By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, March 09, 2026
A brief question for Sen. John Cornyn: What, exactly, is
the point of you?
You’re not Ken Paxton, true. Paxton, the corrupt imbecile
who serves as the attorney general of Texas and your opponent in the upcoming
Republican primary runoff, is pretty gross: He is an adulterer, a chiseler, an
abuser of his office. Donald Trump, whom you are satisfied to serve as the most
abject and obedient of lackeys, also is an adulterer, a chiseler, and an abuser
of his office. On top of that is the fact that he attempted to overthrow the
government of these United States in January 2021 after losing the 2020
presidential election to Joe Biden—and you voted to acquit him in his
impeachment after that attempted coup d’état. President Trump has
launched an unconstitutional war against Iran, has carried out wanton massacres
in the Caribbean, has overthrown the government of Venezuela, has dispatched
U.S. special forces to Ecuador, and in none of these instances has he so much
as nodded in the general direction of Congress—the branch of the U.S.
government in which you serve, Sen. Cornyn, and the branch entrusted by our
Constitution with the power to declare war. You have been exactly as
faithful to your vow to uphold the Constitution as Ken Paxton was to his
wedding vows—and, with all due respect to the blessed institution of marriage,
your infidelity to the Constitution is more consequential than Paxton’s
infidelity to his wife.
If Texans must have a man without honor, without any
sense of his constitutional obligations as a senator, a man without any sense
of duty as a citizen—why you instead of Paxton? Because we can remember a time
when you were a different sort of man and a different sort of senator? If
anything, that makes your current situation a little worse: Paxton is what he
is and always has been that, but you, Sen. Cornyn, have been degraded.
Your degradation is a scandal not in the common sense—you are well beyond that
now, it seems—but in the Christian sense, i.e., a destructive example that
tends to lower respect for important institutions and to corrode the public’s
moral sense in general.
Why not stand up on your hind legs, act like a man, and
demand that Congress do its duty in the consequential matter before you? You
literally have nothing to lose—no future political prospects, no standing, no
reputation. Even if you get reelected, you’re finished—well past the apex of
whatever it once meant to be Sen. John Cornyn. On the other hand, you have much
to gain. Redemption and reconciliation begin with penance. Now is the time—not
after the election, not when things have calmed down, not when it seems Trump’s
influence is once again waning—now. You do not have to wait on anybody: not
Trump (who withheld his endorsement in part because he wanted to publicly
humiliate you), not the voters, no one—only your own conscience. So pull the
trigger, already.
If you will not do your duty, then you should resign.
And so I repeat my question: What, exactly, is the point
of you?
Economics for English Majors
You have heard the expression: “It is an ill wind indeed
that blows no one some good.” The phrase often is used in a way opposite to its
meaning, to announce an “ill wind” that is an unalloyed evil. What the phrase
actually is meant to communicate is something more like the proverb holding
that “every dark cloud has a silver lining,” One man’s loss is another’s gain,
etc. Seemingly catastrophic developments often end up being good for someone.
A little simple economics is enough to illustrate that:
The Trump administration’s illegal war in Iran has sent oil prices higher, and
that is almost always treated in the press as a self-evidently bad thing. The
press is very funny about prices: Rising gasoline prices are bad, rising house
prices are good until they aren’t, rising labor prices are pretty much always
good, etc. But rising oil prices and rising natural gas prices are very, very
good for many Americans: The U.S. energy industry is the world’s No. 1 producer
of both oil and natural gas. The energy industry is pretty sophisticated about
pricing: Unlike some industries with a more short-term view of the world, U.S.
oil and gas keep their eyes on a pricing sweet spot: Prices high enough to keep
their producing assets very profitable, but not so high as to lure new
producers into the marketplace or to provide a spur to change consumer
behavior.
Things that are good for the energy industry are not only
good for a couple of fat-cat executives at big companies with names you have
heard of. They are good for all sorts of people—white-collar, blue-collar,
engineers and finance guys and truck drivers—and all sorts of communities from
Texas to New Mexico to Pennsylvania. I remember a sign at a restaurant serving
fracking crews in Pennsylvania advising customers not to worry about their
dirty boots: “No mud on the floor, no cash in the drawer.” Of course, other
Americans will howl at relatively high gasoline prices, and the guys who sell
F-350s will experience some customer hesitancy at the margins if that $100
fill-up goes to $140.
