Roger Kimball

I am not going to comment directly on the passing of Senator John McCain. Although I voted for him in 2008, I thought him a deeply flawed candidate. His behaviour subsequently, especially after Donald Trump became the Republican nominee and then President, was in my judgment petty, self-aggrandising, and harmful to the country. What interests me now, however, are the hallelujahs of praise and commendation that surrounded his passing. He has always been a hero to the neo-conservative faithful. But here we have The New York Times running a fawning obituary with the title ‘War Hero, Senator, Presidential Contender.’ It was the full lion-of-the-Senate treatment: ‘proud naval aviator . . .

A few take-aways from yesterday’s prosecutorial frenzy. 1. Paul Manafort is in deep trouble. Absent a presidential pardon, he is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars. 2. The crimes of which Manafort was convicted — eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud — not only predated his brief relationship with Donald Trump but had nothing to do with main focus of Robert Mueller’s original writ, namely, to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’ That was the nub of Mueller’s marching orders. But note that Rod Rosenstein also authorised him to pursue ‘any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.

What does it mean to be “presidential”? Literalists might say: “It’s whatever behaviour and affect a President exhibits.” But most of us will have something more rigorous in mind. To be “presidential” means to be dignified but masterly, simultaneously courteous yet decorous, friendly in a self-contained sort of way. The problem with this view is that so many presidents throughout history have violated it, from Andrew Jackson and his smash-up-the-china parties at the White House to Bill Clinton's novel deployment of cigars with Monica Lewinsky. Donald Trump recently mocked the traditional idea of being presidential, explaining that behaving in that way is “a lot easier than what I do.

Meanwhile, back at the DNC...With the world mesmerized by the insane ravings of John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama, our inner heartstrings are tugged with compassion with the obvious suffering of another human being.  In the case of Brennan, one’s mind turns not to Hamlet (“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”) but rather "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." There may be a dollop of animal cunning behind Brennan’s humiliating anti-Trump outbursts. He may be hoping against hope that his own role in the effort to delegitimize and reverse the results of a free, open, and democratic presidential election will be swept under the rug and he will emerge unscathed.

As a giant balloon caricature of the President of the United States as a baby swaddled in a nappy takes flight in London, protesters took to the streets to denounce the President’s “insulting,” “rude,” “humiliating,” “repulsive” behavior. “Trump is a racist and disrespects our nation. Why does he get to meet our Queen?” tweeted the MP for Redcar. Argh!! The baby blimp, the protests, and the hysterical rhetoric were already in play when the President’s tabasco interview with The Sun appeared, just hours after he met with Prime Minister Theresa May for a swish, red-carpet affair at Blenheim Castle, birthplace of Winston Churchill.

OK, I had never heard of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court, before last week either. But it doesn’t take long to discover that he is possessed of a razor-sharp legal mind and a very traditionalist judicial philosophy. By “traditionalist,” I mean that he believes that the judiciary’s role is to interpret the laws of the United States as written, not to use the law to further his personal policy preferences. Until at least the mid-1950s, this was the dominant sentiment on the Supreme Court. It was cast aside in succeeding years as Justices found “emanations and penumbras” (William O. Douglas’s words) in the Constitution to justify social policies that they favoured.

What’s the single most moronic pop song? I know that the competition for that title is stiff. Different judges will have different worthy candidates. High up in my pantheon of awfulness is John Lennon’s emetic 1971 effusion “Imagine.” Everything about the song is repulsive, starting with its dangerously faux-naive politics (do you have your air-sickness bag handy?): Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion, too Imagine all the people living life in peace To which I respond with Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”: They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

While the Anti-Trump Mandarins of the Commentariat (ATMC, for short) are busy untwisting their knickers after the President’s historic summit meeting with the Tubby Tyrant of North Korea, I have an important real-estate tip to pass along: beach-front property in North Korea. Keep your eye on it. As Trump said yesterday in his wide-ranging press conference following his meeting with Kim Jong-un, that stretch of land between China and South Korea would be an ideal spot for luxury hotels and condos, if only Kim would stop shooting off cannons there. “If only.” Bear that in mind, as Donald Trump assuredly will, as you chuckle over the incongruity of “beach-front property” in close proximity to the words “North Korea.

