The time a former Navy officer tried to tweak Andrew Jackson's nose, with predictable results.
The thing with Andrew Jackson is that even in a situation where one is naturally inclined to be sympathetic (as when someone tries to assassinate him) he still comes off as jerk.
Daniel Walker Howe is very good on how for Andrew Jackson his authority counted more than facts and could countermand facts.This willful attitude towards truth applies to more than just Jackson.
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1. So, god help us all, I have a few thoughts on the Synder Cut, Jack Kirby, Richard Nixon, Billy Graham, anti-Semitism, L. Brent Bozell, crusader LARPing, the motherbox, and techno-Freudianism.
2. I have mixed feelings about this whole Synder Cut business in part because it involves the popularization of what I think is the greatest achievement of American commercial comic books, Jack Kirby's truncated Fourth World epic. But alas in depoliticized & domesticated form.
3. The Fourth World was a long but aborted storyline, extending for more than 1,500 pages in four interlocking series from 1970 to 1973 (with a brief epilogue in 1984). Although cancelled mid-stream, it still stands as Kirby's stunning allegory for the upheavals of 1960s/1970s.
Bernie Sanders is one of the top 3 or 4 most influential Democratic Senators on domestic policy right now, so a magazine seeking to be part of that conversation should pay attention to his staff.
The Bidenite space in American politics is underserved journalistically but to be honest I don't know what a Bidenite magazine would look like (since Biden himself, quite admirably, is responsive to shifts in party).
Anyways, sending out kind thoughts to my former colleagues at TNR. Tomasky has a good record at Democracy at publishing an open-minded journal that is tuned in to current & emerging debates.
1. Neera Tanden, mon semblable, — ma sœur! Like @sunraysunray I had some complicated feelings about Tanden's failed nomination. I don't agree with her politics but (for obvious reasons) also don't like to see a fellow obsessive tweeter crash & burn.
2. Tanden business is rife with irony: her political identity over last 4 years has been as a centrist anti-Trumper punching left while trying to build coalition with GOP Never Trumps. Yet her nomination wasn't scuttled by Bernie but by Manchin, Romney, Murkowski etc.
3. The other irony is that Tanden is being scapegoated for Trump's sins. Official Washington was never able to tame Trump's tweets & GOP went along (only Twitter itself put an end to it). But establishment, of which Tanden is part, wanted to show tweets can be punished.
1. Really good thread on how fundamental anti-monarchism is to USA political culture & how odd it is that American right has now embraced the crown. But that also has roots worth thinking about.
2. Buckley up people, we're doing an old style Jeet tweetstorm. Some thoughts on American monarchism, William F. Buckley's spanking fantasies involving the Queen of England, Spanish dynastic politics, fascism, George Wallace and Jack Kirby.
3. So, the praise of the British monarchy from American sources like National Review & Heritage Foundation has struck many people as strange. Aside from long-standing USA anti-monarchism, the American right has long had a powerful anglophobe strain.
Nobody draws the Irish this way anymore. I blame cancel culture.
In greater seriousness, I know the whiteness literature is a little out of fashion right now, but it's hard for me to look at 19th century art & not conclude that Anglo-American WASPs racialized Irish Catholics.
Some people have noticed that the woman (Bridget McBruiser, an example of Irish depravity from Samuel Wells' 1866 New Physiognomy) looks like the Grinch. That's not an accident.
1. People are starting to wake up to the fact that Bernie Sanders is now one of the most powerful political figures in America. Here's Politico.
2. And here's the LA Times: Bernie Sanders, Power Broker.
3. Bernie the Power Broker cuts against two nominally opposed positions. There's the Hillary Clinton position that Bernie is just a whiny outsider that no one likes (in fact he's an effective parliamentarian) & the Sorelian left view that "politics is over" after 2020.