James Comey Gives A Whole New Meaning To The Term "Useful Idiot"

.@Charles__Marino , a former Secret Service agent and national security expert, tells me James Comey is "gonna have a very, very, very long night."

From his experience in the USSS, Marino predicts the Washington field offices for the USSS and the FBI have already been…

— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) May 16, 2025

It wasn't until I got up this morning that I began to realize Comey's 8647 Instagram post hadn't just gone viral, it had metastasized. As both a true crime fan and a follower of the various lawfare cases against Trump, I have sort of a sketchy idea of what can happen if you get the feds on your case. James Comey, as a former FBI Director, should have had a much clearer idea -- but if he did, he apparently never thought it would apply to him.

Farther down in the tweet embedded above, Susan Crabtree quotes more from the former Secret Service agent Charles Marino:

"Look, here's the deal, they're sending agents out, and they're gonna talk to him, and he's not gonna have a choice. He's gonna have to talk to them, because this stuff about, well, I, you know, I found this on the beach. I didn't know what it meant. None of that makes sense."

Just as a true crime amateur who enjoys watching perps being interviewed on TV, I can imagine the questions he's going to have to answer (that is, unless he elects to remain silent, which would nevertheless be disastrous for his reputation):

• "You said in your post that you saw the message in a walk on the beach. Where was that beach?"
• "What time did you see it this morning?"
• "Was anyone with you when you saw it?"
• "Can you take us to where you saw it?"
• "It sounds like you had your phone with you, and you took a photo of the message yourself. Did you in fact take the photo yourself, on your phone?"
• "Can we look at your phone?"

Susan Crabtree, who made the post embedded above, has a much more complete and insightful report at Real Clear Politics that's the most comprehensive I've seen to date.

As an attorney and former top law enforcement official in the nation, Comey is well aware that he can decline an interview without having an attorney present, so he may refuse to cooperate with Secret Service agents’ questioning until he can hire a lawyer to represent him. On the other hand, Comey could agree to demonstrate how open and transparent he is and immediately cooperate and sit down for an interview.

The problem is, as the former Secret Service agent said, "None of that makes sense". Former FBI Director Comey was out for a morning beach stroll. He almost certainly wasn't alone, he likely had an entourage or maybe just a security guy with him -- he's 6'8" and clearly identifiable. Where was this beach? Where on the beach, exactly, did he see the message? Did he discuss it with anyone who was with him?

Oh, by the way, the agents are going to be scouring the area around the beach for security cameras that will confirm or dispute his version of events, which frankly strikes me as improbable.

If he doesn't answer questions, the Secret Servioce/FBI are going to get his phone via subpoena, not to mention video footage, and that will likely establish (or not) his location at the time he claims to have been on the beach. If he took the photo, it'll be on his phone with metadata as to the time and place it was taken. If he didn't take the photo, how did he find it? Did he discuss it with anyone? If he destroys or wipes his phone, he's in trouble for obstruction of justice or tampering with evidence.

If anything on the phone differs from what he's said publicly -- I actually doubt if he took the photo, or he was on the beach when he said he was -- he's got problems with PR and the prosecutor. If there are any contradictions, no matter how small, in what he may have told investigators, he's got the problem that lying to federal investigators is itself a crime, something he himself has used against Trump's advisers.

Just looking at what's come out this morning has me stunned at the incredibly poor judgment this displays -- this guy is presumably a top attorney and a former FBI director, and he's exposed himself to precisely the sort of legal and investigative trouble he was trying to create for people like Michael Flynn and Trump himself.

In January 2017, then-FBI director James Comey decided to send FBI agents to interview Flynn. Knowing that Flynn had asked Kislyak to ensure Russia did not respond harshly to U.S. sanctions and also that Vice President Pence, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, and Press Secretary Sean Spicer had all said Flynn told them he had not made such a request, Comey decided that Flynn needed to be interviewed as part of assessing whether Flynn was acting under Russian influence. The FBI discussed how to structure the interview, and then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe called Flynn on 24 January, asking him to meet with two FBI counterintelligence agents; Flynn agreed. McCabe also asked if Flynn wanted a lawyer present, to which Flynn said no.

The two agents met Flynn at his office later that day and asked Flynn about his exchanges with Kislyak regarding the late December 2016 United Nations Security Council resolution regarding Israeli settlements. According to the FBI notes, Flynn told the agents he had not tried to influence Russia's vote on the resolution; in fact, he had asked Kislyak to have Russia oppose or delay the resolution. The FBI agents also asked Flynn whether he had asked Kislyak to avoid escalating the diplomatic conflict. According to FBI notes, Flynn responded: "Not really. I don't remember. It wasn't, 'Don't do anything'". After the meeting, the agents prepared an FD-302 form, a form used to summarize an FBI interview, for the discussion with Flynn.

