By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, December 02, 2024
If there’s a word for the guy with the hook who yanks
vaudeville performers off the stage after they’ve overstayed their welcome, I’m
the premature version of that. Too eager. When Barack Obama wrested the
Democratic nomination from Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, I wrote that I was
grateful at least that we wouldn’t have to write about the Clintons anymore.
Now, I worry they’ll try to run Chelsea next time around. When Donald Trump
announced his 2016 campaign, I wrote a piece headlined “Witless
Ape Rides Escalator,” and when he was dragged out of office in 2021, I
capped off—or so I thought!—my Trump commentary with “Witless
Ape Rides Helicopter.” But like whatever iteration of the “Donkey Kong”
franchise we’re on now, some simian specimens from the 1980s don’t know when to
go extinct. I’ll probably end my professional days writing about the ghastly
little spawn he named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New
York Post about his sex life.
But the one that might hurt the most: I really thought we
were done with the Kennedys.
But, no. The
Kennedys, like the Annenbergs—another family of jumped-up
gangsters who spent the 20th century playing aristocrats—have
become fully institutionalized, with Trump having selected nanny-molesting
junkie criminal weirdo Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—that great bolus of messianic
pretension expelled by Millbrook into the world of dopey left-wing activism—to head
up the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s a cretin in every way
that matters.
At least he has a famous name.
Pro-lifers who sold their souls to get Trump into the
White House have been rewarded with an HHS nominee who is, among other things,
an abortion zealot, having affirmed as recently as May that he opposes any
regulation of abortion no matter how late into the pregnancy, “even
if it’s full term.” He lately and suddenly insists that he is in favor of
the “emerging consensus” on abortion, i.e., he has affirmed that he will say
whatever it is politically necessary to say about the issue. When it comes to
one of the most important policy questions that intersects with the health care
industry, Trump’s HHS nominee apparently has reached the age of 70 without
having quite figured out what he really thinks about it.
At least he has a famous name.
One might easily understand why Kennedy might want to
keep open the means to eliminate, via surgery or poison, an unintended
pregnancy. According to the adultery
journal he kept—because what kind of mentally normal man doesn’t keep such
a diary?—he managed to maintain affairs with 37 different mistresses in one
year. That’s not quite Uncle Jack’s “girl-a-day routine” (as
reported by Gore Vidal) but it apparently was enough—along with his
relentless campaign of cruelty and humiliation—to drive
one of his three wives to such despair that she killed herself.
At least she had a famous name.
Of course, death and despair and dysfunction attends the
Kennedys—they have been producing those in considerable quantities for a
century now.
What an “aristocracy” we have. Donald Trump is the
grandson of a tax-dodging immigrant who made his fortune dealing in whores and
horse meat in the Yukon and the son of a racist slumlord from Queens. Joseph
Kennedy might not (your judgment will depend on how much weight you give
to the accounts of mafiosi such as Frank Costello) have been the bootlegger of
lore, but he did use his political connections to corruptly set himself up in
the post-Prohibition trade, a business he later sold to mobster Longy
Zwillman. And so it goes: RFK and JFK conducting their affairs with the
same actress—apparently
on the same night, on at least one occasion. Trump conducting his affairs
publicly in the pages of the New York tabloid press. RFK Jr.’s second wife
swinging out there in the horse barn, discovered with her fingers inside the
noose—she apparently had second thoughts but was unable to save herself. Children
dying of preventable measles cases in Samoa as RFK Jr. crusaded against the
vaccines that could have saved many lives, suggesting that the vaccines
themselves were the problem.
At least he has a famous name.
RFK Jr. also says he doesn’t think his father was killed
by Sirhan Sirhan, who pretty obviously killed Robert F. Kennedy—we have Sirhan
Sirhan’s word on that, among other evidence, including all the people who
saw him kill Robert F. Kennedy—hell, George Plimpton was there trying to
wrestle the gun out of the assassin’s hands. But these worthy American
aristocrats can get funny about who killed whom. You’ll remember that the
grandson of the horse-butchering Yukon snowbilly pimp once suggested that the
son of the mobbed-up probably-not-a-bootlegger liquor baron was assassinated as
part of a plot that involved the father of the Texas senator who was then one
of the GOP primary rivals of the horse-butchering Yukon snowbilly pimp’s
grandson. Sen. Ted Cruz swallowed his pride and has never stopped
swallowing.
