I’m Still Loving The Smell Of Schadenfreude In The Morning: Geek Edition

A tale of two campaigns:

First, Obama, as reported in a fascinating and tantalizingly brief piece by Michael Scherer over at Time.com:

For all the praise Obama’s team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. “We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place,” said one of the officials. “None of them talked to each other.” So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states.

The new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record. Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture. “We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,” said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. “In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in ’12 than in ’08 because it made our time more efficient.”….

The magic tricks that opened wallets were then repurposed to turn out votes. The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone — a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not….

“We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”

…The numbers also led the campaign to escort their man down roads not usually taken in the late stages of a presidential campaign. In August, Obama decided to answer questions on the social news website Reddit, which many of the President’s senior aides did not know about. “Why did we put Barack Obama on Reddit?” an official asked rhetorically. “Because a whole bunch of our turnout targets were on Reddit.”

And now the Romney approach, from reporting at Politico:

A much-touted mobile app used by Romney campaign poll watchers to track voters faced hiccups across the country Tuesday that left one prominent conservative Romney critic declaring it on Twitter “nothing short of a failure.”The system, known as the ORCA Project, was intended to give the Republican challenger’s team real-time information so campaign workers could call, text or visit people who hadn’t yet voted in attempts to corral them before polls closed.

Yet dozens of Romney poll workers across the country took to Twitter throughout the day to gripe that they were unable to log in, lost data they had inputted or found it moving slower than they needed to keep up with poll traffic.

Jeffrey Cook, a Romney poll worker from Fort Dodge, Iowa, gave up after eight hours of being unable to log in and tried to provide his data over the phone after the campaign sent out information about a telephone helpline….

“This looks like hundreds and hundreds of people,” said Akbar, whose popular Twitter handle @ali became a central repository for ORCA complaints. “Something’s going wrong. More people are experiencing problems than are saying it’s working.”

That’s damning for a feature of Romney’s digital campaign that was expected to be a blockbuster. Earlier this month, in fact, Romney deputy political director Dan Centinello was quoted by the Huffington Post as saying of ORCA, “There’s nothing that the Obama data team, there’s nothing that the Obama campaign, there’s nothing that President [Barack] Obama himself can do to even come close to what we are putting together here.”

The Obama campaign has a similar app, Mobile Pollwatcher, which had no reported problems on Tuesday

Ahhhh. This isn’t getting old, is it.

One more thing.  As ever, it’s never their fault.  Conservatism cannot fail. It can only be failed — or betrayed:

In the heat of the election, some pro-Romney tweeters blamed the press for suggestions that ORCA wasn’t working quite right.“Media stories reporting ORCA efforts shut down by hackers are false,” wrote Tommy Duggan, publisher of The Valley Patriot newspaper in Massachusetts. “We just got first-hand confirm[ation] that system worked brilliantly.”

As we might say in the framing familiar to this blog:  Continue acquiring intimate knowledge of Colonel Sander’s best friend.

Images:  Vincent van Gogh, The Blue Train (The Viaduct in Arles), 1888.

Hendrik Gerritsz. Pot, Flora’s mallewagen. (Allegory of the Tulip Mania.) 1640.

I’m still grinning ear to ear.

My voice is hoarse from all last night’s howling at the moon with 1000+ of my suddenly dearest friends (MA Democrats do know how to party….).  All day I’ve failed to recover (old man!) from the resulting 3:30 a.m. bedtime, followed by that all-to-familiar 6:45 alarm that begins the process of getting Blessed Increase off to school.

But by damn, I’m still smiling huge.

What’s more, sometime last night — after the fourth scotch I think, or maybe the first bourbon I had to follow those wee drams — it came to me:  years of GOP obstruction had one limpidly clear consequence last night.

A while back, the Senate had a choice:  entertain the nomination of a grandmotherly law professor to serve as the first head of a novel Consumer Finance Protection Bureau — or to send Elizabeth Warren packing as part of a larger campaign to prevent that new body ever taking action.

We all know what happened:  the Senate’s Republicans told President Obama they would never confirm Warren (or anyone) for the job.  The recess appointment that followed provoked controversy enough, and whether by her choice or Obama’s, the administration decided not to toss gasoline on the flames by placing Warren at the head of the agency she had (with others) built.