. . . On 13 February, Flynn resigned as National Security Advisor, writing that he had given "incomplete information" of his conversations with Kislyak.

If anyone should be aware of the potential for getting into this sort of hot water, it's Comey himself, but here you are. The first thing I did was check Comey's age, and to my astonishment, he's only 64. He can't plead senility, as some did for his predecessor Robert Mueller, who was 74 at the time of confusing testimony to Congress in 2019.

Elsewhere in her RCP report on Comey's beach blunder, Susan Crabtree gives some details that might provide insight into Comey's state of mind:

Others on social media and cable news Thursday night questioned whether Comey was trying to gin up publicity in advance of the release of his new book, “FDR Drive,” a legal thriller, which will be out May 20. \

[Fox host Jesse] Watters asked [Director of National Intelligence Tulsi] Gabbard whether she thought Comey was trying to “goad” the Trump administration into investigating and prosecuting him to make him a legal martyr so he can regain political relevance.

I've learned enough about the publishing industry to know that when Washington figures like Margaret Truman, John Ehrlichman, or Jim Lehrer write thrillers, they're being paid to attach their names to books that have been ghostwritten by hacks. It sounds like Comey needs money -- his career seems to have lost momentum after Trump fired him as FBI Director in 2017, and he probably needed the new book and the book tour to try to rehabilitate himself.

While he's probably already received his advance, I wouldn't rule out his publisher canceling the release of the book in light of the current controversy, which rules out the book tour. But even if the book comes out and the tour is still on, Comey is going to have other things to worry about, and I would guess he's going to have to pay a whole set of lawyers much more than he'd ever earn from the thriller.

Which brings me to the queston: was James Comey ever all that smart? Scott Adams has always had insight into the potential of guys who are tall with good hair:

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe And The Episcopalian Mindset

Episcopal Church Bishop Sean Rowe: It's against what we stand for to help white refugees fleeing South Africa pic.twitter.com/h4LEZaYQt6

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 14, 2025

I left The Episcopal Church behind a couple of years before I became Catholic, via a twisted path that involved an unsuccessful attempt by a "continuing Anglican" parish to enter the Ordinariate. On balance, that distance from my Episcopalian days has kept me from thinking very hard about the problems I saw with day-to-day Episcopalianism. An article from Last year in The Critic, which came well before the latest controversy from Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe's statement that it's "against what we stand for" to help Afrikaner refugees fleeing South Africa, gives a conventional picture of TEC's predicament:

The figures are stark. Only 12,000 people were confirmed into the Episcopal Church in 2022.

. . . As those confirmation figures imply, the statistics are far from rosy. In 2022, there were 1.6 million baptised Episcopalians, down 21 per cent from 2013. Attendance collapsed by 43 per cent over the same period, with almost 285,000 fewer churchgoers each Sunday — roughly equivalent to a city the size of St Louis.

But this neglects other trends, such as the increasing average age of the Episcopalian population. Another discussion goes into much more illustrative detail:

One of the most troubling things about the future of the Episcopal Church is that the average member is incredibly old. The modal age of an Episcopalian in 2019 was sixty-nine years old. With life expectancy around 80, we can easily expect at least a third of the current membership of the denomination to be gone in the next fifteen or twenty years.

. . . But, that doesn’t tell the whole story about the future of the Episcopalians. Churches need money to operate and on this measure there’s plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The Episcopalians calculate what they call “plate and pledge,” which is an accounting of not just money dropped in the offering plate, but also the amount that members have pledged to donate in the future.

. . . There’s little reason to expect that the money is going to run out for the Episcopalians anytime soon. In fact, the total amount of plate and pledge has actually risen between 2014 and 2019. In 2014, the denomination received about 1.3 billion dollars from their members. By 2019 that had increased by about fifty million dollars. That’s surprising given that the overall attendance in the tradition has declined during that same time period.

. . . Now, there are two possible explanations that I can think of to explain this trend. The first is that those that remain in the Episcopal Church are incredibly committed to the cause. . . . The other is that many Episcopalians have died in the last few years and they have given a portion of their estate to the church. This would obviously drive up the overall “plate and pledge” donations and possibly inflate these numbers. It may be the case that the average offering in the plate is actually smaller, but that is supplemented by these larger donations from the wills of those who have died in recent years.

