home again home again 

Sindria's Prophet #08

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [AO3]

** TW/suicide of family member implied (it is marked ahead with ((text)) so you know what to skip) ~POV shift Mori~ In my old life I had spent 4 or so years as a historical reenactor for the mid 1700's through early 1800's on my weekends. My group mainly acted as pirates/privateers and sang sea shanties. We had done performances on different ships, but every time we were invited onto a period ship I couldn't make it, so I was geeking out when I saw the ship we'd be taking to Sindria. I prayed it didn't show on my face. Sure it was exciting for an other world's nerd like me to get to see a ship like this in use, but to everyone else it was a normal ship. The ship had two masts -both square rigged with a fore and aft sail at the back for better steering. Considering the reputation for the waters around Sindria I expected a bigger three mast ship for strength, but who was I to judge?

With only two masts, this ship probably only needed a crew of about nine people to allow for different shifts. It didn't look like it had room for many passengers. No doubt, Sinbad didn't expect to be bringing four extra people back with him. I was in full on research mode by the time I got on the ship, and I tired my best to not stand out or get in the way. Getting to look up at the rigging from on the deck was an experience. After everyone was settled I'd definitely make a point to look around more. I might even take one of the scrolls out and try drawing the deck of the ship since I never got around to drawing that gorgeous room in the hotel. I considered myself lucky that no one tried to talk to me until the rooms were being divided out -I had been hyperfixating so I might not have even noticed if they did.

Studying the ship could only boost me for so long. About 15 minutes before we left the port I could no longer ignore that my head was throbbing from exhaustion. This headache was undeniably becoming a migraine if it wasn't one already. I decided that sleep was the next thing on my agenda. Luckily, I made that decision around the same time the rooms were being divided out. I had figured I'd end up in the same room as Alibaba, Aladdin and Morgiana, but Alibaba was put in the same room as Ja'far and Masrur. Everyone put their bags down, and headed back on deck except me. I sat on my bed with my head in my hands as I started to let myself fully calm down. In the quiet it hit me just how much I had been using working on the scrolls as a way to avoid thinking about my guilt and lost home. I'd have to find time when no one else was in the room to work through these feelings. There was no way I could keep it bottled up until we reached Sindria. "Excuse me, Miss Mori?" Aladdin had re-entered the room and closed the door. We might not have been formally introduced but he was told who I was. "What is it?" I lifted my head to look at him, and tried to keep my expression positive. I felt the waves rising. A Magi was talking to a Prophet in private; something was bound to happen. The walls of the ship creaked, and I heard steps and the floor boards creak in the hallway. The wave got a little bigger. Silence hung in the air as the boy just stood there. Instead of trying to guess what he wanted I waited. His hands tightened around his staff. Aladdin looked nervous as he confronted me. "I know you say you've read Fate, but I don't think Fate is something written in stone. It's something that everyone makes together. It can always change." The hallway floor creaked behind the Magi again. The wave was getting bigger. Someone was definitely listening in, and there was only one King that was a chronic eavesdropper.

