There’s an irresistible fin de siècle sexiness to Washington County, Pennsylvania, whose Republican party has notoriously announced (everyone’s quoting it) that when it comes to morality, on s’en fout, babe.

We [do not send our representatives to Washington] to vote [their] conscience, we [do] not send [them] there to do the right thing…

Here’s Wash. Co.’s Republican chair, telling us bourgeois prudes to fuck off with the conscience and do the right thing shit. Life is a cabaret, you fools!

Update/recap of the idjits in Louisiana who maintain that state’s distinction: America’s highest murder rate, now for the 31st year.

“People are armed to the teeth.”

I know you’re thinking New Orleans, but don’t forget Baton Rouge, home of LSU.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn tries to help Israel come to grips with its death cult.

… With buses being torched on streets, violent protests against both law-enforcement and journalists, the inability to implement effective crowd-control over thousands (and the admission that such control was effectively impossible), the complete failure to keep institutions closed and public gatherings within specified regulatory limits, and the abdication of enforcement mechanisms, it seems clear that the State of Israel has lost control over the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox Jewish, sector of its population. 

… The State of Israel [has] come to the conclusion that [it] simply can’t impose the conditions required by law on a resistant and sometimes violent community of over one million citizens. 

… Because there is no equal application of the law, lawbreakers win widespread impunity, and with no political leadership to ensure the primacy of the law, the national interest, and the safeguarding of life, Israel is well on its way to being a failed state... This breakdown of social and political relations should be understood as a civil war.

… The behavior of the Haredim, both by their willful disobedience of COVID restrictions and their now violent resistance, is effectively spreading terror amongst the Israeli population at large. And other Israelis – Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, men and women, are afraid.

… [This] is now a concerted, coordinated effort to embed and embolden Haredi autonomy from state control and wider social norms. Their leadership, if not all members of the community, understand that the subtext of the pandemic is about power.

… [T]he ultra-Orthodox are no longer acting out confusion, negligence, situational difficulties, or financial and spiritual strain.

… There is a deliberate intent and concerted effort to wield Judaism as a weapon and to use the Torah in service of a kind of Jewish terrorism – and no regard to who may get hurt. There should be no space for a death cult – complete with the glorification of the martyrs – in Israeli Jewish society.  

But in the earlier case of Oxford’s amazing, protracted, attempt to protect/retain Tariq Ramadan, and in the current case of France’s Sciences Po so intently protecting/retaining Olivier Duhamel that the head of the school (who knew all about plausible child rape and incest charges against Duhamel) has just resigned over the scandal, we are afforded a remarkable opportunity to see how elites work, and of course to see why ordinary people hate elites.

[Frédéric Mion] said he was alerted to the allegations in 2018 by a former culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti. He said had no taken action because of the lack of tangible evidence and because Mr. Veil told him it was only rumors.

[Yes, because you can’t have a chat with your buddy about maybe he raped his kid unless you get videotape. Plus a crony told him to ignore it.]

But in a phone interview on Tuesday, Ms. Filippetti said Mr. Mion had called her after the accusations were made public last month in the book and said, “We shouldn’t let anyone think that we knew.”

[Elites lie, and expect others to lie with/for them.]

Ms. Filippetti said the call had “chilled” her.

Back in 2018, she said, she trusted Mr. Mion to “at least” remove Mr. Duhamel from his position at Sciences Po.

“You can’t just sweep everything under the carpet when it comes to something that bad,” Ms. Filippetti said.

*****************

Sure you can; sure you can. Duhamel is a big-shot full of fine ideas about compassion and justice; you’re going to dump him because of some no-account fourteen year old kid?

… don’t kill me! party.

There is a disturbing reason Republicans in Congress are giving for refusing to break with President Donald Trump: They fear for their lives.

According to Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), this is a major reason why more House Republicans aren’t voting to impeach [or, more recently, convict] Donald Trump in the wake of the attack on the Capitol.

“The majority of them are paralyzed with fear,” Crow said in a Wednesday MSNBC appearance. “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”

Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, found in his own reporting that “Crow was right.”

Ms. Kouchner’s evocation of summer days at the family property on the Côte d’Azur is powerful in its evocation of a false idyll: tennis, meals, Scrabble, wine, laughter — as well as nude bathing in the swimming-pool, touching under the table and mockery of bourgeois sexual constraints.

How often, in Nabokov’s novel, Humbert Humbert evokes the nauseating contrast between a privileged sunlit world and the clandestine rape of a child by her step-father. Camille Kouchner’s memoir recalls the incestuous assaults on her brother by their step-father, the high-profile political pundit Olivier Duhamel.

*************

Human beings do get up to some crazy shit. Kouchner’s mother was a radical lefty (longtime lover of Castro) whose anxiety about being mistaken for sexually conventional apparently exceeded her anxiety about whether her husband was sexually assaulting her son.

One account of the now-national scandal ends with Kouchner quoting one of her father’s (Bernard Kouchner) favorite sayings:

“Between the strong and the weak, it’s liberty that oppresses and the law that liberates.”

For decades – assuming the charges against him are true – Olivier Duhamel enjoyed the particular freedom of the French elite, protected by powerful friends who knew about the incest and didn’t care. But he also benefited from a larger, stylish, subversive, liberty – often, in actuality, a cruel personal license – long associated with debased versions of revolutionary ideologies. Duhamel’s “liberties” oppressed a helpless child; now, decades later, that child goes to the courts, to liberate himself.

****************

Deep structure of all this? Start with Michel Houellebecq.

[J]ustice failed, [but] democratic self-preservation is working. Trump lost the presidency, and that loss held despite all his attacks on the vote and the counting of the vote. His party split against him on this second round of impeachable offenses. He has lost his immunity to civil suit and his impunity against federal indictment. The world is crashing down upon his head.