The piece goes to ther heart of what isn't wrong:

But, that leaves a bigger question – can a denomination continue when it has money but no people? That’s the future that may be facing the Episcopal Church. According to their finance office, the denomination has $400 million in trust, $11 billion in a pension plan for retired clergy, and another $4.5 billion in assets held at the parish and diocese level. To put it bluntly, money is not the issue. This means that denominational leaders are not going to be forced to disband when the accounts hit zero[.]

What we're looking at -- and what we've been looking at for quite some time -- is a denomination that hasn't needed to worry about money. One thing that's always intrigued me about TEC is the extreme surplus of graduating seminarians each year vis-a-vis the available positions for new associate priests. This is largely because the Episcopal priesthood continues to be a highly prestigious and well-paid occupation, with relatively undemanding duties, especially considering the steady decline in membership, but there's always enough money to pay the clergy -- or at least, those clergy who can find jobs.

Contrast that with the perpetual shortage of Roman Catholic vocations. This spilled over into the Ordinariate; there was an equivalent surplus of Episcopalian seminarians and young associates who suddenly felt the call to cross the Tiber, especially when the Ordinariate was going to be open to married priests. Experience showed quickly enough that Episcopalian vocations don't produce the same quality of men as Catholic.

But reflecting on my Episcopalian days, I've begun to think more and more that money, and the attitudes of the monied, drove much of the Episcopal mindset. I began to see this as I went through confirmation at an upscale parish: at the time, I was working for a bank. I quickly discovered that Episcopalians look down on banks. They're connected with trade. One priest, when he learned where I worked, said, "Oh, I could never work for a bank. I'd just give away all the money!"

I briefly considered suggesting that if he did that, he'd actually be stealing from all the accountholders, but I quickly realized that wouldn't change his mind. Nor would it change his mind if I said the bequests in trust to to the parish, or the funds that will pay his pension, are also held in banks. The preferred job at that parish was with a respectable non-profit.

I met my wife at another Episcopal parish, and as we began to develop our plans to get married, we paid the necessary visit to discuss them with the rector. I'd since left the bank, so that wasn't what disturbed the rector. His problem wasn't so much that my wife was an attorney -- plenty of white-shoe law partners are Episcopalian, after all -- but that my fiancee was a lawyer for an insurance company. He actually believed that what an insurance attorney does all day is find ways to cheat policyholders out of their payments. He seemed sincerely worried that I was making a big mistake.

However reluctantly, he did let us continue with our plans, but this was a real revelation for me. At the first parish, I eventually wound up on the mission committee, which had a modest budget for donations to promote mission. The Episcopal chaplain at the University of Southern California came to make a pitch for his program: he said that given the current academic environment, a university campus should be considered mission territory, and he had concrete proposals for what could be done.

The conmittee had had no other such proposals -- as far as I know, it had just rubber-stamped an annual donation to end apartheid in South Africa, which went to heaven knew what halfway around the world. The committee chair told me that the same old-same old donation to South Africa was far, far more important, and that was that. Somehow I see this week's announcement from Presiding Bishop Rowe that it isn't the church's business to help white South Africans as coming from that same old-same old mindset.

Looking back, I have a hard time explaining to myself why I put up with this as long as I did, except that actually, I didn't. Our last parish, where we were for ten years, which is a third of my time as an Episcopalian, was largely gay, and its big advantage was that it wasn't as stuffy as the others. The plus to the gay part was that they didn't look down on people for working at banks or insurance companies -- they were much less inclined to look down on anyone. And they were Anglo-Catholic, which went a long way to soften me about Catholicism.

But I think the real Episcopalians only tolerate the gays and use them mainly to virtue signal, which the gays actually don't like. The real Episcopalians tolerate them as long as they don't interfere with the money, and that's not so much the dollars and cents, but the mindset. That's The Episcopal Church of which Sean Rowe is the Presiding Bishop. It will keep going until the money runs out, which is likely to be a long time.

An Obtuse Take On The Class Conflict

I ran into a remarkably obtuse essay by Joel Kotkin at Real Clear Politics this morning, Donald Trump has scrambled the old class allegiances. I don't follow Kotkin, but according to Wikipedia,

Kotkin is the author of several books. The New Class Conflict was published in September 2014 by Telos Press Publishing. In this book, Kotkin assesses the changing complexities of class in the United States, which he argues can no longer be understood in terms of traditional political divisions between left and right or conservative and liberal. For Kotkin, the new class order of the twenty-first century is marked by the rise of a high-tech oligarchy, a culturally dominant academic and media (both journalism and entertainment) elite, an expansive government bureaucracy, and a declining middle class.

