Thursday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy.

Eulogy Flashback

From Osita Nwanevu:

The trouble with this is that people aren’t sent to Washington to have giving hearts for their colleagues, or to charm reporters, as McCain did. They are sent to craft and enact policies that have concrete consequences for ordinary people. It has never been clear whether Obama’s and McCain’s shared civic vision—that preserving civility matters more than achieving ideologically desired outcomes—allows for any point at which the American people should assess the character of political leaders on the basis of the policies they support. Whether, for instance, it was incumbent on Bush to acknowledge on Saturday that his and McCain’s advocacy for, in his words, “the true peace that comes only with freedom” led the United States into a war that brought neither peace nor real freedom to the Iraqi people. Or whether it was appropriate for McCain to select Henry Kissinger as one of his eulogists—a man who remains in Washington’s good graces despite a career that has likely killed millions. (Kissinger’s assistance with Richard Nixon’s sabotage of Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace talks with North Vietnam may have helped extend the torment and suffering of the war not just for McCain, then a prisoner of war, but for thousands of American soldiers and the people of Vietnam.) Much has been made of the fact that President Trump did not attend Saturday’s service. But any doubts that the keepers of American political norms stand ready to fully embrace more rule-bound, polite, and magnanimous representatives of Trump’s bigotry should have been quelled by élite indifference to the presence of John Kelly, one of the architects of the still unresolved family-separation crisis.

It is true, as Obama said in his eulogy, that political discourse can tend toward the “small and mean and petty” and “phony controversies and manufactured outrage.” But, for all the coruscating idiocies that the Trump years have brought us, they have also made clear that our most heated and significant fights are the product of a substantive divide between the values animating the left and the right in this country. The hope that Obama and McCain seemed to share was that we might ultimately come to find these values compatible—that we might commit to a politics uncurdled by wildly different and competing notions about what it means to be an American and which classes of people in our society are truly deserving of wealth, security, and power.

But the rise of Trump should raise doubts about whether that hope can or ought to be realized. It may instead be the case that there are political decisions about which one has a moral responsibility to be mean and unforgiving—that it shouldn’t, for instance, be considered churlish or unsporting to insist that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi or Vietnamese civilians or the traumas inflicted on children needlessly separated from their families should forever stain the legacies of the leaders who caused them. On Tuesday, protesters loudly interrupted the hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, on the grounds that a conservative majority will have grave implications for women’s health and corporate power, among other issues, for decades to come. The restive and unruly voices on the rise in our politics may not live up to the shining example set by our fables about the Maverick. But, then again, not many people ever have. Not even John McCain.

WHAT CAN BIDEN DOOOOOO

Absolutely nothing, you fools, you imbeciles.

WASHINGTON (AP) — National security adviser Jake Sullivan told lawmakers this week that the White House is not seeking to place conditions on U.S. military assistance to Israel, days after President Joe Biden signaled openness to the notion that was being pushed by some Democrats as the civilian death toll in Gaza from Israel’s war against Hamas climbed.

With A Spoon

And if he violates it...

Donald Trump is once again prohibited from attacking the law clerk at his ongoing bank fraud trial in New York, now that a four-judge appellate panel has reinstated a gag order that was briefly lifted this month.

The two-page appeals court decision on Thursday wiped out Trump’s lone victory—albeit a minor one—during the trial that threatens to destroy the business tycoon’s real estate empire.

Lunch

eat

Village Royalty

The problem with Henry Kissinger isn't just all the people he killed, it's that he killed all those people - joyfully unapologetically - and was still treated as a Wise Old Man of Washington. A fancy friend to parade at dinner parties to show you were somebody who mattered. A man whose council and praise was sought, treasured, and boasted about.

Rumsfeld died in obscurity as a mostly unlamented clown, as you would expect for a man like him. He wasn’t publicly feted for his genius for fifty years by the world’s most prominent bastards, who got pissy if anyone complained. pic.twitter.com/b44KCOHz8d

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) November 30, 2023

And the Village is - and certainly it was - the place of the "bipartisan consensus." Henry wasn't a Democrat or Republican, really, he was establishment. He was the inner circle. He lived at the head table of the permanent floating dinner party.