Trade-offs! As Thomas Sowell says, “There are no
solutions, only trade-offs.”
Words About Words
We first come across that “ill wind” business in The
Proverbs of John Heywood, though one assumes, from the retrospective nature
of that work, that the phrase had been around for some time. The proverbs are
worth reading on their own, but I especially recommend this edition with a very entertaining foreword by Julian
Sharman. Sharman describes the struggling state of English literature under
the French-speaking Normans—“Norman yoke” and all that—who sought to suppress
the language: “Antiquity was dead, but not without issue. Already patient
monastics had begun to embalm the decaying Saxon saws and sentences in hideous
cerements of rhyming Latin.”
“Hideous cerements of rhyming Latin” etc.—what a
sentence.
Heywood’s Proverbs (a work originally bearing the
title “A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the
englishe tongue compacte in a matter concernyng two maner of mariages, made and
set foorth by Iohn̄ Heywood”) is full of good and interesting stuff beyond that
ill wind.
But you, to cast precious stones
before hogs,
Cast my good before a sort of
curre dogs.
And sawte bitches. Whiche by whom
now deuoured,
And your honestee amonge theim
defloured,
And that ye maie no more expence
afoorde,
Nowe can they not afoorde you one
good worde.
And you theim as fewe. And olde
folke vnderstood,
Whan theues fall out, true men
come to their good.
Whiche is not alwaie true. For in
all that bretche,
I can no ferthyng of my good the
more fetche.
Nor I trow theim selfes neither.
If they were sworne.
Lyght come lyght go. And sure
sens we were borne,
Ruine of one rauyn, was there
none gretter.
For by your gyfts, they be as
little the better,
As you be muche the worse. And I
cast awaie.
An yll wynde, that blowth no man
to good, men saie.
Wel (quoth he) euery wind blowth
not down the corn
I hope (I saie) good hap be not
all out worn.
I will nowe begyn thryft, whan
thrifte semeth gone.
The “ill wind” proverb shows up in Henry IV Part 2:
FALSTAFF What wind blew you hither, Pistol?
PISTOL Not the ill wind which blows no man
to good.
If ever I start a breakfast restaurant, I will call it
The Norman Yolk.
In Other Wordiness
Some shameless pedantry here: Press materials for a new
movie about the Second Punic War related that Denzel Washington will play the
role of “Hannibal Barca.” There was no such person as Hannibal Barca—the
Carthaginian general known to history simply as “Hannibal” was the son of a man
called Hamilcar Barca, but “Barca” was a cognomen (a nickname, really) meaning
“lightning,” owing to his speedy military maneuvers. Think of the Roman
examples Scipio Africanus or Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, each bearing a cognomen
referring to a famous victory. The elephants-in-the-Alps Hannibal belongs to a
family sometimes called the Barcids, after Papa Hamilcar’s nickname. Wikipedia
reports: “Modern historians occasionally refer to Hannibal’s brothers as Hasdrubal
Barca and Mago
Barca to distinguish them from the multitudes of other Carthaginians named
Hasdrubal and Mago, but this practice is ahistorical and is rarely applied to
Hannibal.”
But, of course, there are times when it is important to
know which Hannibal one is talking about.
Also, a potentially touchy subject: Hannibal was an
African, but he was not black. I myself do not much care about the largely
phony social-justice nonsense issue known as “representation” in Hollywood
casting—and Denzel Washington is going to be great, because he’s pretty much
great in everything—but the Carthaginians were a Semitic people who looked more
like modern Arabs or Greeks. Denzel Washington also has been cast as Macbeth
and Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, in Much Ado about Nothing, roles that
were not written with black actors in mind. Mix it up, I say.
