For some reason, friends of mine have been talking about Sting online recently, and when I talk about his album The Tepid Heart, they can’t tell that I’m kidding! I guess that’s because if someone told you there was a Sting album called The Tepid Heart and you didn’t google it, you’d just assume it was real. Anyway, that’s caused Sting to be on my mind, and now whenever I read a column by Sting’s fellow baby boomer soft-rocker David Brooks, I can hear Fields of Gold playing in the background.
But I’m not sure “tepid” even does this one justice:
As the impeachment investigation proceeds, it’ll be important for us Trump critics to not set our hair on fire every day, to evaluate the evidence as if it were against a president we ourselves voted for. Would we really throw our own candidate out of office for this?
Jesus, this one is easy: “YES”. Let’s suppose that Lanny Davis continued to take money from the Ivory Coast and Equatorial Guinea without telling anyone while working on Hillary’s campaign. Let’s suppose the Ivory Coast hacked Republicans’ email during the campaign. And then let’s say that Hillary made Lanny Davis her National Security advisor, and that Lanny Davis then had inappropriate phone calls with the Ivory Coast and made a strange foreign policy decision favored by the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. And then let’s suppose that when the FBI investigation of Davis was heating up, Hillary asked Comey to end the investigation, then fired him when he wouldn’t.
Would anyone (other than possibly Peter Daou) be saying Hillary shouldn’t be impeached and removed? I don’t think so.
In fact, I can’t possibly think of a worst example of trying to see things from the “other side’s” point of view. In fact, I think the main difference here is that many liberals, myself included, are ambivalent about impeaching Trump right now (for political reasons), whereas we would not be ambivalent at all about impeaching Hillary under the hypothetical scenario I described above.
jl
But, would be easier for us. We’d have good veep backup.
Omnes Omnibus
Obligatory. Brooks never was.
Doug!
@jl:
Even if we didn’t….
Chet Murthy
Heh.
(Column by David Brooks) intersect (not a hot take) == ??
The empty set. As a good friend once said to me (about some sub-room-temperature IQ type co-worker): “I’ve run that experiment enough times, I don’t need to do so again to be able to know the outcome”.
And then I see Yastreblansky has fired up the ol’ torch ….
Gin & Tonic
But Ivory Coast and Equatorial Guinea are black people. Russia is white people. That nullifies your example.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
yup, I have successfully passed Thinker Brooks quiz.
Also, too:
Jack Donaghy: And what Indigo Girls song did you get that from, Lemon?
Liz Lemon: Vagabonds, Quilts and Moonlight.
PhoenixRising
The main contrast to this hypothetical is that Ivory Coast is not a frenemy with which US relations have long been strained by a disagreement about how the US and EU support (or crap out on) an ethnic minority within Ivory Coast that aspires to statehood.
IOW, yes, but that wouldn’t be the half of it.
George Spiggott
The threat of the Ivory Coast to Western Democracies vs. Russia’s threat…?
Well done Doug! Even in the hypothetical, you slip in a sly “both side do it” false equivalence.
different-church-lady
Hypothetical not possible.
Doug!
@George Spiggott:
There’s no way to do this without a both sides do it tinge. The only even remotely Flynn-like guy here is Lanny and thus the only remotely Russia and Turkey-like countries are Ivory Coast and Equatorial Guinea.
Central Planning
Doug!, I thought of this exchange when I started reading this, not sure why:
From this old article
Anyway, I’m not really a “Party Uber Alles” kind of guy, so yeah, I would want ANY president removed for those transgressions
PPCLI
Kansas Senators yelping about cuts to farmer welfare in DT’s budget.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article152224902.html
Crop insurance subsidies? Taste the free market, baby! Subsidized rural flights? Get off the public teat! Those are MY tax dollars you are spending.
George Spiggott
@Doug!:
It’s the ridiculous imbalance of the “equivalence” that makes it a great “both sides” gibe.
different-church-lady
@PPCLI: Leopards. Faces. Eating. All that all that.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Central Planning:
David Brooks and other Republicans refuse to believe such a person exists.
danielx
@Doug!:
Please tell me you’re not still stuck on seeing things from the “other side’s” point of view.