And what is Sen. Cruz going to do when ordered to vote
for the philandering crackpot junkie felon by the coup-plotting grandson of the
horse-butchering Yukon snowbilly pimp? Sen. Cruz is going to do whatever he is
told. The distance from “great
lunch” to “yes” on confirmation is considerably less than the distance the
esteemed senator from Texas already has traveled.
Donald Trump dreams of creating a dynasty, a kind of
ersatz royal family. After meeting with Queen Elizabeth II and imposing his
ghastly children on the U.S.-U.K. “special relationship,” Trump proposed a “next
generation” summit between his children and the fashionable young British
princes. Someone might have asked: “Next generation of what?” Not that
the would-be American royals and the British royals don’t deserve each
other—Meghan Markle should be an honorary Trump, no?—but the neediness was
unseemly in a man who is supposed to hail, after all, from a republic.
But all those famous names!
I’m not much of a class-war guy—I am, in fact, a
hierarchy-positive guy. I believe in class and class distinctions as good and
necessary. But the American ruling class can bring out my inner Lytton
Strachey, at least as portrayed by Jonathan Pryce in Carrington: “God
damn, confound, blast, and f–k the upper classes.” Kennedys, Trumps, Clintons,
the lot of them—it’s a pity we don’t have recourse to exile as a means of
political hygiene.
And Furthermore …
There are a few good people in American public life with
famous family names—Margaret Hoover and Barry Goldwater Jr. and Ross Perot Jr.
and people like that—who do good work, often quietly. Some of them do their
work so quietly that they’d be embarrassed to be praised for it in a public
forum. You know who you are.
That stipulated, it is not easy to make a very good
positive case for American political dynasties or American pseudo-aristocratic
dynasties. The Kennedys are the same ridiculous grotesques they always have
been. The Clintons—there isn’t enough penicillin in the world. The Obama
daughters so far seem content to disport themselves in Aspen or wherever and
sometimes to pretend
to do work. Hollywood is full of people who were born into the
business—Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Quaid, etc.—but there aren’t a
lot of entertainment dynasties that make it into third and fourth generations
with any real vigor.
In politics? Well. The Adamses both had tough times in
their presidencies and, while they were able, intelligent, prudent men from
whom contemporary American pols, especially conservatives, could learn a thing
or two, they were more or less played out by the time Henry came into his
own.
I’ll give you the Bushes—they’re the best-case scenario:
Irrespective of whether you agreed with his policy views or priorities, George
H.W. Bush was one of the most able public men of his generation and arguably
the best-prepared president of the modern era; Jeb Bush played an enormously
consequential role in Florida’s success story and was one of the most
successful governors of his time; George W. Bush was a capable and patriotic
man about whom the worst that could be said—and please do not mistake me for
writing that this is a minor criticism—is that he suffered from an
excess of democratic idealism in foreign policy. George P. Bush has … not done
a great deal of damage to the republic, so far. The Bush twins seem pleasant
enough, though I have never watched Today with Hoda and Jenna. Prescott
Bush was an Eisenhower man, and I’ll forgive him his role in creating the
Interstate Highway System. I like and admire the Bushes, but I don’t think
having the last name “Bush” would necessarily incline me toward a politician.
But, of course, the name “Bush” is not very much welcome in Republican circles
right now and it is hard to see them as Democrats (even if Barbara Pierce Bush
was a Kamala Harris supporter), so that probably won’t come up for a
while.
But, as I noted in the opening: I’ve been wrong about
this sort of thing before.
Words About Words
About coordinating conjunctions and commas last week, a
reader points out that “because” is a subordinating conjunction, and so one of
my examples was erroneous. The reader is, of course, correct. There are seven
coordinating conjunctions and a handy mnemonic device for remembering them:
FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.
There are lots more subordinating conjunctions,
including, but not limited to: after, although, as, as if, as long as, as
though, because, before, even if, even though, if, if only, in order that, now
that, once, provided, rather than, since, so that, that, though, without,
unless, until, when, whenever, where, whereas, wherever, whether, while,
within, besides.
