Let's Revisit Just War Doctrine.

Almost exactly a year ago, on November 26, 1963, I posted:

It was never a secret that Zelensky had only up to the end of this year to win the war, and he clearly hasn't done it, with the new added factor that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is bleeding attention and resources from Ukraine. The new circumstances simply compound the general miscalculation over Ukraine's prospects. This brings me to Roman Catholic just war doctrine as outlined in CCC 2309: >

• damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

"These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the 'just war' doctrine."

What we're beginning to see is that for whatever reason, US and Western policymakers seriously underestimated Russia's capability to continue the war in spite of serious early setbacks. These only served to confirm policymakers and other influencers in their initial view, which discounted any factors warning that there simply were not serious prospects for long-term success. But this circumstance reflects back on the question of whether all other prospects for putting an end to the crisis of early 2022 had been shown to be impractical or ineffective, especially if the end state imposed by the US and NATO looks like it will be little different from a negotiated solution imposed before Russia invaded.

One reason this question is being so little discussed is that, as Signor Graziani points out, a retreat from his signature Ukraine policy would be yet another factor lessening Biden's chances in next year's election.

Remarkably little is being said about the latest development in the Ukraine war, which simply doubles down on the original bait-and-switch: that Ukraine could quickly regain the terrirories Russia had annexed in 2014 by the end of 2023. But as of April of that year, the Council on Foreign Relations had begun to have its doubts:

For any government interested in the outcome of Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive, few issues loom as large as Crimea. Kyiv’s leaders say they are determined to regain all territory lost in last year’s Russian invasion. . . . Washington policymakers routinely insist that Ukraine’s war aims are for Ukraine alone to decide, yet they suspect that such grand aims exceed the country’s military capacity. They worry too that Russian President Vladimir Putin might even be ready to use nuclear weapons to hold on to the Black Sea peninsula—his single biggest foreign policy trophy.

In recent days, with the war in a two-year stalemate and Ukraine's prospects looking increasingly grim, Biden has inexplicably initiated a last-ditch escalation:

In the last few days, Biden has removed restrictions on Ukraine’s use of the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, for long-range attacks inside Russia. Ukraine promptly fired U.S.-made missiles deep into Russian territory. At the same time, Biden has sent U.S. antipersonnel mines to Ukraine, reversing an earlier policy. Both moves were “part of a sweep of urgent actions that the lame-duck Biden administration is taking to help Kyiv’s faltering war effort,” in the words of the Washington Post. In a further escalation — and of course, there would be a response — Russia announced that it had fired a new hypersonic ballistic missile at Ukraine that could also strike U.S. facilities there.

The recent developments in Ukraine would be alarming in any context. But these events come as the 82-year-old President Biden’s apparent cognitive decline continues. Biden, of course, did not run for reelection because a secretive group of Democratic Party powerbrokers forced him out of the race, convinced that he was not up to a second term that would last until he was 86 years old.

Biden's forced withdrawal from the campaign was a no-confidence vote in his ability to serve as president at all, but the outcome of the election, based in part on Trump's campaign promise to end the war, was also a clear rejection of his Ukraine policy. The problem is Putin's response:

Russian President Vladimir Putin decided his response to the U.S-led NATO group firing missiles into the Russian Federation would be to send a message with a multi-warhead intermediate range hypersonic missile.

President Vladimir Putin said, “one of the newest Russian medium-range missile systems was tested in combat conditions, in this case with a ballistic missile in non-nuclear hypersonic edition.” The missile has a range of approximately 3,500 kilometers, below the threshold for the “Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), that’s a reach throughout western Europe and the hypersonic message is likely, ‘you have no iron dome system that can prevent this.”

Sundance at Cobnservative Treehouse concludes,

So far President Trump has remained quiet, as the provocation against our peaceful interests are ongoing. For his part, Vladimir Putin has remained reserved and careful in his response; however, as U.S/NATO missiles continue to land inside the Russian Federation, there is concern that Putin’s restrained responses may indeed escalate.

We hope there are backchannels between Moscow and Mar-a-Lago; however, without any doubt the [Intelligence Community] is looking to intercept any communication that might possibly be taking place. Everyone in/around the orbit of President Trump likely has Nat/Sec surveillance on them.