Instead, she was told to pack up her marbles and go home, with the GOP celebrating her return to the safely (they thought) isolated groves of academe.   As it happens, Warren made her way back to the  Massachusetts just as our accidental senator, Scott Brown was showing all the signs of being a lock to extend the wild ride he’d begun by defeating the single worst political candidate for whom it’s been my misfortune to volunteer.*

Sure, there were other Democrats already aiming at Brown, at least a some of them good people who, I’m sure, would make solid legislators.  But to be blunt:  they were second and third tier candidates.  Brown had a ton of money, and — as the actual race that followed demonstrated — no worries at all about being able to attract much, much more.  He had the image stuff down:  he was a good guy with the truck who managed to (seem to) be as independent of his party as every Massachusetts Republican needs to be.  He was nice looking (if you like that sort of look), well known and mostly liked state-wide, with a campaign organization already in place that non of the Democrats in the race could begin to match.

Yes, this is a Democratic state, and yes, it was a Presidential year — but no one with a finger in the wind thought that Brown was seriously at risk.  The tell:  not one of the ten Democrats from Massachusetts serving in the House  chose to risk their safe seats for a run at the upper chamber.

Enter Elizabeth Warren.  She arrived preceded by at least some fame.  She proved able to draw money as no other MA Democrat this year could have.  And she turned out to be a genuinely talented campaigner.  She wasn’t perfect — but as a rookie from out of town in a state that has historically been deeply unfriendly to women chasing the top jobs, she started out good, learned fast, and became truly impressive by the end of the race.  She hit all the notes, playing beautifully to the better angels of our natures, while, as her  scorched earth counterattack on Brown’s unbelievably feckless asbestos attacks demonstrated — she managed to  master all the necessary lessons of the gut-punch school of Massachusetts politics.

And yesterday, she won.  Decisively.  The invincible Senator Brown ended the night as roadkill squashed by a juggernaut no mere pickup could dodge.

Counterfactuals are never certain — but I can’t come up with a scenario that has Brown falling to anyone in the original list of Democrats seeking to oppose him.

I can’t see Elizabeth Warren running if she were in her first year or so shepherding a new agency she’d worked so long and so hard to establish.

If the minority in the Senate had merely behaved as virtually every prior caucus of both parties had done, allowing the confirmation relatively routinely of a qualified executive branch nominee, I can’t see anything but re-election and a full six year term for the Republican who took Ted Kennedy’s seat.

And yet, on the 50th anniversary of Ted’s first senatorial election victory Warren and not the incumbent  will be heading back to Washington.

All because the Republicans made a decision to oppose literally everything the President proposed.  I’m not saying that they could have anticipated the consequences that flowed from the decision to try to end every Obama initiative in failure…but there are indeed outcomes that flow from their actions.  What caused once  sure-things like Akin and Mourdock to fall was more explicit, more obvious, clearly the result of the long process of radicalization that has wrecked the Republican party.  But don’t let the self-destruction of the crazies fool you.  They and Brown all lost for overlapping reasons — and the biggest of them is that the GOP has doubled down on the belief that if they wreck the country they will be rewarded with power.  Brown can be seen as collateral damage — or perhaps a victim of Republican friendly fire.

He won’t be the last one.

In the meantime, I get pleasure every time remember this: all those GOP senators who swore never to permit Warren anywhere near actual power have got a problem.

Q:  What do you call that nice lady from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?

A:  Senator.

May they choke on the lesson.

*Losing is no fun, and those last few days of working when you know that the face of the campaign simply never grasped the basics of the job — those final shifts really, really suck.

Image:  Francisco de Goya, Incendio, fuego de noche, 1793.

Dear Mr. Romney…

I write to tell you how much I value your bold, principled stand on the scourge of minds and drain on the treasury that is…a puppet.  May I encourage you, please, to stand fast on this; it is long past time that brave voices like yours made sure such travesties receive no support from right thinking Americans and their leaders….

…which is to say, dear Balloon-Juicers, that I deeply enjoyed this morning’s pundit roundup at the Great Orange Satan, in which was documented what seems to have been the only truly memorable moment from Wednesday’s debate. The shorter: in a venue in which the forces of darkness planned to unveil the RomneyBot v. 4.0, now with empathy module implemented, the programming turned out to be, well, not quite bug-free.

For all the alpha male stuff, and the energy level, and the spectacular and at least temporarily successful rewriting of the Romney plan and platform, what regular people and a fair subset of the punditocracy seem to recall was that awkward bit where the man who likes to fire people told everyone he was going to kill off a large, cuddly, yellow bird.

