Love Lies Bleeding

Since the official start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been to one funeral. The person who died was Mrs. D's cousin, who died of advanced Alzheimer's at the remarkably young age of 55. She did not have COVID-19.

The funeral was small and surreal; maybe 20 people at most. Everyone had to wear a mask and outward displays of affection were not in evidence -- no hugs for the survivors, muffled conversations throughout. The minister who presided noted that this was the first funeral she had done in months.

At least there was a funeral. Many people who have died in the last six months have not had a funeral at all, or much support as they approached the end of their lives.

It wasn't that way for John Lewis, the civil rights leader turned congressman who died last month. Lewis was an important figure in our recent history and no one disputes that he deserved the honors he received, but still, it rankled. Writing for the Spectator USA, Amber Athey noticed:

Funerals are important: they acknowledge the sanctity of life and allow friends and family to come together to grieve their loss. This reality doesn’t change based on how famous or revered an individual was to the general public: it doesn’t hurt any less to say goodbye to someone who was just a dad or just someone’s child or just a dear friend. Their lives aren’t any less significant. Yet politicians have decided that celebrity affords them the right to override the onerous restrictions on funerals that so many average Americans have been forced to accept.

Yes, Georgia is unique in that it allows anyone to have a funeral. However, the governor’s executive order prohibits gatherings of more than 50 people if social distancing cannot be maintained. Photos of Lewis’s funeral in Atlanta showed that many more than 50 people attended and that social distancing was not maintained in parts of the church, nor during the burial outside.

Emphasis in original. Beyond that, other rules don't seem to apply:

At the same. time, a significant number of attendees traveled from out of state to attend the funeral. 50 members of Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attended. Mayor Muriel Bowser issued a mandatory two-week quarantine for anyone who travels to Washington, DC from a coronavirus ‘hotspot’. Georgia was one of the states designated as a ‘hotspot’ on a list released by the DC government on Monday. Nevertheless, Pelosi (an essential worker) flitted around the Capitol all day Friday, almost gloating about her freedom from the rules. 

This is a dangerous game. People are noticing. Back to Athey:

How could any person who has lost a loved one during the pandemic see this blatant hypocrisy and not be incensed? You had to decide which family member could enter the hospital and be the last to see their father alive. You had to have last rites read over the phone. You could not touch the casket before it’s lowered into the ground. You could not embrace each other as the dirt was shoveled. All the while, the same politicians who lectured you about making sacrifices to stop the spread traveled with impunity, attended large funerals without proper social distancing and avoided quarantines upon their return.

We are told, incessantly, that this crisis will not end unless people mask up and get with the program. We are sitting on a powder keg. Many of us have reasons to grieve, but those reasons don't seem to matter unless you are a politician with the proper credentials, or some other A-lister or grandee. Meanwhile, the march of restrictions rolls on. You and I have to wear masks. It would seem masks are not necessary where the air is rarefied. Know your place and breathe deeply.

This Masquerade

Our benevolent governor finally pulled the trigger on his latest power grab:

Gov. Tim Walz has issued an executive order mandating mask use for indoor public spaces.

The mandate will take effect early Saturday morning, and requires Minnesotans to wear masks in public indoor gathering areas like stores and restaurants, as well as while using public transportation.

Exemptions are in place for people with medical or mental health conditions that make it "unreasonable for the individual to maintain a face covering."

Children under the age of five are also exempt from the order, though masks are still encouraged for children between the ages of two and five. The order states that "those who are under two years old should never wear a face covering due to the risk of suffocation."

A few thoughts:

