winchou: Naive

John Bolton

John Bolton is making the rounds, selling his book. I'm not going to link the book because it pisses me off that he can skirt a Congressional request to testify, as well as a White House NDA, and still get out and make money off this entire fiasco.

On the other hand, Micheal Bolton is an awfully good sport about his unique place in pop culture. This fake Audible product is all I need to hear from the book, and maybe the only way to consume it – plus, Michael really hits the note on mustache.

The free press is no longer a facility used to hold the the rich powerful to account. It is a contrivance to help the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful – whether by publishing tell-all books, or serving as the minor leagues for the Executive Branch. Things felt bad a few years ago when the 'revolving door' lead to ideological grifting and lobbying, but this feels worse. Like the financial markets in the early 2000's, this isn't just skimming off the top or some insider trading scheme. This is not a cheat, it is a systemic fraud. It's political 'derivatives', using abstract tools and obfuscation to drain the market, and the equity, in this case, is trust.

In terms of motivation, Trump has no interest in ideology, or any interest in making the government do any particular thing, or work any particular way. He has only self-interest. He is exactly the kind of person who would construct an enormous, self-enriching side-bet instead of governing the country. After all, he is not essentially a real estate developer, or an entrepreneur, or a reality TV star. He operates at different (lower) level of abstraction – he is a brand.

I can think of no un-cynical reason for someone like Bolton to join the White House after his gig on Fox News, leave the White House under a cloud of anger, choose not to testify on issues that were critically important to the nation (at a presidential impeachment trial), then turn around, write a book about it, and go out and sell it. Stephen Colbert interviewed him two nights ago, and made things as clear as possible. But Bolton chose to remain opaque and defensive, deflecting and blaming others. Colbert grew more and more frustrated, as did I watching it.

Colbert: … when the cameras are off, what's the 'Conservative' opinion of Donald Trump?

Bolton: Well, look, I think many of them, in fairness to Trump, look at the comparison and, as I did in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, look at the comparison with Joe Biden and say: whatever we think of him, he's not going to be a Democrat subject, especially these days, to the pressure of the left. Look I bought that argument in 2016

Colbert [interrupting]: No, he's going to be subject to the pressure of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. He's a person willing to sell out the interest of the American people for his own re-election. What could be worse in Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden's philosophy than betraying your country to a hostile foreign leader, sir?

Bolton: Trust me, I understand that point …

Colbert: But will you answer that question?

Bolton: I'm trying to …

Colbert: Okay, I'm sorry. My apologies, go ahead.

Bolton: What I thought in 2016 was we at least have to try it out, and so I voted for Trump. Having experienced seventeen months of working with him, I can't in good conscience do that again. And that's why I'm not going to vote for him, and I'm not going to vote for Biden.

Colbert: I guess what's exasperating is there is nothing, absolutely nothing Donald Trump has done that is surprising to me. My rule is everything you think about Donald Trump is probably true, because he's not deep enough to get your socks wet in. He's incredibly readable, that's why when he ran casinos, the house lost. There's nothing to learn about him, that's why he'e essentially a boring person. How did you not know beforehand that he was just callow?

Bolton: Because I couldn't believe it was that bad, and I know other people say they saw it from the beginning …

Colbert [laughing]: But you're an international negotiator, how could you be naive? You've dealt with the worst people in the world.

Bolton: You've really insulted me now by calling me naive. Look, I thought it was possible to work with somebody. I thought surely they would want to learn about the complexities of arms control negotiation and that sort of thing, and as I detail in the book, that turned out not to be true.

Bolton's book appears to be as much about himself as it is about Trump. But like Confederate monuments that 'need context' or removal, or a DW Griffith film, the value of the content makes the art un-viewable or un-readable. It might rival Shakespeare, but if it enables this whole crap-storm, I'm not touching it.

Jon Stewart

This morning, Colbert has Jon Stewart on his show, and the two old friends engage in a rambling and fascinating conversation about this moment: COVID-19, Swampy Don, Black Lives Matter, and Joe Biden. They scrape for specks of truth within these topics and seem to find one in knowing that Joe Biden understands real loss, and isn't faking his desire to heal the nation. I can take some hope from that and will try to build some enthusiasm for Biden's candidacy.

Stewart: I have recently been thinking about something, and that is that we are a country in terrible anguish right now. Just – we are in pain. 'American Exceptionalism', that kind of – the blindfold is off and we're kind of seeing ourselves as who we really are. That 'American Exceptionalism' is not a title that you wear like you were Miss America in 1937, and you'll always be Miss America. Like, it takes effort and work to maintain, and if you treat it as a fait accompli, it will erode. And you will lose it And we are seeing that erosion. And we are fearful, and we are angry, and we are in pain. And when I see Biden past the schtick, I see a guy who knows what loss is.

Colbert: That's it.

Stewart: Who knows grief.

Colbert: That's it.

Stewart: I think that that kind of grief humbles you … There's a humility to the randomness of tragedy that brings about caring that can't be faked. And it can't be contrived.

But to make sense of the media in the present, Stewart goes on the Pod Save America podcast. It is strange to rely on comedians to scavenge truth, and find that kernel of clarity, but it's like we observed in this earlier post, comedians don't have a dog in the fight – they just want to make you laugh. They can make funny news, make fun of news, make news funny, but they need to understand the news. The more they understand, it seems, the funnier they can be. And so, here it is, your moment of zen:

Well, so it's a generational project. The 'right' has done a really impressive job over a sixty-year period. You know, they got to a point where they thought: you know what, the institutions in America that people rely on for clarity and for authority are not comporting to our point of view. There's too much 'the best and the brightest' going on and not enough 'love it or leave it'. We would very much like some more 'love it or leave it'. So for sixty years, what they decided to do was: we will build an alternative structure – you know what, academic institutions are rotted to the core with liberalism, we will build our own academic institutions, think tanks are rotted to the core with liberalism, we will bring our own think tanks, we will bring our own media. And this was a conscious strategy …

So my feeling is, we've got to stop reacting to this nonsense, cause it's nonsense, and start building a culture that earns that editorial authority back from the audience. That isn't just responding to the moment of what they've done. Right now it's purely reactive.

Pandemic

Meanwhile, news around the pandemic is not good. COVID-19 is spiking in the US and in Portugal, specifically in a few civil parishes in Greater Lisbon and the Algarve. The scale of the spike is clear from my latest Georgia vs Portugal graph, which required an expansion of the Y-axis. While the increase in Georgia is frighteningly obvious, the cases in Portugal are localized (luckily, we are not affected). Rather than increasing the national total, it has kept the national total from continuing its downward trend.

The seven-day average for Georgia is 1,454.7 cases per day; the highest it's ever been, by far. That's more than a sixty-percent increase from last Friday (889.4). Portugal's seven-day average is 332.3 cases; that's less than a two-percent rise from last Friday (326.3).

A 'smart lock-down' strategy seems to be the new normal for Europe, and a few civil parishes in Greater Lisbon are impacted by stricter isolation orders (in Amadora, Loures, Sintra, Odivelas), but most of the actual city proper is not affected.

Georgia's Governor, Brian Kemp, is moving ahead with the state's re-opening. When asked about any new actions to help curb the spread by the local newspaper, he deferred to the Department of Public Health, who indicated that they are stepping up social media efforts to help get word out about wearing masks as well as testing.