You’re forgiven if you don’t know this, but there’s a Democratic Minnesota congressman running for president. Dean Phillips is pretty much a Biden fan-boy, but at 54 he’s significantly younger. That’s really the only appeal of the guy — he’s Joe Biden from almost 30 years ago, which isn’t really the advantage he thinks it is. It’s all about Phillips’ ego.

If he handles his 15 minutes of fame well, he gains name recognition and positions himself to run for the Senate or for governor (because there’s essentially no chance he’d beat Biden). Perhaps, as a consolation prize, his candidacy draws other Democrats into the field and he can take credit for a sitting president having to sweat out winning his own party’s primary.

In other words, he says it’s all about Biden, but it’s really all about him.

I’m not at all interested in voting for him, and this weird grab for attention only diminishes my interest. He’s trying, though, and is campaigning in New Hampshire (I know, I’m dismayed that the electioneering has already begun in 2023). Unfortunately for him, he’s bombing spectacularly. He’s not very good at politics.

Speaking in a theater here less than a week after announcing his campaign, Phillips faced screaming and profanity from voters disappointed in his response to a question on a cease-fire in the Middle East. He was accused of gaslighting the lone Black woman in attendance, who was escorted out of the event — but not before a handful of other attendees walked out of the room.

The tense moment reflects the impassioned debate and nuanced positions within the Democratic Party over the Israel-Gaza war and underscored the question of whom exactly Phillips hopes to appeal to with his campaign. Though many Democrats express a desire for an alternative to Biden, it is unclear if Phillips is the candidate they are looking for.

Around an hour into the meandering town hall here Wednesday, 23-year-old Democrat Atong Chan rose to ask Phillips to support a cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war.

Phillips blinked rapidly as Chan asked her question, and then began his response by turning around the question to ask her about how she feels about the Israelis killed by Hamas in the conflict.

“I’m going to answer each of your questions, but I have to tell you, I took note that you didn’t mention — how do you feel about the Israeli babies? And moms and dads and grandmas and hostages in Gaza who were brutally murdered? I just want to hear, before I answer your question, if that empathy is across humanity or only for Palestinians right now?” Phillips responded to Chan, a Manchester resident.

He interrupted before she replied, “I am completely empathetic to them.”

Phillips repeatedly invoked his multiple visits to Israel in the past year and his role as the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs subcommittee focused on the Middle East, and told Chan, “You and I are the same.” Though he said he was “horrified and disgusted when I see Palestinians slaughtered,” and denounced Hamas as an enemy of both Israel and Palestinians, he did not answer her follow-up questions about why he is not calling for a cease-fire.

All the politicians, Democrats included, seem to be rushing to find a centrist position that doesn’t require them to condemn violence and murder. It’s not going to work, unless you’re trying to court the fascist vote.

Oh well. I think most people had written off Phillips long ago. When the response to his early attempt to appeal to prospective voters is “screaming and profanity,” I think it’s safe to say he’s done. Go home, Dean Phillips.

If you want to know why America is getting stupider, read these short accounts of incidents at home school conferences. The author has to go to these events — she’s selling materials to teach feminism, but of course she can’t mention feminism. She gets nauseous every morning before hitting the aisles at the thought of the rabid Christian/conservatives she has to be nice to.

One sample:

I am in Texas, my home state. A mom wanders in, picks up a journal, and reads about Kate Warne, the first woman detective.

“Where do you do your research?” she asks. I give her several sites. “That’s good, that’s good,” she says.

“Now then,” she begins again, “what is your slant?”

“Slant?” I ask.

“Which way do you lean?”

“Just historical facts,” I tell her.

“OK. But listen, I need you to do something for me.”

She reaches out and takes my hand. Apparently we are best friends now.

“Write about Biblical characters,” she says. “We need that. Especially the men.”

I tilt my head to the side.

“Well, we focus on actual women from history,” I say.

Wrong answer.

“Well, I will have to think about this.”

She drops my hand. The friendship is over.

Keep in mind that Ken Ham is the king of homeschooling. The dreck that floods these conferences is guaranteed to degrade the quality of the homeschool experience.

Note: I am not dead set against homeschooling — some homeschooled kids emerge from the experience with great educations. But it’s really, really hard, they are the minority, and the majority of homeschooled kids are there entirely because their parents are ignorant and don’t want their kids to be smarter than they are, and the schooling is often driven by religious fanaticism. Or nowadays, weird political fanaticism. MAGA parents don’t want their kids exposed to Liberals and Socialists and Ideas.

I would never have homeschooled my kids, because my wife and I don’t know enough. And we both have PhDs!

The drunken game of musical chairs has ended, and creationist/election denier/bigot/Trump vassal Mike Johnson has won. It was a revealing game, because this should have been an opportunity to show off the very best of their party, the people who would represent the Republican vision of the future. Instead, we got a peek at what they think is great, and got serving of sewage sludge.

