He did it
by digby
Of course he did …
Here’s video of @jimsciutto asking Peter Navarro if political investigations about the Bidens have come up during China trade talks, and Navarro declining to answer. pic.twitter.com/uaev1O960s— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) October 24, 2019
Did anyone actually think he wouldn’t add the Biden smear to the trade talks?
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Students of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.
But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.
Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)
Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances. Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.
It’s also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)
That is the toxic combination of views has the Attorney General of the United States running all over the world seeking evidence to back up a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which Ukraine, the “deep state,” the Intelligence agencies of Italy, the U.K. and Australia, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee all conspired to frame Russia and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They call this an investigation into the “origins” of the Russia investigation, which is also being handled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham, appointed by Barr.
Barr’s personal intervention is outside the boundaries of the normal procedures, but that is yet another example of his “unitary executive” theory: He works for the president and the president has the power to assign him to any task, including being an international man of mystery. So far, Barr appears to be coming up goose eggs with the foreign intelligence services. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is “sparking discord in several foreign capitals, going outside usual channels to seek help from allies in reviewing the origins of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation begun during the 2016 presidential campaign.”
On Thursday night the Times set the political world aflame with a report that Durham has officially opened a criminal investigation into the matter. No one is sure what basis there is for this, but reports over the past week or so suggest Durham’s team is focusing intently on the people Donald Trump often rails against in his public statements, including former FBI agent Peter Strzok and possibly high-level intelligence community personnel such as former CIA chief John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.
The timing of the story is obviously designed to counter the very bad news coming out of the House impeachment investigation in the House on a daily basis. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting that Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would hold parallel hearings into the origins of the Russia investigation, as promised. Graham is now balking because the Senate rules would require that he allow Democratic participation. (The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released two substantial reports on the 2016 election, making clear that they came to the same conclusions as the FBI and the intelligence community regarding Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, also complicates matters for him.)
So Graham has been reduced to introducing a meaningless resolution saying that the House is being unfair, obviously hoping to appease Trump and keep his homegrown followers happy. According to the Daily Beast, it’s not working. In fact, TrumpWorld wants Graham to call House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to testify before Graham’s Senate committee, which would be a serious violation of congressional norms. He seems reluctant for the moment, but who knows what he’ll be willing to do as time goes on?
So for the moment the task of bringing the Fox News alternate-universe conspiracy theory to the mainstream falls to Barr and Durham. They have both reportedly been to Ukraine in recent weeks, presumably searching for that elusive “DNC server” that Trump constantly babbles about. Maybe they will manage to delight the Trump base by trying to prosecute some FBI and CIA personnel. Barr seems willing to push the boundaries beyond anything we could have imagined, so that’s not as outrageous as it sounds.
The only remedy for this is for Congress to reassert its own prerogatives and impeach the president and, if necessary, his henchmen. If they fail to hold him accountable for the vast abuse of power and corruption of his office, the precedents will be set and the “unitary executive” will become the working model for all Republican presidents, just as Barr intends. The next one will no doubt be more efficient at using it than Donald Trump.
Pompeo writes his own obituary
by digby
Any Republican who shows this kind of unequivocal support for Donald Trump’s foreign policy is dead in the water for the future, even in Kansas. Just as with Mike Pence, the necessity for them to constantly pledge fealty to their Dear Leader leaves them no room to create some distance from him for the future.
If Donald Trump is unable to cheat his way to victory in 2020 and somehow solidify Bill Barr and company’s Unitary Authoritarian Executive, these people will have sealed their fate. If Trump goes down after one term, Republicans will scream bloody murder but they will soon drop him.
Trump’s so-called America First policy is incoherent and anachronistic. Republicans haven’t been isolationists since 1941, and they won’t be after Trump is gone. At this point, I don’t think they really believe in anything but racism, misogyny and owning the libs. But even if you believe in strict isolationism at a time when the planet needs to come together to solve the existential threat of climate change and fascism is on the rise all over the world, you simply cannot see this chaotic, ignorant, racist approach to dealing with other countries as a positive.
