Roger Kimball

A genuine liberal education is as much an education of the emotions as it is an education of the intellect. The truly educated person experiences the right emotions at the appropriate times in the appropriate intensity for the appropriate reasons. Aristotle explains all this in the Nicomachean Ethics. Knowing this, I felt badly watching the 'debate' among the first tranche of 10 Democratic aspirants to be their party’s nominee for president in 2020. I felt, I must admit, an immoderate excess of schadenfreude — tinged with revulsion, it is true, but the element of pleasing disdain predominated. I am not proud of it. I merely record the fact. But consider my provocation.

 New York The great ceremonial game of poll dancing is gearing up for its quadrennial orgy. Headlines across the fruited plain bark out numbers and percentages in mystic confabulation. Votaries sway back and forth as the modern magi of the press repeat the results of this contemporary incarnation of taking the auspices. Was any medieval or ancient devotee of numerology more besotted by the task of squeezing significance out of numbers than our pollsters and their marks, or clients, are today? I doubt it. During the First Punic War at the naval battle of Drepana in 249 bc, the commander Publius Claudius Pulcher grew impatient when the sacred chickens failed to signal divine approval for the battle by refusing the grain they were offered.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, announced yesterday on Twitter that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, would be departing her job at the end of the month. He later, at a press conference about a new program to help felons reenter the work force, praised her as a 'magnificent person' who has done 'an incredible job.' Taking the podium, Ms Sanders expressed her admiration for the president and his agenda and said, tears in her eyes, that working for him had been 'the honor of a lifetime.' Pretty straight forward, right? Wrong. The press hates Sarah Sanders. Like its hatred for Donald Trump, the detestation is reflexive, visceral, and in the deepest sense aesthetic, a matter of immediate feeling.

Like the poor according to Jesus of Nazareth, Joe Biden we will always have with us, or so it seems. Can anyone remember when he first ran for president? It was more than 30 years ago, in 1988. I looked it up. Many of the people who work for me weren’t even born when Biden plagiarized his first speech. And now, just as he should be stocking up on Geritol and Viagra and preparing for that Acela Express to the beyond, he is at it again. Running for President. Of the United States of America. Joe Biden and 6m785 other Democratic hopefuls. Opinions about Joe’s potency — as a political candidate, I mean — vary widely. I have several well-informed friends on both sides of the chasm who believe that he will be the candidate.

Oscar Wilde once observed that only very superficial people don’t judge things by their appearances. Like many of Wilde’s quips, that observation has the dual advantage of being both witty and true. Its apparent flippancy — in fact, its flippancy is genuine, not just apparent — does not so much conceal as embody the deep truth it expresses. Thomas Aquinas also appreciated the importance of appearance as the ambassador of truth. Aquinas tended to speak of pulchritudo, ‘beauty,’ which he congregated with the good and the true as interwoven ‘transcendentals.’ The beautiful, Aquinas wrote, is id quod visum placet, that which having been seen, pleases.

Inquiring minds want to know, what will Justin Amash — wait, who? JUSTIN AMASH, you know, he’s the US Representative from Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District. He’s a bona-fide Trump-hating Republican. Waaaay back in 2016, he joined the lemming list of Republicans who opposed the nomination of Donald Trump. Some individuals who had signed onto that list — Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example — have had second thoughts and now support the President. But not Justin Amash. No siree Bob. His motto is ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ In case you doubt this, consider his recent Twitter emission, which is a series of variations on a theme announced at the beginning of his Twitter thread. 1.

I am embarrassed to admit that when William Barr became Donald Trump’s Attorney General a couple of months ago, I did not remember that he had been here, done that as George H. W. Bush’s Attorney General back in the previous century. They did have television back then, however, and students of history, as well as students of politics, can profit from watching Barr’s original confirmation hearings, presided over – drum roll, please – by a younger, much more acute Joe Biden, who, like the poor, we seem to have always with us. It’s a long clip, but very much worth sampling, especially for the adroit, no-nonsense performance of William Barr and mildly challenging but still respectful performance of Joe Biden. What a difference a few decades make!

At this point, we can relegate the admonitions and advisories to the small print reserved for the disclaimers about possible side effects on bottles of medicine and past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-returns notices on mutual-fund prospectuses. Sure, it is possible that Donald Trump will lose the presidential election in 2020. It is also possible that he will choose not to run. Many things are possible. But as I have explained in these virtual pages — taking care to post those cautionary bulletins — it is likely that Donald Trump will run again for the presidency in 2020 and it is very likely that he will win and win by a much larger margin than his victory in 2016. I set forth my thoughts on the subject at the end of March.