Hence, stuff like this from Mary Elizabeth Wallace at Salon:

[D]espite coming out of the evening looking stronger than he has in weeks — Romney made the error of looking like a man who is not on the side of innocence, whimsy, learning or childhood. Nor did he seem to grasp that Big Bird is an integral part of a show that was created for and remains at its core about community and diversity, one that has for decades been an essential tool in helping low-income children prepare for school. Going after Big Bird is like putting down baseball and rainbows and YouTube videos of otter pups. You just don’t.

Also, these metrics caught my eye:

The phrase “Big Bird” was appearing 17,000 times every minute on Twitter. At midnight, CNN reported that mentions of Big Bird on Facebook were up an astronomical 800,000%.  Facebook later said Big Bird was the fourth most-mentioned topic on Facebook during the debate, getting more attention than topics like jobs, taxes, Jim Lehrer and Obamacare.

(Both quotes via the original DKos roundup, btw.)

I remain amazed at the Romney campaign’s ability to spin lead out of gold.  Really: he had a good debate, just about as good as it was possible to imagine, given his own strong performance and President Obama’s seemingly tired and distracted one.  Leave aside for a moment the medium-to-long game of taking apart all the BS that he spewed, which is already putting in play the issues of trust and character that will IMHO flow to the President’s benefit.  The debate itself was clearly the best 90 minutes the Romney folks have had for a very long time.

Yet and yet and yet…Big Bird!

The line had all the sound of a prepared zinger, which, if true, means that someone with access to RomneyBot source code actually thought it was a good idea to personalize their device’s budget seriousness by cutting the throat of a fictional character beloved by millions.  And if it wasn’t rehearsed, that’s in some ways worse.  It means Romney revealed just a bit of himself, that gay-bashing bully-mean guy character that Ann keeps assuring us doesn’t exist.  If offing Big Bird just burbled out of his head and mouth on the spot?  Not a pretty window into the notional soul of a man who would be president.

Either way, of course, I’m grateful. Way to douse the glow of your big night, big fella.

Oh…and one more thing.  Mitt? Yo! Mr. Romney?

Can I ask a favor.  Really, not a big one.  OK?

Here goes:

Would you, oh could you, please, please, pleeeeeeze…

…..persist in your blanket hornpipe with that oversize fictive fowl?

Image: Peter Jakon Horemans, Still Life with Plucked Chicken, Apples and Beets, 1768.

Deval Is My Guy

Via the invaluable Charlie Pierce, we learn that Deval Patrick, Mitt Romney’s successor as governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (channeling CP: God Save It!), has very helpfully stepped in and filled out that bit of Mitt’s resume that his predecessor somehow neglected to mention last week in Tampa:

“I guess the main observation I would make is that (Romney) was a lot more interested in having the job than in doing the job,” Patrick said. “We were forty-seventh in the nation in job-creation. Real wages were declining. Our roads and bridges were crumbling. We had a structural deficit that he left behind. Business taxes went up.

“He did one profoundly important thing — really profoundly important, and I say that sincerely — and that’s health-care reform, and he makes no mention of that. I can’t understand that as anything but some kind of political calculation. The presentation he’s making right now is that he was Mr. Fix-it, and I’m telling you, he didn’t fix much.

“People ask me all the time what is the real Mitt Romney? Is he a conservative? Is he a moderate? Is he a pragmatist? I think he’s an opportunist. I think he does and says things he needs to do and say to win elections and to appeal to the people in front of him.”

I love it.  Perfect. Kills Romney with his friends, because heaven forfend they should dwell on the fact that his greatest accomplishment was to enact a socialist-fascist-will-sapping-dependency-inducing-anti-American-wholesale-seizing-of-the-health-care-sector-big-government-tyranny private-sector focused health care bill just like Obama’s – except for  its superior women’s reproductive health provisions.  And it does him no favors with everyone else, given that he did, as Deval says, botch the rest of his job.

That line “more interested in having the job than in doing the job” is going to sting too, or should — because it pretty much describes what he’d bring to the presidency.  Does anyone here recall any real act Romney has persuaded you he really wants to complete as President?

Sure — he’ll loot the place, shifting the tax code in his favor; he’ll shower goodies on his friends too. That’s how he rolls.  But he refuses to say anything detailed about anything he wishes to do — and by detailed I mean anything even a hint more concrete than “We’ll create the same number of jobs over the next four years a normal economy would.”  (via)

And so we get the delightful prospect of seeing Romney portrayed for all to see as the man who nonchalanted his last crack at being a political CEO — and is getting hammererd for it by another guy who has had to pick up after a GOP mess — speaking sometime after 9 tonight, in case you’re keeping score at home.