It doesn't appear that Biden ever had a realistic outlook on the Ukraine situation, especially after Zelensky's counteroffensive faltered in early 2023. But at this stage, a likely negotiated settlement that would stop the carnage while accepting the status as of late 2022 would indicate that the damage inflicted by Russia on the nation or community of nations would not be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it would not have been impractical or ineffective; there were never serious prospects of success; and continued conflict is likely to produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

It's hard to imagine what Biden has in mind, but it certainly isn't good.

The Polls Did Pretty Well!

Predictably, I fouynd this at Real Clear Politics this morning: Were the polls right? It’s complicated.

One of the most frequent questions I get about this election is some version of, “why were the polls so wrong?”

. . . RCP’s final poll average gave Harris a lead of .1 (that is, one-tenth of a point) nationally. Trump is now winning by 1.7 points, yielding a miss of 1.8 for the national average — pretty close, by any reckoning. And it could get even closer when the final tranche of ballots is tallied.

The biggest miss in the swing states was Arizona, where the poll average missed by 2.7. In four of the seven swing states, the difference between the average poll margin and the vote count was 1.7 points — even better than the national results. 

Turn now to the seven battleground Senate contests: In three of them, the miss was less than 1 point. It averages 1.6 points. The biggest miss was in Nevada, where the polls had Jacky Rosen ahead of Sam Brown by 4.9 points in a race she won by 1.6.

So the polls were pretty darn close, huh? Less than two points off! The problem was that most of them, including the RCP average, had Harris winning. On top of that, the consensus across all media throkughout the election season, even before Biden withdrew, was it was going to be "razor thin", "extremely close", and so forth.

This site gives the electoral college totals for all presidential elections since 2000:

• 2000: George W. Bush wins the Electoral College 271-266 (with one faithless elector not voting for Al Gore)
• 2004: George W. Bush wins the Electoral College 286-251 (with one faithless elector not voting for John Kerry)
• 2008: Barack Obama wins the Electoral College 365-173
• 2012: Obama wins the Electoral College 332-206
• 2016: Donald Trump wins the Electoral College 304-227 (Trump lost 2 electoral votes to faithless electors while Hillary Clinton lost 5)
• 2020: Joe Biden wins the Electoral College 306-232

It concludes,

So the last 6 elections give us some parameters in assessing whether and how 2024 ends up being a “close” election.

As noted above, it would be very hard for the election to be closer than 2000, given the hair’s width of separation between Bush and Gore that decided the pivotal state of Florida.

Something along the lines of 2016 and 2020, where the decisive margin was 5 figures’ worth of raw vote margin and less than a percentage point’s worth of difference in the key states, would also qualify.

Even something like 2004, where the difference between victory and defeat was a bit over 100,000 votes or 2 points in margin in a single key state, probably would qualify as “close,” although it actually would not rank as one of the top 3 closest elections of the 2000s.

The 2024 Electoral College total was 312-226, with only Obama's two victories surpassing Trump's margin. This was nothing like a close election, especially with the recent example of 2020 for comparison. This piece neverthneless insists the polls did pretty well:

The final Yahoo News/YouGov survey had Trump and Harris at 47% of the vote apiece among likely voters. That left 6% of likely voters who were either backing third-party candidates or who were still undecided — giving ample room for either candidate to take a small lead.

But the popular vote total had Trump at 50% to Harris at 48.3%, which means that that poll had Trump's total at 3% too low. All it did was reassure everyone that the election would be close, when it wasn't. The only definite thing this does is convince me that reading Real Clear Politics is a waste of time.

The Gaetz And Hegseth Controversies Look Like They're Fading Away

What I'm beginning to notice about the dual Gaetz-Hegseth not-quite scandals so far is that, unlike the sort of allegations that go metastatic, these both seem to have stalled. It's beern roughly a week since news leaked of a memo written by an unnamed woman who claims to be a friend of another unnamed accuser that was sent to Trump's transition team.

That memo claimed Hegseth raped a 30-year-old conservative group staffer in a hotel room in Monterey in 2017, the [Washington] Post reported. Police investigated the incident but Hegseth never faced charges, the memo said.

And so far, we've basically had clarifying information regarding a non-disclosure agreement and Hegseth's version of events, which seems to have been confirmed by a subsequent police investigation. Let's contrast this with, say, the timeline of the Monica Lewinsky scandal:

Jan. 7: Lewinsky signed an affidavit stating that she never had a sexual relationship with Clinton, at the request of attorneys representing Paula Jones, who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment in 1994. . . . A conservative legal group that had volunteered to fund her lawsuit had gotten an anonymous tip about Lewinsky, so Jones’ lawyers subpoenaed Lewinsky in hopes of arguing that Clinton displayed a pattern of workplace harassment.

