The hidden downside of being in a political party openly and explicitly committed to the destruction of any aspect of civil society that doesn't privilege them is that it turns out to be full of evil people.

Boehner will end providing Cruz more cred with the flying monkey brigade than Cruz could ever have generated on his own.

end up providing

I'm not going to buy his book in any event, but wonder if the guy really understands the (imo straight) line between the Contract with America, of which he was a drafter, and the current Republican party.

I wonder if Boehner addresses the simple fact that he had an opportunity to get the Senate immigration reform passed, but chose not to even try ostensibly because it would have violated the "Hastert*" rule of not bringing things up for a vote which do not have the support of the majority of your caucus It probably would have cost him the Speakership but as he points out that was a shit sandwich anyway. I suspect that he was actually more on board with the Mitch McConnell "no wins for the popular black president" strategy than he let on publicly.

*The fact that the rule is named after a notorious pedophilic sexual predator seems to merit no mention from anyone. To me the Republican party can be legitimately labelled as the Sexual Abuse Party. How un both sides of me.

It's weird where these people draw lines. Newt Gingrich was on the good side of the line, but Ted Cruz was a bridge too far.

I await the discussion in Cruz's memoir about how people like Gaetz were beyond the pale.

*The fact that the rule is named after a notorious pedophilic sexual predator seems to merit no mention from anyone.

Filed away under "Banana Republic is a Popular Women's Clothing Store".

I just can't get over how much I love that he ended the paragraph with "Not that anybody asked me." Like, it was practically written by my cranky 12 year old.

That was to discourage shoplifters. Nobody wants to be accused of hiding the banana at the mall.

Actually, it's written like a blog post, now that I think about it.

In the early years of the century, when respectable pundits kept saying we were replaying the history of ancient Greece, I kept saying no we're replaying 1777, and we're the Brits. People like Boehner just never seem to get that, as Jane McCrea's death tells us, you're always a hostage to the conduct/war aims of your allies of convenience. You have to choose wisely.

11: Who's the colonists - the rest of the world? People not checking all the white/well-off/etc. boxes?

I think Boehner's desire to distinguish himself from Cruz is purely a matter of personal dislike. Substantively, Boehner and Cruz are the same guy -- and their ruthless self-interest was naturally going to lead them into conflict. If there is any hope for the future, it's that there are inherent inefficiencies in forming a Caucus of Assholes.

At the time, I was thinking of Iraq. Mostly because Burgoyne, listening to people like Skene, was convinced that they'd be greeted as liberators. And it might even have worked . . .

The wikipedia page on McCrea is pretty good, especially the quote from Gates' fuck-you letter to Burgoyne. That's very high quality propaganda, and absolutely had the desired effect.

Who could have known that liberators don't kill civilians they're liberating? Oh, right, everyone.

When I founded the Leopards Eating People's Faces, I expected to just enjoy drinking a big, rich Cabarnet with plenty of dark fruit notes while leopards ate other people's faces.

Don't drag me into this shitshow.

When I was first elected to Congress, we didn't have any propaganda organization for conservatives

Goodoldaze folderol. We had talk radio in 1990, and it only got huger over the next decade as he moved into power.

He means there wasn't one against him.

I hope we aren't going to start to blame people for getting hoisted by their own petard.

https://internetkhole.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/tumblr_nl99o2m3yy1r5e698o1_540.jpg

I was looking to link a copy of Boehner's book cover to point out how it neatly plays into rightwing fulminating about The Swamp, and came across this nice discussion of political memoir book covers. Turns out Tip O'Neill did basically the same thing.

The former speaker or the Irish mohel?

Anyway, Abraham Lincoln Elementary School is safe from the San Franciscans.

23. Good news, although apparently it will be revisited when kids are fully back in classes. So probably after 2026.

24: Also uncanceled: poplar trees!

Okay so no one read the first link except me? It's quite a horror story.

Her illness persisted throughout the winter of 2018 and into the New Year, until it became clear that this was more than vertigo or the flu. She began suffering from a "brain fog" so severe she couldn't connect one thought to the next. She couldn't eat or often forgot to. Her weight plummeted to 95 pounds. She fainted every day, and her adrenal glands malfunctioned. Her body no longer made enough cortisol, rendering her incapable of feeling anything but stress or fear. Her blood pressure dropped to dangerous levels; one reading reported 58/44. ... She had lost the ability to form short-term memories. She asked numerous times why I'd come to Asheville and immediately forgot my answer. Her conversation looped into grand and sweeping curlicues that never connected with logic: the 2016 election, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the decades of malfeasance that constituted Murdoch's case. No one knew what was wrong. She needed a battery of tests but felt too ill to keep appointments. She told me she thought she would die in her lair ... Bob's daughter from his first marriage, Margaret, a veterinary doctor at North Carolina State University, suggested that Sara's symptoms might be a continuation of the case of cat-scratch fever that almost killed her when she was 11. Bartonella, the bacteria that causes that illness, can lie dormant for years and flare back up, especially when the afflicted is under extreme duress. This autoimmune disorder puts Sara at very high risk for COVID-19-related complications, but her treatment has been delayed owing to the pandemic. In the meantime, she found an endocrinologist who prescribed hydrocortisone and fludrocortisone to treat her low cortisol and adrenal collapse.