"I agree," I said bluntly. I wanted Sinbad to hear my answer. Ten years ago, he came to the conclusion that Fate was something already written as a way to cope with his guilt and trauma, and he thought he was 'the chosen one' for being able to read ahead through the waves, but he was wrong on both accounts. "You do?” Aladdin was surprised. It must sound weird coming from someone who read Fate. "I've read more than one Fate for this world, so I know there is no one true path." The manga, anime and OVAs were a little different after all. "And if Fate couldn't be changed then I couldn't be here." I turned so I was sitting facing him. "You see, I wasn't in any of the Fate I read. I wasn't even in this world until five days ago." The magi took a few steps towards me with wide eyes. Aladdin had felt very alone for not being from this world -now he would know he wasn't the only one. It wasn't a reveal that caused problems on its own when Aladdin explained in the original so I didn't see an issue in letting Sinbad overhear about me either- I had already implied as much the previous day. I felt the need to elaborated. "Everything I do changes the Fate I read because I wasn't here. For example, only one of the Fates I read showed the conversation where you all found out about the Kou Fleet. Remember how I yelled at Alibaba? If I didn't convince him to leave then King Sinbad would have knocked him out, and Alibaba would be kept asleep with medicine for this whole trip. Since I was there this time, I was able to change that." "Oh!" He brightened up a bit. "I much prefer things this way." "I agree. Like this it will be much easier for him to heal." I looked down at my intertwined hands. "I have no idea how this will change the Fate I read though." Aladdin hummed a question mark, but he didn't say or ask anything directly. I answered the obvious question to my words, "I can't read a Fate that I'm a part of, so now that I'm here I can't read how my actions are changing Fate. Eventually, the Fate I did read will become useless, and I have no idea if I'm changing it for the better." It was only as I said it that I remembered that Sinbad was listening. I had basically just told him that my usefulness as his Prophet would have a definite expiration date. All I had wanted was to let Aladdin know that he might not be able to rely on me for everything. I definitely wasn't thinking clearly. Aladdin cut into my thoughts. "Is that why the Rukh are so active around you? Because you weren't originally a part of the Flow of Fate?" "Probably." I didn't know what else to say. I knew I had to be making distinctive waves in the Rukh just by being here, let alone with all of my changes. "Miss Mori, where are you from?" I hummed in amusement at that. "I'm from much farther away than you or your parents-if you can believe it." I was from the same world as the person who wrote the original Fate of this world. There was no way I could tell anyone that. He was shocked again. It was written all over his face that he was questioning if I was really from a dimension farther away than Alma Torran. Aladdin gripped the flute that he always wore. "Then... Are you the person he didn't recognize?" "He?" Which 'he' -oh. I lowered my voice. "Ugo?" I put one finger over my lips and looked at the door. Sinbad has to remain ignorant about the Sacred Palace; he's too self-absorbed. Aladdin looked confused at my change in volume. He followed my gaze to the door and back then nodded. He didn't look all that surprised that I knew about Ugo. I kept my voice low. "Aladdin, let's talk more about this some other time. The walls have ears on such a small ship. And I'm exhausted." "Okay. Rest well, Miss Mori." Aladdin spoke at normal volume. I heard a scramble in the hallway, the magi left, and I put my glasses in the top of my bag for safe keeping. I could hear Aladdin through the wall. "Oh! Mr. Sinbad, Mr. Ja'far, did you want to check on Miss Mori too?” "Uh, yes. How is she doing?” Was King Sinbad's response. I could hear the nerves he was trying to

cover up. "Real smooth there, Sin." I mumbled as I finally drifted into unconsciousness. --- I was a young man of 20 some years. I had started a family. We didn't have enough money for food. I ended up taking a risky job because I knew it would pay better. ... No. I'm a six year old girl? I don't remember if I had parents, but I remember going to visit this old dog every day. ... If life was hard, and I had nothing to loose then there was no reason not to bet everything I had on one last round. How could I return to my family without money? The last time I saw my son he was three. Would he even remember me? ... Ya know, when you grow up with someone and everyone else can see your chemistry you'd think it would be obvious that we'd marry when we grew up, but she met someone else. ... I knew things were bad, but I never even considered that my neighbor was stealing from me when I was at work. Bastard stabbed me with my own kitchen knife when I caught him. --- I wasn't myself in my dreams. Every time I woke I had to ground myself and remember where and when I was. Rereading the scrolls I had made helped. Just how many Rukh had merged with me, and why? I had no connections to any of those spirits while they were alive. Was it just because ghosts like me? I wrote down every dream I had; their lives might have been over, but they were a part of me now. I was too exhausted to go on deck, and I could feel that there were still more lives inside of me that I had to get aquatinted with. When I wasn't sleeping, I was working on scrolls again since I at least had enough energy to write and draw. My breathing was getting difficult, and I was struggling with temperature regulation. I wasn't okay enough to tell if it was my body struggling with the changes in my magoi, like when Sinbad took in all the Rukh after the Fall of First Sindria, or if I was just sick. After making sure I could still use magoi manipulation I decided that it was probably the later. I mainly left that room for food, and I waited until almost everyone was done before going. I avoided talking to others too. If I was sick I needed to minimize my contact with others. Alibaba seemed to be in a similar state to me. We both found that staying near each other when around the others made them less likely to approach us with the depressing cloud that hung over us.

