Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, Defining ‘Wall Street’)

“Wall Street. Collective noun for the financial community in lower Manhattan, derived from the wall that early Dutch brokers erected in the seventeenth century to keep out angry, tomahawk-wielding clients.”—American humorist and novelist Christopher Buckley, “Shouts and Murmurs: A No-Bull Guide to Investment Terms,” The New Yorker, July 9, 2001

Those angry clients have been turning into quite a throng in the past week or so, what with watching the value of their stocks and bonds shriveling in the wake of President Trump’s tariff maneuvers. Question: they’d never descend on the Capitol or even the White House after this, would they?

Well, if they did, they wouldn’t be “angry, tomahawk-wielding clients.” Instead, to borrow the term used about certain overly excited Washington visitors on January 6, 2021 that were subsequently pardoned, they’d be merely “tourists.” 

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, Defining a Wall Street Term Much in Vogue Recently)

“Downside. Term preferred by brokers to describe financial calamity. Considered less alarming to client’s ear than ‘loss,’ ‘crater,’ ‘nosedive,’ ‘tank,’ ‘flameout,’ ‘bankruptcy,’ ‘Chapter 11,’ or ‘destitution.’ Often used in conjunction with ‘potential,’ ‘risk’ and ‘exposure,’ all belonging to the client. Compare: Downturn—What a stock will experience as soon as you have bought it. Down—Direction of a human being after leaping out the window of an office building following a call from a broker.” —American humorist and novelist Christopher Buckley, “Shouts and Murmurs: A No-Bull Guide to Investment Terms,” The New Yorker, July 9, 2001

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, on the Face of China’s Leadership)

“Well, to be sure, China was clearly intent on becoming daguo (a new word in Bird's vocabulary), a ‘great power.’ But it was going about achieving this goal in a relatively quiet, deliberate, and businesslike way. It was hard, really, to put any kind of definite face on China. The old Soviet Union with its squat, warty leaders banging their shoes on the UN podium and threatening thermonuclear extinction, all those vodka-swollen, porcine faces squinting from under sable hats atop Lenin's Tomb as nuclear missiles rolled by like floats in a parade from hell — those Commies at least looked scary. But on the rare occasion when the nine members of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the men who ruled 1.3 billion people — one-fifth of the world’s population — lined up for a group photo, they looked like a delegation of identical, overpaid dentists….After days of studying photographs of the individual Politburo members, Bird still could barely tell one from another; though the one in charge of state security did at least look like a malevolent overpaid dentist.”—American novelist Christopher Buckley, They Eat Puppies, Don't They? (2012)

Tensions between China and the US are the highest in my lifetime, what with questions on the origin of COVID, allying with Russia, making threatening moves towards Taiwan, and surpassing the US as the world’s dominant economy. Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power into his own hands, in a way not seen in that country in decades, doesn’t make matters any easier.

Now, you can read this very serious Brookings Institution explanation of the latest members of China’s Politburo. But I must confess that it’s hard for me to think of this motley crew in the same way after reading Christopher Buckley’s satiric take on them in the above passage.

After more than a decade, however, Buckley might want to return to the subject of China. This time, with Xi’s continuing grip on the drills of power, he might want to show the Chinese Politburo of “dentists” themselves left toothless.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, on the Start of the Summer When All Mel Broke Loose)

“MEL IS CONDEMNED BY THE PRESS. Mel is pulled over by a centurion for driving his chariot at great speed, and accused of having a blood-alcohol level exceeding that mandated by Tiberius. ‘Arrest me not,’ he telleth the centurion, ‘for I owneth Malibu. And thou lookest a bit Jewish unto me.’ Sayeth the centurion, ‘Tell it to the procurator.’”—American comic writer Christopher Buckley, “Shouts and Murmurs: Stations of the Mel," The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006

At this time 15 years ago, the film industry was still reeling from the fallout over Mel Gibson’s arrest for drunk driving in Malibu the prior month. (That's his mug shot in the accompanying photo.) 

The initial report by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—that the actor-director had been detained “without incident”—turned out to be incorrect, with the tape leaked to celebrity Web site TMZ.com showing that Gibson tried to run away, then went into an anti-Semitic rant against the arresting officer.

Two years before, Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ had provoked accusations of reviving the ancient “blood libel” of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. His outburst during his arrest seemed to confirm all that his critics had been saying about this ambiguous, even problematic box office hit.

