roomed with another aspiring actor, Rip Torn, and they studied at the Actors Studio.
After a few appearances on Broadway and on television, Reynolds was off to Hollywood, where he signed with Universal and manned the wheel as Ben Frazer on Riverboat, an NBC Western that starred Darren McGavin.
He met Needham on that show, and the stuntman would double for him on projects through the years. Reynolds is referenced in “The Unknown Stuntman,” the theme song from the 1980s ABC series The Fall Guy, and he played an aging stuntman in Needham’s second film, Hooper (1978).
Reynolds joined Gunsmoke for its eighth season in 1962 as Quint Asper, a half-Comanche who becomes the Dodge City blacksmith. He played the title warrior in the 1966 spaghetti Western Navajo Joe, was an Iroquois who worked as a New York City detective in the short-lived ABC series Hawk and portrayed a Mexican revolutionary in 100 Rifles (1969).
Reynolds got another shot at toplining his own ABC show, playing homicide detective Dan August in a 1970-71 Quinn Martin production, but the series was axed after a season.
Reynolds appeared often on NBC’s The Tonight Show, and in 1972 he became the first non-comedian to sit in for Johnny Carson as guest host (Reynolds’ first guest that night was his ex-wife, Carne; they hadn’t spoken in six years, and she made a crack about his older girlfriend Shore). He and Carson once engaged in a wild and improvised whipped-cream fight during a taping, and he got to show a side of him the public never knew.
“Before I met Johnny, I’d played a bunch of angry guys in a series of forgettable action movies, and people didn’t know I had a sense of humor,” he wrote. “My appearances on The Tonight Show changed that. My public image went from a constipated actor who never took a chance to a cocky, wisecracking character.”
Reynolds showed that lighter side when he played a sperm in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972), and he lampooned his lavish Hollywood lifestyle in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie (1976). He was not above making fun of himself and his toupee.
In 1979, he opened the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre in Jupiter and in the 1980s, he developed the syndicated game show Win, Lose or Draw with host Bert Convy. The set was modeled after his living room.
With his divorce from Anderson and bad restaurant investments contributing to more than $10 million in debts, Reynolds filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1996 and came out of it two years later. In recent years, he sold properties in Florida, including his fabled 160-acre ranch — The Allman Brothers recorded an album there in the 1990s — and auctioned off personal belongings.
Survivors include his son, Quinton; he and Anderson adopted him when he was 3 days old.
Despite the ups and downs of a Hollywood life, Reynolds seemed to have no regrets.
“I always wanted to experience everything and go down swinging,” he wrote in the final paragraph of his memoir. “Well, so far, so good. I know I’m old, but I feel young. And there’s one thing they can never take away: Nobody had more fun than I did.”
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After the New York Times committed a flagrant act of … something by publishing this anonymity by a claimed member of the Trump administration, everyone wants to know, and is now speculating upon, the identity of the writer.
Jim Geraghty says:
We can draw a few conclusions about the anonymous senior official in the Trump administration who wrote the New York Times op-ed about the “stable state” “resistance” within the executive branch.
The writer is a traditional Republican, referring to “ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.”
The writer is particularly informed about, and concerned about, the president’s views on Russia:
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
The writer looked up to John McCain: “Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation. We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue.” The writer may well have been compelled to write this op-ed after McCain’s passing and the eulogies and reaction at his memorial service.
The writer did not work on the campaign — obviously, he holds Trump in low regard — but he’s probably been around the administration a while: “Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president.”
The writer must understand that being uncovered would end his career in GOP politics and torpedo any hopes of running for the Republican nomination someday. This is probably the last stop of his career. He probably considers himself to be part of a knowledgeable bipartisan consensus policy establishment and is worried about how his current work for Trump is perceived and will be remembered. This person is probably worried about his reputation and whether or not working for Trump will tarnish his legacy.
Traditional Republican, focused on Russia, inspired by McCain, been around a while, no future ambitions, part of the establishment. There is more than one figure in the administration who fits these criteria, but not many.
But I notice the recent article, “Aside from his father, Huntsman Jr. had ‘no greater mentor’ than McCain,” August 27, in the Desert News:
“Aside from my own dad, there’s been no one more impactful in my life,” [U.S. Ambassador to Russia] Jon Huntsman told the Deseret News from Moscow after initially declining to comment on his relationship with the Arizona senator, who died Saturday after battling brain cancer.
“It was the highest honor to associate with him. He was a mentor in many ways. Country first and bipartisanship were deeply ingrained due to his influence,” Huntsman said of his longtime friend.
Huntsman attended John McCain’s memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral. And Huntsman has already addressed calls for him to resign after Trump’s summit with Putin.
Huntsman responded:
Representatives of our foreign service, civil service, military and intelligence services have neither the time nor inclination to obsess over politics, though the issues of the day are felt by all. Their focus is on the work that needs to be done to stabilize the most dangerous relationship in the world, one that encompasses nuclear weapons, fighting terrorism, stopping bloodshed in Ukraine, and seeking a settlement of the seemingly intractable Syrian crisis. Their dedication to service to their country is above politics, and it inspires me to the core. It is my standard. (Emphasis added.)