I wonder why the elephant has a sad?

A personal note:  I know Deval a bit.  We overlapped in college and became friends after we both had the great good fortune to travel abroad on the university’s dime after graduating in a program that made sure that outgoing fellows (me) got advice and counsel from returning ones (Deval).  I’m not in anything like regular contact with him now — I see him very occasionally at political events, and we hug, and that’s it — but in our twenties and early thirties I got to know him reasonably well.  He’s the real deal:  as smart as they come, very tough, and a good guy.  I’m  really looking forward to the speech tonight — when he’s on, he’s as good or better than Obama himself.

All of which is to say:  this election is going to be bitter indeed.  I’m scared of all the money the bad guys will throw at it.  I despair on a daily basis of a media to which I once belonged with so many members that seem committed to not doing their jobs.  But I look at the lineup coming this convention and I am relieved to see that a lineup the Yankees of the ’20s would have feared.  We’ve got the big boppers, and they don’t.

Image: Franz Marc, Elephant,  1907

 

David Brooks Is Always Wrong, Again–Both Sides Do It Edition/Tricky Dick Bonus Feature.

If I wrote for The New York Times it would piss me off beyond measure that I had to share type with David Brooks. I know from direct, personal conversation that actual Timesmen (or at least one of them) don’t feel that way — there’s a pervasive issue there with the self-conceit of a newsroom papacy with concommitant infallibility.  But still, it must gall on some deep level to know that all the hard work of doing actual journalism could get lumped in with the sloth and intellectual dishonesty of the newspaper business’s best two minute man.

Case in point: today’s Brooks keening that is almost a type specimen of the hackery.  It’s a perfect more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger column about the terrible nastiness of politics today (it wasn’t like that when honorable men walked the land!) that somehow manages to land on precisely the talking point the Romney campaign hopes will offer some cover for their candidate’s foreign policy and security weakness.

Let’s go to the videotape! (h/t Warner Wolf).  Brooks starts out by trotting out what appear to be casual, but are in fact carefully crafted assertions:

Maybe a campaign is like a courtship…Maybe a campaign is like a big version of “American Idol.”….Maybe, on the other hand, hiring a president is like hiring a plumber….You could make a case that most campaigns are a little of all three, though the proportions vary from year to year.

Study those phrases well, grasshoppers, for here you see one of Brooks’ standard tropes, and a measure of the skill he wields to much greater effect than lesser hacks like McArdle or his mini-me, Douthat.  What he’s written is mostly piffle, of course — but he has, as he usually does, inserted the crucial weasel words: “maybe…maybe…you could…are a little of…” Push him on any part of his claim here, and he can just pillsbury doughboy back into the “maybe nots” or the “perhaps you could make a different case…” and wobble on.

More important for his rhetorical aims, Brooks cleverly poses what appears to be an open ended list, which he then slams shut by declaring that “most [weasel again] campaigns are a little of all three.” What was a chain of musing suddenly becomes the ground of all that follows. He’s transformed assumptions into facts — his single most common stupid pundit trick — and we’re off to the races.

Up next, the pearl clutching:

So far, though, the 2012 presidential campaign is fitting into none of these categories. It’s being organized according to a different metaphor.

As an aside: Dear David:  Out here where most of us live, campaigns are organized in the material world, and this one now confronts corporations, metamorphosized into  people, along with crazed billionaires, dumping unlimited boluses of cash into the race.  The framing of political dispute in that context is not built on a metaphor; it is a direct response to an actual present, in-the-world circumstance. Just saying, you pretentious sack of wind.

But I digress…

This year, both organizations seem to visualize the campaign as a boxing match or a gang fight. Whichever side can hit the other side harder will somehow get awarded the champion’s belt.

So far this year, both President Obama and Mitt Romney seem more passionate about denying the other side victory than about any plank in their own agendas.

Another sidetrack:  Dear David:  I know that this will cause you pain, but I have to break it to you that campaign politics at this (or really any) level is actually about winning.  Denying your opponent victory is not an aesthetic choice.  It’s the goal.  Sorry, old tool.

But I digress…

Both campaigns have developed contempt for their opponent, justifying their belief that everything, then, is permitted.

Oh my! Mabel get my nitroglycerin! I do declare that I feel palpitations!