• The whole thing is unreasonable. But you knew that.
• We hear incessantly that the "science" says wearing a mask works. But we don't know, really. We're still in the middle of this experience and most of what's proffered as evidence are really assertions. I suspect there are scientists galore who are actually studying these mandates and we'll eventually get the truth about mask efficacy. But we don't have it yet. 
• I don't believe mask mandates are about thought control or whatnot, but I do know the news media are still awfully good at thought control. People are scared to death of COVID and while certain populations have reason to be cautious, most people who actually encounter the virus will not be at serious risk. Wearing a mask will make no real difference either way.
• I struggle with wearing a mask myself, but I doubt my discomfort would constitute a condition that would exempt me from the order. In my mask-wearing experience thus far, my glasses are constantly fogged and I become quite conscious of my breathing, which causes me a significant amount of anxiety. I don't know how my discomfort benefits others, but my social media feed is full of people who believe it does. And you cannot convince them otherwise. And, for that matter, complaining reveals your selfishness.
• You will note, as with all Walz depredations, there is no end date or sunset provision. Walz will require you to modify your behavior for as long as he chooses, whether his requirements are necessary or proper, and he does not need to provide you with a rationale. While I don't imagine he will mandate all Minnesotans wear a ball gag by October, you can't necessarily rule that out.
• I have mentioned it before, but it's worth saying again. When we finally get past all this, the real damage will be to our ability to be neighbors. Fear is corrosive as hell and the notion that your fear justifies the use of force against your neighbors to assuage your fear is poison, flat out. And any mandate is force.

By the way, if the masks don't work, this may be next:

It's for your own good, and we've heard quite enough from you anyway

That would be a shame

Sean Spicier laments:

Faith matters

Remarkably scandal free, they'll have you know.

Walz Between Church and State

Our overlords say no Church services with more than 10 people, even in a building as huge as the Cathedral. The bishops say "nuts":

The bishops’ decision to contravene a statewide executive order is the first made by U.S. bishops since the coronavirus pandemic began.

But Minnesota’s bishops said the state’s prohibitions on religious gatherings of more than 10 people does not respect the right to the free exercise of religion.

“It is now permissible for an unspecified number of people to go to shopping malls and enter stores, so long as no more than 50 percent of the occupancy capacity is reached. Big-box stores have hundreds of people inside at any one time, and the number of goods that are being handled and distributed in one store by many people—stock staff, customers, cashiers—is astounding. Workers are present for many hours per day, often in close proximity. There is no state mandate that customers wear masks in those malls or stores, wash their hands consistently, or follow any specific cleaning protocol,” the bishops wrote.

“In these circumstances, and given the well-researched protocols that we have proposed (and that are being followed successfully elsewhere in our nation) how can reason require us any longer to keep our faithful from the Eucharist?”

In response, Governor Walz said the following:

It's on. And it needs to be.

This should be obvious, but. . . .

Via Instapundit, the unreliable narrator Peggy Noonan makes the salient point:

It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue, they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.

They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.

Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder, you choose the word.

It's easy to write checks on other people's accounts. As for the politicians:

Meanwhile some governors are playing into every stereotype of “the overclass.” On Tuesday Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf said in a press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. Local officials who “cave in to this coronavirus” will pay a price in state funding. “These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of a war.” He said he’ll pull state certificates such as liquor licenses for any businesses that open. He must have thought he sounded uncompromising, like Gen. George Patton. He seemed more like Patton slapping the soldier. No sympathy, no respect, only judgment.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations “racist and misogynistic.” She called the entire movement “political.” It was, in part—there have been plenty of Trump signs, and she’s a possible Democratic vice presidential nominee. But the clamor in her state is real, and serious. People are in economic distress and worry that the foundations of their lives are being swept away. How does name-calling help? She might as well have called them “deplorables.” She said the protests may only make the lockdowns last longer, which sounded less like irony than a threat.

Those deplorables elected the Bad Orange Man. And there's an excellent chance they will do it again. Why is that?

When you are reasonable with people and show them respect, they will want to respond in kind. But when they feel those calling the shots are being disrespectful, they will push back hard and rebel even in ways that hurt them.

As a rule, we aren't comfortable talking about class in this country, but the stratification of class is stronger today than it has been a very long time. And our Betters aren't particularly magnanimous.

I am an older fat dude with a horrible family history for heart disease -- if I get the 'rona, it could be very bad for me. But having a third of the country on the dole is going to be a lot worse for all of us. And those who would deign to protect me aren't doing me, or anyone else, any favors. But self-affirmation is a helluva drug.