Those that did see me could obviously tell I was unwell. From their words it seemed like they were assuming I was just mourning -they were only half wrong. It gave me an easy excuse to leave, so I never corrected them. I did feel bad for worrying everyone. The whole situation sucked. I wanted to cry. I had been in lock down back home because of Covid-19 for 8 months as an at risk person (it's still Oct 2020 in this story). I was literally in a fantasy anime world now. I wasn't given a better immune system, but my boobs didn't need a bra anymore??? WTF?? If the current arbiter of Fate was me writing fanfiction, then they had a lot of explaining to do. ... Who was I kidding? I knew why I would write something like this. I wanted to see more stories about people like me -someone with my disabilities and life experiences- get to be someone "valued" even if they couldn't be on the front lines. My migraine wouldn't go away, and it wasn't the only part of me in pain. I think I got palpitations a few times -breathing was even worse during those episodes. If I hadn't had health problems growing up I probably would have been panicking. I knew it was stupid to not tell anyone what was going on with me. But would anyone even be able help me on a ship? Telling them would just make them worry more than they already were. Aladdin and Morgiana could tell something more was wrong with me; I couldn't fully hide from them while sleeping in the same room. They must have let the others know since they gave me some pain killers at some point. It tasted awful. I'm honestly not sure how affective it was, but it did knock me out. ((Skip to the next paragraph to avoid the trigger)) At least I was left alone most of the time. I had no choice but to sit with my thoughts about Balbadd. I grew up mourning. The blood on my hands might not be the same as losing most of my loved ones back home, but it was damn similar to when I was in high school thinking "if only one of us had answered the phone that day." The Balbadd revolt would have been much worse if I wasn't there. And even if I had said something sooner there was little that could be done to actually stop Al Thamen when they had their hands so deep in that country. Even with Sinbad there to sway Fate, Al Thamen would still find a way to spill blood. Even if I told Alibaba days in advance and he tried to talk to Cassim about it, Cassim wanted nothing to do with Sinbad, so any help that came from him would be refused. Cassim was twisted around Issnan's fingers and out for blood. I did the best I could. My actions did save some people. I'd have to take solace in that. --- I woke up to something wrapped around me, almost like I was tied down. I couldn't move my legs. I gave up trying to untangle my skirt and covers from me, and just pulled the skirt out from under the cloth belt -kicking the whole mass off like a cocoon. I had put my underwear on underneath and I still had the tunic on so I wasn't left totally uncovered. Star light shown in from the window. I had slept through another day. I couldn't remember my dream. Maybe I had finally returned to having my own dreams. The other beds in the room were occupied. My head was still swimming. I felt trapped. I needed something. I heard the waves outside, and felt the waves of Fate washing over me. Their sounds called to me. Back home I had used the sounds of waves to meditate and stim regularly. I had been hearing them all this time, but I wanted to see them. I didn't bother to slip on my flip-flops as I made my way to the door, didn't even think about grabbing my glasses until I was already on deck. It had been so dark below that I couldn't see anyway, and didn't realize I wasn't wearing them. The wave of Fate I had been following lead me farther into the space. When I hit it's end, the adrenaline that had got me that far died out. The night air hit my legs and I shivered. It was colder than it was at night in Balbadd. I thought we were heading south. Did I still have a fever? The cold reminded me that I really should have put on

my shorts or something before coming out here. The tunic just barely covered me. My vision was going grey scale. This was bad. Really bad. I recognized this feeling. I was about to pass out from not being able to breathe right. I used to have fainting spells as a kid because of my weak raspatory system and needed to carry smelling salts for a few years. The last time it happened was about five years ago -I had been really sick. My head was throbbing; my heart was pounding. Guess I was sicker than I thought. I needed to focus on breathing and getting to the ground. I stumbled to the bowsprit (the pole that sticks out the front of the ship) as support. I needed to get to the ground safely before I collapsed. I'd gotten a concussion once because I didn't get down before the black out hit. A wave crashed into me from behind. If I hadn't been putting all my weight on that wooden shaft I would have been pushed over even though it wasn't a physical wave. What in the world was behind me that would cause such a wave? I removed one arm to look back as my knees started to give out. There was definitely someone there. Their color balance didn't match anything I could remember, but they were really familiar. Without my glasses I couldn't really tell anything -especially since everything was becoming different shades of black. And I already had bad night vision. The light was fading. Shapes were getting harder to discern. Even though I was breathing deeper I hadn't managed to counter the fainting spell. I was going down. I definitely fell, but it didn't feel like I fell for long enough to hit the ground. The feeling across my back was really familiar. Someone had caught me.