The story of how certain Hollywood conventions arose over
the years—why Romans and space emperors all have British accents—is surely an
amusing one, and I assume that 10,000 linguistics dissertations have been
written on the subject. (If not: Get to work!) The notion that characters with
X characteristic must be played by actors with X characteristic is dumb and
always has been. Scarlett Johansson had it right when she said, “I should be
able to play any person, or any tree, or any animal,” and wrong when she
reversed course. (As a writer, I am professionally obliged to hold the
opinions, judgments, and unscripted words of actors in comprehensive contempt,
and I do, but even actors sometimes get it right in spite of themselves.) I
like Mel Brooks’ Yiddish-speaking Indians, but I like even better his
response to an admirer who told him, “You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today.”
Brooks, a very wise man, replied: “You couldn’t make it then.”
And Furthermore ...
I’m a gun guy, and I don’t make any apologies for that,
but I do get why it creeps some people out and causes the occasional eye roll.
From my inbox today: “We’ve Got an AK-47 for Every Budget!”
I’m sure you do, buddy. I’m sure you do.
I’m also a little bit of a watch guy, and I suppose it is
time to reiterate my maxim
that, in a democracy that maintains way too much of a cult of egalitarianism, public figures who wear Rolex watches are pretty much in for
trouble. So long, Kristi Noem—it takes a lot to stand out as an
embarrassing vulgarian in Donald Trump’s orbit.
My recommendation: Wear Vacheron Constantin instead. It’s
the old The Devil Wears Prada issue: The kind of characters Lauren
Weisberger wrote about in her novel do not actually go in all that much for
logo-forward brands such as Prada and Gucci, but you want to use a brand name
in the title that the proles will recognize, so it’s The Devil Wears Prada
instead of The Devil Wears the Row or Satan Has a Thing for Loro
Piana or Beelzebub Really Prefers Oni Selvedge Denim or whatever.
The kind of people who get mad about other people’s conspicuous consumption
know what a Rolex is and what it means. Maybe get a Roger W. Smith (if you have
that kind of money) or a Nomos Glashütte (if you don’t want to spend the price
of a pretty nice house on a timepiece) or something. A Rolex is just asking for
trouble.
The author William Gibson once described the U.S. $100
bill as “the international currency of bad s--t,” and it isn’t the dollar
value—it’s the symbolism. The devil pays with C-notes.
In Closing
I do not think I would agree with James Talarico about
very much when it comes to politics. I wonder about religion. I have met
progressive Christians whose faith is more progressivism than Christianity,
and, of late, many more of a practically identical kind among conservative
Christians. It is interesting to me that in our time right-wing Catholics and
right-wing Protestants feel—not without reason—that they have more in common
with one another than either has with more liberal or progressive members of their
own religious communities. It is difficult to place myself mentally in the kind
of world where T.S. Eliot could write, without embarrassment: “Reasons of race
and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews
undesirable.” But I do believe that our more liberal social attitudes are the
result of a hollowing-out of our religious faith and religious orthodoxy rather
than the more desirable kind of liberalism that might come from a deepening of
these.
From Dorothy Day, whose politics could not have been more
disagreeable to me:
When I came home from the
hospital to St. Joseph’s house on Chrystie Street I was filled with gratitude
for having a house of hospitality to come to. We were one of those hospices the
Holy Father was praying for. Up on the top floor Nelly Lampkin, as she told me
her name was once years ago, tho she is generally known as Nelly Post, is
failing. She is over eighty and for many years has lived on the Bowery. She was
one of the sights at Sammy’s Bowery Night Club (it is hard to see Jesus in such
people as go slumming in such a night club, enjoying the wrecks around them)
and she was in and out of our hospice for many years. A few years ago she came
home for good, and was anointed only to go out again with fresh vigor. Now she
cannot leave her bed, though she tries to keep bright. When she got news of Tom’s
leaving for Paris she said pertly, “Now he’ll be finding another little lady
and forget all about me.” She weighs about sixty pounds and when she had to go
up to Bellevue recently for a treatment, Isidore could easily carry her up and
down the four flights of stairs. (P.S. Nellie died a week after this was
written.)
Day’s politics were at times naïve and at times something
worse than that, partly because she was part of a circle that was heavily
influenced by such figures as I.F. Stone, a supposed progressive journalist who
was, in fact, a Soviet agent.
But that part about it being hard to see Jesus in people
who take human suffering and degradation as entertainment? She was right about
that. And about much else, I expect.