Unmasking

We are all supposed to wear masks now. But there is also some unmasking going on. Consider this example from a local political favorite:

Sure, that must be it

You might remember Strub, who served one term on the corrupt New Brighton City Council, adding a veneer of sanctimony to the usual money-grubbing that goes on there. Turns out ol' Strub figured out it's more lucrative to work for Gov. Walz, as the linked article informs us:

Not everybody supports the efforts of small businesses to oppose Walz’s months long shutdown. Brian Strub, a member of the governor’s staff, says that efforts by churches to reopen are motivated by greed and will endanger lives.

“Beware of any church suing to reopen, as they may be showing their true colors of caring more about the collection plate than about human life. This [the closures] is #prolife in 2020,” he wrote in a now deleted tweet.

I have been attending Mass online since the clampdown began. I have also been giving online to my parish for years now. As a congregation, we are greatly saddened that we cannot gather together for Mass. My parish is not wealthy, but it's not the money that matters. Except to Strub, who doesn't appear to have the courage of his convictions. You can delete your tweets, sir, but we sensed who you are long ago. Thank you for dropping your mask.

Just so we're clear

I haven't written much about the Trump impeachment charade, because it is a charade, but we did learn something about the depravity of the Democrats yesterday -- while they noisily decry Trump for imagined abuses of power, they abuse the hell out their power:

The most stunning aspect of the report, to me anyway, was the inclusion of telephone records of House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, Nunes’ aide David Harvey, President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and investigative reporter John Solomon. Schiff refused to say how he was able to obtain these records.

The mainstream media is abuzz with stories about Nunes communication with “Rudy Giuliani during key aspects of his Ukraine pressure campaign.” Nunes was in touch with John Solomon around the times he published major articles. And on and on. The telephone records don’t include the actual conversations. They identify who was calling whom and how long they spoke.

Schiff has crossed the line of decency with this move. Once again, he has abused his power. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton tweeted that obtaining these records is a remarkable abuse of President Trump’s constitutional rights. I would argue that it’s an abuse of the constitutional rights of all of the above. These are KGB tactics.

The author of this piece, Elizabeth Vaughn, is probably understating the meaning of this. What we've learned is the Democrats will stop at nothing to wield power. Any notions of fairness or decency are gone. We are in "whatever means necessary" territory. Our friend Gino has been warning us about this mindset for years, based on his experiences with the California donks. It's not coincidental that two California donks, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, are at the helm.

Trump will survive the attempt, but that's not enough. The Democrats must be stopped. They should never, ever have any power again.

Star Chamber Schiff Gets Bum Rushed in the SCIF

I’m glad the Republicans finally stormed the castle today, disrupting the reindeer games of Adam Schiff and his merry band of miscreants. At no point since the putative “impeachment inquiry” began has there been any actual inquiry going on. What happens in that super secret room is narrative manufacturing. It’s crap, and the Democrats know it. But they also know their confreres in the media will report whatever they manufacture as news. Can you get a career denizen of Foggy Bottom to contradict the Bad Orange Man? Of course. That’s easy. And whatever serves the narrative is probative, no matter how many other officials contradict the statements, and no matter that this most recent dude is reporting third-hand.

The Republicans in Congress have been letting this charade go on for a month now. It should have stopped the day it began. The only way to conduct a legitimate inquiry is to let both sides participate. That hasn’t happened and the Dems have had no intention of allowing anyone to provide any scrutiny of their manufacturing process. We currently have auditors in my office -- they come every year because the company where I'm currently working is transparent. The Congress needs plenty of auditing. And an enema.

In case you'd forgotten

Whistleblowers are in the news these days. But as always, some whistleblowers are more valuable than others:

Since Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, his government has waged a war against whistleblowers and official leakers. On his watch, there have been eight prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act – more than double those under all previous presidents combined.

And yet other apparent leaks have gone entirely unpunished or have been treated, as in the case of General David Petraeus, as misdemeanors. As Abbe Lowell, lawyer for one of the Espionage Act eight, Stephen Kim, has argued in a letter to the Department of Justice, low-level officials who lack the political connections to fight back have had the book thrown at them, while high-level figures have been allowed to leak with “virtual impunity”.

More, much more, at the link, including a reminder of how John Brennan rolled. And it's the Guardian, so you can't call it a right-wing source.

