- Three and a half years after my heart and kidney transplants, I’m doing fine;
- About Biden’s pardon of his son, and the impending takeover of the FBI to pursue retribution;
- Robert Reich understands why he did it;
- Yet another essay (posted around Facebook) about how Trump’s win is about “who we are,” especially why Trump’s supporters don’t actually care about the Ten Commandments;
- The car folks at Jalopnik’s take on Vivek Romaswamy is not kind;
- How Musk and Ramaswamy have no idea what they’re doing;
- And a note about listening to Bruckner.
The good news for today is that I had my three-and-a-half-year visit with one of the cardiologists (Dr. Xie) at CPMC, following up my heart transplant in May 2021, and I’m still doing just fine. Dr. Xie actually used the word “amazing.” OTOH with the holiday weekend we forgot to have my blood work done in advance of the appointment; I’ll do that tomorrow, and those results will trickle in over the following days.
Frankly the thing I think worry about the most is whether I’ll live long enough to finish my projects. Finish SFADB; write a book, whether or not anyone will read it.
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Republicans, and even some Democrats, are howling over President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, after saying repeatedly that he would never do so. They accuse him of having “lied.” No. He made a promise, and broke it, which is different. Circumstances changed. There were reasons, primarily the promises of Trump’s selection for head of the FBI, Kash Patel, to pursue his “enemies list” once he’s in control of the FBI, simply because he considers certain people to be Trump’s political foes, not because they’ve done anything wrong. Here’s a story about that, in WaPo: Kash Patel has an enemies list centered on grievance, subtitled “The loyalist Trump hopes will run the FBI published a list of members of the ‘Deep State’ that’s mostly a list of people who have wronged him or Trump.”
And so does the shining city on the hill of America devolve into petty fascism. Biden can be forgiven, it seems to me, of shielding his son from the MAGA wolves.
Robert Reich’s take is decent.
Robert Reich, 3 Dec 2024: Pardon me, subtitled “President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter is understandable, but it inadvertently gives Trump ammunition”
I’ve seen many Facebook posts pointing out the hypocrisy of Republicans complaining about this pardon, considering the many people Trump pardoned — and the several of his cabinet picks who’ve committed crimes and been pardoned!
Reich:
My first reaction to the Sunday news that President Biden was pardoning his son Hunter was sadness.
Biden has a constitutional right to pardon his son, and I can understand his concern that Trump’s overt aim to use the Justice Department and FBI to pursue “retribution” against political enemies might subject Hunter to further charges and harassment.
House Republicans have claimed Hunter is guilty of more than the felonies he was charged with: lying on a firearms application form about his drug addiction and failing to pay taxes that he later did pay.
My sadness comes from President Biden’s suggestion that the charges against his son were influenced by Republican politicians. “It is clear that Hunter was treated differently,” he wrote. “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.” Biden continued: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
He goes on to discuss a larger issue.
There’s a larger issue here. The pardoning power was never supposed to be a means for presidents to put themselves, their families, members of their administration, and campaign staff above the law. Yet that’s precisely what it has become.
Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, on old drug charges. George H.W. Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others in his administration on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair.
As the framers of the Constitution saw it, the pardoning power was supposed to be a safety valve against injustice. The origins of the power in the United States Constitution are found in the “prerogative of mercy” that originally appeared during the reign of King Ine of Wessex in the seventh century.
His recommendation:
We need a constitutional amendment to prevent the continuing misuse of the pardoning power.
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Here’s an item that’s being passed around among my Facebook friends. It reflects my own sentiments, especially the part about Christian indifference toward their candidate’s violation of their supposedly-revered 10 commandments. It’s yet another piece about how Trump shows us who we really are. I found the source link.
Bowling Green Daily News, Aaron W. Hughey, 17 Nov 2024: Trump’s win shows us who we really are [PDF]
I’ll quote the last part.
Like many Americans, prior to Trump’s win, I honestly believed most Americans weren’t fans of vulgarity, profanity and disgusting language. But Trump set the record straight on that. Apparently, a lot of Christians are completely fine with all kinds of boorish behavior.
In my eighth-grade social studies class, Mr. Sparks taught us all Americans are equal before the law. You’ve probably heard that rumor, too. But as Trump demonstrated conclusively, some Americans can break the law repeatedly – committing crimes that would land most of us behind bars – and suffer no consequences.
And furthermore, having a criminal record is now something many Americans celebrate and even cheer. Kudos to Trump.
Which brings us to those infamous Ten Commandments we’ve been hearing about for most of our lives. In Sunday school, I was told it was a big deal to violate any of them. As Trump has shown, however, most Americans don’t really care about God’s laws – the fact that some want them plastered everywhere notwithstanding.
Finally, prior to the election I bet many readers saw America as a shining city on a hill, as Ronald Reagan so eloquently put it [more than] a few years ago. Now we know that’s not the case. We are just as susceptible to being seduced by a corrupt, power-hungry, narcissistic, wannabe dictator as any other Third World country.
Again, congratulations to Trump for exposing the cold, hard truth about who we are. There is no American Exceptionalism; we are not immune from evil, anti-democratic authoritarian leaders with fascist tendencies.
So let’s stop pretending we’re something we’re not.
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Shorter items.
The cool kids at Jalopnik aren’t impressed by the “viscerally repulsive moron” Vivek Ramaswamy.
Jalopnik, Collin Woodard, 3 Dec 2024: Vivek Ramaswamy Is Mad About Rivian’s Georgia Factory Because He Doesn’t Know How Loans Work, subtitled “Either that, or he knows he’s lying and just doesn’t care.”
The piece concludes:
Now, in addition to making every woman in his general vicinity dryer than the Atacama desert, Ramaswamy has also made a lot of money. So it’s hard to believe he doesn’t know how loans work. On the other hand, assuming he actually does know how loans work, then the only logical conclusion is that he’s just straight-up lying, which is also unthinkable. A Republican lying? That can’t be! What about those so-called “Judeo-Christian” values?
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Another item about how these people who want to downsize the government have no idea what they’re dealing with, and will likely do damage.
The Atlantic, Nicholas Bagley, 3 Dec 2024: Musk and Ramaswamy Are Making a Big Mistake, subtitled “They want to blame the bureaucrats, but they’re going to need those very same bureaucrats if they want to get anything done.”
The piece begins with the writer hiring a plumber — a specialist — to deal with a problem he couldn’t solve himself.
This is, yet again, a piece about how conservatives think in simple-minded, black and white terms. And they don’t understand how they’re going to wreck the government. Here’s the last para:
Maybe Musk and Ramaswamy can pivot. Maybe they will be more creative, daring, and capable than I expect. For now, however, it looks to me like they are coming at the problem with the wrong mental model and a half-baked belief that they can achieve change through sheer force of will. I admire the ambition, and I share their concern about government dysfunction. But I fear they have no clue how to fix it.
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Music: been listening to Bruckner the past few weeks. I have a Gunter Wand set of his symphonies; I have a Herbert von Karajan set, part of a big Herbert von Karajan box. The popular ones are the 4th and 7th; the profound ones are the 8th and 9th. I’ve discovered that the 3rd is quite good, and the 5th, quite long, is almost as profound as the later ones.