Jan. 12: Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr — who had been investigating Whitewater, a scandal-plagued Arkansas real-estate venture with which the Clintons had been involved — receives more than 20 hours of tapes of phone conversations that seem to contradict the affidavit. The tapes come from Linda Tripp. . . to whom Lewinsky had confided about President Clinton.

. . . Jan. 13: At the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, Va., Lewinsky dishes more about the relationship to Tripp, who’s been secretly wired by FBI agents, per Starr’s orders.

Jan. 17: Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report reports that Newsweek had been tipped off about President Clinton’s affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, but had yet to run a story about it. On the same day, Clinton denies the affair in a deposition in the Jones suit[.]

. . . Jan. 21: Drudge publishes allegations that Lewinsky had kept a “garment with Clinton’s dried semen.” Mainstream news outlets pick up his report over the course of the week.

What clearly made the scandal juicy at the time was the idea that something was actively being covered up by both the Clinton administration and the media, and independent journalists and the FBI were concurrently leaking details that contradicted the official version of events. The whole basic story emerged over a 14-day period, with a steady drumbeat of emerging figures like Linda Tripp and Matt Drudge that gave credibility to the initial allegations.

So far with the Hegseth controversy, we're halfway through the 14-day period of the Lewinsky blowup, but the big key ingredient is missing, that is, credible evidence that something has been covered up, at least, not by the Trump transition or the media. No Linda Tripp has emerged with dynamite confirmation, either. All we have is an anonymous memo by a friend of an anonymous woman who so far doesn't seem willing to become the latest metonymy for a cheating wife a la a Lewinsky.

The big problem we also have is that through the Stormy Daniels "hush money" trial, we've already learned what a non-disclosure agreement is, that media figures routinely obtain them to make troublesome litigants go away, that Trump himself did this, and attempts to put him on trial for it simply boosted has standing in the polls. And at this point, unlike with Stormy Daniels, whose reputation can't be damaged more than it's already been, the anonymous accuser here has a great deal to lose if she violates the NDA.

A similar thing seems to be happening with Matt Gaetz. The allegatioins against him

began during the first Trump Administration in late 2020 under Attorney General Bill Barr, and concerned allegations that Gaetz had engaged in a sex-trafficking scheme involving a 17-year-old girl.

The probe intensified following revelations about Gaetz’s ties to Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole County tax collector, who pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and other charges in 2021 and admitted to paying women for sex, including the minor in question, and introducing her to other men.

. . . Gaetz vehemently denies the allegations, calling them part of a politically motivated extortion attempt. His attorney insisted that no evidence connected him to the crimes, and in February 2023, the DOJ closed its investigation into him without filing charges. Prosecutors reportedly struggled with witness credibility, including Greenberg’s testimony.

The problem continues to be that there's nothing new. As of yesterday,

An unauthorized person gained access to a file containing confidential testimony from women who have made allegations about former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s pick to become the next attorney general, a lawyer said Tuesday.

Attorneys involved in a civil case brought by a Gaetz associate were notified this week that an unauthorized person accessed a file shared between lawyers that included unredacted depositions from a woman who has said Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17, and a second woman who says she saw the encounter, according to attorney Joel Leppard.

Gaetz has denied all the allegations, and the Justice Department ended its sex trafficking investigation without any criminal charges against him.

. . . The files the person was able to access were part of a defamation case filed by a Gaetz associate against Gaetz’s onetime political ally Joel Greenberg, who pleaded guilty in 2021 to sex trafficking of a minor, and admitted that he had paid at least one underage girl to have sex with him and other men.

As with Hegseth, these allegations are old, they've been made by people with serious credibility issues, and they've already been thoroughly investigated by law enforcement with no charges issued. There are no new assertions by a new Linda Tripp-type figure of stains on blue dresses that would contradict the existing narrative. And it sounds like Gaetz's attorneys, possibly augmented by the Trump transition legal team, are frightening media away from the story:

Sunny Hostin looks like she’s about to rip the heart out of her producer as she’s forced to issue a correction on Matt Gaetz.

pic.twitter.com/DdGCKaCHG0

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) November 20, 2024

Mark Halperin probably has this right.