Sometimes I was able to stay conscious when I fainted. It was kinda like ending up in sleep paralysis but with a -20 to all sensory inputs. Seemed like this was one of those times. I couldn't hear what they were saying or see them. It was like my head was deep under water. There was a pressure on my forehead. Were they checking my temperature? When someone faints you're supposed to lay them on the ground and position them so they can breath easier. This person didn't take first aid classes or forgot or something because I was being lifted upwards instead of laid down. It was really warm and comfy though. I liked this feeling. What was it? Safe? Was that it? I hadn't felt actually safe in a long time. I certainly didn't feel safe in that house back home even after everything was over. Maybe it was the feeling of warmth and safety. Maybe it was the way the waves were moving. Maybe it was the numbness that comes with blacking out. But whatever it was had stopped the pain. With the pain gone I calmed the rest of the way. I felt my spine straighten out onto a soft surface. The warmth faded even though something was now covering my legs. I was in a bed. The cold was back without a source of warmth to leech from. I definitely had a fever if I was this cold. Damnit. I grew up with all sorts of chronic health conditions and have always gotten sick easily. Even though I was now in an anime world, I was still me. Was I going to die in this world from some common illness that was already cured back home? We might not have had a lot of money back home but I was lucky enough to get a job with usable health insurance that let me work from home during a pandemic. I could at least get medicine every time I got a normal illness. I was finally able to afford to get and keep an inhaler. Not that any of that was of use to me now. My motor functions were returning. I rolled to the side and curled into the fetal position. I had lost everything. No home. No friends or family. Who would want to look after a stranger with nothing to give back? I was doing what I could to seem worthy of the main cast, but how long would that last? The story would reach its end in five years. What would I do after that? What was the point of all of the savings I had managed to make back home if I was going to be Isekaied? I had been the main bread winner and now my family couldn't even use my savings because I hadn't left a body behind as proof that I had died. All of the thoughts and feelings I was still running from were flooding through me. I couldn't even distract myself with writing scrolls or anything. This was probably for the best. Pushing things away for much longer would be unhealthy. And if I couldn't let myself feel miserable when I was sick and alone, then when could I? I let the tears fall. I hadn't been a loud crier since I was a kid, so I was caught off guard when I could hear my own sobs. I didn't have it in me to hide any more. The bed I was on creaked but I hadn't moved. There was a new weight on the mattress.

I wasn't alone.

The concept that someone was checking on me hurt harder. I didn't grow up in a healthy environment, so now feel immense guilt when someone shows me genuine kindness. But I am also aware and recovered enough to know I deserve kindness, so the guilt always paired with an equal amount or more of relief. I felt a hand stroke my hair. They wanted to comfort me. And I wanted comfort. The waves washing over me encouraged me seek out more. I used what little strength I had to pull myself against them. Having undeniable proof that I wasn't alone and that someone cares was overwhelming. The relief made me cry harder. I'd have to thank them later. But for the time being I'd pour out as much emotion as they'd let me.

On Metamodernism

It’s tough to grasp metamodernism as an artistic movement but most of us live lives strongly affected by the concepts of metamodernism every day. You’re having a serious conversation with your friend about her mental health; simultaneously, you and your friend are part of a groupchat where you are currently making fun of the very friend you are supporting. This isn’t necessarily disingenuous; you are witnessing two different instances of a person and those two instantiations of you happen to be different depending on context and medium. In part, metamodernism is a kind of acceptance of our multiple selves, our tendency to oscillate between states or even inhabit both in a sort of human superposition.

I taught my friends about metamodernism in our groupchat as my friend Jarett consoled me via one-on-one text after the sudden implosion of my five-year long relationship and the fact that my life is generally unbearable—a fact that is more embarrassing when one considers how easy I have it. It’s sort of a shame feedback loop. 

As I was explaining metamodernism for my own satisfaction, I thought that I might actually make an okay professor. I could teach American literature. Maybe. 

So I get a job teaching at the local community college and my life slowly comes back together like a cut that heals. I am relatively respected by my students and I have some abstract sense purpose, the cracks in the surface of which are only visible if one spends a long, existential period of time contemplating the practical or, god-forbid, spiritual uses of an education in American literature what with the reality of a global climate catastrophe and the approaching drumbeats of right-wing strongmen leaders reaching positions of power all around the world.

But things are pretty good.