Both sides do it.  Of course!  How could I have been so blind?

In both campaigns, you can see the war-room mentality developing early. Attention spans shrink to a point. Gone is much awareness of the world outside the campaign. All focus is on the news blip of the moment — answering volley for volley.  If they bring a knife, you bring a gun. If they throw a bomb, you throw two.

Really?  First, again, it’s not exactly news to anyone who actual does politics that you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.  But anyone watching the actual Obama campaign claiming that they aren’t playing a long game as well as a short one isn’t paying attention.  In Brooks’ case, that means he’s willfully not doing so; he’s actively not-knowing anything that would confound his ability to depict his fantasy world. That’s what, in real journalism, we call failure. As for awareness of the world outside the campaign…let’s try to finish this screed before 0-dark-hundred and simply say that I haven’t noticed Obama ceasing to do his presidenting whilst kneecapping his eminently target-rich opponent.  Last I heard, walking whilst chewing gum is a requirement of the job.

Both sides are extraordinarily willing to flout respectability to show that they are tough enough to bare the knuckles.

Oh, Thank You Lord.

He actually just says it.  “Both sides…” do it.  It’s the one sure sign that points to the howler to come. For we know that in just about any dyadic relationship, both sides don’t do it in the same way, whatever it may be.  Given that it’s Brooks, we know that what’s about to come is a beauty of false equivalence.  Let’s see…

In November, the Romney campaign ran a blatantly dishonest ad in which President Obama purportedly admits that if the election is fought on the economy, he will lose. The quote was a distortion, but the effectiveness of the ad was in showing Republican professionals and primary voters that Romney was going to play by gangland rules, that he was tough enough and dishonest enough to do so, too.

Note two things:  Romney is. by Brooks own statement, a blatant liar.

See also that Brooks is a rather more subtle corrupter of the truth:  he claims that the point of the ad was to persuade Republicans that Romney is enough of a thug to be president.  I’ll grant him that, but this was hardly the only point of the Romney spot; rather, this ad is one of a series, still ongoing, trying to paint Obama as a failure as a steward of the economy.  To suggest that this was mere inside GOP baseball and hence, by dogwhistle implication, not quite a real lie, is itself a material distortion.

But remember:  Both Sides Do It!  So what was the Obama sin, equivalent to Romney’s out-and-out lie?

Last week, the Obama campaign ran a cheap-shot ad on the death of Osama bin Laden. Part of the ad was Bill Clinton effectively talking about the decision to kill the terrorist. But, in the middle, the Obama people threw in a low-minded attack on Romney.

That would have been this ad:

This,  Mr. Brooks, is what Harry Truman meant when he said that he didn’t give the Republicans hell, he  just told the truth and they think it’s hell.

It is a fact that Obama made the final decision and gave the order to attack bin Laden.  It is true, as President Clinton says in the piece, that we hire our presidents to make exactly this kind of hard choice. It is true that Romney publicly suggested that this was not a high priority goal of his, and that it was not something he would necessarily do.  The record isn’t obscure or controversial here.

And it is just as true that this is a campaign.  We’re in the midst of making a choice presented to American voters as to which of two men we wish to take on such difficult tasks.  Directly comparing one record to another is not just an ordinary feature of any campaign; it’s essential. There’ nothing “low-minded” about pointing out that Obama did one thing, while Romney had indicated he would not.

Plus, of course, there’s that deeper problem:

Brooks himself admits Romney is a liar. Brooks himself acknowledges, in effect, that the Obama piece is accurate.  He just doesn’t like it.  So he lies himself, and says the two acts — lying, and presenting a  factually supported argument that caused Brooks pain — are the same.

It’s just a coincidence, of course, that this false equivalence falls directly into line with what has become the chorus-line GOP response to the embarrassing truth that Obama pursued and caught  bin Laden where Bush did not and Romney — taking W. Mitt at his word* — would not have done.

I admit that there isn’t much else available to the political hacks trying to prop up the kind of mendacious and unqualified candidate presented to them in the person of the failed one-term governor of Massachusetts.  But Brooks’ problem, and that of everyone who gets a byline at his shop, is that if you lie down too often with the hogs, it becomes harder and harder to tell the difference in between one mammal and the next in the wallow.

PS:  I realize I never actually got to the Nixon howler up top of the column.  Basically, Brooks claims that Nixon ran as a plumber (and yes, he made that joke) … the guy who would come in and fix stuff.  I guess Brooks has forgotten about the Southern Strategy and the “secret plan to end the war.”  Ah well.