“Really smart people who understand Capitol Hill and politics and confirmation history say Gaetz is going to be confirmed,” says @MarkHalperin. “Kennedy is going to be confirmed. Because for one thing, every Republican senator has constituents, donors, staff, family members in… pic.twitter.com/gMxXuTdyjm

— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) November 15, 2024

It's all kabuki so far.

More Dribbles Out On An Affronted Ingenue

As I've been saying, the affronted ingenues who come out of the woodwork with steamy allegations against Trump and other Republican nominees soon enough turn out not to be ingenues, whatever else they may be. This is starting to look like it's the case with the as-yet unnamed woman who, through a friend, has passed allegations against Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth to the Trump transition team at Mar-a-Lago, which in turn have been leaked to the press.

It appears that the fullest accounts are in Vanity Fair, behind a paywall, and the Washington Post. The Post's version goes like this:

The alleged incident is said to have occurred when Hegseth attended a California Federation of Republican Women conference in Monterey, and allegedly took place between just before midnight on Oct. 7, 2017, and 7 a.m. the following morning at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa, according to the police statement, first reported by Vanity Fair. The allegation to police was made Oct. 12, 2017, the report said.

The police statement did not provide any other details beyond noting that the complainant had a bruise on her right thigh and that there was no weapon or property involved.

The Post could find no reference in court files to the matter. The police statement does not disclose the complainant’s name, citing her identity and age as “Confidential.” The Post also generally does not name alleged victims of sexual assault.

. . . Hegseth has been married three times, according to court records. He married his first wife, Meredith, in his early 20s and they divorced in 2009, according to Minnesota court filings. The couple agreed that the reasons for the split were an “irretrievable breakdown” of the marriage and Hegseth’s “infidelity,” according to a filing in their divorce case. She declined to comment.

He married his second wife, Samantha, in 2010. Hegseth fathered a child with another woman, Jennifer Rauchet, then a Fox News producer, in August 2017, during that marriage. According to court records, Samantha Hegseth, who did not respond to a request for comment, filed for divorce in September — a month after the child was born. Following his second divorce, Hegseth married Rauchet.

So at the time of the alleged incident, Hegseth was unmarried, although soon to marry his third wife. Another Post story, this one behind a paywall but quoted on X, gives more detail:

At some point in the evening, the complaint alleged, Jane Doe received a text from two women at the bar who told her that “Hegseth was getting pushy about his interest in taking them upstairs to his room.” Jane Doe, who was nearby, came over and talked to those two women, and after they left, she “remembered sensing that Hegseth was irritated,” the memo said. What happened next is in dispute.

According to the memo, Jane Doe “didn’t remember anything until she was in Hegseth’s hotel room and then stumbling to find her hotel room.” The memo said that her memory of six to nine hours “was very hazy,” and that her husband was searching for her and was relieved when she finally showed up.

The following day, the woman returned home and “had a moment of hazy memory of being raped the night before, and had a panic attack,” the memo said.

The woman then went to the emergency room, where she received a rape-kit examination that “was positive for semen,” the memo said. The woman gave county authorities a statement about what happened, according to the memo sent to the transition team.

This leaves open the problem that the woman was at the hotel with her husband and children, but according to the chronology in the police report, she was in Hegseth's room at the hotel from just before midnight to 7:00 the next morning. Various accounts say that her husband had been frantically looking for her throughout this time. NBC News quotes Hegseth's attorney:

[Timothy] Parlatore denied the allegation, saying, “This is a situation where a consensual encounter occurred and, unfortunately, the woman had to come up with a lie to explain why the woman had not come back to her husband’s room that night.”

“It wasn’t reported until days later until there was pressure from her husband. It was fully investigated by police and video surveillance as well as multiple eyewitness statements show that she was the aggressor,” he added.

According to the chronology we have, the incident took place over the night of October 7-8, but it wasn't reported until October 12. The New York Post adds further comment from Parlatore:

Parlatore alleged that the accuser was simply trying to save face with her husband.

“She woke up to a whole bunch of texts from her husband saying, ‘Why didn’t you come back to our room?’ Afterward, she had to come back and lie,” he added, citing a police report that is not publicly available.

Days after the encounter, the accuser filed a complaint to the police, who investigated the situation and ultimately, the local district attorney declined to pursue charges.

Two years later, in 2020, the accuser threatened to pursue Hegseth in court, which resulted in his settlement payment to her in exchange for the woman signing a non-disclosure agreement.