Coordinating conjunctions connect things of equal
grammatical weight from nouns (Jack and Jill) to adverbs (slowly but surely) to
independent clauses, as in last week’s discussion. Subordinating conjunctions
establish relationships, hierarchy, cause and effect, etc. “I washed the dishes
after we finished Thanksgiving dinner.” In addition to the conjunction issue,
that sentence also is of interest because it represents a genre increasingly
prominent in our public life: It is a lie.
In Other Wordiness …
Headline
from the New York Times:
Trump’s Cabinet: Many Ideologies
Behind the Veil of ‘America First’
One faction of President-elect
Trump’s prospective nominees seems focused on revenge, another on calming
markets and a third on cutting people and budgets.
I have no doubt that Trump has a guy whose big enthusiasm
is “cutting people,” but, unless the administration has hired Jack the Ripper,
what the Times probably meant is “cutting payrolls” or “cutting
positions.”
Also: It’s “You’ve
got another think coming,” not “You’ve got another thing coming.” As
in: “If you think you can get away with that nonsense, you’ve got another think
coming.”
Economics for English Majors
If you want to understand why “shield laws” for
journalists are a nice-sounding terrible idea, you need to think for a minute
about the “ketchup as a vegetable” controversy of the Reagan years, which had
nothing—seriously, not one word in the law—to do with ketchup.
The federal government has been in the school lunch
business since 1946, and that sounds great to a certain kind of good-hearted
person: What on Earth should we spend money on if not feeding nutritious meals
to hungry children who cannot afford them? Except, of course, the National
School Lunch Program (NSLP) had very little to do with relieving the supposedly
Dickensian conditions of American schoolchildren in the Truman years (though of
course we had a lot more real poverty in the 1940s than we do now) and a
lot to do with providing yet another subsidy for one of the most powerful
branches of (cue spooky music) Big Business: farmers. Wall Street has
nothing on Big Elmer, and the school lunch program was designed to consume
“surplus” commodities in order to keep them out of the marketplace, i.e., it
was what is known as a “price support.” At the risk of sounding RFK Jr.-ish:
Another way of saying that is that the government spent, and spends, a metric
buttload of money—literal tons of money, if you took it in cash and stacked it
on pallets—to “protect” Americans from that most nefarious of all shadowy
forces: low prices at the grocery store. That’s American-style humanitarianism
in brief: tax poor people to pay for a program that makes their food more
expensive and then denounce anybody who complains as a child-hating,
pauper-kicking misanthrope.
The NSLP grew and mutated over the years, of course, as
such programs are wont to do, and while there was still federally organized
commodity-dumping on a massive scale (my mother was known to buy “government
cheese” from those who received blocks of the stuff under the old food-support
program; selling those commodities was a big business not unlike the
Appalachian trade in food-stamp Pepsi, i.e., hillbilly
wampum), by the time of the “ketchup as a vegetable” controversy, the main
questions were the size of the subsidy paid to local school districts for each
meal served and what kind of meals were eligible for the subsidy. The rule in
the early 1980s had specified that there had to be two vegetables served as
part of the meal—but what counts as a vegetable? How processed can a vegetable
be and still be a vegetable? A tomato sliced up and put on top of a salad
counted as a vegetable, but what about a tomato simmered down into tomato paste
and put on a pizza? Local schools wanted more flexibility about the kind of
meals they served, and the original proposal from the Reagan administration
would have let them count certain condiments and such (pickle relish, not ketchup,
was the actual hypothetical example) as a vegetable, provided (this part was
always left out of the hysterical discussions that followed) that there was
another serving of a different vegetable of such a size as to plausibly make up
the difference. The idea was to make more school lunches available for federal
subsidies, but, as you can imagine, the storyline was, approximately, “Evil
greedy Republican skinflints want to take away your children’s spinach and give
them ketchup.” Of course, tomatoes already were eligible for the commodity
program when processed into tomato paste and similar products, so they were
available to schools at basically no cost.