The Sanctimony Bulk Pack

James Comey is a tall man and his self-regard towers over even his expansive height. Jonathan Turley reminds us of a few things:

The inspector general has confirmed what was clear and obvious. The memos were FBI material, and Comey did violate provisions of the Federal Records Act and FBI rules clearly barring their removal and disclosure. Moreover, the inspector general agreed that it was not necessary to guarantee an investigation into Trump. Investigations were ongoing and the report cites other “options” that Comey refused to use. The report concludes, “What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.”

The reason Comey violated these rules was as obvious then as it is now. Leaking the memos was designed to improve his stature in the media and it worked. Comey transformed himself into a badly needed hero to use against the villain Trump. He knew the memos would change the focus of media coverage to his new role as a federal government whistleblower.

No one owes James Comey an apology.

The old-fashioned way

Some people decry Ilhan Omar because of her anti-Semitism. That's not what could bring her down, though. Simple, old-fashioned graft just might:

An independent government watchdog says Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar's campaign may have committed serious campaign finance fraud.

Omar's campaign spent $21,547 on travel for the E Street Group, run by Tim Mynett, whose wife is now accusing him of leaving her for Omar. Tom Anderson, who is with the conservative National Legal and Policy Center, said the travel payment may actually be Omar using campaign funds for personal use, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

"We believe Representative Ilhan Omar may have touched the third rail of campaign finance law: disbursing campaign funds for personal use," Anderson said. "It's a brazen act Representative Omar was caught doing before in Minnesota and all of the evidence we've seen tells us she’s probably doing it again."

Omar has operated under the assumption that the Esme Murphys of the world will cover for her. If the "probably" turns into "is," she'll have to leave. There are dozens of the DFL politicos who would love to have her seat in Congress. We're watching this one.

Franken Agonistes

Al Franken wants his old job back:

At his house, Franken said he understood that, in such an atmosphere, the public might not be eager to hear his grievances. Holding his head in his hands, he said, “I don’t think people who have been sexually assaulted, and those kinds of things, want to hear from people who have been #MeToo’d that they’re victims.” Yet, he added, being on the losing side of the #MeToo movement, which he fervently supports, has led him to spend time thinking about such matters as due process, proportionality of punishment, and the consequences of Internet-fuelled outrage. He told me that his therapist had likened his experience to “what happens when primates are shunned and humiliated by the rest of the other primates.” Their reaction, Franken said, with a mirthless laugh, “is ‘I’m going to die alone in the jungle.’ ”

And now, a musical interlude:

Regrets, he has a few, which Franken shared with Jane Mayer, last seen going after Brett Kavanaugh for things Kavanaugh hadn't done, but now in commiseration mode with a politician who actually did things:

When I asked him if he truly regretted his decision to resign, he said, “Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” He wishes that he had appeared before a Senate Ethics Committee hearing, as he had requested, allowing him to marshal facts that countered the narrative aired in the press. 

The piece I've linked, in the New Yorker, is very long and full of attempts at exculpation. Does Franken deserve a second chance? Was what happened to Franken fair?

Well, Franken's not going to get to represent Minnesota in the Senate again, unless Tina Smith were to stand down. Do you see that happening? I don't. Do you think Franken is going to primary Smith, the former Planned Parenthood executive? Do you think the DFL would let him? I don't. If Amy Klobuchar were to retire after her term is up (she's not going to be president, you know), Franken could run for that seat, but he'll have to wait until 2024 to have a chance. Franken will be 73 years old at that time, and there's little reason to believe Klobuchar would give up her seat in any event, unless she runs for president again. If that were to happen, there's a gaggle of younger DFL politicians a mile long who would want her seat and would not be amenable to standing aside to let Franken assuage his psyche.

If Franken really wants to avenge his situation, there's another solution: move back to New York and challenge Kirsten Gillibrand. Of course, he'd have to wait until 2024 for that chance, too. But if he's got anyone to blame for his fate, assuming he doesn't look in the mirror, Gillibrand is the culprit. Back to Mayer:

Minutes after Politico posted the story, Senator Gillibrand’s chief of staff called Franken’s to say that Gillibrand was going to demand his resignation. Franken was stung by Gillibrand’s failure to call him personally. They had been friends and squash partners. In a later call, Gillibrand’s chief of staff offered to have Gillibrand speak with Franken, but by that time Franken was frantically conferring with his staff and his family. Franken’s office proposed that Franken’s daughter speak with Gillibrand instead, but Gillibrand declined.