In the above paragraph, Christopher Buckley demonstrated his usual comic genius with his parody of the stations of the cross. If he had held his fire, he would have found even more material in the next few years, when audiotapes surfaced of Gibson telling his much younger girlfriend, Oksana Grigoriev, that she “deserved” to be beaten and that he’d “bury” her.

Four years ago, there was talk about Gibson’s “comeback,” given the Best Director Oscar nomination he received for Hacksaw Ridge, his first effort behind the camera since the disastrous 2006 film Apocalypto (which, Buckley waggishly suggested in his satire, Gibson had offered to rename Fiddler on the Roof II).

Fifteen years after his Malibu melee and PR mess, though, Gibson is unable to fully emerge from the shadow cast by his past anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic comments, not to mention his drunken, violent behavior—a history not just viewed in a different light because of the #MeToo movement, but also by actress Winona Ryder’s claim (denied heatedly by Gibson) that he referred to her in the 1990s as an “oven-dodger” (a reference to the Holocaust).

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, With a Satiric Mini-History of Irish Monks and Alarm Clocks)

“500-875—Irish monks introduce the concept of the ‘alarm’ clock during their missionary travels through heathen Europe, banging spoons on pots over their heads every morning precisely at 5:45 a.m., while simultaneously shouting biblical passages in Greek and Latin. The monks are able to reckon the time accurately by the morning steam rising off cow pies. This practice of ‘rude awakening’ (exsomnolentia molestias) is not broadly popular among their converts and results in a number of on-the-spot martyrdoms.”—American satirist Christopher Buckley, “A Short History of the Hotel Alarm Clock,” in But Enough About You: Essays (2014)

Will the Fox ‘Twin Galahads’ Lay Down Their Trump Lances?

“Mr. [Seamus] Colonnity’s valiant colleague, Mr. Corky Fartmartin, was joining in Fox's defense of the president. So we had on our hands twin Galahads tilting lances. But Mr. Fartmartin's efforts to link Hillary Clinton to all of Mr. Trump's calamities weren’t quite getting traction. Still, one had to applaud the passion with which these two ‘Lions of Fox’ defended their president. If only more members of the media were as patriotic. Mr. Trump returned the favor by inviting them frequently to golf with him, and told me to comp them whenever they stayed at Trump properties. Naturally, the media even managed to make these friendly gestures by Mr. Trump seem criminal.”— American author and political satirist Christopher Buckley, Make Russia Great Again: A Novel (2020)

Among the many joys of Christopher Buckley’s fake memoir by "Herb Nutterman"—President Trump’s seventh chief of staff—are the hilarious names created for their very thinly disguised, real-life counterparts. (Do I really need to tell you that Colonnity is Sean Hannity and Fartmartin is Tucker Carlson?)

The difficult aspect of writing this satire, though, lay in spinning out a plot more absurd than what has been happening in the Age of Trump—very much including at the media outlet that helped propel him to the White House.

The irony in Buckley’s passage above extends well beyond those names for the Fox prime-time stars. As any fan of Lerner and Loewe (or, for that matter, T.H. White and Sir Thomas Malory) would remember, pure-hearted Sir Galahad was loyal to King Arthur, a wise, judicious monarch who ruled Camelot with wisdom.

But “Colonnity” and “Fartmartin” follow—for reasons best known to themselves and their boss, Rupert Murdoch—a President governed not by reason but by rampaging resentment.

Like Facebook, Fox News has fashioned a monster out of Frankenstein: an audience that has turned angrily on its creator. A quarter century after Murdoch gave free rein to Roger Ailes to whip viewers into a lather of bitterness over the liberal elite, the network’s prime-time pundits have not seriously tried to convince them that Donald Trump lost the election fairly and that no amount of challenges based on nonexistent evidence can reverse that outcome--even as many of their colleagues have admitted the obvious.

How dismally they must have felt over a week ago to hear crowds in Washington chant, “Fox sucks!”—all because the network finally attempted to live up to its “Fair and Balanced” moniker by calling Arizona for Joe Biden.

As my friend Joe Ferullo noted in a recent piece for The Hill, Fox is hardly alone as a channel that traded objectivity for editorializing—it is part of a larger trend towards “the tribal journalism of cable news,” mirrored on the left by MSNBC and CNN.

But, in the current needlessly fevered transition, Fox bears unique responsibility for the belief of 70% of Republican voters polled by Politico/Morning Consult that Joe Biden's victory was not "free and fair." Their evening stars—Hannity, Carlson, and Laura Ingraham—have been particularly reckless in giving a forum for the Presidential voter fraud narrative.