I think my reaction is to wonder why exactly this is a newsworthy story. It involves some public figures, but I'm not sure there are lessons to learn or actions to take, and it's possible that the author wrote it to vent her own frustration and helplessness. The usual routine of arguing about who is most to blame, who acted ethically and who unethically, seems really unappetizing. Sometimes these stories have rich veins of allegory to mine, but this one just seems sad and awful. Perhaps that's the vital lesson for our times itself.

I tried to read it, but I got sad so I stopped.

26:. Just for the record - I read the first link too.

Maybe I shouldn't have posted it. :/

I think my reaction is to wonder why exactly this is a newsworthy story.

Why did you read the story? Regardless of your answer (curiosity? voyeurism? interest in a compelling narrative?), your answer to my question is going to be the same as the answer to yours.

It's an interesting story. Me, I spend too much of my time reading stuff that fits a simpler definition of newsworthiness.

29:. Well, I am glad I read it. It's very sad, and there isn't any clear moral, but it gave me a lot think about.

I'm holding out for something that gives me a bunch to think about but is more cheering. Maybe the one about the woman who interviewed the guy attracted to her feet?

I tried to read it, but I got sad so I stopped.

This is basically true of nearly everything I try to read anymore, although I did finish reading the linked article. I guess the world just will keep getting more crowded and more polluted and more angry and more unequal, and everything will get worse until it's too hot for humans to live anymore.

This is related only in my own head, but it's been contributing to my state of mind: my mom's (70-something year old) friend was attacked last week in the middle of the afternoon in downtown LA. The assailant knocked her down and kicked her while she lay on the ground, and yelled racial epithets at her. My mom went to see her and says she'll recover from her physical injuries although of course she's pretty upset. I've been looking for reports of it in the local news and I haven't seen anything, which makes me wonder how much more common this sort of thing is than even the news coverage would suggest. I had a similar thought when I was reading the article, and looking at the appellate decisions that are available online in the Murdoch case. It seems pretty clear that this was a miscarriage of justice. What's more, it had to have been apparent all along, to many people involved. It must just happen, all the time.

I read it, but it took me a while. I wish there was an ending. Murdoch is still in prison. Dozens of bad things happened to Sara and there's no clarity about which were caused by mental illness, which by a criminal conspiracy, and which by Internet hate mobs. Then again, maybe "don't expect pat endings" is another moral worth imparting.

I couldn't get to the end of the foot-thing either. Maybe it's my attention span.

33.2: That's horrible. I hope they catch somebody.

33:
I am really sorry. Glad your Mom's friend is okay. I suspect the official stats are off by a factor of at least 3 or 4, weighted towards missing "lucky" escapes where the victims' injuries are light enough that they'd rather not deal with reporting it. This suspicion is partially based on all the "lucky" escapes from light racial assault in my family and immediate friend circle.

Fat old privileged white guy problem but man is yesterday's Moderna 2 kicking my ass.

Consider this a standing gibberish alert.

Likewise on Moderna. Got my second shot two days ago, and couldn't call in sick to work yesterday, but skipped an early meeting. Today, two days later, I napped on my lunch hour, and have felt much better since.

I recommend Tylenol and sleep.

I got the good one, but I'm 8 days away from dose #2.

Maybe I shouldn't book a plane flight the next day?

33: jesus, that's horrible. I'm so sorry.

I meant to offer up the "newsworthiness" angle for discussion, not just rhetorical effect. jms, I'm so sorry for your mom's friend, and I wish there were more I could do. I also tend towards the "it must just happen, all the time" conclusion... except it isn't all the time-- intermittent reinforcement for evil means evil stays motivated. Yeah, that's a joke, but it's not so funny.

jms, I'm so sorry about your mother's friend. Thank you for looking up a bit more about the case. I was curious but didn't know where to start. In the end, I think it does matter a little whether there was an actual injustice, although I think the author's choice to leave it as somewhat ambiguous (I mean, the author interviews people who say he's likely innocent, but never seems to quite say that this is a righteous cause) is probably a better decision for the narrative.

