Two-Faced Leadership, Blind Justice That Ignores Racism, & A New Political Weapon...Going After the Children
Why don't our Christian politicians, justices, and ministers practice the values they preach?
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: We need to stop letting our leaders completely reinvent themselves in their quests for power while pretending it’s principle.
Supreme Court Allows Trump to End Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, Others: Blatantly racist rhetoric still can’t clear the Court’s evidentiary bar.
Buttigieg Separated From Children After False Report to CPS: Political cruelty now spills past the target and onto children and overburdened public systems.
Kareem’s Datebook: This week marks the anniversary of the opening of Airplane!, arguably my most enjoyable film role, which I remember with gratitude because it let me loosen up in public and buy a very nice rug in the bargain.
Advise & Consent | Otto Preminger (1962) - YouTube: This sharp political drama reminds us that Washington’s addiction to blackmail, ego, and procedural gamesmanship did not begin when Donald Trump moved into the White House.
Kareem’s Jukebox: At “The Dark End of the Street,” James Carr turns adultery, guilt, and longing into a soul confession so raw that six decades later you can still hear his heart breaking.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
The supervillain Two-Face, in the movie The Dark Knight, is the alter-ego of former District Attorney Harvey Dent, one-time friend of Bruce Wayne and ally of Batman. Dent’s face is badly burned in an explosion engineered by the Joker, who later manipulates him into becoming a force for evil. What is it about this character that reminds me of J.D. Vance?
Like Dent, Vance arrived on the public scene with sterling credentials (a diploma from Yale Law School) and presented himself as a crusading good guy: his book Hillbilly Elegy sought to explain working class anger to the liberal elite, and, during the 2016 presidential campaign, he declared himself a “never-Trump guy,” saying, among other things, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.” But, scarred by the acid of Trumpism, he has like Two-Face become a force for evil, reinventing himself in a way that causes anyone with a shred of common sense to doubt his sincerity, and wonder if there’s anything he won’t do to attain power.
With this background in mind, it’s not really surprising that Vance has come out as an advocate for the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon who, prior to Trump’s ascension, was the modern avatar of presidential ruthlessness and criminality. Speaking last week at Nixon’s Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, he opined that the Watergate scandal “would be like a 12-hour news story” in today’s media environment. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy!” Criminal conspiracy, bribery, suborning perjury, and abuse of power are business as usual in the Trump World where Vance operates. He admits as much, and sees common injustice in how the two presidents were treated: “If you look at the story of how the ‘deep state’ took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration.”
Who was the “deep state” that took down Nixon? Vance, of course, didn’t name them, allowing the members of his audience who are ignorant of history to imagine a rogue’s gallery like the shadowy villains Batman is up against. In fact, the “deep state” opposing Nixon included a unanimous Supreme Court (in United States v. Nixon), a Republican-controlled Congress, his own White House Counsel and, most tellingly, Nixon himself talking his corrupt head off on tape. Not to mention Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters and bestselling authors who chronicled his wrongdoing in All the President’s Men.
When Hamlet says, “God hath given you one face, and you have made yourself another,” he is himself practicing deceit, pretending to be mad in order to drive Ophelia away before she is caught in the whirlwind of his revenge plot. The motivations for Vance’s duplicity are nowhere near as noble. He is just another political chameleon, ratcheting up his insincerity to the degree necessary to exist in Trump’s White House. It doesn’t take a Shakespearean level of genius to reach the obvious conclusion: Something is rotten in the District of Columbia.