All of this might be amusing, in its odd way, if Hannity and Carlson weren’t aware that Trump isn’t missing a few brain cells. But they are, and that knowledge opens them up to a charge of journalistic malpractice.

According to an article in Vanity Fair by CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter, Hannity has grown tired of the 24/7 burden of being on call as an off-camera sounding board and on-air booster of a President desperately needing attention. “Hannity would tell you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his associates told Stelter.

But Hannity dares not say anything remotely like this publicly. Doing so would not merely end the friendship of the President with his “shadow chief of staff,” as Stelter suggests; it would also mean that progressives would remorselessly chide him for shameless cheerleading for the President, that the network would lose access to and patronage from a still-powerful figure in American politics, and that Hannity would open himself up to the same kind of retaliation experienced by two other media personalities formerly friendly with Trump, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

And so, Hannity tries to leave minimal daylight between himself and the President. "Americans will never be able to believe in the integrity and legitimacy of these [election] results," he told viewers as Joe Biden built an electoral and popular vote advantage that Trump did not enjoy in 2016 over Hillary Clinton. He has taken to retailing the President’s baseless charge that an electronic voting system used by election authorities across the United States has cost him millions of votes.

Carlson has had to perfect a similar balancing act of publicly embracing the President while privately stressing out over the President’s fecklessness. 

In early March, after backing Trump to the hilt during the impeachment fight, he felt compelled to fly down to the Trumps’ Mar-a-Lago resort to tell the President that COVID-19 really WAS a big deal. That warning, the commentator said, was based on a tip from a non-partisan figure in the U.S. government with access to intelligence, who claimed that the Chinese authorities were concealing the severity about the outbreak (advice, it should be noted, that the President could have availed himself of if he paid attention to his daily intelligence briefing).

The President’s shift in tone after their talk was short-lived, as Trump went back to downplaying the seriousness of a pandemic that, as of this writing, has claimed more than 250,000 American lives.

Nevertheless, Carlson feels obliged to give oxygen to the conspiracy theories of this lazy, lying excuse for a manager. The broadcaster has claimed that the "outcome of our presidential election was seized from the hands of voters" and put in the hands of "clearly corrupted city bureaucrats."

The problem is that Trump keeps devising wilder and wilder tests of the loyalty of his Galahads. One would have thought that Carlson, for instance, would have gotten a lifetime pass from the President by inappropriately comparing critics who think Trump contracted COVID-19 through his own reckless behavior with those who say women in provocative clothing ask to be raped.

(In a blog post right after that statement, Wonkette properly gave Carlson's insanely offensive analogy the back of her hand: “There is, in fact, no known outfit in the world that is scientifically proven to prevent sexual assault. Masks, on the other hand, are known to reduce the transmission of COVID-10. We all know this. It's been proven.”)

But Trump’s multi-state electoral challenges—knocked down, one by one, across the country—may be too much for even Carlson to stomach.

First, Carlson was embarrassed into offering an on-air apology about ballots illegally “cast” by dead people when one cited case, James Blalock of Georgia, turned out to be correctly—and legally—cast by his widow, Mrs. James Blalock.

Second, after offering Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as much time as she wanted to exhibit her “evidence” of voter fraud, she angrily declined, leading to Carlson’s on-air explanation of the brush-off.

It’s one thing when Fox personalities elsewhere on the schedule are finding it increasingly difficult to hide their impatience over the endless and pointless electoral lawsuits. It’s another entirely when even the “twin Galahads” are showing signs of cracking under the strain.

Yet Murdoch, Hannity and Carlson may have no choice but to follow through, as long as they can, with their daily nighttime charade, even as the most brazen challenge to Presidential election results in American history continues unabated.

Like any major company, Fox fears a competitor that can slice into its market share. Trump has already called on his supporters to watch Newsmax and One America News Network, two rivals that have been out-foxing Fox as purveyors of outlandish conspiracy theories.

The “twin Galahads,” then, may represent Murdoch’s best chance of warding off trouble from a President whose candidacy he endlessly promoted four years ago, despite privately dismissing him as an“[expletive] idiot,” according to an April 2019 article in the Daily Beast.

