Notes On A Smoky Summer
In the old Fleet Street — a row of lumbering, ugly buildings in the center of London surrounded by pubs — the hacks would call these sultry, distracted weeks of July the “dog days” of summer. (“Dog days,” I recently discovered, is a phrase that goes back to the Romans, referring to the “Dog Star,” which was dominant this time of year. Sadly, it has nothing to do with dogs wilting in the midday heat.)
News becomes less newsy (they called the interns “summer relief” in those days, and it wasn’t all about sexual harassment); sports crowds the front pages; and you feel the mind wandering as Canadian smoke turns the skies yellow, England breaks soccer hearts yet again, and the mad king sputters in the half-destroyed lair formerly known as the White House.
Speaking of whom, some brief notes on the current scene as the heat dome hovers …
He’s Still Out Of His Mind
We’re used to it, of course, but it still demands repeating. The president is mentally unwell — a delusional, malignant sociopath incapable of absorbing any reality that is not pure wish-fulfillment. We have never elected anyone to that office as inadequate to it as this man. The stream of consciousness we were subjected to last night is merely the latest of a series of humiliations for a country dumb and desperate enough to re-elect a global laughingstock. Have I said this before? Yes, I have said this before. It remains a fact we are currently doing our best to ignore. For appearance’s sake.
He provided no new evidence of any fraud. Yes, foreign countries have tried to influence our elections. So what? His claim — that China somehow successfully rigged 2020 — makes no sense, and has no serious documentation. But the result, of course, is the continued delegitimization of the core procedures of democracy, an unforgivable dereliction of duty by a president, and something he does entirely to assuage his own ego. There really is nothing more to this than Trump’s conviction that elections he wins are always fair, and elections he loses are always rigged. Trump is not hard to understand. We have a toddler as POTUS.
And he decides to bore us with this self-centered bullshit even as the war he vowed never to fight reignites because Vance was too incompetent to draft an enforceable MOU to get out of it. And so the global economy slides because Trump simply couldn’t concede that Obama got the best deal from Iran available all those years ago. The price of one man’s insatiable ego: $100 billion of taxpayers’ money, and $85 a barrel and climbing.
The Pathos Of Edsall
I read Tom Edsall every week without fail. He’s an old-school liberal lefty who nonetheless has a healthy respect for electoral reality. And after years of frustrated attempts to coax self-criticism from the Democrats, he kinda unleashed this week — with a simple plea to the party he wants to support. If they want to win, he argued, they need to change on three things: immigration, crime, and trans. He’s dead-on. These issues truly are the test, it seems to me, of whether the Dems are serious. And what Tom understands is that the change needs to be stark, clear, and striking to work.
On immigration: a pledge to keep the Southern border sealed, to deport the most recent Biden wave of new arrivals, including in the interior, and to move everyone else to a path to citizenship. On crime: aggressive prosecution of violence, restoration of bail requirements, and lifetime imprisonment for repeat violent offenders. On trans: full civil-rights protections but no co-ed sports and no child transitions. Simple, clear, sane, and popular positions. Nothing inherently conservative about any of them.
I’d add a fourth, for what it’s worth, as a kind of bouquet for the message as a whole: an end to corruption. What we’ve seen these past two years is a level of political graft and grift far beyond anything in US history. A sitting president traded on his name to scam thousands of gamblers out of $2 billion. His sons have all but integrated US foreign policy into a payola scheme for their own business interests; and no-bid contracts are ubiquitous when it comes to the Trump retinue. There is nothing these low-life crooks won’t monetize — and even the teleprompter dude is in on the scam! They’re now giving advance notice of Trump’s Truth Social posts to paying clients, who can use the heads-up to play the markets. In the DC swamp, the algae are truly balling.
Senator Ossoff has the goods — which is why he is easily the most attractive possibility for 2028 right now:
How much do you guys know about Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband? He’s on the Saudi payroll for $2bn, did you know that? And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East, apparently, while at the very same time asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. Can you imagine, like a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump, a royal, a princeling. The rules are for us, not for them. ... The Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.
More like this, please. A lot more.
Keir Was A Good Bloke
It is one of those rare things in life when someone you knew extremely well as a kid goes on to become prime minister, if only for two underwhelming years of relative failure. I’m not immersed enough in the details of English politics to offer a serious critique of his premiership, but I do think it’s worth noting that I never really recognized the boy I remember in the man I observed from afar. He used to be a kid of daring and drive. He ended up a half-man in a neutered suit.
What happens to people when they climb the greasy pole I avoided? Some adjustment is essential, of course. White lies, euphemisms, awkward alliances, and trade-offs are all integral to political survival, and I’m no purist. But the one thing I recall of Keir in grammar school was the clarity of his strong convictions — a clarity utterly absent in his time in Number 10. Of course these convictions needed tempering over time. But they seem to have evaporated entirely into a zone of pure “process”.
Part of it I ascribe to the kind of socialization anyone who becomes an international human rights lawyer, as Keir did, will go through. These elites glide effortlessly together, like shoals of tiny minnows, especially in the EU bureaucracies where Keir thrived. They use their own language; abide by their own rituals; every argument they make is parsed to avoid offense, every point finessed, until what’s left is oddly sterile and unsatisfying. The antics of a Trump or a Farage are, to my mind, much worse in a leader. But they represent something recognizably human; and people want their leaders to be human above all. Keir somehow drained that out of his system until his smallness absorbed itself. He’s not alone.
