The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote." —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Greetings from the far left coast where your oft humbled scribe is rehabbing the current running related injury, trying to figure out what comes next after knocking out the three-part look back at Allen Ginsberg, and stocking the wine closet in preparation for default on the national debt.
After the Ginsberg project comes the abyss. No clue what to take up next. Two brief blogs last week (links at the end in the usual place) settled for low-hanging fruit: the George Santos saga and those classified documents that just keep coming.
The new regime at the PBS NewsHour is up and running smoothly with co-anchors Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett, Lisa Desjardins at the Capitol, Laura Barrón-López covering the White House, Nick Schifrin all over the place, including Ukraine, and the rest of a stellar team. One minor quibble. The Politics Monday feature with Amy Walter, publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Political Report, and NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith disappeared when the new year rolled in. A somewhat cursory search failed to turn up any announcement about its status. Politics Monday and the Friday Brooks and Capeheart wrap-up of the week in politics bookended the week nicely. The commentary of Walter and Keith will be missed if indeed the segment has been dropped.
Debt ceiling. As the Adam Driver character in The Dead Don't Die put it, oh, man, this isn't gonna end well.
Trans. I am wary of venturing into the trans minefield and have generally steered clear of the topic. With that in mind I recommend a column by Mona Charen at The Bulwark and a complementary article at The Atlantic by two trans academics, Leo Valdes, doctoral candidate in history at Rugers, and Kinnon MacKinnon, assistant professor of social work at York University.
Charen's concluding paragraphs are in tune with my thinking, such it is:
Many of the teenagers who present as trans have other issues—especially autistic spectrum disorder, depression, and anxiety. It can be tempting for the patient to latch on to the trans identity, imagining that solving that will alleviate the other problems. But if gender dysphoria is not the primary disorder, drastic interventions would be a terrible mistake. It’s up to careful clinicians to tease out what’s really going on with the patient before issuing a diagnosis or prescribing life-altering drugs. Also, a significant number of kids who declare a trans identity as teenagers rather than as children realize, with time, that they’re actually just gay.
It is fully possible for two things to be true: 1) that there are people with gender dysphoria who will lead happier lives as the other sex, and 2) that we are in midst of a fad that is sweeping up many kids who are not truly trans and will have their lives blighted by teachers, school administrators, physicians, and others too bulldozed by political fashion to evaluate their individual cases carefully. The sooner we come to terms with the latter, the better.
Retired FBI agent Charles McGonigal stands accused of money laundering, violating US sanctions, and other misdeeds (Shayna Jacobs, et al., Former senior FBI official accused of working for Russian he investigated, Washington Post, January 23, 2023). McGonigal happens to be the agent in the FBI's New York office charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections. It is not irrelevant that the New York office was notorious for its hostility toward Hillary Clinton.
Historian TImothy Snyder wrote about Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election in his book The Road to Unfreedom and took up the subject again last week in an article after McGonigal's indictment (The Specter of 2016: McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America). The lengthy article is worth reading in full. Some key takeaways:
One accusation is that in 2017 he [McGonigal] took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin…was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016…Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
…
In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. That April, I broke the story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime, on the basis of Russian open sources. At the time, almost no one wanted to take this connection seriously. American journalists wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia…
The reason I was thinking about Trump and Putin back in 2016 was a pattern that I had noticed in eastern Europe, which is my area of expertise. Between 2010 and 2013, Russia sought to control Ukraine using the same methods which were on display in 2016 in its influence operation in the United States: social media, money, and a pliable candidate for head of state. When that failed, Russia had invaded Ukraine, under the cover of some very successful influence operations…The success of that propaganda encouraged Russia to intervene in the United States, using the same methods and institutions.
…
To this observer of Ukraine, it was apparent that Russia was backing Trump in much the way that it had once backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, in the hopes of soft control. Trump and Yanukovych were similar figures: nihilistic, venal, seeking power to make or shield money. This made them vulnerably eager partners for Putin. And they had the same chief advisor: the American political consultant Paul Manafort.
Memo from the Desk for Speculation and Rumor. Putin's calculation is that he will be home free in Ukraine if he can hold out through 2024 US elections that will give MAGA Republicans the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress.
Former CrossFit entrepreneur Marjorie Taylor Greene is angling to be Trump's running mate on the MAGA ticket in 2024.
Tim Miller on the new MAGA establishment and the rise of Greene "from QAnon crazy to Queen of the GOP":
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For decades, there [has] been this internal fight between the moderate establishment Republicans and the far-right crazies—but that’s been over for a while now, and the crazies won. As a result, a handful of the old establishment, like me, left the party. Those like Kevin [McCarthy] who stayed just came to terms with it in order to survive.
The result: a Frankenstein monster that merges the populist base with the tax-cutting establishment. And the newest face of this monster is Marge. (How Marjorie Taylor Greene Became Kevin McCarthy’s Best Friend, The Bulwark, January 26, 2023)
Memo from the Editorial Desk. I tidied up the list of websites of interest on the Portable Bohemia home page. Sites that appear to be inactive, links that have gone missing, and websites that have fallen out of favor were removed.
Two New Blog Posts:
Drag Queen Story Hour Comes to Congress. January 20, 2023. The George Santos miniseries saga continues to spin off spectacular storylines, each more wildly improbable than the last. The first episode kicked things off with a fabricated resume exceptional for being so blatant and so easily fact-checked. This was followed by reports…read more>>
Oh, Those Classified Documents! January 25, 2023. Hall of Fame second baseman and manager Frankie Frisch (1898–1973), "the Fordham Flash," hated it when his pitchers walked opposing hitters. Oh, those bases on balls! he would moan as manager of the Cardinals, Pirates, and Cubs back in middle of the twentieth century. One can imagine White House chief of staff Ron Klain…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: Hawthorne Bridge Eastside at SE Grand Avenue. This and a companion structure a few blocks north at the Morrison Bridge were designed to evoke the neighborhood's industrial past. I originally thought to use this photo in conjunction with commentary about the new MLK sculpture in Boston, which has gotten mixed reviews, and what Charlie Sykes referred to as the "uglification of public art," but that discussion would entail more than I want to take on today. (For Sykes' take, see, MLK Deserved Better. He's Not Alone, The Bulwark, January 18, 2023.)