(The accompanying photo of Sean Hannity was taken May 29, 2014, by Michael Vadon; the photo of Tucker Carlson, speaking at the 2018 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, FL, was taken Dec. 22, 2018, by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ.)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, Imagining a Female Flack Amid Rising U.S.-Chinese Tensions)

“An important part of her [Winnie Chang, head of the “U.S.-China Co-Dependency Council”] job, aside from promoting harmony and mutual understanding, was appearing on television and radio and writing thoughtful op-ed articles for the newspapers, explaining away Beijing's latest effrontery or outrage, whether saber-rattling at Taiwan or the appalling number of female newborns being found in Chinese dumpsters. Winnie didn't always win the argument, but she always made it with style. When the attack dogs of the right went after her, snarling and snapping, she responded with a lightness of touch that made their fury seem disproportionate or even pathetic. Winnie personified the Chinese proverb that says, ‘You cannot prevent birds from dropping on you, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.’”—American satirist Christopher Buckley, They Eat Puppies, Don't They? A Novel (2012)

As described by Buckley, Winnie Chang might be the most beguiling female produced by China since Madame Chiang Kai-shek quickened the pulse of many an American male politico or diplomat in the1940s. But even Winnie might find it to be a bridge too far to explain away China’s current distress and unrest over the Coronavirus.

It involves far more than discussing the quarantining of an entire city of 11 million, or of spinning the endangerment of the nation’s carefully plotted strategy of economic dominance. It also means tiptoeing around the regime’s squashing of blunt warnings by several doctors that measures needed to be taken immediately before catastrophe followed. 

At bottom, a spin doctor like like Ms. Chang would have to address whether an authoritarian government can really provide the transparency necessary to contain the spread of an epidemic that of this writing has resulted in 42,000 confirmed cases around the globe, including 1,000 deaths.

Let’s see if those birds stop at dropping or move on to nesting.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, on Parents’ Dread of Science Projects)

“No phrase strikes more terror into the heart of a parent today than ‘Science Project.’ Notwithstanding, a few weeks into the start of term your spouse will cheerfully announce to you—in child’s presence, so as to preclude any protest on your part—the ‘wonderful’ news that your child has selected you, specifically, to be his ‘partner’ in the aforementioned exercise. (Refrain from stabbing spouse with fork under the table; there will be plenty of time in which to express your rage, betrayal, and other emotions.) You are now expected to devote all your ‘free’ time over the next six weeks to devising a miniature version of the particle accelerator at CERN, in Switzerland, a home video explaining string theory using cooked spaghetti, or erecting a model of the human genome using 3.4 trillion Styrofoam balls (available at Wal-Mart). Unfortunately, the days are past when science projects could without embarrassment consist of store-bought ant farms (minus ants); hastily drawn cardboard charts showing how fast ice melts when immersed in a mixture of five parts gin, one part vermouth; a model of Sputnik using a Ping-Pong ball and two toothpicks; or a malodorous dish of dead tadpoles proving scientifically once and for all that amphibians cannot be left indefinitely on a hot radiator. In extremis, a project can be built around parent’s recent hospitalization for exhaustion.”— American satirist Christopher Buckley, “Homework: A Parent’s Guide,” in Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from “The New Yorker,” edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder (2001)

Essay: Dershowitz, Epstein, and the Perpetual Perils of Representing ‘The Dregs of Humanity’

“He had won acquittals for some of the most loathsome human beings on the planet. Yet not content to shrug and say that he had simply been upholding the purity of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, he insisted on going the unnecessary further step and proclaiming in front of cameras that his smirking client, shoes still sticky with his victim’s blood, was ‘totally innocent’ and, ‘really, a terrific human being.’

“Even colleagues who hadn’t lost a minute’s sleep in long careers spent defending the dregs of humanity shook their heads in wonder at Alan Crudman’s amazing protestations on behalf of his clients. Could he really have convinced himself of their innocence? Impossible. Too smart. It had to be more complicated: He had graduated to telling the big, big lies, daring God to challenge him. This fooled no one, but the media ate it up. The T.V. talk shows loved it. It got them callers galore. And Alan Crudman was never too busy to go on television, on any show, to comment about anything at all. If the Weather Channel invited him to go on to discuss the legal implications of a low-pressure system over Nebraska, he’d be there as long as they sent a limo for him. A short man, he demanded big vehicles.”— Christopher Buckley, No Way To Treat A First Lady (2002)

The accompanying photo should have been enough to clue you in, Faithful Reader, that the legal eagle in today’s quote was Alan Dershowitz. But, after Christopher Buckley’s spot-on description, were you ever really in any doubt? The surname of the media-obsessed attorney is the thinnest—but most hilarious—of fictional fig leaves over his reputation. 

At the time Buckley satirized Dershowitz, it was only a few years after the longtime Harvard academic had loudly championed a horndog, lying Democratic President facing investigation and impeachment. 

Two decades later, the political parties in charge of the House of Representatives and the White House have traded places, but one thing hasn’t changed: Dershowitz is still defending a horndog, lying President. 