Anyway, here’s Pompeo licking Trump’s boots with so much ferver you’d think he’d choke on his own tongue:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo aggressively defended President Donald Trump on Thursday against criticism that his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northeastern Syria would inflict lasting damage on America’s credibility with its allies.
In an interview with The Wichita Eagle and The Kansas City Star, Pompeo said that Trump is good for his word and that, “what the president said he would do, he did it.”
Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw U.S. forces earlier this month from northeastern Syria infuriated the region’s Kurdish population, which viewed the move as a betrayal after its soldiers had fought alongside the U.S. military against Islamic State.
Pompeo rejected a question about whether the president’s treatment of the Kurds had undercut U.S. credibility.
“The whole predicate of your question is insane,” Pompeo said. “The word of the United States is much more respected today than it was just two and a half years ago.”
Since Trump’s announcement of the withdrawal, Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence have led a diplomatic effort to end an outburst of violence that followed, displacing roughly 200,000 people and leaving prisons holding Islamic State fighters unmanned.
“We make clear the things that we will do,” Pompeo continued. “We also make clear the things that we’re not prepared to do. I think it’s important for people to understand that other countries have to step up too. Other countries must share the burden for not just the security of the world, but security for their own countries.”
The secretary’s remarks come amid new survey data showing increasing public concern about the situation in Syria. A CNN poll released on Thursday found that 75% of Americans are concerned and that 69% believe recent changes in U.S. policy will lead to a re-emergence of Islamic State.
The policy has led to bipartisan outrage on Capitol Hill, where Republicans and Democrats have demanded consequences for Turkey – a NATO ally – and its president, Tayyip Erdogan, who directed the invasion and is expected to visit the White House next month.
Trump on Wednesday said that he had ordered all sanctions on Turkey be lifted after it had agreed to halt its assault on the Kurds. Pompeo said he had recommended that action in light of his negotiations with Ankara.
“Was I comfortable? Yes. I recommended that to the president,” Pompeo said. “We went and laid out for President Erdogan the fact that we were against what he had done – the president was very unhappy that he conducted an incursion into Syria.”
“We wanted to stop that incursion to save lives,” Pompeo said. “We did that.”
War is peace.
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By All Accounts, John Durham Works for the Most Corrupt US Government Ever
by tristero
Media outlets are currently full of vacuous talking heads salivating over the honest, sober, careful, “widely respected” John Durham, the prosecutor who opened up a totally bogus criminal investigation into the origins of the probe into Russian interference with 2016. So let me point out the obvious:
John Durham has no integrity whatsoever. He works for the most corrupt US government and the most corrupt Attorney General in our history (and given the records of Nixon and Bush, that’s saying a lot). If he truly had integrity (and had even a mote of smarts), he wouldn’t be working for Trump and Barr. He would have found an honest way to draw a salary.
Will Durham act with integrity going forward? So far, there’s no public evidence he has any intention to. Let him earn his integrity, and let’s see what he does.
And media? If your talking heads are friends with a government official, they should be banned from praising their honesty and integity. The same thing was said time and again about the utterly dishonest Barr and about so many others, including Kavanaugh. It’s dangerous misinformation and hampers a serious evaluation of what these officials are actually up to.
Top Shelf
by Tom Sullivan
Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Image from Australian Broadcasting Company profile.
You can just hear Don LaFontaine, can’t you?
STEVE BANNON is back.
Back to pull Donald Trump’s fat from the fire.
This time, it’s “War Room: Impeachment.”
Steve Bannon has “returned from exile” after a perilous journey “to spark populist movements at hotspots around the world.”
Bannon will need two days of stubble and wear three shirts at once to save to save a presidency in peril … from itself.
From the basement of “Breitbart Embassy” (his Capitol Hill home), Bannon will “broadcast live, seven days a week.”
