Friday, November 22, 2019
THE BOLTON TEASE
John Bolton is clearly miffed that the House Democrats do not seem all that desperate to hear from him. He keeps tossing out hints like a chorus girl lifting her skirts higher and higher to capture the attention of an audience of uninspired Moulin Rouge patrons. He reminds me of the great line delivered by Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady: "I'm willing to tell you. I'm wanting to tell you. I'm waiting to tell you."
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4 comments:
After Fiona Hill's testimony how much can he add? On the assumption that she is on the up and up (which she certainly seems to be) we know what he thought about it : it was a drug deal; he wanted no part of it and he wanted his concerns and other people's concerns on record with the White House lawyers. I presume that he wanted to ensure that when the shit hit the fan (which is what he seems to have expected) none of that shit would attach itself to him. There is more of that from a historical point of view we might like to know but it is not clear that from a legal point of view there is anything more that Congress needs to know.
Charles Pigden
Bolton can't add to the Hill testimony but I think it could be a tipping
point for a few Senators.
Speaking of the Hill testimony, here's a contextual linkage to her mentor, Professor Richard Pipes.
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2019/11/22/the-pitfalls-of-a-pit-bull-russophobe/
Hill was great in her testimony. She actually spoke proper English---not least with a proper inflection. No wonder her Republican Inquisitors were so befuddled.
To Jerry,
The link did not work. However I am not at all surprised to learn that Hill is a Pipesian sort of scholar as the tenor of her testimony suggested as much (though of course this in no way diminishes its value as evidence against Trump). There is an interesting and little-noticed divergence between Pipes père the historian of Russia and Pipes fils, also a historian but a bit more of a right-wing think-tank apparatchnik. Pipes père is famous for a conspiratorial reading the October revolution: it was a top-down affair with little in the way of popular support. Daniel Pipes on the contrary has a reputation for rubbishing conspiracy theories generally. There is no actual inconsistency here, since it is perfectly possible to maintain that although conspiracy theories in general are intellectually suspect there are a few genuine conspiracies which have had a big influence on world affairs, the Bolshevik coup being one of them. Nonetheless in my persona as a philosopher of conspiracy theories I have had occasion to cite Richard the father against the likes of Daniel the son, when arguing that genuine conspiracies (described by *true* conspiracy *theories* ) can have a major impact on history.
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