Gillibrand then went on Facebook and posted her demand that Franken resign: “Enough is enough. The women who have come forward are brave and I believe them. While it’s true that his behavior is not the same as the criminal conduct alleged against Roy Moore, or Harvey Weinstein, or President Trump, it is still unquestionably wrong, and should not be tolerated.”

Minutes later, at a previously scheduled press conference, Gillibrand added insult to injury: she reiterated her call for Franken to resign while also trumpeting her sponsorship of a new bill that banned mandatory arbitration of sexual-harassment claims. She didn’t mention that Franken had originated the legislation—and had given it to Gillibrand to sponsor, out of concern that it might be imperilled by his scandal.

For her part, Gillibrand regrets nothing:

I recently asked Gillibrand why she felt that Franken had to go. She said, “We had eight credible allegations, and they had been corroborated, in real time, by the press corps.” She acknowledged that she hadn’t spoken to any accusers, to assess their credibility, but said, “I had been a leader in this space of sexual harassment and assault, and it was weighing on me.” Franken was “entitled to whichever process he wants,” she said. “But he wasn’t entitled to me carrying his water, and defending him with my silence.” She acknowledged that the accusations against Franken “were different” from the kind of rape or molestation charges made against many other #MeToo targets. “But the women who came forward felt it was sexual harassment,” she said. “So it was.”

So Franken got knifed by an ambitious pol who pretended to be his friend. Should we be sympathetic to his plight? You can if you'd like. But as far as I'm concerned, if I'm going to feel sympathy for a former Minnesota senator, I'll pick Norm Coleman instead.

Dirty Cop Barr

I saw a little of the circus up on Capitol Hill yesterday, in which various half-witted Democratic senators (redundant, I suppose) tried to turn Attorney General William Barr into an international supervillain. I thought to myself --

• they don't really believe any of their claims, but 
• they need to get the narrative rolling right away, because 
• when Barr starts indicting people, they will then be able to claim he's a Trump stooge, and 
• that Hillary Clinton in particular needed to have that narrative in the air

As usual, Victor Davis Hanson got there first, with a list of useful reminders:

Russians likely fed salacious but untrue allegations about Trump to ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was being paid in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to find dirt on Trump.

The Russians rightly assumed that Steele would lap up their fantasies, seed them among Trump-hating officials in the Barack Obama administration and thereby cause hysteria during the election, the transition and, eventually, the Trump presidency.

Russia succeeded in sowing such chaos, thanks ultimately to Clinton, who likely had broken federal laws by using a British national and, by extension, Russian sources to warp an election. Without the fallacious Steele dossier, the entire Russian collusion hoax never would have taken off.

100% true statement. Back to Hanson:

Without Steele's skullduggery, there likely would have been no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court-approved surveillance of Trump aide Carter Page. There might have been no FBI plants inserted into the Trump campaign. There might have been no subsequent leaking to the press of classified documents to prompt a Trump collusion investigation.

Given the Steele travesty and other past scandals, it is inexplicable that Clinton has not been indicted.

It is. But her luck could be running out soon, despite the 20-screen multiplex of project emanating from Cory Booker, Mazie Hirono, Kamala Harris, et al. Why? Back to Hanson:

For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.

For Clinton now to project that the president should be indicted suggests she is worried about her own potential indictment. And she is rightly concerned that for the first time in 40 years, neither she nor her husband is serving in government or running for some office, and therefore could be held accountable.

Thus, she and her patrons must turn William Barr into a dirty cop. The alternative?

Hear the children/Don't turn around oh oh oh

It's great fun to be a commissar, Megan McArdle reminds us:

Revolutionaries and reformers, working from outside the system, can't force people to renounce wrong-think by threatening to strip them of their livelihoods and drum them out of the public square. Those weapons are available only to the powers-that-be.

To advocate such tactics is therefore to admit that you are no longer fighting the system, but that you are the system -- that in the centers of cultural production, at least, Rosa Luxemburg is giving way to the commissars, and Martin Luther to the Grand Inquisitor.