It was so hard to read. I guess I think it's a story about obsession and burnout. There isn't a happy ending, but I think the "moral" is that fighting huge, immovable systems is very, very difficult, even if you are right. Probably also that knowing that innocent people are sometimes imprisoned for life sentences is a thing that happens (rarely? sometimes? often??) is different than knowing a person who is injustly imprisoned and trying to do something about it. Also, there's an interesting bit about how she's draining all her accounts and driving herself to nervous exhaustion on behalf of someone kind of unlikable. The tattoo vignette is great, kind of a perfect encapsulation of how she's mentally stuck with Murdoch. What must it be like for family members working on the same problems?

I meant to offer up the "newsworthiness" angle for discussion, not just rhetorical effect.

I was being a bit thin-skinned. But I think it's probably because there's a kernel of truth to it. Do we need to read about someone's horrendous span of six years, where there's no lesson or bad guy, and it's not clear that they themselves were trying to get the story out?

I didn't exactly think she should give up the fight, but I desperately wanted her to talk with a highly competent therapist who would help her put some parameters on the fight, to be less gripped from some of the more internal sources of torment, and not just turn one tragedy into two.

45: I broadly disagree with NW about the Kids Nowadays, but I am 100% in accord with him on the value of reading the stories of other people as a path toward empathy and critical understanding.

IF A WRITER HAS TO ROB HIS MOTHER, HE WILL NOT HESITATE; THE 'ODE TO A GRECIAN URN' IS WORTH ANY NUMBER OF OLD LADIES.

I'm owed to a Grecian urn?

Ugh, I'm so sorry for your mother's friend, jms.

Honestly, "All the King's Men" is worth like three old ladies, tops.

Confusing Robert Penn Warren with William Faulkner is worth negative1.27 old lady orgasms.

(I am assuming that was what was going on in 51 rather than some subtle Southern literature bon mot.

Whichever.

Now I need to figure out what Faulkner wrote.

I guess I should read the Wikipedia plot summary of The Sound and the Fury because it's important for my mental development.

That's a weird book.

Is that why the South hates education? All the novels make them look really fucked.

56: Unlike the young folks nowadays, when I was a kid we were serious about literature and used Cliffs Notes.

Who has that kind of attention span?

38 et al.: The Pfizer vaccine had that effect on me with both shots, although the second was definitely worse than the first. I think Cassandane had the Moderna vaccine. The first shot had no effect on her except a little soreness, but the second one (Tuesday afternoon) gave her flu-like symptoms yesterday, maybe lingering a bit today. Fever, chills, aching, nausea, etc.

I say, what's a Grecian urn?
Depends what his job is.

I was in bed for three days after my first AZ shot. People say the second one is easier. I sincerely hope so.

58. Mobes, there are probably ten thousand theses relating those cheerful Southern novels to the strains of losing the Civil War and of white racism. If you get an education you have to read them all, so you get hateful about education for making you sad and crazy.

I really don't get the passive bystander thing. Especially after this last year, having an excuse the punch an asshole in the face would be extremely cathartic.

I have such fond memories of being in a special pass-fail section of a lit class where the prof didn't usually allow P/F but was trying one section as an experiment so we wouldn't corrupt the other students, and basically it was a normal section where people generally did the readings and had interesting things to say, until the week that the reading was The Sound and the Fury and we all got there and were like "Yeah, we all gave up on this one. And we don't have to hide that because you're not going to fail us for skipping one book out of 10." So refreshing.

It really is remarkable how badly they were damaged by Abraham Lincoln. Yet people name schools after him.

I only remember reading As I Lay Dying in high school. What a goddamn bizarre book.

I haven't had time to get to that Wikipedia page.

Well, the mom is dying. One of the sons is building her casket outside her window. He breaks his leg. The daughter gets pregnant while planting crops. I think there's another nonverbal kid whose chapters are stream of consciousness? Anyway, the mom dies. They all take a jolly roadtrip to go bury her one state over. The kid with the broken leg has his leg set in cement, and it reeks. The mom is decomposing in the back of the carriage. The story sort of dissolves into an imprecise ending. That's what I got out of it.

Spoilers.

I just could never read anything by the guy. Gave a talk in Oxford one time and went to see his house. A lovely spring afternoon, you could almost think the existence of Mississippi was justifiable. Almost. Y'all.

The daughter gets pregnant while planting crops.

Is that what the kids were calling it back then?

Seriously one of the most confusing scenes to young Heebie, and the teacher had to explain it. "When they got to the end of this row, it was will we or won't we and we got to the end of this row so we did." JUST SPELL OUT WHAT IT IS, PLEASE.

Despite the fact that many people can't tell Robert Penn Warren from Faulkner, the former was much more clear about who fucked who.

The only thing I ever read by RPW was his Nez Perce poem, and there's no confusing that with Faulkner.

All the Kings Men was good. Or so I thought at 19.

Read the poem.

It's 64 pages with no Wikipedia page. No way.

I didn't even know anybody was still writing poems like that so recently in English.