I have taken an unscientific survey among my colleagues, whom you reference, about whether I should resign. The laughter told me everything I needed to know. It also underscores the fragile nature of this moment.
The unnamed official who wrote the New York Times op-ed concludes, “There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first.”
Just a theory.
The mystery writer of The New York Times op-ed that claims to be a member of the “Trump Resistance” while serving as a “senior official” in the administration has sparked a lot of speculation as to who it might be. One popular theory: Vice President Mike Pence.
The theory, which Pence’s office has adamantly denied, stems from the presence of one word in the piece that Mike Pence frequently uses, a word not in common use. Step aside “Rosebud,” the mystery word of today is “lodestar.”
According to Merriam-Webster, lodestar refers to “a star that leads or guides” or a person who “serves as an inspiration, model, or guide.” The mystery writer uses the word at one point in reference to the late Sen. John McCain, calling him “a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue.”
Vice President Mike Pence, apparently, has a penchant for the word. …
Another explanation for the use of the word “lodestar” could be that the mystery writer wanted to throw off people’s scents and make Mike Pence a suspect, a pretty low thing to do in a narcissistic stunt.
In a statement on Thursday, the Vice President’s office denied the charge and agreed with Trump that the mystery writer is “gutless.”
I wrote yesterday wondering about the Times’ motivation given that the Times has opposed every Trump policy since he was elected, when the writer does not oppose Trump policy, but believes Trump is too unstable to be president. If you were Deep Trump, and you believed Trump shouldn’t be president but Trump’s policies should continue, would you do the seemingly principled thing and loudly resign, or would you stay in, hope Trump left the White House, but seek to continue working with President Peice? Of course Shapiro’s theory makes that unlikely if Deep Trump did throw out “lodestar” to cast suspicion on the writer’s potential future boss.
The New York Post reports:
Vice President Mike Pence – and “the field” – lead offshore bookmaking picks as the White House mole behind the anonymous bombshell New York Times op-ed blasting President Trump.
Pence was listed at 2-to-3 odds on the site MyBookie as the fifth column official who claims to be working behind the scenes to stop some of Trump’s policies that they find wrongheaded.
The biggest favorite, at 1-3 odds, is “the field,” someone not listed among the 18 administration officials listed by the Costa Rica-based operation.
At 2-to-3 odds, a winning bettor investing $1 would profit 66 cents. At 1-to-3, a gambler wagering $1 would net 33 cents with a win.
“What tipped us off was ‘lodestar,’ “ MyBookie head oddsmaker David Strauss said of Pence. “When you search members of the administration (who have used that word) only one name comes up – and that name is Mike Pence. He’s used in multiple speeches this year.”
The other 17 named potential moles, listed by MyBookie, are: Education Secretary Betsy Devos (2-to-1), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (4-to-1), Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (4-to-1), chief of staff John F. Kelly (4-to-1), Defense Secretary Jim Mattis (5-to-1), Attorney General Jeff Sessions (5-to-1), Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (6-to-1), Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue (6-to-1), Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (7-to-1) Labor Secretary Alex Acosta (7-to-1), HHS Secretary Alex Azar (8-to-1), HUD Secretary Ben Carson (8-to-1), VA Secretary Robert Wilkie (8-to-1), Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (10-to-1), Ivanka Trump (12-to-1) and Jared Kushner (12-to-1).
Hours after MyBookie posted numbers, Canada-based Bovada issued its own Trump-leak odds and listed embatted AG Sessions as its favorite at 5-to-2.
He was followed by Pence (3-to-1), Kelly (4-to-1), Mattis (4-to-1), UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (10-to-1), “Javanka” (15-to-1), Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats (15-to-1), White House counsel Don McGahn (15-to-1), Melania Trump (50-to-1) and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway (50-to-1).
Bovada listed President Trump, himself, as the potential mole and Times writer at 25-to-1.
As for the last sentence: Readers my age or thereabouts might remember the original TV series “Dallas” and the worldwide speculation over who shot J.R. Ewing in a season-ending cliffhanger episode.
After the next-season opener revealed J.R.’s shooter, another show revealed that the producers had filmed several characters shooting J.R. so the cast wouldn’t know who actually shot J.R. until the next season, including actual shooter Kristin Shepherd, brother-in-law and archrival Cliff Barnes, J.R.’s wife Sue Ellen, and even J.R.’s father Jock and mother Miss Ellie.
And one more:
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Today in 1963, ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand” moved from every weekday afternoon in Philadelphia to Saturdays in California:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Doors’ “Waiting for the Sun,” their only number one album:
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First, USA Today last Thursday:
A California man was arrested and charged Thursday with making violent threats to Boston Globe employees, calling the newspaper the “enemy of the people,” the U.S. Attorney’s office for Massachusetts said.
Robert D. Chain, 68, of Encino, California, was charged with one count of making threatening communications in interstate commerce, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in Los Angeles Thursday and be transferred to Boston at a future time.
Court documents say Chain made about 14 threatening calls between Aug. 10-22, in reaction to the Globe’s efforts to organize a coordinated response from newspapers across the country to President Trump’s repeated attacks on the media.