Is pizza sauce a vegetable? It’s a trickier question than
you might think. A lot of pizza sauce recipes are made of nothing but
vegetables—tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, oregano, etc.—but calling the
result a “vegetable” doesn’t seem exactly right. Sugar is a 100 percent
vegetable product. So is high-fructose corn syrup. But when you tell your
children to eat their vegetables, you aren’t thinking of a big bowl of sugar
topped with HFCS. You could say “Just use common sense!” if you were fool
enough to think that would lead to anything commonsensical.
What you really need to keep in mind is that the big
driver behind the school lunch program wasn’t children’s nutritional needs—it
was farmers’ economic interests.
Which brings me, via the usual scenic route, to my
subject: shield laws for journalists.
Congress currently is considering a bill, the PRESS Act
(that’s “Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act,” and here I will
reiterate my position that people who come up with cutesy acronyms for such
legislation should be impeached, pilloried, and permanently disenfranchised),
which is a “shield law” for journalists, one that would liberate them from the
obligation to comply with certain subpoenas. Under the law, the
feds:
may not compel a covered
journalist to disclose protected information, unless a court in the judicial
district in which the subpoena or other compulsory process is, or will be,
issued determines by a preponderance of the evidence, after providing notice and
an opportunity to be heard to the covered journalist disclosure of the
protected information is necessary to prevent, or to identify any perpetrator
of, an act of terrorism against the United States; or disclosure of the
protected information is necessary to prevent a threat of imminent violence,
significant bodily harm, or death, including specified offenses against a
minor.
The two words that most matter in all that legal language
are “covered journalist.”
Who dat? The law reads:
The term “covered journalist”
means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records,
writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that
concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public
interest for dissemination to the public.
The problem with that language is that every jackass who
is out there “doing my own research” is someone who “investigates information
that concerns matters of public interest,” and everybody who republishes his
junk on Facebook “publishes news.” If everybody is a journalist—and, under that
definition, pretty much everybody is a journalist, or could immediately become
one, even illiterates—then the category “journalist” means nothing and neither
do a whole lot of subpoenas. Is a blogger a journalist? I’m sure Ezra Klein
thought so back when Wonkblog was his one-man show rather than a Washington
Post feature. Is a guy who posts links on a website, maybe with a little
commentary, a journalist? Matt Drudge probably was the most important
journalist of the Clinton era, and that was what he mostly did. But as William
F. Buckley Jr. used to say—and as Jonah Goldberg often quotes him saying,
“Expressio unius est exclusio alterius,”or, To include is to exclude. A
definition of “covered journalist” that is workable as a matter of law would
have to exclude a lot of people.
Which is to say: Shield laws are a backdoor means of licensing
journalists. Even if the government isn’t issuing ID cards that say
“USDA-Certified Grade-A Organic Journalist” on them, giving a special set of
legal protections to a group of people based on their trade is licensure.
And there would be legal peril in practicing unlicensed journalism.
In our upside-down times, there are a lot of small-time
citizen activist types who are out there doing real journalism, while a lot of
people working in high-profile journalism jobs—Paul Krugman of the New York
Times, for example—do not really do journalism at all. Fox News is 99.44
percent sewage-grade Republican propaganda (on a good day!), but how are
you going to write a shield law that excludes the most popular cable news
outlet in the country or a good third of the columnists at our most
important newspaper?
Whatever decision gets made, it is going to get made by
the ketchup-as-a-vegetable guys, and it is going to get made in the same
self-interested, self-serving way.
We have a good legal system in this country. We have
excellent courts, excellent procedure, etc. It is a good enough legal system
for journalists, who do not need any special privileges to do their job—and who
surely would be gently but profoundly corrupted by the pursuit and maintenance
of such privileges, should they be offered.
And if you’re thinking this wasn’t really an economics
issue, you’ve got another think coming.
A lot of people will be tempted to support the shield law
only because Donald Trump bitterly opposes it. Trump is, of course, too
ignorant to understand that the law would actually give him a very useful tool
for punishing journalists he doesn’t like, even as it probably would not do a
lot of good for its supposed beneficiaries.
In Conclusion
If you think my assessment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is
harsh, consider all the stuff I left out. It isn’t that I don’t sympathize with
recovering addicts and people who have had horrible trauma in their lives—I
do—but the fact is that it is entirely possible for people with sad back
stories to still be arrogant, destructive, self-righteous, dangerous fools. And
the Kennedys are a pack of them.
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