So he's an expert on class, but in the current essay, Kotkin gets about half of everything wrong. He begins,

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.

This began long before Donald Trump. Labor leader Goerge Meany's refusal to endorse George McGovern in 1972 was much more significant. According to the New York Times on July 17, 1972,

The harsh opposition of George Meany to the Presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern is creating widespread confusion, deep cleavages and spreading dissension within organized labor.

Labor leaders questioned since the close of last week's Democratic convention said that Mr. Meany was likely to have his way if he asks the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations at its Wednesday meeting to withhold endorsement of Senator McGovern.

. . . Meanwhile, in Rancho La Costa, Calif., the executive board of International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted today to support the re‐election of President Nixon. The leadership of the union has been close to the Nixon Administration, and the endorsement had been expected.

Nixon did a great deal to reshape the Republican alignment, including the Southern strategy and the overtures to labor. He carried 49 states in the 1972 election. Trump and Reagan simply continued strategies originated by Nixon. Kotkin goes on,

Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.

Kotkin invokes Marx, but only to say that Marx is irrelevant, things are much more complicated. But if we recognize that Trump is basically following Nixon's paradigm, exploiting an existing Republican alliance between the proletariat and the lower bourgeoisie, things actually become simpler. The working class broadly defined, a work force made up of both blue and white collar, forms a consensus at the center, pretty much the same thing Nixon called the "silent majority", except that beginning to recognize its power, it's become vocal as MAGA.

And in invoking Marx, Kotkin ignores Marx's insight that the Lumpenproletariat, the criminal and idle underclass, is the enemy of the proletariat. What's actually been taking place -- and this is a trend that also began generations ago -- is an alliance between the elites and the criminal-idle underclass. Think of Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s":

. . . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.”

These are clearly the seeds of George Floyd in 2020, the canonization of a street addict by the elites, the social tensions surrounding which were a simmering factor that led to Trump's vindication in 2024. Kotkin does seem to sense one change:

Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.

. . . Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media.

Except that Sanders and AOC are generally regarded as jokes -- both have been called out for flying in private jets on that same "fighting oligrchy" tour. They're the same thing as the Black Panthers in Leonard Bernstein's 1970 party, absolutely nothing new. Kotkin seems to miss this. He also begins to contradict himself. Of the college-educated bourgeoisie, he says,

Their numbers have expanded globally with the massive increase in college enrollment, which grew almost 80 per cent between 1970 and 2010. People who work as lawyers, environmental consultants and teachers are now reliably Democratic. This slice of the middle class often considers itself both enlightened and fit to lead, thanks to their high test scores and degrees. They tend to have little use for patriotism, family or religion, in comparison with working-class voters.

Yet a few paragraphs later, he says,

Many educated millennials face a world where the ‘good’ jobs are disappearing, while they have to cope with rising rents and exorbitant tuition payments. In the US, some 40 per cent of recent graduates are underemployed, meaning they work in jobs where their college credentials are essentially worthless.

. . . Increasingly, many with college educations (once seen as the ticket to a middle-class life) consider university a waste of time, with more seeking careers in the trades instead.

This has actually become a new feature of Trumpism, but Kotkin doesn't recognize it: the working class broadly conmsidered has come to recognize that college degrees don't pay off, and Trump is taking revenge by cutting federal grants, and likely tax exemptions, to prestige universities. He concludes,

The new class conflict is far more complex than the favoured narrative of the oligarchs vs the people, or the old Marxist battle between industrial workers and the bourgeois merchant class. The only way to address the shift to an increasingly extreme politics comes from finding ways to provide greater opportunities for income and ownership. If we fail in this, the results won’t be pretty.

I think the answer is simpler: the elites have followed the "radical chic" pattern that began in the 1960s and allied themselves with the Lumpenproletariat. Part of this alliance is performance art, as it was in the 1960s. Another part is much more serious, embodied in the Great Replacement theory behind the Biden administration's mass migration policies that appear to have favored deliberately resettling third-world gang members into the US heartland.

These aren't fringe conflicts. Kotkin seems to miss this, as he seems to miss what the actual majority is, and its history.

New Conspiracy Theories!

I'm not sure what this signifies, but I'm belatedly learning that between the death of Benedict XVI and the election of Leo XIV, several related conspiracy theories have emerged. Since I'm a Catholic convert, I should point out that if I thought there was a grain of truth to any of them, I would have to revert to my childhood Presbyterianism, but so far, that hasn't happened.

