In Praise of John Bolton

(I Never Thought I'd Say That)

I don't remember which demonstration this was.

One fine day not too long ago (probably a Tuesday, possibly in 2018), I was riding the Chestnut Street bus in Philadelphia. A couple was sitting across the aisle, chatting. After a bit, the man, on the aisle, turned to me and said, "By the way, has anyone ever told you that you look like John Bolton?"

The Chestnut Street bus, midday, not too crowded, can be a convivial place, and the man seemed friendly. I said, "Yes, actually."

It's true. We have a passing resemblance, based largely I think on the glasses and the mustache. When Mr. Bolton is in the news, I have received an occasional query.

I don't like John Bolton. There are so many reasons, but the one that sticks in my mind is the story of an irate Bolton chasing a woman down a hotel corridor in Moscow in 1994, yelling at her angrily, and then pounding on her hotel room door as he shouted insults.

Here is the curse of being old. I do remember. And here is the strength of democracy - I can link you to a story. It hasn't been erased. (Click here. Actually, here's another.)

Still, I do look a bit like John Bolton. It's a reminder of our common humanity.

And now he's acting like a patriot, telling the truth about Donald Trump and the quid pro quo in Ukraine. It doesn't change the past, but it does change the present.

There's a slightly inapropos quote from the old movie Casablanca. At the end Claude Rains says to Humphrey Bogart, who has just put Ingrid Bergman on the Lisbon plane with Paul Henreid and then shot a late-arriving Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), "Well, Rick, you're not only a sentimentalist, but you've become a patriot."

I don't think Bolton is a sentimentalist, and I don't think Ingrid Bergman would have had much interest in him. But it's just possible that he is a patriot.

And here's one more thing. Perhaps, after all this time, and so much prevarication, dissimulation, and outright bluster, Bolton may have come to the conclusion that facts matter.

See also Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil, Fascism, Jim Crow Was a Failed State.

7/11 - The Day the Trump White House Fell Apart

 Another Inflection Point in a Downward Trajectory

National Mall, Washington, D.C., July 4.

Degringolade is a wonderful French word that basically means falling down the stairs, although by extension it is commonly used to refer to a bankruptcy.

So I think a morally and intellectually bankrupt presidency had a degringolade moment today over the citizenship question. The delayed announcement by Mr. Trump that he would not in fact be issuing an executive order mandating the inclusion of the citizenship question on the census, followed by Attorney General Barr's rather pathetic attempts to sweep up the mess, were low points even for an administration as disorganized and incompetent as this one.

Chief Justice Roberts of the Supreme Court hogtied Donald Trump on this issue on June 27, and it took Trump until today to figure it out.

I look forward to the many post-mortems, and I won't get into the weeds here, but I think this was probably his worst day since Helsinki. Which was only last summer. Feels like a lifetime.

I'd like to predict that this will end quickly and neatly, but I just don't believe it.

See also An Inflection Point.

An Inflection Point

I could feel some tectonic plates shifting after the meeting in Helsinki between Putin and Trump. Some are calling Trump a traitor, which in my opinion is probably true. Others are asking what actually went on behind closed doors for two hours, since Trump is well known to have an attention span of about 18 seconds. The idea of him carrying on a sustained conversation for two hours with no aides to prompt him is laughable. So there will be the inevitable jokes about the Putin-Trump tryst. Was there spanking? Were there whips?

All of this is amusing, but I think it's not the main point. And I don't think that Trump's childishness or his petulance are the main point.

I think the main point is that Trump showed weakness. His painfully servile performance can be indicative of a number of things. Perhaps there really are pee tapes. More likely, the Russians have been financing Trump for many years, after the New York banks gave up on him, and so the Russians have the ability to ruin him financially, politically, any way you wish to name.

But we live in a world of carnivores. Putin is not alone. There's an old line about never showing weakness to a wild animal, because when the wild animal senses weakness, it automatically attacks.

The wild animal Trump needs to fear, more than Putin, is the American people. Right or left, we see ourselves as a great power, and when questions arise about what Mr. Trump was doing on his knees in front of Mr. Putin for two hours, I think the worm may just turn.

See also Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil, Fascism, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?