“If she were to come out and start repeating these false claims, or if this in any way derails the confirmation, then, yeah, we will probably be following a pretty massive lawsuit against her for defamation and civil and extortion,” Parlatore said.

Megyn Kelly refers to -- and appears to be reading from -- another source, possibly the separate Washington Post story, at about 4:50 in the YouTube below:

After the encounter, she "expressed concern because she had not gone back to her room where her husband and children were, and that Hegseth told the cops that she planned to tell her husband she had fallen asleep on the couch in another guest's room," according to the statement.

Well, some of us have been there; the idea that someone would concoct that sort of story isn't outside the bounds of possibility, and this has been the continuing problem with all the E Jean Carrolls, Stormy Danielses, and Christine Blasey Fords -- people have seen this sort of thing in their own experience. It's worth noting that jurors are selected in court cases on the basis that they're expected to bring their own life experience to deciding whether witnesses are credible.

The best we can conclude is that neither Hegseth nor the woman displayed good judgment, although the woman was by all accounts sober, while Hegseth's judgment was impaired. This doesn't excuse Hegseth in particular, but it doesn't make him guilty of a crime. Given the public's reaction to the variious allegations against Trump -- they tended only to improve his standing in the polls -- I have a feeling the public has plenty enough good sense to write this off.

They're Underestimating Trump

This morning's headline at The Hill: NFL stars celebrate big plays with dance moves inspired by Trump:

Players across the NFL celebrated big plays Sunday with dance moves inspired by President-elect Trump.

Raiders tight end Brock Bowers, Titans wide receiver Calvin Ridley and Lions defensive end Za’Darius Smith all followed San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa in celebrating big plays with dances inspired by Trump.

After a 23-yard touchdown, Bowers shook his arms and hips in the end zone similar to how Trump famously dances.

Following the game, he told USA Today that he’s seen “everyone do it.”

“I watched the UFC fight [Saturday] night, and Jon Jones did it. I like watching UFC, so I saw it, and thought it was cool,” he said.

. . . College players have been doing the move for weeks, and now it’s gone international, the AP noted.

This confirms the words of General Patton:

When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost, and laughed.

Yet again, we're seeing Trump's instinctive understanding of subliminal cues. He's a winner of the sort General Patton commended to his troops. Big-league ball players and the toughest boxers are emulating someone they apparently now see as an even bigger winner. But in that context, also note a strange non-event reported at the UK Daily Mail: MAGA world outraged after now-deleted tweet reveals Mitch McConnell's secret plot to derail Trump's agenda in the Senate:

Donald Trump's MAGA faithful were outraged after it was leaked that Mitch McConnell hatched a plot to stall his Cabinet nominations in the Senate.

The backlash began after a now-deleted tweet from New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer claimed McConnell told colleagues 'there will be no recess appointments' for the president-elect's cabinet members.

'Message to Trump Team: "There will be no recess appointments" Sen. Mitch McConnell said tonight at a Washington gathering,' Mayer wrote on X at around 8 pm Sunday.

. . . Mayer has since deleted the tweet without explanation, but not before it caused commotion among Trump supporters, who suspected something was foul was afoot.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah reiterated that 'McConnell is no longer the Senate GOP leader' before asking: 'Remember that time when McConnell decided he wouldn’t be speaking for Senate Republicans anymore?'

But note that sopurces close to former Republican Leader McConnell have been leaking to Jane Mayer, a leftist writer for the New Yorker:

Her paternal great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, one of the founders of Lehman Brothers. Her maternal grandparents were Mary Fleming (Richardson) and Allan Nevins, a historian and John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s authorized biographer.

Mayer attended two private non-secondary schools: Fieldston, in the northwest area of the Bronx borough of New York City; and—as an exchange student in 1972-1973—Bedales, a boarding school in the village of Steep, Hampshire, England.

A 1977 magna cum laude graduate of Yale University, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and served as senior editor of the Yale Daily News and as campus stringer for Time magazine

In other words, she's a generational member of the blueblood establishment. But beyond that, one of her books is an effort to rehabilitate Anita Hill's failed attempt to play the affronted ingenue card against Clarence Thomas:

Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) (co-authored with Jill Abramson), a study of the nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court[.]

This precis summarizes her argument:

Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment by Thomas, and the attacks on her that were part of his high-placed supporters rebuttal, both shocked the nation and split it into two camps. One believed Hill was lying, the other believed that the man who ultimately took his place on the Supreme Court had committed perjury.