The most recent elaboration of this set of theories is contained in the hour-long YouTube post embedded above, in which Michael Lebron, who posts on the YouTube channel Lionel Nation, interviews Erik Thaddeus Walters, an adjunct associate professor at John Cabot University in Rome, which caters to English-speaking students who for whatever reason find themselves there. His D Phil is from the University of Vienna. Mr Lebron, who jokingly says he's not a conspiracy theorist but a conspiracy analyst, has had several interviews like this with Dr Walters in the runup to the just-concluded conclave.

The overall takeaway is a happy one, reflected in the title of the post: "Secret Move by Pope Leo XIV Restores True Papacy -- Why No One Is Talking About It". The underlying basis of the theory as it's reached its present stage of development is a version of sedevacantism:

Sedevacantism is a traditionalist Catholic movement which holds that since the 1958 death of Pius XII the occupiers of the Holy See are not valid popes due to their espousal of one or more heresies and that, for lack of a valid pope, the See of Rome is vacant. Sedevacantism owes its origins to the rejection of the theological and disciplinary changes implemented following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).

This particular variant is more recent, and it doesn't appear to be unique to, or have been originated by, Dr Walters. In this version, the see has been vacant, or at least its true occupant has been unclear, only since the resignation of Benedict XVI:

His announcement of this plan to resign, just shy of a decade ago, shocked the world. In fact, in the aftermath of Benedict’s resignation came a strange phenomenon: Catholics claiming that he hadn’t really resigned.

Patrick Coffin, former host of Catholic Answers Live, suggested that Benedict’s “resignation” was some kind of elaborate sting operation, in which Benedict merely pretended not to be the pope to expose corruption in the Church. In Coffin’s words, “if his abdication was intentionally false, it was a masterstroke, pure genius, because it revealed all the corruption that he knew was simmering just below the surface of the Church’s life, but he was too weak to confront it.”

The death of Benedict in 2022, nine years after his resignation in 2013, simplified the problem, at least somewhat: if Benedict had been the true pope all along, the see was in fact vacant upon his death. The link just above calls this "Benevacantism". The putative remedy at this point should have been to call a conclave to replace Francis in early 2023. Again at the link:

Upon hearing of Benedict’s death, Coffin announced that he had become a sedevacantist, saying, “The pope has entered eternity, RIP. The impeded See is now vacant. May the pre-2013 cardinals do the right thing, and avoid yet another antipope.” Why is that so alarming? Because this line of reasoning makes for a clear collision course for schism and heresy. Here’s why.

Only cardinals under the age of eighty can vote, and Benevacantists don’t accept the legitimacy of the cardinals created by Pope Francis, since they don’t accept the legitimacy of Pope Francis. That leaves only forty-four of the 224 cardinals in the College of Cardinals who are old enough to have been made a cardinal by John Paul II or Benedict, but young enough still to be voting age.

Dr Walters, as far as I can tell, agrees that Benedict's papacy post-resignation was valid but impeded, but in his view, it was impeded because Benedict had resigned under some type of pressure and was being held prisoner. In any case, his conclusion is the same, that the cardinals created by Francis remain invalid and should not have voted in the conclave just concluded. But this leaves the problem that the conclave appears to have settled rather quickly on a seeming moderate consensus candidate in Cardinal Prevost.

If Francis had created such a majority of electors in his image, why didn't they just elect a straight-out Francis clone, like Cardinal Tagle? As best I can determine -- the discussion on YouTube is by no means clear -- Dr Walters feels that Cardinal Prevost, before he was elected, somehow convinced the Francis-created cardinals not to vote in the conclave, or the vote was secretly held before the Francis-created cardinals returned from a long lunch break, or something like that.

If this is the case, Prevost would have had to get this scheme past the camarlengo, who runs the conclave, Cardinal Kevin Farrell. Prevost would have had no special authority to do anything until he was elected pope, after all. Neither Mr Lebron nor Dr Walters explains how this could happen, but they seem more of less satisfied with the overall outcome, viz, the see is filled, and Leo XIV is a valid pope.

But this leaves open the question of why this would be a valid conclave, if, under the overall sedevacantist outlook, no cardinals created since Pius XII have been valid. We must assume that the last cardinal created by Pius passed away generations ago, so no conclave since then is valid, snd if the See of Rome is as vacant as it was before Francis or Benedict, what restored the legitimacy of the see after John XXIII?

Even so, there's yet another theory on the new Pope Leo: that he at least appears to be validly elected, but he will wear traditional garb and pray in Latin only to distract from his Francis-loyalist agenda, he is actually a heretic and can't be elected pope, and Cardinal Burke must call a new conclave made up only of John Paul II- and Benedict-created cardinals.