With his “kinetic flair and penchant for the dramatic,” Bannon will not stop until he’s crushed every traitor.
Or “until the Senate votes on impeachment.”
“We’re riding to the sound of guns.”
Yes, really. Quotes above from The Hill. It ought to have a splashy poster and a trailer. (But please, no bare-chested volleyball.)
“The argument that this is all fake news and a deep state witch hunt is just not working,” Bannon revealed to The Hill’s Jonathan Easley:
The Democrats, Bannon said, are routing Republicans with their top-shelf impeachment messaging operation as they investigate Trump’s interactions with Ukraine.
“It’s a master class in disinformation warfare,” Bannon said.
If you did a spit take just now, clean yourself up before continuing.
Translation from Breitbartese: The GOP has no defense for Trump’s impeachable actions or the “top-shelf” facts and public admissions already in evidence. They’re left with character assassination, kabuki theater, and arguments about a process written and approved by a Republican majority in 2015.
The Hill is on a roll. The site declared Thursday, “Nearly half of Americans think Democrats have moved too far to the left: poll.” The same Quinnipiac poll shows similar numbers of voters think neither Republicans nor Democrats have moved too far left or right (46 and 42 percent, respectively; margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points). But those aren’t clickbait numbers and won’t frighten Democratic centrists.
Not exactly voters riding to the sound of guns.
The Most Amazing Thing That Republicans Believe About Trump
by tristero
They really seem to think that this is all there is, and that not much more will come out if they can just stop the Ukraine probe.
They have no idea who they’re defending, no idea how deep his depravity. Oh, they know he’s crazy, ignorant, profligate, and corrupt. But still, they really have no idea.
We do. There’s a lot more. And maybe not all of it will come out, but a lot more will. And a lot more of those in Trump’s orbit will wind up like Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort before it’s over.
This is what made them gasp
by digby
It occurred when William Taylor, the lead U.S. envoy to Ukraine, described a video conference call in July with officials from the White House Office of Management and Budget. Even Republicans who were present expressed concern, the source said, because the call made a direct link between President Donald Trump and the withholding of military aid to Ukraine for political purposes.
One OMB official, who was not named by Taylor during his appearance on Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, informed those on the call that there was a hold on U.S. military aid. While that OMB official didn’t know why the funds were being frozen, a second OMB aide, who was not on camera, said “the directive had come from the president to the chief of staff to OMB,” according to Taylor. The call occurred one week before Trump’s discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“There were audible sighs and ‘ughs’ (during Taylor’s deposition) when that process was described,” according to the source.One member of Congress who was in the room, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said the moment made the connection clear between the withholding of aid and Trump’s demand that Ukraine conduct an investigation that could implicate his political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
“He drew a very direct line in a series of events he described as being President Trump’s decision to withhold funds and refuse a meeting with Zelenskiy,” Wasserman Schultz said, “unless there was a public pronouncement by him of investigations of Burisma.”
I’m not entirely sure why this is being seen as a huge breakthrough. It’s really just corroboration for what Trump himself was seen to have said on that phone call and he and his chief of staff later admitted to saying! I get that he’s a pathological liar and stunningly stupid but he said what he said and we all know it. Taylor’s testimony is helpful but it isn’t the smoking gun. Trump’s own words were.
Taylor’s testimony lays out the whole plot from his perspective in great detail. It is a devastating portrait of this corrupt “irregular” policy track in Ukraine designed to bribe the Ukrainian president into publicly smearing Joe Biden in exchange for military aid, a presidential meeting and, apparently, a trade agreement. Trump pulled out all the stops. Taylor is an important witness. But this isn’t a situation where we needed to know “what did the president know and when did he know it?” We know he knew it all from the beginning.
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Poor Lindsey Graham just can’t catch a break
by digby
He tries so hard and it’s never, ever enough:
Donald Trump and his close political allies demand more aggressive pushback to the House impeachment investigation.