The impeachment did not prevail. But Trump still lost. And as the power of that loss reverberates, so should the honors to the day’s heroes of day: the brilliant and eloquent House managers, led by Representative Jamie Raskin—and the eight senators who wrote their own profiles in courage.

Get a load of that picture. Bless you. Bless you.

It was the first non-peaceful transfer of power in American history. In over two centuries, it remains unprecedented, the most grotesque assault on democratic processes by a single president in history… That Trump clearly put the lives of cops, Senators and his own vice-president in danger was, of course, of no concern for him. No lives apart from his own have ever mattered to him…

There has never been a president who has done any of this: express contempt for the democracy he leads, refuse to accept the legitimate results of an election, and attempt to stay in power by marshaling violence in the streets. There are no parallels among any first-world modern democracies for this kind of behavior by a head of state or prime minister. No Western leader, after losing an election, has ever insisted he actually won it in a landslide — and refused to grant any legitimacy to his successor. It is such a grotesque violation of a president’s oath of office that, only a few years ago, it would have been deemed an impossibly far-fetched scenario.

**********************

Non-degenerate political observers search and search for words accurate and strong enough to convey the moral depravity of this person. All feel (I dare say) the same sense of linguistic inadequacy. No one — not Mencken, not Murdoch, not Hitchens, not Arendt, not Didion, not Orwell, not even James Baldwin, whose writing so astonished wee UD when she encountered it in high school and has never stopped astonishing her — no one had or has the political and writerly chops to really express the disgust and shock attendant upon realizing that the leader of your country is not only vile, but arguably one of the vilest people in the world.

All of us who were more or less properly raised were taught (I dare say) to ignore, to socially annihilate, the worst of the worst, the vilest of the vile, especially those among the vile who held positions of power and were therefore able to marshal their vileness to produce real destruction. They had to be so radically isolated as to be without scope for action. Indeed many of us have dealt with the sometimes close-to-unmanageable emotions the cruelty of this man has inspired by altogether shifting our attention away from him, somehow in some sort of sad magic trick trying to make him go poof. Almost as many people, though, revel in his viciousness and want to keep him front and center.

Among rockhard reactionaries and erstwhile idolators it’s largely women so far – Lynn Cheney, Nikki Haley – who have finally, for cynical or authentic reasons, cracked.

Anyway Andrew Sullivan, up there, found the word “grotesque” and ran with it.

comically or repulsively ugly or distorted

incongruous or inappropriate to a shocking degree

It’s a good choice, a promising direction, grotesque. It captures the continued disbelief many of us harbor in regard to the full sharp slap of a president who seems to have tried to kill his vice-president and other political leaders in order to establish a tyranny. Comically and repulsively ugly and distorted in the feathered and tattooed bodies of the insurrectionists who tried to kill in the name of their beloved. Inappropriate to such a shocking degree that we still refuse to let ourselves be slapped that hard. As my congressional representative, Jamie Raskin, smacks my face again and again with it, I still – even now – try to dodge the blows.

Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.

Let’s face the music and dance.

These are UD‘s mantras; she recites them to herself all the time. Only she lacks the courage to live by them.

There’s got to be a morning after
If we can hold on through the night
We have a chance to find the sunshine
Let’s keep on looking for the light

(Sing it.)

Better late than never. This blog has for years kept a tally of the number of times someone in the finance world has the absolute GALL to suggest that donating to, or working as an investment advisor to increase, Harvard University’s $40.9 billion endowment might not be the best use of your money/time.

Of course, given that university’s obvious need, and the need of the very wealthy to give to the world’s very wealthiest university, few people voice this suggestion. But here’s one – and it’s setting the money world, “abuzz,” says the New York Times.

Why make the Harvard endowment any more money? What systemic bias do you perpetuate?

The author of these two questions is described as a “venture capitalist and provocateur.”

And baby you don’t get any more provocateuric than THAT.

… the QAnon Lady stroking Trump’s genitals.

“They don’t teach [their children] science so they don’t understand how viruses work… They don’t understand math so they don’t understand what an exponential function is. When you double or triple each time the number of people each person infects, then that is causing a lot of them to die and a lot of them to be sick, and along with them the rest of us.”

There’s our January 6 insurrection, and there’s the haredi insurrection.

“It has begun to dawn on people that we have basically an insurrection here of individuals who refuse to obey Israeli law, from what we mandate in the schools to health care and all down the line, everything that we do.”

‘IT SURE LOOKS LIKE TRUMP WILL FACE

CRIMINAL CHARGES FOR ELECTION FRAUD‘

The sheer availability of weaponry in the United States increases the risk of terrorism. Terrorist groups in other democracies have usually scrambled to find weapons; the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, for instance, had to resort to getting arms from Libya.

*****************

And David Frum:

Hundreds of millions of firearms are housed in American garages, basements, and attics. Delusions and disinformation still flow through social media. For a long time, however, mainstream politics has been barricaded from violence not only by the moral resistance of decent people—but also by the pragmatic calculations of even cynical politicians that violence does not pay.

That pragmatic calculation has been weakening. In 2018, the present governor of Montana won a House race after he violently attacked a journalist for asking him an unwanted question. More and more politicians campaign with firearms at their side. The taboo on political violence, already weaker in the United States than in many peer democracies, is weakening further. Among other things, Trump’s impeachment trial offers an opportunity to reassert that taboo, to denormalize mayhem and murder as the route to power.

So it’s not only Trump who is on trial. It’s his methods—and all who aspire to adopt his methods as their own in the political contests ahead.