In this brilliant, often shocking book, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, two of the nation's top investigative journalists, examine all aspects of this controversial case. They interview witnesses that the Judiciary Committee chose not to call and present documents never before made public. They detail the personal and professional pasts of both Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill and lay bare a campaign of lobbying, public relations, and character assassination fueled by conservative power at its most desperate. A gripping high-stakes drama, Strange Justice is not only a definitive account of the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings but is also a classic casebook of how the Washington game is played by those for whom winning is everything.

Winning was everything to both sides, of course, it still is, and Anita Hill lost. In fact, subsequent attempts to play the affronted ingenue card have all lost -- especially when they've gone after Trump.

So, why is Mitch McConnell playing footsie with an upper-class member of the anti-Republican left? Something tells me the anti-Trump members of the Senate, at least as of yesterday, were beginning to rally around the possibility that the House Ethics Committee report against Gaetz might be released with salacious allegations, as well as possibly calling the woman who threatened to sue Pete Hegseth as a witness. But I think saner heads prevailed; if Trump could weather tetimony from the likes of E Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels, putting a couple of other phony ingenues in front of a Senate committee could well backfire.

I think it's slowly beginning to dawn on some of these people that, as General Patton understood, Americans love a winner, and one thing that makes Trump a winner is his instinctive mastery of subliminal cues. This is something Sen Fetterman understands better than other Democrats:

Fetterman said, “There are some [nominations] that I would be excited to vote for, like my colleague from Florida or the representative from New York, of course. Then there are others that are just absolute trolls, just like Gaetz and those things. That’s why, you know, Democrats, you know, like Trump, that gets the kind of thing that he wanted. You know, like the freakout and all of those things.”

He continued, “It’s still not even not even Thanksgiving yet. And if we’re having meltdowns, you know, every tweet or every appointment or all those things, I mean, it’s going to be four years.”

Fetterman added, “I’ve also claimed that Trump is the strongest, that he’s been in the three cycles here. And now things that were really unique that happened the assassination attempt that was in Butler, that’s 45 minutes from where we’re sitting right now.”

It looks like somebody leaned pretty hard on Jane Mayer to take that tweet down. I'll bet someone even leaned pretty hard on McConnell. General Patton would be proud.

The Ingenue Accuser Strategy

My point in yesterday's post was that Trump, having somehow gotten this way through successful careers in salesmanship, the management of wealth and influence, and entertainment, has a deep and instinctive insight into subliminal cues. It reminds me of discussions I've seen of artists like Shakespere or Michelangelo that point out that critics can take paragraphs to explain the effect of specific scenes or vignettes, but the decisions the artists made in creating them must have been nearly instant.

These sorts of insights operate below a conscious or rational level. But some sort of underlying intent is clearly behind Trump's nominations of Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and Matt Gaetz, because the reactions from his oppenents have been so over-the-top on one hand and predictable on the other. Trump must have had some sense that this would be the case, and I've got to assume he also has an instinctive sense of how an end game will play out, even if it's obscure to everyone else.

I'm going to leave the reactions to Tulsi Gabbard aside for now -- that she's a Russian agent -- because they're a little too transparent and banal. But I want to focus on the accusations against Hegseth and Gaetz, which are also predictable and transparent, because they seem to fit something more like a dreamlike archetype, the ingenue accuser. So far, the ingenues who've been marshaled against Hegseth and Gaetz are anonymous and speaking through attorneys, and the details of their accusations haven't been fully revealed, but they're starting to fit an existing pattern.

Past ingenue figures -- and of course, I'm using the term very loosely -- have included Anita Hill against Clarence Thomas, Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh, Cassidy Huthinson against Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels against Donald Trump, and E Jean Carroll, yet again against Donald Trump. The problem with the ingenue archetype is that figures like Carroll, an octogenarian sex columnist, and Daniels, a porn actress, hardly qualify as ingenues, and the credibility of all of them has collapsed under scrutiny. They simply turn out not to be ingenues, their stories are phony, and the whole affair turns into something like the punchline of a dirty joke.

But more important, what we've seen is that all these seemingly tawdry affairs wind up working to the benefit of the nominee. Clarence Thomas was confirmed, as was Brett Kavanaugh. Cassidy Hutchinson, Stormy Daniels, and E Jean Carroll somehow served as subliminal cues that helped bring about Trump's unprecedented political comeback and reelection; in particular, the trials involving non-ingenues Carroll and Daniels did nothing but boost Trump's rise in the polls.