On Thursday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) introduced a symbolic resolution condemning the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry as being inherently unfair and constitutionally problematic. Among other things, the non-binding bill called on the House to hold a vote to open an inquiry, to allow Trump to call witnesses, and to provide congressional Republicans the power to issue subpoenas and “participate fully” in all proceedings.
Graham’s effort was designed as a sop to the president. In fact, the senator had just returned from lunch with Trump at the White House when he introduced his bill, and reported that the president was not at all dissatisfied with the defense he’d received from the Senate GOP.
“I think he feels frustrated that—here we go again,” Graham told The Daily Beast.
But his resolution appeared to only infuriate Trumpworld writ large as it demanded that the Senate Republicans hold public hearings and congressional investigations that placed the president’s domestic opponents under the microscope.
“He honestly probably would have been better off doing nothing than that because it’s pretty clear this resolution is nothing more than a ploy to appease the base which is furious at him right now,” said one Trumpworld operative.
That Graham’s maneuver fell short of satisfying the political bloodthirst among Trump’s allies didn’t go unnoticed by his colleagues, many of whom have privately gripped in recent days about Trump’s eagerness to air his disapproval of the very people who he needs to keep in his corner if and when an impeachment trial occurs. One top GOP Senate operative said that patience on the Hill is “wearing thin.”
“It’s exhausting and they don’t know what they don’t know in terms of where this is going,” the operative added.
Other aides said that they found the attacks from Trump-allied operatives to be counterproductive.
“It’s an interesting strategy,” a senior Senate GOP aide told The Daily Beast, “to attack Republican senators after they try to defend you.”
Oh heck. They are starting to fight amongst themselves. And Trump is getting upset that they aren’t protecting their Dear Leader quite enough. They seem concerned. What a shame.
If Graham were to hold Judiciary hearings to interview different witnesses and establish a counter-narrative more favorable to Trump, it’s unlikely that Senate rules and precedent would allow for a process that many Trump backers might want to see.
According to several Senate veterans, the rules of the chamber do dictate that Graham would have to grant Democrats on his committee the chance to call witnesses selected by the minority members of that committee. It is possible, several aides said, that Graham could move to scrap and/or set the rules of his committee though it’s unclear if he’d be successful and doing so would represent a massive breach in norms and risk upending future committee business.
“It’s something we never considered when we were there,” said Greg Nunziata, who was formerly senior Republican counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The majority and minority historically work in concert in planning hearings. The majority does call the majority of witnesses but it is practice is to allow the minority to call witnesses as well.”
Graham, on Thursday, said he would not call witnesses to testify, and in doing so he noted that he would have to allow the minority member, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), to call witnesses of her own. Graham also admitted that he was under pressure from Republicans to subpoena the Democratic lawmaker running the impeachment probe who is currently Trump’s public enemy number one. “I’m being asked by folks out in the Republican world, why don’t you call Adam Schiff?” Graham said. “I think that’d do a lot of damage to the country, for a senator to call a member of the House.”
While that more measured approach has angered Trump-allied operatives, including the president’s son Don Jr., it is one that has notably been embraced by some in the White House. One senior aide told The Daily Beast that they were waiting to see the results of the U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the Russia probe origins before deciding on next steps.
“I suppose following his report,” the aide said “further action could be taken as warranted.”
He’s waiting for Barr, obviously.
Matt Gaetz and The 300
by digby
Gaetz is such a clown. But he’s a perfect representative of a certain strain of wingnut. Even as they pretend to be isolationists and “America First” and back Trump’s disgraceful abandonment of every bipartisan international institution they used to rub in liberal faces, they see themselves as Spartan warriors:
Congressman Matt Gaetz sure is feeling himself after leading the blitz of House Republicans into private impeachment hearings — delaying them for hours — and he’s glowing about scoring brownie points with POTUS.
We got the Florida Rep. on Capitol Hill, shortly after members of his Freedom Caucus ignored protocol and barged into a secure facility Wednesday, where Adam Schiff was conducting a closed-door deposition as part of President Trump’s impeachment inquiry.