McArdle is referencing recent events at Middlebury College, but she could have just as easily used any number of other liberal arts colleges, including my own alma mater. To get a sense of what's going on, consider the demands of the Middlebury student government:

Any organization or academic department that invites a speaker to campus will be required to fill out a due diligence form created by the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in coordination with the SGA Institutional Diversity Committee. These questions should be created to determine whether a speaker’s beliefs align with Middlebury’s community standards, removing the burden of researching speakers from the student body.

Heterodox opinions need not apply. There's more:

Additionally, administrators will ask Faculty Council to require all academic departments to have Student Advisory Boards which will have access to a list of speakers invited by the department at least a month in advance. The Student Advisory Boards’ purpose will be to ask the student body for potential community input when necessary.

They won't really be asking, though.

One tradition that many schools have is to assign a book to all incoming freshmen. I might suggest future Middlebury students ought to be given a copy of Lord of the Flies and a mirror. But in the meantime, there is the matter of all the undergrad commissars and their enforcement of woke orthodoxy. Back to McArdle:

Woke-ism may have some of the emotional tenor of church, but it lacks the supernatural beliefs and cohesive ritual of a real faith.

As for cultural socialism ... what could "collective ownership of the means of production" mean when applied to culture, which is collectively produced now and always has been?

I suspect that both sides are searching for a different word, one associated with both religion and Marxism: What they are trying to describe is an orthodoxy, a received wisdom enforced not by argument but by social, economic or even violent coercion.

So how do you enforce it?

Existing orthodoxies are largely self-enforcing, transmitted by a million little social signals you absorb without noticing.

Adopting a new orthodoxy, however, is messy. And while the new orthodoxy gropes toward its final shape, people living under it experience a special, debilitating terror: the fear that anything you say might be held against you, that what is mandatory today might be forbidden tomorrow, with ex post facto justice meted out to anyone who failed to anticipate the change.

It's a clear case, Herr Kommissar
'Cause all the children know
They're all slidin' down into the valley
They're all slipping on the same snow

Alles klar? 

Watch the world burn

Paris is burning again:

French yellow vest protesters set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police Saturday in the 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron. Large plumes of smoke rose above the rioting on Paris' landmark Champs-Elysees Avenue, and a mother and her child were just barely saved from a building blaze.

French police tried to contain the demonstrators with limited success.

Limited success has been the French way. There's more:

Yellow vest groups representing teachers, unemployed people and labor unions were among those that organized dozens of rallies and marches Saturday in the capital and around France.

Protesters dismiss Macron's national debate on the economy as empty words and a campaign ploy by Macron to gain support for the European Parliament elections in May. Protesters are angry over high taxes and Macron policies seen as coddling business.

"Those who participated in this great debate are mostly retirees and upper middle class, meaning Macron's electorate, even though we understood this great national debate was supposed to respond to the yellow vest crisis," lawyer and protester Francois Boulo told Europe-1 radio.

The two takeaways?

• Great debates are mostly crap; and
• There will be no response that threatens a bureaucrat's rice bowl

The yellow vests aren't coherent themselves, of course. But they aren't going away.

Be the solution

National Public Radio reports, with a straight face, the following:

Andrew Weissmann, the architect of the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, will study and teach at New York University and work on a variety of public service projects, including his longstanding interest in preventing wrongful convictions by shoring up forensic science standards used in courts, the sources added.

Emphasis mine. This Weissmann guy has spent his career specializing in wrongful convictions, as the invaluable Mollie Hemingway reminds us:

If Mueller had no effective supervision against the abuses of the above underlings, why would anyone trust him to supervise his good buddy Weissman, whom he picked to run lead on his probe of Trump? Weissman destroyed the accounting firm Arthur Anderson LLP, which once had 85,000 employees. Thanks to prosecutorial abuse, jurors were not told that Arthur Anderson didn’t have criminal intent when it shredded documents. The Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction, but it was too late to save the company.

Weissman also “creatively criminalized a business transaction between Merrill Lynch and Enron,” which sent four executives to jail. Weissman concocted unprecedented charges and did not allow the executives to get bail, causing massive disruption to the families before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed most of Weissman’s case.