I am pretty sure it is not intended to be an exercise in comedy, but there are a few amusing passages in my friend Ron Radosh’s latest anti-Trump effusion. Writing about the scandal that President Trump and others have denominated “Spygate,” Ron writes that:  . . . it is becoming apparent that the FBI source (since exposed as academic Stefan Halper) was not put into Trump’s campaign for political purposes but was part of a legitimate counterintelligence operation investigating Russia’s election interference in the U.S. elections and involved three of his campaign aides, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis, whom Halper interviewed.

The only time I met Donald Trump was at a small event for politically mature journalists at the White House last April. After milling about with my fellow scribes in the press room—it’s a lot smaller and shabbier than it looks on TV, like Jim Acosta—we were ushered into the Roosevelt Room near the Oval Office. The President, secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross, and a few aides (Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Reince Priebus: wot larks!) soon joined us. After a brief presentation, the President took questions. Mine was about Iran.   During the campaign, I noted, the President had regularly decried the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e, the 2015 Obama Iran deal in which the U.S.

Pop quiz: how many branches of government are there in the United States? If you said “Four,” go to the head of the class. As of May 17, 2017, the traditional three branches of  Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, are joined by the Office of Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel in charge of destroying the president. It’s been a fun year. It’s not everyone, after all, who so thoroughly commands the police power of the state that he can order a predawn, guns-drawn raid on people he doesn’t like. Usually, that drama is reserved for dangerous criminals—terrorists, murders, major drug dealers. But Paul Manafort, a businessman, was close to Donald Trump, so he and his wife got the SWAT-team treatment on suspicion of a white-collar crime.

Is Donald Trump intemperate? You betcha. The latest episode in the Trump Reality Show was his twenty-minute fugue, via telephone, on Fox & Friends Thursday morning. It was a breathless, manic performance in which the President inveighed against “leakin’, lyin’ James Comey,” the Justice Department, and the murderous regime of Iran. He dilated on the prospects for peace and denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. He talked about the travails of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, whose home, hotel room, and business have been raided by the FBI. He also, in response to one question, graded his job performance at the 1 year, 3 month mark: A+. The word that many commentators employed to describe the President’s comments was “unhinged.

Absorbing the handholding—we were not party to anything so standoffish as handshakes here—the kisses, and the hugs, I thought of Paradise Lost: “They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,/ Through DC took their solitary way.” I quote from memory. Macron and Trump, Donald and Emmanuel: the state visit was nothing if not a bromance, at least in its pas de deux. I think it was in Ars amatoria that Ovid recommends that suitors take every opportunity to touch the objects of their interest. If you are sitting at the games with your date and a speck of dust—or dandruff—falls on her dress, flick it off with your hand. If no speck of dust falls, flick it off anyway. Then she’ll be perfect.

Inquiring minds want to know: What is James Comey’s favourite snippet from Gilbert & Sullivan? My candidate is this bit from one of the “susceptible” Chancellor’s songs in Iolanthe: “The law is the true embodiment/ Of everything that’s excellent/ It has no kind of fault or flaw/ And I my Lords embody the law.

Is a big blue Democratic wave poised to sweep the Republicans out of Congress in the 2018 mid-term election? To listen to much of the media, you might think so. A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post quoted Nate Silver, the Yoda of Dem pollsters, who suggested that the “Democratic wave in 2018 may be swelled substantially by the enthusiasm gap into a tsunami.” Last month, when the conservative Democrat Conor Lamb eked out a narrow victory over Rick Saccone in a special Congressional election in Pennsylvania, CNN gleefully reported that “Lamb’s performance is ominous for Republicans as the November midterm elections approach.

The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure who makes Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove look like Albert Schweitzer after a nap. 'Yes', screamed an editorial in The New York Times, 'John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous'. Bolton is a 'hawk’s hawk', an 'extreme ideologue' and 'warmonger' whose appointment 'scares people' and 'puts us on a path to war'.