Gaetz compared his move to the Spartans in the the 2006 movie, “300.” Seriously, you gotta see how pumped he was — we fully expected him to shout, “This … is … Washington!!!”
Don’t assume Gaetz or any of them are students of the Classics.
Everything they know about this episode is from a really stupid movie. I wrote about this back in 2007 when it came out:
Hey Joey, Do You Like Movies About Gladiators?
by digby
I’ve been following this story about “300” in the entertainment press with some interest. It has to be the most breathless, overwrought wingnut attempt to find relevance in popular culture yet. Here’s Newsweek:
…the cultural significance and popular appeal of “300” reach beyond the thrill of watching pixilated decapitations. The Persians in “300” are the forces of evil: dark-skinned, depraved and determined to terrorize the West. The noble, light-skinned Spartans possess a fierce love of liberty, not to mention fierce six-pack abs. “Freedom is not free,” says the wife of Spartan King Leonidas. The movie was adapted from a graphic novel by Frank Miller (“Sin City”). Miller’s post-9/11 conservatism (he is reportedly working on a new graphic novel pitting Batman against Al Qaeda, titled “Holy Terror, Batman!”) suffuses his comic-book fantasies. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that “300” resonates for some real warriors. At a theater near Camp Pendleton outside San Diego, cheers erupted at a showing of “300,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The Marines (“The Few, the Proud”) identify with the outnumbered Spartans.
Ok. So the few the proud at Camp Pendleton see themselves in the role of Spartans. Most of them do have fierce six-pack abs, if not necessarily light skin, and it’s common for soldiers to enjoy battle rituals. I’m not surprised by this.
But this is ridiculous:
The analogy between the war on terror and the death struggle of ancient Greece with Persia has not been lost on some high administration officials either, especially Vice President Dick Cheney. (A White House spokesman declined to comment about the film.) In the months after 9/11, a classics scholar named Victor Davis Hanson wrote a series of powerful pieces for the National Review Online, later collected and published as a book, “An Autumn of War.” Moved by Hanson’s evocative essays, Cheney invited Hanson to dine with him and talk about the wars the Greeks waged against the Asian hordes, in defense of justice and reason, two and a half millennia ago.
Everyone thinks of George W. Bush as being something of a child, with a childlike view of the world. But I think Dick Cheney’s a bit of a child too, at least when it comes to war, something which has been well documented if not well reported. He indulged in ridiculous fantasy scenarios in the first Gulf war and was so taken with Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary that he came to believe he was Lincoln and wanted to fire Schwartzkopf for being too McClellanlike.
Keep this guy away from netflix, half baked conservative historians and comic book writers. It’s dangerous.
But, as pathetic as Cheney’s Walter Mitty delusions are, nothing comes close to the wingnut bloggers:
The movie is a cartoon, based very loosely on historical fact. The Persians are depicted as either effeminate or vicious abusers of women, while the Greeks are manly men. The bad guys in “300” also include corrupt Spartan politicians who refuse to send more troops to the battle. Some right-wing bloggers have likened them to liberal Democrats voting against the surge in Iraq.
Here’s a fairly typical post:
The mind set reflected in the reviews of “300” suggest that the reviewers, with their apparent discomfort with the open expression of defiant aggression expressed in the movie, are too sophisticated to partake, even vicariously, in the Spartan heroics. It is unclear whether the pacifist left would ever fight, even to save themselves, let alone to save the civilization that they cannot imagine is under siege. If the sophisticates of Athens had refused to pick up the sword, they would have been dead or enslaved. Our modern day sophisticated Athenians of the MSM who refuse to wield their weapons, their pens and computers, in the service of Western Civilization, have already shown their willingness to live as slaves. After all, what did the Danish cartoon saga tell us except that the members of the elites in Academia, Hollywood, and the MSM are willing to offer up their free speech rights in obeisance to the barbarians at the gates.