And he’s still making people shake their heads, not merely for taking on controversial clients (Clarence Darrow specialized in this, of course), but also for trying to incinerate accusers’ reputations.

But there is a key difference between now and then: these days, it’s Crudman (I’m sorry—Dershowitz) who finds himself under attack—not only for negotiating a hideous “non-prosecution agreement” with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami that allowed then-client Jeffrey Epstein to serve a ridiculously light sentence for his sex crimes, but for allegedly being so friendly with the money manager that Epstein passed along a couple of his underage victims.

Perhaps the civil litigation involving Dershowitz and accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre will resolve these latter charges—if they’re not settled first (as a prior suit was). But in the meantime, Connie Bruck’s New Yorker profile has been so lacerating that Dershowitz has launched a preemptive strike against what he terms a “hit piece.” 

If you don’t chuckle over Dershowitz’s self-pitying title, “J’accuse” (in the 1898 piece that inspired it, novelist Emile Zola spoke out for Alfred Dreyfus, not himself), or the notion that Dershowitz is inveighing against a “partisan effort by a giant of the media to stifle the marketplace of ideas” (what is Dershowitz’s latest preferred media outlet, Fox News, if not “a giant of the media”?), you’ll laugh yourself silly as he extols his “perfect, perfect sex life.” (As for the latter claim: He undoubtedly blesses the fact that under law, a wife cannot be compelled to testify against her husband.)

Much like the current President he’s been defending, Dershowitz reveals himself in all his thin-skinned, egocentric ignominy, defeating every attempt by Buckley and every other satirist to make him more laughable than he makes himself.   

I am sure that The New Yorker vetted Bruck’s piece not just with its editors and fact-checkers but its lawyers. The profile can hardly be seen as flattering (the dissolution of his marriage to first wife Sue Barlach—including a contentious divorce—especially does not reflect well on him), but one might argue that it wasn't as bad as it could have been. After all, Bruck did not mention a particularly revolting defendant from early in Dershowitz’s career: nursing-home magnate Bernard Bergman, who went to jail on Medicare and tax fraud charges.

Since he first grabbed the public’s attention, Dershowitz has styled himself a civil libertarian, and he is surely correct in claiming that defendants are entitled to a vigorous defense. 

But, no matter how controversial, even disreputable, some clients might have been for the likes of William Kunstler or Ramsey Clark, these attorneys made a point of representing them for ideological reasons. In contrast, it has become an increasingly notable element of Dershowitz’s career that, the richer and more powerful a client is, the more vigorous offense the lawyer mounts.

Claus von Bulow may have been the first of Dershowitz’s made-for-tabloids clients, but by now he is hardly the most notorious. The icy aristocrat has been followed and arguably surpassed in loathsomeness by Mike Tyson, O. J. Simpson, and Jeffrey MacDonald. While not representing them in court, Dershowitz has also loudly supported William Kennedy Smith, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

What’s the common denominator among these half-dozen figures? That’s right: they’re all males accused of violence against women. A strange streak, is it not? And this penchant for defending problematic men looks even dicier when associated with Dershowitz’s denunciations of both statutory-rape laws and prosecuting “johns” but not their prostitutes, as well as attempts to smear victims like Desiree Washington in the Mike Tyson case.

Can you understand now how #CreepyDershowitz might be trending so strongly recently on Twitter?

The Epstein case is particularly problematic. Dershowitz claims that, out of more than 250 cases in his career, this is the only one he regrets. 

But his claim that Epstein misled him about the extent of the allegations rings hollow. Even if he is correct that he had only heard about a half dozen possibly accusers, that is not insignificant. And, by the time the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami tried to bring charges, it had identified 34 potential victims. 

Moreover, it is hard to believe, given the constant stream of young women around Epstein’s home, that Dershowitz would not have guessed that his friend was playing with fire. 

In short, Dershowitz’s “regret” might result more from his own legal jeopardy than from any qualms about having taken on such an unsavory client. (I mean, come on: This is the same man who said, “Every honest criminal lawyer will tell you that he defends the guilty and the innocent.”)

Whenever Dershowitz appears on Fox to defend President Trump, are viewers told that Jeffrey Epstein—the same shadowy figure, the network has reported constantly, who was always around Bill Clinton—won a remarkably lenient deal from prosecutors a decade ago with the help of the man they're viewing on the screen now?

Does the willingness of these viewers to excuse the President for nearly everything also extend to this attorney-apologist?

Just curious.