Tim reads his letter to Cardinal Burke live on air https://t.co/hOcD2WvnGH

— Timothy Gordon (Rules for Retrogrades Show) (@timotheeology) May 1, 2025

But that view must be argued with Dr Walters, who feels that this very election without Francis-created cardinals has already taken place. As I say, if I believed any of this, it would be back to the Westminster Confession for me.

In the real world, what seems to have become a general sigh of relief over Leo XIV leaves this sort of disgruntlement to the lunatic fringe, which strikes me as a very good sign.

An Omen?

When I learned that Robert Francis Prevost had been named the new pope, I was convinced I'd seen the name somewhere before. As my wife and I drove to mass yesterday morning, it was confirmed: we found ourselves right behind a Prevost bus on city streets that led us almost all the way to the parish. From Wikipedia,

Prevost . . . formally known as Prevost Car, is a Canadian manufacturer of touring coaches and bus shells for high-end motorhomes and specialty conversions. The company is a subsidiary of the Volvo Buses division of the Volvo Group.

Even before that, once I saw photos of Leo XIV, I decided I liked any pope who wears glasses, as Pius XII did in my childhood. In fact, at that time, both President Truman and the pope wore glasses. Something basic has been restored.

As I've begun to feel reassured, The Guardian is not so much:

After years of sympathetic and inclusive comments from Pope Francis, LGBTQ+ Catholics expressed concern on Thursday about hostile remarks made more than a decade ago by Father Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV, in which he condemned what he called the “homosexual lifestyle” and “the redefinition of marriage” as “at odds with the Gospel”.

In a 2012 address to the world synod of bishops, the man who now leads the church said that “Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel – for example abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia”.

. . . The cleric also called for a “new evangelization to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality”.

At Just the News, New pope, Leo XIV, in early days [of] papacy, appears to be winning over church's wary traditionalists

When the new pope appeared last week for the first time on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, the historic moment looked like a worst-case scenario for Catholic traditionalists.

A close adviser to predecessor Pope Francis, Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was seen as the “least American of the American cardinals – a figure deeply rooted in the Francis era. He was a critic of Vice-President JDVance and to the extent he was known, he was seen as a progressive, raising fears his papacy would continue the previous papacy’s trajectory.

. . . But instead, the first days of Pope Leo XIV’s papacy have – at least temporarily – assuaged traditionalists’ fears.

“Originally you had people saying conservatives’ heads are going to blow up, that this was Francis’ papacy, part two,” Thomas Williams, a conservative author and theologian, told Just the News. “I was worried, too.”

But that began to change, Williams said, as the new pope began to speak.

He told cardinals – who had come from around the world to Rome after Francis's death last month to decide among themselves who would be the next pope – to stay long and to give him counsel. The request was in sharp contrast to Francis’ often unilateral decision-making. He also prayed multiple times in Latin, a meaningful gesture for traditionalists.

In another development that could wind up an early problem for Leo to overcome, his brother has turned out to have a high social media profile:

The far-left media and their allies in the Democrat Party are in full panic mode after it was revealed that Lou Prevost, the straight-shooting Floridian brother of the newly elected American Pope Leo XIV, isn’t just Catholic — he’s unapologetically MAGA.

Prevost, a Port Charlotte, Florida native, proudly lives his life like many forgotten Americans—with faith, freedom, and the First Amendment.

But now, after his younger brother ascended to the papacy as Pope Leo XIV, the leftist media mob is frantically digging through Lou’s Facebook page looking for anything to “cancel” him over. And they think they found gold.

. . . On April 4, Prevost reposted a video of a younger Pelosi arguing for tariffs on China, exposing the radical 180-degree flip-flop that Pelosi and her Democrat cronies have pulled to appease the globalist agenda.

The original post didn’t hold back, “These fing liberals crying about tariffs is just unreal. Do they not know that there is a thing called video? Just listen to what this drunk c has to say in the mid 90s long before her husband had Grindr dates.”

Elsewhere,

Prevost told Newsmax in an interview over the weekend that his brother’s new role will force him to change some of his behavior.

“I’ve had to modify my activities and what I do, what I say, what I write in public spaces or say in public spaces. I’ve seen a couple already,” the Pope’s brother said. “I don’t want to get him in trouble or raise any grief or cause problems.”

The elder Prevost also confirmed that he has had political discussions with his brother in the past.

“When he was bishop or cardinal, we’d occasionally have discussions. He knows where I stand, I know where he stands, and now as Pope, there are going to be some differences there.”