“300” resonates because Americans have not yet shown themselves so willing to live as slaves as their “betters” in the effete elites.
Who hasn’t wondered why the “modern-day Athenians of the MSM refuse to wield their weapons, their pens, and computers, in the service of Western Civilization?” Thank God Americans such as this fine blogger are wielding their mighty weapons in public for all the world to see, eh? It’s made all the difference.
The Jawa Report is much more honest and straightforward than most:
I just saw “300”. It is probably the most important movie made since 9-11.
[…]
The propaganda, it is oh-so-beautiful. It rivals anything put out by Republic Pictures or Warner Brother’s animation during WWII. Heroic Americans fight the Hunnish/Asiatic hordes (many seem to forget that it wasn’t until after WWII that our movies redeemed the “Germans” by separating them from the “Nazis”—part of the Cold War propaganda effort).
In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and compare this to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part I–that classic piece of Soviet propaganda which artfully legitimized the Stalinistic purges as an effort to consolidate state power in the face of a foreign menace (Ivan as Stalin, the boyars as anti-revolutionary forces, and the Turks as the Germans). And who would argue that Eisenstein’s masterpiece wasn’t needed to help the war effort? Or Bugs Bunny? Or John Wayne?
No, “300” brings us back to the good-old days of propaganda. When propaganda was produced in support of our country. When propaganda was produced to remind us that we are the good guys and that our ideals are better than the ideals of our enemies.
Go see “300”. If you don’t like it you probably hate America. That, or you’re gay.
Right.
It should be said that some rightwing bloggers were not as taken with the film. But their commenters showed them that they were missing the point:
No one ever said that reinstalling the American man’s long-lost testicles was going to be a painless process, but it’s worth it. Best of all it reminds us that we once made of far sterner stuff than we are now and we need to get it back. I’m hoping there are a hundred more movies like “300” over the next couple of years. We need them.
dostrick on March 16, 2007 at 12:51 PM
Bingo.
Haven’t seen it yet (getting my infusion of cinematic testosterone tomorrow), but I’m definitely pumped up and ready for it. I can let the fact that it’s not historically accurate by any means slide since the movie makes no pretenses to the contrary. It pisses off all the right people (liberals, the tyrants in Iran, etc.) while espousing themes such as that there are some things worth fighting for.
‘Bout damn time. I’ll take this over former tough-guy Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima wimpfests any day.
thirteen28 on March 16, 2007 at 1:03 PM
“It’s a manly film, full of heroic poses and speeches…”
Which is why some liberal reviewers hated it, of course. After all, liberalism’s fundamental premise is the sissified surrender of the West, while presided over by girlymen.
So there you have it.
I couldn’t believe it when I heard about this movie because I’ve long joked that “America isn’t Sparta — America is a bunch of fat, spoiled shoppers” which is true. We are not a warrior culture, never have been, and yet we’ve fought and won our share of wars. These guys can go on and on about how it doesn’t matter that the film was historically inaccurate because it was all about teh good vs evil and all, but its inaccuracy is quite relevant. If you want to be a mighty warrior nation, everybody has to move their fat asses off the couch and become — you know — warriors. “Wielding” a keyboard and using words like “girly-men” and Islamofascism” doesn’t count.
This is how it’s done:
The agoge was a rigorous education and training regime undergone by all Spartan citizens (with the exception of future kings.) It involved separation from the family, cultivation of loyalty to one’s group, loving mentorship, military training, hunting, dance and social preparation.
The term agoge literally translates as ‘raising’. Supposedly introduced by the semi-mythical Spartan law-giver Lycurgus but thought to have had its beginnings between the seventh and the sixth centuries BC, it trained boys from the age of seven to eighteen.
