eye of the storm

richard cohen gives one of the few actually thoughtful treatments of a rich theme: the role of revenge in, let's say, international affairs.  it's there. and when people say it's not - when, for example, they try to draw some hard-and-fast distinction between vengeance and justice - and portray themselves as advocates of the latter and not the former - they lurch into extremely palpable dishonesty. "justice" in a criminal or war-type sense, is a slightly rationalized or systematized or delegated revenge, and by the same token, the sense for revenge harbors within it a feeling of a universe that rests on a balance which, disturbed, ought to be restored.

time for my weekly frank rich slam, i guess.
i think he's sort of saying what i said here. but instead of, you know, developing a point of view, he  recites every scandal that the people he's writing about have ever been near, and many that they haven't been near. he could have actually done some cultural analysis, but instead he does what - i'm realizing - frank rich does: just smear, in the sense of drawing vague associations meant to discredit everybody across the right of the spectrum: he wants you to leave the column just feeling that every person he mentions is personally polluted. even if that were true (and as a tendentious hit job, there have been worse), it wouldn't really get to the heart of these questions.

you know, he's even throwing out gay rumors about the lt. gov. of sc, no doubt in order to accuse him and every person to the right of michelle obama, of hypocrisy, but also of course without any evidence, and just that hint of sexsmarm that characterizes the whole piece.

and of course, it's an easy strategy for anyone to employ, and if you weren't, you know, the kind of columnist who would defend bill clinton no matter what, you could frank rich everybody over on the other half with cigars etc. the current secretary of state, selected by the president, is bill clinton's wife. remember when she said "i'm no tammy wynette, standing by her man"? really, do you think the main or most substantive problem with republican politics is sexual misbehavior? is that what we learned from the sotomayor hearings? i don't think this does anyone any good, even frank rich himself, who should think rather than merely smear shit all over everything.

let's ay you think lindsay graham and tom coburn are completely wrong about everything. nothing requires you to nod along as frank rich just tosses in ensign, sanford, mark foley, jack abramoff, etc in order to discredit them by mutual party affiliation. you could repudiate this merely irrelevant claptrap and try to say, exactly, why lindsay graham and tom coburn are wrong.

i must say that i appreciate coburn, in his last round, raising the tenth amendment and quoting madison on scope of federal power. he asked her specifically about the use of the commerce clause to justify almost any piece of legislation, or any expansion of federal authority. he asked her, at the widest scope, whether the size of the contemporary american state comports with the vision of the founders, to whom sotomayor genuflected, as a supreme court nominee must. he's right that the answer to that is utterly obvious. roughly, we do not have the form of government that the framers devised.

what this makes you realize is precisely that what groups you belong to does matter: the white republican guys are exquisitely sensitive to the way that white guys are discriminated against, though by any measure this is comparatively trivial, though of course if it directly affected your life, as it did ricci, you'd be rightly disturbed. but they've been remarkably blind, of course, to the ways that other groups are discriminated against. so maybe, first, oppression of white men would give white guys some connection to groups that have been discriminated against, or at least make them aware that, if you want to know whether latinas are discriminated against, and the details of that discrimination, you'd better ask a latina. if so, you need a latina on the court etc.

the senators ought to decide not simply to repeat themselves, or not more than three times or something. after awhile, you realize that it's pretty much narcissism, mere grandstanding: they're on television. they've run out of points to make or questions to ask. but they just keep going.

lindsay graham with a pretty sharp line of questioning: if you're trying to decide whether the right to bear arms is a fundamental right, don't you have to use your own judgment, your own sense of the american traditions, of who we are in relation to gun ownership etc? is there a cookbook that gives you the answer?

and her answers are, as he's pointing out, disingenuous: no, my own judgment is irrelevant. it's all precedent, technicalities etc.

i do think that the republicans on the judiciary comittee just seem absolutely obsessed with "wise latina" and ricci. ask her about it. but just hammer her over and over with the very same words, hour after hour? you start to realize that they take themselves to be members of an oppressed and endangered minority; their rhetoric has shifted toward what used to be called the "neo-nazi" "movement": they speak for an endangered white race, as though overly aggressive affirmative action programs were extermination camps. this becomes bizarrely disturbing when you hear it in the drawl of the former attorney general of alabama: jeff sessions.i actually thought alabama (where i used to live) had come a long way from bull connor or whatever.