What we have at the moment against Gaetz boils down to this:

A woman told the House Ethics Committee that she saw Matt Gaetz, who is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for the U.S. attorney general, have sex with a minor, her lawyer said Friday.

“My client testified to the House Ethics Committee that she witnessed Rep. Gaetz having sex with a minor at a house party in Orlando in 2017,” Joel Leppard said.

This in itself raises puzzling questions. People normally have sex, underage or not, in private. How did this person find herself in a situation where she witnessed this act? Was it in some sort of orgy? How was she so sure the victim was 17 and not 18? What sort of substances had she ingested to wind up in this situation? If her judgment was so clouded simply as to be in the same room, how can her testimony not be impeachable? But the story goes on,

“Merrick Garland’s DOJ cleared Matt Gaetz and didn’t charge him. Are you alleging Garland is part of a cover-up?” a spokesperson for Gaetz said Friday.

Gaetz, 42, who represented Florida’s District 1 covering part of the Florida Panhandle, was investigated by the FBI on sex-trafficking allegations involving a 17-year-old and was not charged with any crime.

I suspect this story will fall apart pretty quickly as the witness turns out, like the others, not to be an ingenue. The same sort of narrative seems to be shaping up with Hegseth:

Trump Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth’s lawyer Tim Parlatore said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Saturday that sexual assault allegations from seven years ago — in 2017 — were “completely investigated” at the time and that he is “completely and totally innocent.”

“He is completely and totally innocent. It was completely investigated. She was the aggressor,” Parlatore said in a phone interview, referring to the woman who claimed she was assaulted.

Parlatore said that in 2017, Hegseth, the host of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, was invited to speak at an event hosted by the California Federation of Republican Women conference in Monterey. After the event, he and event organizers were at a bar, where he had “too many drinks.”

The accuser, who was allegedly sober at the time, took him back to his room, Parlatore said.

“She took advantage of him. She led him. She was, by all accounts, both video and eyewitness, she was sober. He was drunk. She grabbed him. She took him to his room. She’s like walking arm in arm with him. And really putting it on, and she gets him into his room. And then the police honestly, when they looked at it, even though she was the one that reported it, when they looked at the video, they considered charging her,” he said.

Over the next several years, there were threats of lawsuits by both sides that eventually resulted in a settlement.

Parlatore said the settlement had confidentiality provisions that the accuser or others with knowledge of the case breached this week, when the allegations became public.

“The consequences for breaking it are essentially that the settlement is null and void, but beyond the settlement, obviously she’s going to owe us a little bit of money from that,” he said, adding that she did not get much in the first place.

“But now it opens her up to a lawsuit for defamation and because it’s in California, California has a simple extortion statute, so we could sue her for extortion, too,” he said.

If we look at the pattern here, all of the (not) ingenue accuser scenarios have played out in a consistent way, and it's been counterproductive to the intended effect. I can't imagine that Trump wasn't fully aware of the allegations against both Gaetz and Hegseth, and he fully factored them into his strategy when he nominated them, although, as with Shakespeare and Michelangelo, his decisons must have been nearly instant and inscrutable to the rest of us.

I don't know how they will play out, but I can only assume they're part of a strategy to render the RINO faction of the Republicans irrelevant, and so far, the RINO Republicans are acting as we might predict. If they're being predictable, this doesn't bode well for them at all.

"You Got What You Wanted, And Now You’re Still Blaming Biden."

Sen John Fetterman's words to Speaker Emerita Pelosi struck me with particular force when I read them this morning. They came in the middle of an interview he did with Politico:

After Joe’s Biden debate over the summer, you didn’t think he should drop out.

We can both agree that he had a rough debate.

People like [Nancy] Pelosi, she really tried to — what’s the word I’m looking for? — she embraced this “she’s the godmother, she’s the enforcer.” And now she’s blaming Biden. Well, you can’t have it both ways. You got what you wanted, and now you’re still blaming Biden.

I think it’s really ironic that you have a woman at age 84 and she is still hanging on. Why not give a younger generation an opportunity to occupy that seat?

