Admissions

Closing yesterday’s “Hockey Central” broadcast on Toronto radio, host Jeff Marek stated, “My preseason predictions: I should be fired.”

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I'm a glum one

It's explainable

I met someone

Unattainable

Life's a bore

The world is my oyster no more

All the papers

Where I led the news

With my capers

Now will spread the news

"Superman

Turns Out to Be Flash in the Pan!”

Vernon Duke/Ira Gershwin, “I Can’t Get Started”

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“When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past,” I find that almost all those remembrances are negative: mistakes, errors, assumptions jumped to, enthusiasms uncurbed, passive aggressions, insults received and delivered, and on and on. I look in the mirror and proclaim: “You big dummy!”

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How could you believe me when I said I love you

When you know I've been a liar all my life

Burton Lane/Alan Jay Lerner

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Without a doubt the most astonishing admission of the past week was delivered by Sidney Powell, a lawyer in the forefront of efforts to negate the results of the election for president of the United States, in order to keep Donald Trump in that office. She asserted in her work for Trump that she would “release the Kraken,” supposedly killer evidence of illegal behavior and fraud in the voting and the counting of ballots. Among her numerous outrageous claims,* aspersions against the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems have led to a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against her.

Now, in the shadow of Dominion’s lawsuit, Powell’s lawyers released an alleged defense of her many claims about fraud and other misdeeds—asserting that “[n]o reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.”** 

The mind boggles.

You go on television, you hold press conferences, and, most importantly, you argue before courts of law—and now you try to get off the hook by claiming that all of your “evidence,” your “truths,” were complete bullshit, and on that basis you should be let off the hook for the damage that you have done. After all, you claim, reasonable people weren’t going to buy what you were selling. And what of all the unreasonable people. . . ?

I have to lie down. 

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*  Too numerous to list here. Wikipedia has a compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Powell

**  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/23/sidney-powell-trump-election-fraud-claims

La Même Chose

There is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

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Three years ago I wrote a marvelous blog post called “Before You Wrap the Leftovers,” which, according to Google’s view counter, apparently got sucked into a black hole, and almost nobody read. I humbly ask that you read that post before we carry on. (https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2018/01/before-you-wrap-leftovers.html)

Welcome back.

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Nothing New 1

Last month Stewart-Allen Clark, a pastor of a General Baptist denomination church (distinguished easily enough by insiders, one imagines, from a Lieutenant-Colonel or Sergeant-Major Baptist congregation), 

drew scorn for a sermon offering advice to wives he said would stop their husbands becoming "distracted" by other women, (1)

scorn he probably could have avoided simply by cranking up the old gramophone and spinning “Wives and Lovers.” After all, he could have protested, “Jack Jones won a Grammy for that!”

According to the BBC story, Pastor Clark told his congregation that it’s “‘really important’” for men to have a beautiful woman on their arm,” and he asks, "Why is it so many times that women, after they get married, let themselves go?” And then—what I really love—like so many clergymen, he looks into the mind of God and proclaims:

“Don't ever forget this, God made [men] to look and you want them to look at you - not some hottie out there or someone on a computer screen.”

And also don’t forget, as “Wives and Lovers” reminds women, there are all those barracudas in the office.

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Nothing New 2   

For this “Nothing New” I could have gone anywhere, but this NPR report about last year’s Republican national convention makes the point very compactly:

"Biden, Harris and their socialist comrades will fundamentally change this nation," Trump campaign adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle warned.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, asserted that Biden would be taking orders from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the four congresswomen known as the "Squad."

"Their vision for America is socialism," Haley said. "And we know that socialism has failed everywhere."

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said, "Democrats have chosen to go down the road to socialism.” (2)

As we all know in the 1948 presidential election the Democratic incumbent, Harry S Truman, prevailed over the supposed favorite, Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Truman laughingly held up the headline of the rightwing Chicago Tribune:

One person who wasn’t laughing was the bilious rightwing crank Westbrook Pegler. As reported by A. J. Liebling in The New Yorker (Nov. 20, 1948), Pegler exclaimed under the headline “ELECTION RESULTS CALLED END OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC” :

(I guess it's a little late in the day to point out to the long-gone Pegler that the brown shirts were the Nazis, not the socialists.)

Liebling commented:

I imagine Pegler will presently be shopping for a country with a future.

Apparently, Guilfoyle, Haley, McDaniel, and the rest of the GOPers who have been  crying out in the wilderness about the Democrats’ alleged determination to bring “socialism” (3)  into the good ole US of A have overlooked what Pegler discovered in 1948—we already have socialism thanks to Harry Truman. 

Wait—or is it that we don’t have socialism and the Republicans are just doing what they’ve been doing since the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, waving a bloody red rag to distract us from their own failures?

Plus ça change . . .

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(1)   https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56312443

(2)   https://www.npr.org/2020/08/25/905895428/republicans-blast-democrats-as-socialists-heres-what-socialism-is

(3)   “Pinning down a precise definition of socialism is a question that entire forests’ worth of books and articles have given their lives to answer, largely in vain.”

         Jonathan Chait