but this really has a different flavor, where we white dudes are losing control of the judiciary etc. i think it has something to do with obama's election, and i think you actually are seeing and will see actual white suprematism in resurgence. but now it comes in response to actually losing (some) control over the power in our society; it has a pathetic edge, like after affirmative action has assisted all these minorities, we'll have to have an affirmative action program for white people.

what they don't see, because they still have these suddenly-anachronistic-sounding racial/gender/sexuality categories in the front of their minds, is that the emerging elites are massively similar to the traditional elites: in the class they now occupy, the manner of their education, where their money is, their spots on the bureaucratic spreadsheet of power, what they wear or eat, where and how they live. the people who wield this kind of power should just naturally club together, and there's no reason that a republican senator and a hispanic judge shouldn't be playing 18 together at congressional this weekend, talking in a friendly way about what their brokers are advising, how their daughters are doing at stanford, wine, and what a wrong sort of person sarah palin is: all they need to do is realize that their interests and identities are in fact aligned.

i'd think that we will also see more minority spokesmen on the right: as they ascend, they will have to divide: they can't all be liberals, any more than they're all republicans because lincoln won the war. and to the extent that republicans speak for various sorts of elite groups, they should see that they can do what they do in cooperation with other such people, no matter their race, gender or sexuality, as the newly-ascending elites would come in part to identify with, you know, country club values. they'll start pushing tax cuts. of course they will: that's the victory of liberalism construed in identity terms, and also its end.

that of course entails the transformation of the right, because it is evidently still dominated by these racial obsessives. but there is no reason, for example, that there can't be libertarian - or for that matter security-state - latinos or gay people etc. this is the way the obama election etc does actually signal a reconfiguration of american politics. only these fossils must be retired.

one realizes only now how very racialized american politics has been, on both sides. there cannot be liberalism or conservatism, left or right, democrat or republican in a post-identity-politics america. so we may be seeing a profound re-articulation of the political spectrum, and the victories of liberalism (such as affirmative action, or identity-politics itself) are the end not only of conservatism, but of liberalism as well.

nothin wrong with franken as a questioner.

it's really true, however, that we need joe biden on this committee still, to relieve the mediocrity with something transcendentally bad, with a ferocious buffoonery that is quintessentially american.

i do think we need diversity on the supreme court. clarence thomas adds soul. ruth bader ginsburg brings financial savvy. a latina would contribute spice and fiery passion. we definitely need an asian on the court, for innate mathematical ability and pointless industriousness. only a white man, of course, can give the court a neutral, objective, "unmarked" point of view. we should think of the supreme court like a sit-com or a children's show: we need one of each, with two white people. we need a supreme court that looks like america: covered in franchise fast food restaurants and asphalt. or like its population: there oughtta be a meth addict, a special needs child, three bikers, the crips, bernie madoff, and many functional illiterates with excellent sat scores.

sheldon whitehouse doesn't seem to be the senate's brightest light. he asked her a series of incomprehensibly vague questions. "what do you think the founders thought about unilateral action by one of the branches?" er. "i see the constitution as immutable"; odd that there is an amendment process in the very document itself which has often been employed.

sotomayor is growing on me. getting all passionate about the constitution in response to feingold's questioning. feingold was magnificent with roberts and alito, by the way.

sports and jurisprudence: good stuff from mcsweeney's. thanks, adam.

i wouldn't say she's breathtakingly impressive. there are a lot of odd formulations and odd usages. on the other hand, she's composed and reasonable.

sessions just keeps on with the idea that experience is irrelevant to the law. but you know, the questions on the ricci case was pretty sharp. her sort of bland, technical approach seems impoverished, and the decision itself disturbing, or i might say, obviously unjust. plenty of other solutions were possible than throwing out the results. they could have found otherwise; they could have re-heard the case on a different basis; they could have provided substantive reasoning for their decision, etc.

sotomayor was fine in her opening statement. remarkably succinct, for one thing.

from thoreau's journals, june 16, 1854:

I do not believe that there is a judge in this country prepared to decide by the principle that a law is immoral and therefore of no force. They put themselves, or rather are by character, exactly on a level with the marine who discharges his musket in any direction in which he is ordered. They are just as much tools, and as little men.

from the same entry, later incorporated into the essay "slavery in massachusetts": "My thoughts are murder to the state."

it's senator franken!

bizarrely, arlen specter seems to want to ask her about actual legal questions.

we're really going to miss joe biden.