So when you wonder how things are as they are, how so many fucked up things are tolerated and cheered, how it's the people who object who are painted as deviant or even as The Real Racists, it's because this is a deeply fucked up culture filled with deeply fucked up people who fucking loved Henry Kissinger.

Jolly Good Pals

That Fucking Newspaper (the New York Times) has its problems, but the Washington Post, at least the bits originating from the various spook-and-Pentagon-adjacent "foreign policy" lifers, is written by and for people who have been to dozens of parties with Kissinger.

 #3 story when I typed this:

Finally Got Him, Satan

The important thing to understand about Henry Kissinger is that people in Washington do not understand what anyone has against him.

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him

Like all true human rights advocates, Samantha Power goes to baseball games with Henry Kissinger pic.twitter.com/sWAhMpNU70

— 🦕 Jon Schwarz 🦕 (@schwarz) April 12, 2014

Birds of a feather, and all that.

It’s always valuable to hear the reverent tones with which American elites speak of their monsters. When the Kissingers of the world pass, their humanity, their purpose, their sacrifices are foremost in the minds of the respectable. American elites recoiled in disgust when Iranians in great numbers took to the streets to honor one of their monsters, Qassem Soleimani, after a U.S. drone strike executed the Iranian external security chief in January 2020. Soleimani, whom the United States declared to be a terrorist and killed as such, killed far more people than Timothy McVeigh. But even if we attribute to him all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, never in Soleimani’s wildest dreams could he kill as many people as Henry Kissinger. Nor did Soleimani get to date Jill St. John, who played Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever.

Morning

Almost forgot the morning thread. Distracted by the sound of champagne corks popping.

Wednesday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy.

Car Brain On Fox

What is wrong with these people

Fox News is telling its viewers that speeding is a constitutional right: pic.twitter.com/wS93dBamtl

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) November 29, 2023

Putting speed limiters in car would be great, though if people thought "defund the police" was bad politically...

Sure Why Not

 

"Boring Company" Is Just A Really Dumb Idea

Doesn't require much more explanation than that. The initial promise of it, really, was that Musk had somehow improved tunneling speeds/costs. He did this by (essentially) writing on a napkin, "make tunnel machine faster," and then got a bunch of writeups about it from the usual sycophants in the press.

A reasonable innovation, if true, but it wasn't true and tunneling speed/costs, at least the simple act of running the machines, aren't really the issue with any of these projects. 

As for what would go THROUGH the tunnels, he settled on "somebody driving a Tesla." The self-driving car man still hasn't made them self-driving, even in this tiny controlled environment! Amazing stuff.

On the financial front, Boring has since put its self-driving vehicle plans on the back burner—meaning it’s racking up costs to pay a driver for every one to three people it moves underground at relatively mild speeds of under 40 miles per hour in Vegas.

Lunch

eat

Hunter Biden's Hog

The Republicans know it's too powerful, and are scared to let the rest of the world see it.

Trust Us

A lot of "foreign policy" is behind the veil. Sure we all know there are sordid "compromises" made, that the US can't, actually, get anything it wants from everybody all the time. Even assuming maximum idealism (do not assume that), the details are messy.

We put up with bad actors for a variety of reasons, many generally left unsaid. 

Still when things in the world go to shit, when those bad actors who we actively propped up for years commit unfathomable crimes, it is the time to point fingers and say - you guys fucked up! You said you got this, that you were busy managing the world, and it was all above our pretty little heads. You didn't!

Or, really, we fucked up! We trusted them!

Tom and Tom

Can't give him his second mustache this week. Today:

Pay particular attention to that last point: a revamped Palestinian Authority is the keystone for the forces of moderation, coexistence and decency triumphing in all three wars. It is the keystone for reviving a two-state solution.

Less than a year ago.

A week of reporting from Israel and the West Bank has left me feeling that the prospect for a two-state solution has all but vanished. But no one wants to formally declare it dead and buried — because categorically ruling it out would have enormous ramifications. So, diplomats, politicians and liberal Jewish organizations pretend that it still has a faint heartbeat. I do as well. But we all know that the two-state option is not in a hospital. It’s in hospice. Only a miracle cure could save it now.

I suppose they don't strictly contradict each other, but earlier Tom was much more clear about what was happening. As much as it pains me to say it, the ghouls in the Biden administration should've read Tom's column a year ago.

Tuesday Night

Rock on