This sounds like the Vatican will end up handling things the right way. I'm convinced Leo is off to a good start.

What Realy Ails Sen Fetterman?

Ed Driscoll, one of the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit, links to a piece at American Greatness that compares Sen Fetterman to, of all people, the Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov:

Sakharov openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompting the Brezhnev regime to take drastic action against him. . . . He wasn’t just exiled or “banished.” And he was never officially “arrested.” Rather, he was removed from the proximity to power for what the Brezhnev regime called “his own good.”

. . . Sakharov had been diagnosed in absentia with “sluggish schizophrenia,” a condition identified and articulated (i.e. “made up”) by the founding father of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky. Like countless others in the Soviet Union, Sakharov ran afoul of the regime, and, as a result, was labeled “mentally unfit” by that regime.

. . . The Soviet Union was a monstrous place that did monstrous things to nonconformists and called it “concern” for their mental health.

Enter Senator John Fetterman.

The piece goes on to insist that the media reports of Fetterman's mental decline are all anonymous, at second- or third-hand, and aren't medical diagnoses. Instead, they stem entirely from the Democrat left that finds his pro-Israel, anti-Hamas stance inconvenient. But this neglects a key piece of evidence:

Video from earlier this year shows Sen. John Fetterman getting in an argument with an airline crew over the proper way to wear his seatbelt on a flight to Pittsburgh.

. . . The video, which has gone viral, shows an airline crew member asking Fetterman to make sure his seatbelt is visible to the flight crew, citing federal regulations. What ensued was what appeared to be a back-and-forth between the senator and the airline crew member, though many of Fetterman’s responses are inaudible, occasionally raising his hands.

Some of his responses include: “I put my seatbelt on” and “Yes, it is” in regards to his seat belt being fastened.

“If you want to go to Pittsburgh, it’s simple, you have to follow our instructions or be asked to get off the airplane. We’re not asking much,” the airline crew member said at one point. The crew member had also offered Fetterman a seatbelt extender so it could more comfortably fit around his sweatshirt.

While Fetterman's conduct may be subject to interpretation, it's nevertheless reasonable to assume he's a traveler experienced and sophisticated enough to realize that refusal to cooperate with airline personnel enforcing safety regulations will lead to nothing but delay in his own travel plans and possible removal from the flight, all for the sake of a very minor inconvenience, not to mention bad publicity. This is clearly more than just a whispering campaign.

There have been questions about Fetterman's health and judgment throughout his career. According to Wikipedia,

Fetterman was criticized for an incident in North Braddock in January 2013 when he heard a sound he thought was gunfire and followed an unarmed jogger, whom he detained with a shotgun. The jogger, Chris Miyares, a Black American, said that what Fetterman thought were gunshots were kids shooting bottle rockets. , , , Miyares claimed that Fetterman pointed the shotgun at his chest while he loaded the gun and then aimed the gun at his face.

His health history is complex:

According to Fetterman's chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, Fetterman has struggled with depression throughout his life.

In 2017, Fetterman's feet suddenly began to swell and he was subsequently hospitalized for testing. At that time, he was diagnosed by cardiologist Ramesh Chandra with "atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with a decreased heart pump", although this diagnosis was not known publicly until Fetterman's stroke in May 2022.

. . . On June 4, 2019, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Fetterman "collapsed" while presiding over the State Senate; he became wobbly and grabbed the lectern to prevent himself from falling over, and a member of the Capitol's nursing staff came to examine him. Afterward, Fetterman's spokesperson said he had become overheated and was "back to normal".

On May 13, 2022 [at age 52], Fetterman had an ischemic stroke and was hospitalized. The stroke was induced by a clot caused by atrial fibrillation (irregular heart rhythm). Because Fetterman also had cardiomyopathy, his doctors implanted a pacemaker and defibrillator. He was discharged from the hospital on May 22, 2022.

What nobody but nobody has mentioned is something I've suspected ever since I learned about Fetterman's stroke at the time: the guy was a cokehead. This is nothing but a medical truism:

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), a disease typically associated with aging and the definitive leading cause of death worldwide, now threatens young and middle-aged populations. Recreational abuse of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and amphetamine-type stimulants has been an escalating public health problem for decades, but now use of these substances has become a significant contributor to early-onset CVD.

It appears that there have beern troubling patterns in Fetterman's life for the past year. At the Wikipedia link,

On June 9, 2024, Fetterman and his wife were involved in a two-car crash in Maryland. They were hospitalized but quickly released. Fetterman was found to be at fault for the crash after rear-ending another vehicle while speeding.