At this point I really have no interest in the point of view of those who voted for lord shortfingers. I don’t care about their reasons, or their concerns, or their sensitivities, and least of all about their fee-fees at this point. I get that they are determined to follow Trump to the end; nobody likes to admit they fucked up that big by voting for him, especially people who have been Ailes-trained for the last twenty years. Not to mention those who have had the likes of Limbaugh mainlining manure straight into their craniums for even longer.
But you know…I don’t care. They have set us all on the road to hell, so fuck them and the hobbyhorses they ride upon.
patroclus
I don’t understand Brooks’ column at all. What “impeachment investigation”? In the world I live in, the Republicans control the Congress and haven’t launched an impeachment investigation at all. In fact, just today, the lead interrogator of the party in power treated the former CIA director with contempt for not unilaterally declaring the President innocent and every single Republican on the Committee yielded their time to him so he could go on and on and on about “leaks” and other inanities having nothing to do with the subject of the investigation. A real “impeachment” investigation isn’t likely until 1/19, which is 20 months away. In what world does Brooks live in? Does he really think the Republicans will actually allow an “impeachment” investigation?
As for his hypothetical, it wouldn’t occur. Hillary wouldn’t have communicated with a foreign power hacking our election, appointed a foreign-paid traitor as National Security Adviser, fired the Deputy AG, the FBI Director, all the U.S. Attorneys without replacements, intervened to quell the investigations with the FBI, CIA and DIA and obstruct justice, nor collude with the House Intelligence Chair to manufacture ridiculous non-evidence. And neither would Bernie. And they wouldn’t lie repeatedly about everything nor demean and belittle Congress, political opponents, the media, the courts and just about everybody daily and repeatedly. It’s a stupid hypothetical.
Thru the Looking Glass...
Sweet Baby Jeebus, did he really write that?
Tell me it’s a parody from the Onion…
Tepid… stupid… what’s the diff?
MCA1
@patroclus: I think you may have missed the end of the blockquote. Doug’s presented that hypothetical to suggest a possible situation (its plausibility or lack thereof being immaterial) to push back on the bullshit idea buried so deeply in every Republican’s psyche, including Brooks’, that Democrats would be as wary of starting the impeachment process on one of their own under similar circumstances as the GOP is. He’s not saying “similar circumstances” is within the realm of remotely likely, he’s saying “equivalent party over country queasiness” is a b.s. both sides maneuver in the everyday fashion of Mr. Brooks.
MCA1
@Omnes Omnibus: Well played. I can’t think of anyone in the cultural realm during my youth who’s had a greater delta between “peak cool” and “trough of uncoolness” than Mr. Sumner. I mean, The Police were fucking cool, about as cool as a band could get around 1982 when Ghost in The Machine was out. Little over a decade later we had Fields of Gold. WTF?
Another Scott
@Central Planning: That’s funny. :-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who thought Sting was ridiculous in Dune, but he never read the book(s)…)
patroclus
@MCA1: I read the whole column as well as some of the NYT comments. Most of it is the usual drivel about how “elites” must endeavor to understand the alienation of Trump voters. Then, Brooks pretends that he’s a Trump opponent but he then cautions his fellow opponents not to engage in party over country and automatically assume the worst about Trump in the ongoing “impeachment investigation.” There is no “impeachment” investigation, and it’s because his party is putting party over country. He not only has the facts wrong but the target wrong as well. He thinks that Democrats are putting party over country when it’s exactly the opposite.
rikyrah
@danielx:
Amen
lowtechcyclist
Sting may have been 80% of the above-replacement-level-player talent of The Police, but his solo career showed how much he needed Copeland and Summers. He lost me decades ago when he released an op-ed as a single. (Whatever song it is that includes the lyrics, “I don’t subscribe to his point of view.” Twice. ‘Nuff said.)
And speaking of op-eds, would anyone pay any attention to David Brooks if he had a blog, rather than a tenured position on the NYT op-ed page? There are a bunch of columnists with slots on the NYT and WaPo op-ed pages where if they were demoted to the blogosphere, people would say, “s/he’s not that good anymore, is s/he?” when the truth is, they’ve been pretty crappy for years, assuming they were ever that insightful to begin with.
Mark Ralston
@lowtechcyclist: This is the song “Russians” I do not think it means what you think it means.
Songwriters: Gordon Sumner / Serge Prokofieff
Lawrence
The Peter Daou reference is aces.