Steve Scalise, white supremacist and anti-Semite? Jim Jordan, notorious enabler of sexual assault? Tom Emmer, dullard and heir to Michele Bachmann’s electorate? They finally settle on a low-key (most people don’t know how awful he is yet) Trump stooge. This is their best? He won because he was a cipher!

Finally, on Tuesday night, House Republicans picked the name “Johnson” out of the phone book. He was acceptable because he was unknown on Capitol Hill, even to many Republicans. During Wednesday’s roll-call vote on the House floor, Kay Granger (R-Tex.), chair of the Appropriations Committee, rose and mistakenly voted for “Mike Rogers” — the chairman of the Armed Services committee — before correcting herself to Mike Johnson. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), in a statement congratulating the new speaker, called him Jim Johnson. Susan Collins of Maine, top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, told CNN’s Lauren Fox Wednesday morning that she’d have to Google him.

Johnson’s anonymity was his greatest asset. In just his seventh year in Congress, he hadn’t been around long enough, or had enough power, to make enemies. He is the least-experienced speaker in a century and a half. But he has also been an avid election denier, Trump defender and promoter of the deep-state conspiracy, which appealed to the MAGA hard-liners who had defeated McCarthy, Scalise and Emmer.

The Republican party is fucking done, or the United States is done, a failed state. The next election has become even more important, because we have to purge these losers from the government.

You know, Tom Emmer (R-loonytown) was elected from the same district that cursed Minnesota with Michele Bachmann, right? He was a bad choice for the house speaker, but the Republicans nominated him anyway.

He got to bask in the glory of possibly becoming the Speaker of the House, 3rd in line for the presidency, before everyone counted the votes and realized there was no way he could be elected to the position.

So Emmer quit. Goodbye, Tom Emmer. We didn’t have time to complain about you.

I heard that people were walking out on Dave Chappelle’s comedy shows, and I was not surprised — he has a history of being offensive and expressing contempt for gay and trans people. But then I learned why they were walking out.

During his show at TD Garden on Thursday, Dave Chappelle spoke out about the Israel-Gaza conflict, which spurred a walkout by some of his audience members. According to The Wall Street Journal, the comedian first condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel before slamming Israel’s bombing of Gaza and the United States of “aiding the slaughter of innocent civilians.”

Chappelle’s comments were made after he said that he didn’t think students should lose job offers for being pro-Palestine. An audience member then demanded Chappelle to “shut up,” which elicited an emotional response from the comedian. Chappelle proceeded to bash the Israeli government for cutting off water and other essentials to Gaza and accused it of killing innocent people, according to those in attendance at the Boston show.

A few members of the crowd cheered and shouted “Free Palestine” in support of Chappelle, while others yelled, “What about Hamas,” the attendees said. Some individuals got up and left the show. At the end of his routine, Chappelle reportedly added that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” when speaking about Israeli policies and the Hamas attacks.

But wait, I marveled, I agree with Chappelle in this one case. I think that’s the only humane position to take, to both condemn Hamas and their terror attacks, and to condemn the state of Israel for their hateful history. This does not excuse his other views by any means, but he is not approving of Hamas’ cruelty; he is simply also not approving of Israel’s cruel policies.

Fortunately, I am not a comedian, so I’m safe from ‘cancellation’ (not that Chappelle is cancelled — members of an audience have always had the right to disagree with a comic.) And then I read that a prominent academic has lost his editor position for expecting sympathy for the Palestinian people.

Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of the prominent open access journal eLife and a longtime critic of traditional journals, says he is losing that job for publicly endorsing a satirical article that criticized people dying in Gaza for not condemning the recent attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas.

“I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians,” Eisen tweeted today.

The furor began on 13 October when Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, praised one of The Onion’s fake news stories on X, formerly Twitter. The story bore the headline “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.” Eisen said “The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university.”

Here’s the tweet that got him fired.

The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university. https://t.co/R8gufC9opJ

— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) October 13, 2023

And the “offensive” tweet from The Onion.

Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas https://t.co/pshItr0uUS

— The Onion (@TheOnion) October 13, 2023

And here’s a sampling of the responses.

I agree with Hector Rivera; they’re proving his point. Eisen was not approving of beheading babies, there was absolutely nothing heartless and callous said by Eisen. He was not expressing moral ambiguity, but moral clarity, by expecting that we’d have the same respect for all human life. I guess his big mistake was expecting that people would have some sympathy for all the civilians currently targeted for death by the Israeli military.

Hamas and Israel mark each day of war with new numbers measuring the accumulation of death and destruction. The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 5,000 Gaza residents have been killed so far, including 436 in the past 24 hours, primarily in the enclave’s south, where Israel has told more than 1 million Gazans to seek shelter from air raids in the north. The ministry’s figures, which could not be independently confirmed, are not broken down between civilians and militants.