Why can’t we have clarity and decency? What in our system keeps giving us either dangerous clowns or clinical careerists? As soon as I get a chance to have a beer with the dude, I’ll ask Keir myself.
Was Lindsey Graham Gay?
Who cares? That has long been my view. (On the other hand, I was once asked to interview him for an Atlantic event, and in order to get out of it, I said I’d ask him directly about it on stage. They quickly found someone else.)
Of course, some did care — and made Graham the butt of some pretty basic leftwing homophobia. Jamie Kirchick has a good round-up. My faves: “fuck u u closeted idiot,” from Rosie O’Donnell, and “From the closet to the coffin, real seamless,” from Margaret Cho. The queers can be so charming, can’t they? I’d put Graham in a somewhat lamer category. At the Daily Dish, we used to refer to him as Butters, the South Park character, who’s always Cartman’s easy mark. He attached himself to others: first McCain, then Trump. As if he could only really function in some other bigger dude’s shadow.
But what I found truly odd about Graham was his strange, almost pathological devotion to other countries. It’s one thing to support Israel, for example. It’s quite another to almost take up residence there, all but internalize being an Israeli, and speak constantly as if you were a representative of Jerusalem rather than Washington. All of that was true this year.
“I will be with Israel until our dying day,” is not an atypical statement for Butters, who was more in favor of US aid to Israel than Netanyahu was. He favored Dresden- and Hiroshima-like action in Gaza: “I think they should go in and destroy Hamas, just as we destroyed the Germans and the Japanese.” There was a near-religious level of devotion: “If America pulls the plug on Israel, God will pull the plug on us.” I’m sorry but at some point, this is just weird. The same could be said for his championing of Ukraine: not so much a sober weighing of America’s interests but a full-on, enthusiastic participant in another country’s destiny.
Maybe this is simply a function of the power a US Senator can wield: you visit a foreign country, are treated like a demigod, and get to like it. Maybe it’s simply a yearning for righteous conflict usually unavailable in a peaceful democracy, which Graham shared with McCain.
But part was also that he was a global Senator for whom American power was such an aphrodisiac in the late 20th Century that he couldn’t resist over-using it. I can forgive him for that. He meant well, after all, even though hundreds of thousands died and America became a war-criminal nation because of policies he backed. What I find harder to forgive is his total refusal to recognize how disastrous for America his adventurism turned out to be. This man never conceded an error of judgment. He never recanted the Iraq War and was a fervent supporter of the Iran War until his last breath. He’d be trying to get ground troops into Iran right now if he were still alive. The sole consolation of his death is that his catastrophic, well-intentioned, meddling will finally end. But the damage still mounts.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a fascinating chat with film critic David Thomson; reader dissents over the DSA and Dems; 13 notable quotes from the week in news; 19 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of a boy’s birdsong; a patriotic window from Michigan; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a new subscriber:
I’ve been a lurker for a while, but this genderqueer BS makes me angry if I think about it too much. I will never give another penny to mainstream LGB groups, considering how totally they’ve squandered the good will that many of us worked so hard to achieve for our community. Heartbreaking.
Another reason for subscribing: “I enjoy the excellent interviews and insightful commentary.” Most grateful for the support.
New On The Dishcast: David Thomson
David is a historian and perhaps the greatest living film critic. He’s the author of more than 20 books, including biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His new book is called A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies. It’s a wonderful extended rant in some ways, a love letter and a searing indictment of cinema. I was a little intimidated talking with him, but it was a lot of fun.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the uptight genius of Hitchcock, and the authoritarian nature of cinema. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s pod about love and psychoanalysis, as well as readers on the DSA. I also address a couple emails from canceled subscribers.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: John O’Sullivan on conservatism, Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, Robby George on natural law, and Megan McArdle on pretty much anything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Dissents Of The Week
In response to my column on the DSA, a reader writes:
I would dispute your characterization of DSA candidates conducting a takeover of the Democratic Party. Yes, they are winning races in deep-blue urban seats, but they are all getting crushed across the Southeast. I don’t think a single DSA candidate won a primary anywhere in that whole swath of the country.
And I live in Connecticut, which is also very blue. We haven’t had our primary yet, but no candidates endorsed by the DSA are favored to win any congressional primaries. Even the cities here elect mainstream Democrats.
Another dissent along those lines:
It’s as though you intentionally ignore all the success that the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party had during the November election and those currently having success right now in very red districts. Of course NYC elections are going to dominant the news cycle, but far-left candidates winning in extremely blue districts doesn’t mean a party takeover, or that the far-left ideology is taking over. The far left couldn’t even hold Chicago! We’re supposed to think what’s happening in NYC is going to transport to nice, moderate, purple, or even blue districts???
Thanks for the pushback. It’s important. More dissents are on the pod page, and please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Lindsey Graham, deadly ICE, and the bloodshed in Burma. Below are two examples, followed by a new substack:
Here’s an FAQ for the cyclospora outbreak.
Is alcohol going the way of cigarettes?
Naomi Klein makes the jump to an ever-crowded Substack.
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription. Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Since this week’s pod is cinema themed, let’s give our cinema sleuth another shout-out — for his detailed weekly reports that include film location maps, like this one for Montreal:
And from the latest contest, in the Alps, here’s a shout-out to this poor pup:
From what I can tell in this week’s View, we’re somewhere in the Bernese Oberland. My closest connection is our Bernedoodle puppy, who has 1/8 heritage from that region. Sadly he broke his leg, but happily is on the mend:
He did his best to help us find the View window from his homeland, but we just ran out of time.
See you next Friday.