The most direct way to prevent wrongful convictions is to remove people who pursue them. So it's good news, I guess.

Every generation throws a Beria up the pop charts

If you've study history, eventually you learn about Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's secret policeman. He's infamous for any number of reasons, especially his body count, but the most memorable and terrifying idea of Beria's is embodied in the following quote:

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

It turns out the FBI had a Beria, too:

Top FBI official Andrew McCabe did not just investigate President Trump. As he notes in a little-publicized part of his new book, McCabe even investigated his department boss — then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions — after Senate Democrats asked McCabe to look into allegations Sessions perjured himself during his confirmation hearings when he denied meeting with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.

Sessions had, in fact, met with the Russian ambassador. He later corrected the record and explained he had forgotten speaking with the official and was not trying to mislead Congress.

Ordering the Sessions probe was “another unprecedented, partisan action that has been forgotten,” said former federal prosecutor Solomon L. Wisenberg, a partner at Nelson Mullins LLP in Washington. 

This guy McCabe. And there was more, as Paul Sperry notes at the link:

While it’s widely assumed that the FBI stopped its entire Trump-related Russia investigation once Mueller was appointed in May 2017, McCabe and deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein signed off on the third renewal of the FISA warrant on Page two months later.

And in little-noticed June 2017 testimony, McCabe told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the FBI continues to investigate … the Russia investigation.”

Explained McCabe: “[T]he FBI maintains a much broader responsibility to continue investigating issues relative to potential Russian counterintelligence activity and threats posed to us from Russian adversaries."

There are laws against groundlessly subjecting individuals to criminal investigation. Former prosecutors say what FBI brass did to the president and his advisers could potentially be a violation of a federal statute known as “deprivation of rights under the color of law.”  Other statutes proscribing fraud and false statements also come into play. 

It didn't end well for Beria. McCabe won't be facing a firing squad, but he does need to answer for his depredations.

Terrible Beauty and Its Discontents

 If you were to ask any random assortment of film critics and cineastes to provide a list of the top ten films of the 1970s, you would expect to see two films on many lists: Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski; and Annie Hall, directed by Woody Allen. And for good reason -- they are both outstanding. The trailer for Chinatown only begins to suggest how brilliant it really is:

Not long after Roman Polanski directed Chinatown, he committed a horrible crime, raping a 13-year-old girl. He's been busy escaping justice for the last 40 years.

Woody Allen had a string of successful comedies in the 1970s, but he took his game up a notch with Annie Hall:

Woody Allen is still working today, but he's had a slow slide into persona non grata status, as his ongoing depredations have been aired. Some still defend his honor, but there's not much of it left. His movies come and go and only his tribe really cares -- his last successful movie at the box office, Hannah and Her Sisters, is 30 years in the rear view mirror.

We're over 40 years away from when these films were made. Polanski and Allen are both with us, but they are decrepit. In the years since the release of these films, it has become simultaneously easier and more difficult to see them. We live in an on-demand world and you can stream both at any time, but the chances of seeing either film on the big screen is just about nil in 2019, as few theaters would risk the wrath of a public showing.

I have no brief for either Woody Allen or Roman Polanski; they are creeps and monsters. But ought we pretend their masterworks don't exist? Are there no pleasures to be found in either film? Or does the life of the filmmaker devalue his best work, or even render it worthless?

I was too young to see Chinatown when it came out in the theater, but I saw in on the big screen as a college student and it was a revelation. I did see Annie Hall when it came out; I was in high school and it played in my home town for a long time. I enjoy Annie Hall, but I really love Chinatown -- it's one of my all-time favorite films. I trust the tale, not the teller of the tale. And I don't believe those who say the tale is worthless. Do you?

Terrible Beauty

As it happens, terrible people often produce great things. Once we learn of the terrible deeds of talented people, how do we handle that knowledge.

The matter has come up again with the release of Finding Neverland, the HBO documentary about Michael Jackson and his serial molestation of young boys. I have a lot of Michael Jackson's music in my collection. Am I supposed to stop listening to his music? Writing for The Week, Jeva Lange says yes, but she thinks certain deviant filmmakers are okay:

A boycott can feel like the only course of action when a musician (or a director, or a comedian, or an actor ... ) is credibly accused of something terrible. There is the financial consideration: Who wants their money going to a person, or the estate of a person, who's hurt other people? But a personal boycott is as much driven by one's conscience. In the case of Jackson, I've found it impossible to separate "the art" from "the artist," and the suffering the latter, in all likelihood, inflicted.