Palestinian babies don’t count, I presume. I made a quick search of a few sites where the anti-“cancel culture” fanatics hang out, Bari Weiss, Heterodox “University”, Jerry Coyne, FIRE, etc. — ouch, that was painful, I normally avoid that crowd, with good reason — and surprise, surprise: they’re not raising a hullabaloo about the Eisen dismissal. They’re all about hating the right people, so I shouldn’t be surprised at all — hating Palestinians is a fine thing to do now, since, don’t you know, they’re all Hamas.

Look, see all the Hamas terrorists fleeing the righteous wrath of the holy IDF?

If you don’t agree they should all be shot or bombed, you should be ashamed and be fired.

We need to change the punchline of the joke from “The aristocrats!” to “The Republicans!”

I am coming off a four-day weekend, and I had decided I needed to get my mind off things, so my project was to read a book about a period of history I know very little about, a distraction from this period of history that is so thoroughly fucked up. I’ve missed out on the early 19th century, just a little gap in my education, so I picked up this free book via Kindle Unlimited, Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life, by Alan Schom.

As a book, it was OK: it tended to plod a bit, as it was a condensed biography that nevertheless tried to cram in as many details as it could, but I learned a fair bit. It didn’t take my mind off the current situation, though, because the early 19th century may have been even more fucked up than the early 21st.

I have a complaint, though. The author keeps telling me Napoleon is brilliant, a genius, a general impression I had from my pop culture understanding of the Great Man: that he was a great general. Reading what he actually did, though, it’s obvious he was a narcissistic psychopath who was a terrible general. He basically took the great wealth and manpower of France and threw it wastefully at grandiose campaigns that allowed him to loot entire nations, at the cost of great loss of life.

To give him his due, though, he was aggressive and would fight to the last man: he won battles because his opponents would hesitate and back off when they lost tens of thousands of men, while Napoleon would just hurl another corps into the fray, and afterwards, write back to Paris and order another levy of 80,000 men.

Often, that wasn’t enough. His Egyptian campaign was logistically incompetent and a total failure. Do I need to even mention his ill-fated Russian campaign?

That was a moment for me. I’m reading this book, I’d gotten up to 1811, and his Spanish adventure was floundering, the French people were rioting, Austria was mobilizing, and I suddenly realized that I did know a bit about Napoleonic history — wasn’t there going to be a huge catastrophe at the walls of Moscow in 1812? I heard a symphony about that. There was no real prelude to those events, one month he’s flailing about in his fracturing and fractious empire, and the next he’s marching off to frolic in the Russian winter wonderland. It was insane.

Also appalling: he lost, was banished to the island of Elba, and then…he came back, and the enthusiastic French people, whose young men he’d slaughtered in futile, fatal wars, elevated him again in patriotic fervor, and sent him off to Brussels with another army. The masses promoting a lying boob against their own self-interest is not a novel behavior, I guess. End result: 25,000 Frenchman rotting in a field near Waterloo.

What I learned is that the Great Leaders of nations can easily be greedy, self-serving monsters who will sacrifice the lives of their supporters for their own gain, and there will always be historians who look at the body count and conclude that they must be a genius. My cynicism has risen again.

But it’s not all negative news. I also learned how to deal with petty tyrants: banish them to a small island in the south Atlantic (far enough away that he’s not going to be able to row back), and give them a nice house and a small party of their sycophantic supporters and let them cheat at cards (Napoleon was notorious for cheating disgracefully at games of chance, which says a lot about his character) together. Give them five years to grate on each other’s nerves, and also, for one or more of the party to slowly poison the unpleasant ex-dictator. It was a little pocket of hell on Earth. The British dealt with him generously, and it was the most unkind torture they could have performed.

At least I got a little pleasure from fantasizing about the banishment party I’d ship my least favorite modern monsters to. If I were to exile Donald Trump, for instance, who would I send to accompany him? His own children, for sure, and Rudy Giuliani, and maybe Sydney Powell and a few Fox News hosts. It’s easy to imagine a true hell-hole made up of his own most persistent supporters.

Have you seen Piers Morgan’s interview of the Egyptian comedian, Bassem Youssef? I know, you hear “Piers” and you are immediately repelled, but it’s worth it — Morgan is so effectively punctured, without even realizing it, that he’s left floundering about like an empty balloon. Youssef totally dominates and leaves Morgan whimpering about ‘language,’ and also manages to skewer Ben Shapiro, all while making Israel look like a lying bully. And he does it with the most precise use of sarcasm I have ever witnessed.

Piers Morgan’s faux-gravitas is punctured here with such incredible precision pic.twitter.com/Wt09JfQexL

— Mic Wright (@brokenbottleboy) October 18, 2023

Absolutely brilliant.

There’s a really good question in there, too. What is a “disproportionate response”? Has a “disproportionate response” ever worked? Hasn’t Israel been engaging in an ongoing “disproportionate response” for decades, and has it brought peace to the region? Maybe they ought to try something different.