One thing I've noticed about this year's campaign and the surrounding events has been their subliminal, even dreamlike quality. Not least among these images is Sen Fetterman's recovery from a severe stroke in May, 2022, about which the Babylon Bee reported:

In a bizarre coincidence, Senator John Fetterman has suddenly become more conservative after his brain resumed working.

Previously a die-hard liberal, Fetterman has stunned audiences by staking out a variety of conservative positions over the past several weeks, at the same time as his brain regained the ability to speak in sentences. With Fetterman's cognition continually improving, conservatives have sat dumbfounded as they found themselves nodding along with the Democrat.

In this case, Fetterman is speaking not just as a conservative, but as something of a family truthteller. And there can be no question that Pelosi has become the center of a family dispute.

The latest controversy was sparked by Pelosi telling The New York Times that had Biden dropped out sooner, the election may have turned out differently. Specifically, she cited the possibility of having a compressed primary instead of anointing Harris, which is what ultimately occurred.

Is she wrong? Not necessarily, but how do Democrats want to hear what they "should" have done from the person who so royally screwed things up that Donald Trump, the man they compare to Adolf Hitler, got re-elected? Pelosi flew too close to the sun. She believed herself to be above the will of her party's primary voters and executed a soft coup on the rightful nominee. The result was an abject disaster.

But this is just a part of the dreamlike campaign and post-election psychodrama. I've noted here the strange image of Kamala, who was the most liberal senator, to the left of Bernie Sanders, affecting the wardrobe and accoutrements of an upper-class white woman while speaking in a phony black accent.

Nor can we forget the dreamlike images over the past year of a frail, stammering, stumbling, shuffling President Biden -- but contrast that with the equally dreamlike image of Trump in Butler, back on his feet and raising his fist beneath an American flag. Of that image, Sen Fetterman commented at the link above,

“Immediately after that, when I was out, I saw people with custom shirts with that image,” he said, referring to the iconic photo of Trump raising his fist after being shot. “It’s like, ‘They tried everything. They impeached this man, they put him on trial. You know, the media. And now they tried to kill him, and he survived.’ And he had the presence of mind to even respond, and created that. What if that was [Barack] Obama? Can you imagine what that would have meant to Democrats?”

Now let's put this in the context of Trump's controversial cabinet nominations in the past week. Again, we're geting a dreamlike response:

Elizabeth Warren on Tulsi Gabbard: "Do you really want her to have all the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly has been in Putin's pocket? That just has to be a hard no." pic.twitter.com/gOD7274ilI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 14, 2024

A shrieking, schoolmarmish woman making hysterical McCarthyite accusations that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian agent. Something's seriously out of joint.

Let's also look at the dreamlike context of Trump's nominating Gaetz as Attorney General. So far, it looks like Gaetz's Senate confirmation is going to center on unreleased -- and as far as anyone can tell, unsubstantiated -- allegations of sexual misconduct and whatever else, detailed in a confidential House Ethics Committee report. Doesn't this echo in a strange, subliminal way many of Trump's obstacles over the past eight years, the Russian hookers, the Zelensky phone call, the Mueller report, the impeachment attempts, the January 6 committee?

The odd thing is how insubstantial these things all turned out to be, a lot like waking up and suddely realizing it was all a dream. Now it looks like we're going to have an equivalent battle over nothing:

The House Ethics Committee was scheduled to meet Friday, three sources familiar with the meeting told NBC News, and one of those sources said that releasing the Gaetz report was expected to be among the topics on the agenda. Punchbowl News previously reported Wednesday that the Ethics panel had planned to release a "highly damaging" report about Gaetz on Friday, citing multiple sources familiar with the probe.

But Gaetz's resignation complicates things, and the meeting was canceled, according to a source with direct knowledge.

The link continues,

Trump's choice of Gaetz was a surprise to nearly everyone, including members of his own party and officials at the Justice Department — in part because of the Ethics investigation, his past legal problems and his reputation as a rabble-rouser in Congress.

A source familiar with the process told NBC News that Gaetz had been consulting Trump on who would be best to run the Justice Department. Gaetz did not ask for the role, that person said, but Trump asked him to take on the job Wednesday morning, just hours before the decision was made public.

This might look like it was an impulsive decision, but now that we know Trump better, I just don't think he's impulsive. On the other hand, he certainly is instinctive. One thing we've learned about Trump is his instinctive ability to manage subliminal cues. The battle over his controversial cabinet nominations is going to have plenty of subliminal cues. Right now, I have a sense that Trump is somehow ahead of the game.