But I haven't felt similarly about films directed by two other celebrities accused of abuse: Woody Allen and Roman Polanski.

Why? Because making a film is apparently more of a collaborative effort:

But to take Allen and Polanski as representative examples, it is much harder to justify boycotting films in response to directors' alleged sexual misconduct than it is a solo singer like Jackson. The accentuation of a director as the single "author" of a film is known as auteur theory, and has persisted as the primary mode of interpreting and analyzing movies since the 1960s. But auteur theory has plenty of problems, not the least of which is that it subscribes to the notion of a "lone genius," emphasizing the overriding importance of the director — who, historically, is often a man — over the work of the others involved in the creation of a picture.

Allen, as one example, is a particularly heavy-handed director, often writing and acting in his films. His subject matter is also difficult to grapple with as a moviegoer; as The New Yorker's Richard Brody notes in his own attempt, "There has always been something sexually sordid in Allen's work," which makes watching his films while knowing the allegations deeply uncomfortable. But even Allen's most hands-on and autobiographical films are collaborations, and the final product is consequently the work, also, of the actors, actresses, and technical teams behind them.

This analysis doesn't make a lot of sense; as Lange admits later on, Michael Jackson's best work is certainly in collaboration with Quincy Jones. If you want a sense of how crucial Jones was to Jackson's work, consider another group Jones produced, the Brothers Johnson. I'll post two videos, both from the late 1970s, when Jones was working with the Brothers Johnson and with Jackson:

These are similar songs, with similar structures, and they were both big hits in that era. Whose vision dominates these two recordings?

Quincy Jones is a very rich man because of his collaboration with Michael Jackson, but he also made a lot of money working with the Brothers Johnson. He won't care whether Jeva Lange listens to Jackson's music. But there's a larger question about Jackson, and Allen, and Polanski, and Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey, and so many others. Should their work disappear entirely? I'm coming back to that topic next.

A tale as old as time

In other words, do as I say, not as I do:

Since declaring her candidacy in May 2017, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign heavily relied on those combustible-engine cars — even though a subway station was just 138 feet from her Elmhurst campaign office.

She listed 1,049 transactions for Uber, Lyft, Juno and other car services, federal filings show. The campaign had 505 Uber expenses alone.

In all, Ocasio-Cortez spent $29,365.70 on those emissions-spewing vehicles, along with car and van rentals — even though her Queens HQ was a one-minute walk to the 7 train.

She likes to fly, too:

Instead, her campaign embraced the friendly skies, logging 66 airline transactions costing $25,174.54 during campaign season.

The Democratic firebrand or her staff took Amtrak far less — only 18 times — despite high-speed rail being the cornerstone of her save-the-world strategy.

Most of the flights came after her primary win gave her superstar status and Ocasio-Cortez spent weeks jetting around the country, burning fuel to support her fellow Dems.

Do I blame her for using planes and cars? Of course not. Cars take you exactly where you want to go, almost always on a timetable you choose. That's why people buy them and use them. I live 27 miles away from my office. It's not optimal to live that far away, but I own my home outright and the commute isn't the longest one among my co-workers. When we first moved to our home, I worked in downtown Minneapolis and rode the 4 bus every workday. The 4 bus stop is a block away from my house and some people in the neighborhood work downtown and ride it.

Ocasio-Cortez and her staff have work to do. I think the work they do is absurd and counterproductive, but I don't have any say concerning that, as her presence in Congress is at the behest of her constituents, who apparently like her nonsense. As it happens, my representatives in Congress (Betty McCollum, Amy Klobuchar, Tina Smith) are as daft as AOC is, so my views, and the people who agree with me, aren't likely to get an airing in Congress. I do appreciate the New York Post pointing out that AOC's actions don't square with her rhetoric, but it won't change how she operates. One of the great joys of being on the portside is that the rules you require for others don't really apply to you.