*A high risk proposition, I’ll concede.

Image:  Leonardo da Vinci, Lady With an Ermine, c. 1490

 

 

Popcorn For Everyone

I’m “working” on a couple of more substantive posts (look for them sometime in the next Mayan long calendar) and I’m at least trying to work on what they actually pay me for, so blogging is a notional activity right now…

But by every pasta tendril undulating off the blessed FSM, how in the name of strozzapretti can one pass up this (via TPM):

“You have to ask the question, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?”

Damn good question, actually, and even better when asked by one Newton Leroy Gingrich of the current GOP frontrunner-by-default, the Hon. (sic!) Willard Mitt Romney.

Combine that with the “documentary” Newt’s people are putting out there (well, a  Super PAC that, of course, has no actual contact with the Gingrich campaign, but sure as hell knows what to do), and  Rick Perry’s quotable quote from the campaign trail South Carolina — and what you have is our friends across the aisle working on their own damn circular firing squad for once.

Popcorn, aged tequila, and Republicans going all “we are the 99%” on each other.  What more could this city boy desire?

Image: Nicolas Colombel Christ Expelling the Money-Changers From the Temple, 1682.

Man, I Wish I’d Written Something This Nasty

They just don’t make invective like they used to.

I am something of an insomniac, and one of my tricks to get back to sleep when those 4 a.m. broadcasts from KFKD* just won’t let go is to pull out at random a volume from my copy of the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  That’s the last pre-World War I version, and it contains some truly brilliant Edwardian (and Victorian) prose.  (See, for example, Swinburne’s entry on Mary, Queen of Scots.)

So on last Wednesday or Thursday night — or rather, on Thursday or Friday a.m., 0-dark-hundred — I found myself nose-deep in Volume V, Camorra to Cape Colonyand cam across this in the entry on Campbell, John Campbell, Baron, who in 1841 gained the post of Lord Chancellor of Ireland for a grand total of 16 days.  The controversy that arose over that appointment cast him into mostly self-imposed political exile for most of the 1840s.  As the Britannica entry put it, that was when “the unlucky dream of literary fame troubled Lord Campbell’s leisure.”

Now, y’all may know I enjoy the odd bit of invective.  I may even have been called a bit harsh in some of my commentary on a few of our scribbling friends of the rightish persuasion.  But I can only dream of scorching earth with the zeal, brio and sheer music of this, on Campbell’s project:

The conception of this work is magnificient; its execution wretched.  Intended to evolve a history of jurisprudence from the truthful portraits of England’s greatest lawyers, it merely exhibits the ill-digested results of desultory learning, without a trace of scientific symmetry or literary taste, without a spark of that divine imaginative sympathy which alone can give flesh and spirit to the dead bones of the past, and without whcih the present becomes an unitelligable maze of mean and selfish ideas.  A charming style, a vivid fancy, exhaustive research were not to be expected from a hard-worked barrister; but he must certainly be held repsonsible for the frequent plagiarisms, the still more frequent inaccuracies of detail, the colossal vanity which obrudes on almost every page, the hasty insinuations against the meory of the great departed who were to him as giants, and the petty sneers whcih he condescends to print against his own contemporaries, with whom he was living from day to day on terms of apparently sincere friendship.

Smokin’.  Just an orotund symphony of Victorian disdain.  I love it.

And strangely, I just can’t place who it is amongst us know that this characterization of Campbell’s work calls to mind….

…

…

…

(Don’t tase me, bro!)

Image:  English School, Mary, Queen of Scots, in Captivity, 1575

*Ann Lamott’s name for the radio station in your head

I Love the Smell of Godwin in the Morning: Rich Iott/Gay Mexican Muslim edition

I’m as jaded on the snark-subtitled Hitler-in-the-Bunker vids as the next blogger, but this version did have a bit of a kick to it.  So in the spirit of Monday, enjoy:

Go Do Some Post-Health-Care-Vote Reading…

And start with Brad Delong’s front page — a bunch of must reads and a delightful sense of history (and literature) to go with it.  I particularly like that item which for now stands at the top of the page in question.

Image:  Vincent van Gogh, “Corridor in the Asylum” 1889.

Health Care Comment-Without-Words (None Needed edition)

Everyone Chill The Fuck Out

I Got This.

(h/t John Cole)

Image:  Guess.