The aim of the system was to produce the physically and morally steeled males to serve in the Spartan army, men who would be the “walls of Sparta,” the only city with no defensive walls – they had been taken down at the order of Lycurgus. Discipline was strict and the boys were encouraged to fight amongst themselves in order to determine who was the strongest in the group…
Boys were sent from the family home and from then on lived in groups (agelae, herds) under an older boy leader. They were encouraged to give their loyalty to their communal mess hall rather than their families, even when married they would not eat an evening meal with their wives until at least 25. The boys however were not well fed and it was expected that they would steal their food. If caught stealing however, they would be severely punished (not for stealing, but instead for getting caught). All Spartan males with the exception of the eldest son of each of the Spartan royal households (Agiad and Eurypontid) were required to go through this process (they were permitted not to attend as it was believed they were part god).
Americans wouldn’t last a day in such a regime, and frankly, good for us. There have been others who tried to emulate it and it didn’t work out so well.
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Sorry Kirstjen, putting babies in cages makes you irredeemable
by digby
I don’t understand why anyone would think Kirstjen Nielson should be accepted into polite company much less at a meeting celebrating Powerful Women, but apparently, Fortune Magazine thinks she’s just another high-level government bureaucrat:
Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit is the kind of event where you can’t walk 20 steps without being handed the business card of another Powerful Woman, who you know paid $13,500 to be there, because that is the membership fee you would have paid, too, if you were an attendee at Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit.
Hillary Clinton was supposed to be a featured speaker at the conference in Washington this week, but then she backed out, partly because former homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen, enforcer of the Trump administration’s loathsome child separation policy, was also speaking. Incidentally, so was Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii Democrat whom Clinton had just called a “favorite of Russians” in the 2020 race, prompting Gabbard to accuse Clinton of being “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.”
Anyway, I decided to go.
Held at the posh Mandarin Oriental hotel, Fortune’s conference is the kind of event where the seminars have titles like, “Co-Opetition: From Competition to Cooperation,” and where the hallways are lined with pressed-juice stands, and pop-up Dior counters providing mini-makeovers, and many, many advertisements for M.M. LaFleur, which is a clothing brand you never need know exists unless you reach a certain age and income level, at which point its logo will stalk you on Facebook. “M.M. LaFleur Live with Purpose. Dress with Ease.”
Wandering around on Monday and Tuesday (using a press pass, not my life savings), I caught sessions featuring congresswomen Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Old Navy CEO Sonia Syngal and feminist icon Anita Hill. The COO of Rothy’s shoes was there, talking about how to build a viral brand, and so were dozen of audience members wearing Rothy’s shoes — evidence that the COO knows of what she speaks — and I am not going to lie, I was wearing Rothy’s, too.
The summit is one of those why-the-hell-not events, is what I’m saying. As in, I certainly wouldn’t pay for it, but if you want to, go ahead. It’s no weirder than many manly conferences with booths showcasing the latest golf club technology. It’s Goop, but with its feet rooted more on the ground.
Except then, abruptly, it wasn’t. Because Anita Hill finished her Q&A, and the audience members ate our fancy “Networking Lunch,” and then suddenly it was Kirstjen Nielsen on the brightly lit ballroom stage, determinedly dodging every question posed to her by “PBS NewsHour’s” Amna Nawaz.
“I don’t regret enforcing the law because I took an oath to do that,” she said, after Nawaz repeatedly pressed her on whether she regretted signing the memo that greenlighted removing children from their parents at the Mexican border.
Nielsen insisted that she “spoke truth to power from the very beginning” of her tenure, and resigned when it became clear that “saying no” wasn’t enough. But then when Nawaz pointed out that Nielsen had just accepted another position with the administration, on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, Nielsen defended the move: “Are you telling every CEO in here that they should never advise the government?” she asked incredulously.
Uhm — Kirstjen is not just another CEO. She implemented one of the most grotesque policies we’ve seen in America in a very long time. She oversaw the separation of thousands of families without even keeping track of where the children went or who their parents were.
She is a blight on America, right up there with Trump. She must do years of good works before she can hope to redeem her reputation. Taking another job with the Trump administration sets her back at least a quarter-century.
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