An Eagle in His Nest

 John Ganz in his newsletter today quotes from a new essay about the controversy that has ensued, following revelations of the extent of the personal acquaintance between Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein. For everyone who at one point admired Chomsky when they were a budding leftist, this news was indeed a blow; and many on the Left have apparently been arguing for months over whether we now have to reevaluate his entire career. 

My own view is that Chomsky always had certain annoying and disingenuous intellectual foibles; but at the same time, he became a hero to the anti-war left for a reason. I found myself reflexively quoting him—without the thought of Jeffrey Epstein even entering my brain—just two days ago, on the subject of the dehumanizing way we treat war in this country. Many of Chomsky's best lines and moral observations retain their emotional power. 

Centrist or Liberal?

 A couple days ago, the center-left prime minister of Spain suggested that the Moroccan government may have deliberately refused to prevent migrants and asylum-seekers from crossing the border into Ceuta earlier this summer. 

This is a rather odd thing to charge any government with, though, since the last time I checked, it's not the responsibility of any state to hold their own population prisoner within their borders and prevent them from exiting. 

Just a Game?

 Yesterday evening, the Trump administration's comms team apparently rolled out a set of retro flash games on the official White House website. 

One of them is called "Rio Run." God help me, I clicked on it. 

You play in the game as an old white man who wanders around the screen intercepting "border crossers."

Campism

 The Trump administration is obviously flailing around at the moment to try to find the right formula that will explain away the disastrous failure of their war of aggression on Iran. "There is no war," they say; "war, what war?"; "and anyways, we're winning." 

But yesterday, they seemed to converge on a new line: blame Ukraine. 

Trump, in one of his various unhinged social media rants, suggested that the U.S. is not running out of munitions in its war, and has more munitions than ever, and anyways, if we are running out of munitions, it's because the Biden administration gave so many away to Ukraine...

The Worst of the Younger Generation

 Well, Milo Yiannopoulos—that one-time enfant teribble of the MAGA alt-right—has been deported from the country, allegedly for overstaying his visa. 

Before anyone crows about this as poetic justice, though—or, still worse, concludes something like "wow, ICE may be cruel, but at least they're even-handed!"—John Ganz cautions us that this deportation appears to have been almost entirely the product of a creepy factional dispute within MAGA. 

Capitol of the Lost Republic

 I admit that I haven't followed very closely the news this summer about Trump's ever-multiplying D.C. construction projects—the White House ballroom, the planned "Arc de Trump," the "Garden of Heroes," the "Reflecting Pool," and lord knows what else. Every time I see a headline about one of these stories (and they come at us almost daily now—viz. the latest this week about the Supreme Court's acquiescence in the ballroom litigation), I tend to scroll past it—thinking "bah, we have bigger fish to fry here people!"

But I really shouldn't think that. Trump's redesign of our nation's capital is actually central to his larger authoritarian project. It's his way of symbolically burying the old America and the old D.C.—the "capitol of a lost republic," as John Dos Passos called it (in his capsule biography of La Follette). Trump is driven to build in order to pave over the America that was—and to put some new gaudy wasteland in its place that will bequeath to posterity the essence of his tinsel soul. 

Very, Very Evil?

 I had been no huge fan of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's Senate campaign in Michigan up to now (though everyone who can should of course vote for him to keep that Senate seat blue). 

On the one hand, I never bought the insinuation that El-Sayed is personally anti-semitic. On the other, there should never be a "part two" to any statement in which you are condemning a hate crime against a synagogue. As El-Sayed has himself since acknowledged, he should have just said: this is terrible "full stop."