In a CBS followup on the more recent reports,

In the 2024 letter to [Walter Reed] Dr. David Williamson, [former chief of staff Adam] Jentleson warned that Fetterman was not seeing his doctors, had pushed out the people who were supposed to help him stay on his recovery plan and might not be taking his prescribed medications. Jentleson also said Fetterman had been driving recklessly and exhibiting paranoia, isolating him from colleagues.

Grandiose behavior, like that reflected in his dispute with the airline crew, depression, and paranoia are all associated with cocaine use, which in fact is common among celebrities and others at Fetterman's level of society. This would certainly make any prudent person hesitant to associate very closely with someone like that, and it does appear that Trump, while happy enough to have Fetterman say good things about him now and then, is steering a generally safe course and avoiding Fetterman overall.

But there can be little question that anyone in Fetterman's medical condition, if he continues to ignore medical advice, and especially if he's resumed cocaine use, is unlikely to live a whole lot longer in any case. I have a hard time understanding why some on the right feel they need to defend him.

UPDATE: Mark Halperin says reporters know more than they can say:

The Last Credible Democrat?

Weird: Man Becomes More Conservative As He Regains Brain Function https://t.co/6nesG1N1WN pic.twitter.com/TcQ2n21Rx7

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 6, 2023

A piece by Christopher Nicholas at Real Clear Politics raises an insightful poimt:

Is there any Democrat around today who even comes close to Trump’s dominance in the attention economy? To me, there’s just one: John Fetterman. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are a distant second.

Fetterman is a walking “look at me” sign – given the contrast between his appearance and his diction and his education pedigree.

In the course of nominating Sen Fetterman for Loser of the Week on Mark Halperin's Morning Meeting program yesterday, Sean Spicer noted,

. . . the John Fetterman phenomenon. and so I'll say it less about the person and more of this "oh, he's the second coming" and "he's gonna be our savior", a guy who's running around in a Carhartt and shorts, is somehow the future of the Democratic party, I never thought that that would fly, and I think that we finally popped the bubble.

Dan Turrentine simply agreees,

He's not well.

So the conclusion seems to be, as Voltaire said of God, if John Fetterman did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, but the problem in this case is that the Fetterman we thought we'd seen has turned out not to exist.

One particularly head-scratching video of Fetterman emerged earlier this year in which he was on a flight to Pittsburgh apparently arguing with a pilot over his seatbelt.

Despite fallout with progressives over his staunch support of Israel in its war in Gaza, Fetterman was still an in-demand personality last year to campaign in the battleground state of Pennsylvania for Biden and, after Biden dropped his reelection bid, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Since Trump won November’s election — and Pennsylvania — things have changed. Many one-time supporters have turned on Fetterman over his softer approach to Trump and his willingness to criticize fellow Democrats for raising alarm bells.

It nevertheless brought Fetterman plaudits.

Bill Maher, host of the political talk show “Real Time with Bill Maher,” suggested that Fetterman should run for president in 2028. Conservatives — who had long made Fetterman a target for his progressive politics — have sprung to Fetterman’s defense.

Up to now, more centrist Democrats have been reassured, if nothing else, by Fetterman's ability to get attention. Nevertheless, it looks as if his current erratic behavior is not without past context. Christopher Nicholas points out in the first link,

[H]e lives poor but has a multi-million trust fund at his disposal.

Who had access to world class health care but ignored his doctors for five years and then lied to his boss, then Gov. Tom Wolf, about it.

Who later suffered a bad stroke and then lied to the state about it and his recovery as he campaigned for higher office while, of course, serving as the state’s lieutenant governor.

A true renaissance Yinzer … who of course, grew up in south-central Pennsylvania’s York.

I had to look up Yinzer, which is not Yiddish, but a Scotch-Irish name for residents of the Pittsburgh area. Nicholas seems to be concluding that Fetterman has always been something of a phony, even before his rise to national prominence, and current developments should maybe not be a surprise, except to people who thought Fetterman was something he never was.

But this brings us back to a point of yesterday's post, that mainstream Democrats have become an alliance between the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat, not the working class, but the criminal underclass. Nicholas in his essaay cites Sen Sanders and AOC as distant seconds in a Democrat contest for attention, but even this is problematic -- Sanders is a putatively doctrinaire red diaper baby who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, yet he clearly has no problem with his party's deviationism in embracing the Lumpenproles. But his time is nearly up in any case.

The future of the party lies with AOC. This looks like the lesson of trhe Fetterman story.