In those calls, Chain allegedly referred to the Globe as “the enemy of the people’’ and threatened to kill its employees. Trump has often used that phrase in lambasting the news media.
According to the criminal complaint, the caller said, “As long as you keep attacking the President, the duly elected President of the United States, in the continuation of your treasonous and seditious acts, I will continue to threats, harass, and annoy the Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times, the other fake news.”
The Globe said more than 400 news outlets joined the coordinated campaign, including the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Denver Post, writing editorials in support of freedom of the press and decrying Trump’s references to the press as “fake news.’’
For the Wisconsin version of those opinion pieces, click here, then read this blog.
The day the mass editorials published on Aug. 16, authorities say Chain called the Globe’s newsroom and threatened to shoot its employees in the head “later today, at 4 o’clock.’’ Boston police responded by stationing personnel outside the Globe’s offices.
“Everyone has a right to express their opinion, but threatening to kill people takes it over the line and will not be tolerated,” Harold H. Shaw, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Boston Division, said in a statement. “Today’s arrest of Robert Chain should serve a warning to others, that making threats is not a prank, it’s a federal crime.’’ …
Trump’s condemnations of the press have become a common part of his speeches and rallies, and at some of them his supporters have directed invectives and obscene gestures at the media section.
In announcing Thursday’s arrest, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said, “In a time of increasing political polarization, and amid the increasing incidence of mass shootings, members of the public must police their own political rhetoric. Or we will.”
Next, Patrick Poole:
A man rammed his truck into the studios of Dallas Fox affiliate KDFW earlier this morning, just two days after Meet the Press host Chuck Todd published an article calling on his media colleagues to “start fighting back” against Fox News.
KDFW reports on the incident targeting their offices:A man was arrested Wednesday morning after crashing a truck into the side of the FOX4 building in downtown Dallas.
The man, after repeatedly crashing his vehicle into a side of the building with floor to ceiling windows, got out of his vehicle and began ranting.FOX4 photojournalists were able to film him placing numerous boxes next to a sidedoor filled with stacks of paper. The papers were also strewn across the sidewalk and street adjacent to the building.The man ranted about “high treason” and also mentioned a sheriff’s department.
The Dallas police bomb squad was dispatched to investigate a bag the man had left at the scene.
KDFW reports that all personnel were inside the building at the time, and no one from the station was injured.
This car ramming attack comes just after NBC host Chuck Todd published an articleon Monday at The Atlantic calling for others to “start fighting back” against Fox News.
According to Todd, Fox News is the face of a 50-year vilification campaign targeting corporate media.
Of course, his corporate media colleagues all dutifully jumped on the anti-Fox News bandwagon in support of Todd’s call.
Now that someone may have responded to their collective call to “start fighting back” against Fox News, it remains to be seen if the establishment corporate media will tone down their open incitement targeting Fox News and supporters of President Trump.
Yeah, well, don’t hold your breath on that one. Todd appears to have forgotten that Fox is a corporation too, which means by his definition one part of the corporate media has been waging a 50-year war against the rest of the corporate media.
Some people on social media tried to claim that Trump’s rhetoric caused the attack on the TV station. I am untrained in psychiatry, so who knows the motivations of the guy who tried to turn a TV station into a drive-in. (Which happened an employer of mine 90 minutes into my first day there, without the ranting. For that matter, as readers know I’ve fielded various threats since college.)
At this point, though, it’s a race to see what’s going to happen next — assassinations or bigger mass murders than what happened at the Annapolis (Md.) Capital.
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For readers unfamiliar with Watergate: The headline is a reference to the anonymous source who fed the Washington Post information about the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. (From which came every reference to a scandal as ______gate, and every anonymous source tied to said _____gate as Deep _____.)
Now, the New York Times:
The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
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The number one single in the U.K. todayyyyyyy in 19677777777 …
One yearrrrrr laterrrrrr, the Beatles recorded Eric Clapton’s guitar part for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” making him the first non-Beatle on a Beatle record:
The College of Rock and Roll Knowledge reports:
… The Beatles’ George Harrison was heading in to London for a recording session for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. His neighbor, Eric Clapton needed a lift into London, so George offered to take him. George had a different idea though.
Harrison wasn’t happy with his own guitar tracks on the song so while driving, he asked Eric to come to the session and do a track on.
Clapton at first refused, saying that “nobody (famous) ever plays on the Beatles records!” but George insisted. Clapton came in and the invitation has its intended effect: the band members were completely professional and Eric’s solo sounded great.
As Clapton was listening to a playback, the thought his solo wasn’t “Beatle-y enough,” so the solo is run through an ADT circuit with “varispeed”, with the session engineer manually ‘waggling’ the oscillator: Engineer Chris Thomas has recalled: “Eric said that he didn’t want it to sound like him. So I was just sitting there wobbling the thing, they wanted it really extreme, so that’s what I did.” The effect sounded like the guitar was run through the Leslie rotating speaker of the Hammond B-3 organ cabinet.The number one song in the U.S. today in 1975:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 