Thursday, and press report And one clear call for me. And may there be no moaning of the Barr When we set out to see. —Apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson OK, Possums, here it is in redact and white (drum roll, please): The Mueller Report, 448 color-coded pages, replete with almost 900 redactions. Who says the government isn’t effective at education: over the last months it expanded the vocabulary of many Americans by putting that nice word into general circulation. So quickly was the report edited and rushed into print that the Surgeon General’s warning against operating heavy machinery while or shortly after dosing up on the report was omitted. So let me supply the defect and warn you: the report is boring.

While we all ponder the mysteries of the Notre-Dame fire, let me say a word or two about a golden nugget of domestic news. Donald Trump, in the first quarter of 2019, raised over $30 million for his re-election campaign, more than the top two Democratic candidates combined. According to the AP news story, the overwhelming majority of donations were $200 or less, with an average donation of $34.26. You can look that up under ‘Populism, 21st-century American.’ All told, the Trump campaign has almost $41 million on hand (in addition to the $45 million brought in by the Republican National Committee). As a point of comparison, the Obama campaign at this point in the 2012 election cycle had about $2 million stashed away.

There are some furrowed brows (as well as some furtive giggles) over Tucker Carlson’s recent hypothetical musings about what the president might do should he decide he wanted to lose his 2020 reelection campaign. Maybe he would cut funds for E-Verify, gratifying businesses that profit from exploiting the low-wage labor of illegal immigrants (that’s ‘undocumented workers’ in weeny-speak), but hurting American workers. Maybe he would make cuts to Medicare. Maybe — most deadly — he would raise taxes on gasoline, something that would matter hardly at all to those East coast elites who don’t drive much but that would have an immediate effect on those in the heartland who tend to drive more and are on a tight budget.

Harold Wilson was right that ‘a week is a long time in politics.’ But, hey, watching the president in Grand Rapids the other night, and taking a gander at some recent polls, I am willing to ascend pretty high up the old backyard oak, shimmy along a well placed branch and say, with confidence if not quite certainty, that Donald Trump will win the 2020 presidential election, and win handily. But, but The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chris Matthews, James Comey, John Brennan, Cher, CNN, those pathetic females on The View, college professors across the country, George Conway, Maxine Waters, Mad Max Boot, Twitter-addled Bill Kristol and writers for his novelty web site The Bulsomething all tell me that’s impossible. A formidable phalanx of contrary opinion.

Well, I am going to miss the full-bore SWAT-team raids at dawn against aging political factota like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. It was really very courteous of CNN to have been parked outside the homes of those hapless victims so that television audiences all across the country could all be edified by these exhibitions of the coercive arm of state power in action. Mr Mueller could just have had one of his 17 Obama-and-Hillary supporting prosecutors ring up the latest mark and ask him to pop down to headquarters. But that would not have been as dramatic, as expensive, or as cruel. All good things come to an end, however, and yesterday, after 674 days, the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S.

I had lunch yesterday with a friend from London who brought grim tidings from Albion. Like me, he is an advocate of national sovereignty. He thinks the people of the United Kingdom ought to be allowed to govern themselves. So he, again like me, is an advocate for Brexit. He had no idea what was going to happen with Brexit. Yesterday was a busy day. I also chatted with friends about the crisis at our southern border. All honest people acknowledge that there is a crisis, that thousands upon thousands of people, most without English and without skills, are pouring over the border.

Jeb! We hardly knew ye. The 2016 election seems soooo long ago. There was a time, for about 15 minutes, when some wise people regarded Jeb! Bush as the front-runner. He had the name. The camera liked him more than it liked George W. And he had the money. Lots and lots of money. (One of my favorite photoshopped images from the campaign altered the text of a huge billboard from ‘Donald Trump is a moron. —Jeb Bush’ to ‘Burn all our donors’ money. —Mike Murphy,’ Murphy being Jeb!’s campaign manager.) There was so much money sloshing around in Bush campaign coffers that it was hard to keep track of it all.

What does desperation smell like? It smells like House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, who is reprising his ‘Impeach Trump!’ act from 2017, this time with a gavel in his hand. No one knows when Robert Mueller will deliver his report to Attorney General William Barr, and no one knows what portions, if any, General Barr will make public. But the hissing sound you have heard over the last several weeks is the air going out of Mueller’s Get Trump probe as story after story has been crafted to manage expectations down regarding ‘Individual 1,’ aka Donald J. Trump.

Remember the Cretan liar paradox? Epimenides the Cretan says ‘All Cretans are liars.’ But if it is true that all Cretans are liars, then his statement must be false. But if it is false, then Epimenides is telling the truth. So, Epimenides is both truthful and a liar. Ouch. There are solutions to this paradox—for example, to say that ‘all Cretans are liars’ does not entail that they all lie all the time — but what are we to make of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, emphasis on the word ‘former’? Cohen is being measured for his orange jumpsuit in preparation for his sojourn in the Big House as a guest of the government. His tort? Lying to Congress.