I get a parking space. I get an apartment that looks bad, then looks better. I start to open the curtains. I don’t want to hide so much. A year or two down the line I lease a practical car and people treat me with a bit more respect when they see me step out of it. I smile at people in the grocery store. At this point I can see peoples’ mouths when I go outside. When I see their mouths, they’re smiling. They can see my mouth. I’m smiling.

I get to know people and people think I’m lovely. The faculty all look up to me. How young and handsome and intelligent he is! He’ll sure go places, they say. And I do. I quickly earn a raise and then I’m head of the department. And so young! When I’m not inspiring awe I inspire smoldering jealousy. Women? Naturally. And I treat each of them with utmost respect. I value these women for more than the thousands of hours of hot naked ecstasy they provide me. I buy more fresh produce. I throw none of it out.

I single-handedly save the English department at the community college. Funding comes pouring in. Eventually, it becomes one of the premier colleges for literary studies in the Midwest. They rename a building after me. I just turned thirty. Before long, I’m offered a job at the prestigious private university in town, with nods toward a proverbial shoe in the door when it comes to tenure. Unheard of! But he’s just that good. My wrists and forearms become perceptibly thicker. People cross the street in front of traffic to shake my hand. I learn what the fuck “ketosis” is.

Then there I am one day in my cushy office. Rows of leather-bound books fill the shelves around the ample perimeter of the room. I’ve read them all, naturally. My hair has started to grey in places but damn if it’s not as thick and lush as the heart of the Amazon. A knock on the door. My office hours ended at one. I answer and it’s, oh, Claire from this semester’s modern American literature course. Of course I’ve noticed her in class. How could I not? But I’d always maintained a professional and appropriately avuncular demeanor in front of her. She’s twenty-eight, French, gorgeous. Naturally.

We discuss her essay on Light in August and I say to her, you know, Claire, it was the French who were among the first to notice Faulkner’s genius. She puts her hand on my thigh. In her accent that itself somehow resembles a beautiful naked body she says, The French notice lots of things. I slide my attractively thick forearm over the crowded desk space and knock the books and pens and everything onto the floor and—well, let’s just say that my life of success and talent has enhanced me in other ways. And it’s hot and insane and weird and papers fly everywhere. And it sort of just goes on like that for weeks and then months—the relationship, not that particular sexual event. At my age, after all the sex and drugs and joy and tragedy, sometimes I think that it’s the clandestine nature of the thing that really gets me off. Like I need more and more secret or shameful shit to fire off those tired old neurons. I start to become cavalier in front of the students. I begin to, perhaps, show my hand. 

I get another knock on my office, sometime in the Spring. Bill, I say. Come in. He sits down and we engage in a tense discussion where every syllable is laced with a double entendre because he can’t just say it out loud, for Christ’s sake. That’s just not how these things are done. He’s old school, but firm, Bill. She’s graduating anyway, and something tells me when we can finally be together publicly then the thrill will already be gone. 

The students already know. I’ve seen the screenshots. I’ve been memed. Things are tense in class and they can tell that I’ve given up. The fire in my eye that led to my meteoric rise has dimmed to a pathetic ember. Sometimes I take my Audi out on a dark highway outside of town and I press on the accelerator until I can’t go any faster. I have to stop myself from shutting my eyes.

One day in class, I look up from my papers and all the students are out of their desks, standing over me. They’re holding pencils and yardsticks that have been modified into edged weapons. What’s the meaning of this? They use my Tom Ford tie to tie my arms behind me and to my chair. They put me in the center of the room. I knew they would betray me. I’d always known. For years this notion has haunted the deepest recesses of my mind: these people, these kids, are going to be the ones to put this old dog down. Is this because of Claire, I ask. They laugh. They laugh because they think I’m an old fool. I am an old fool.

No, professor, Shellie says. She seems to be the leader. It’s much more serious than that, she says. O life! Everything I’ve ever done. I’ve stomped on people all the way to the top and now it’s all coming back to me, some sort of holdup in the karmic clerical system that led to forty years of consequences all delivered at once. Things were so easy for so long, so fun, that I forgot what it was like to live a life with consequences.

Shut up, she says. You’re here for a reason. What could she know? How did she mobilize all of these students? When did they make the weapons? How many questions could I possibly pose in sequence?

Professor, she says, we have one question for you. Anything, I say. And answer truthfully, she says. And I say of course, of course I’ll be completely honest. Okay, professor, she says, do you consider yourself… a historicist? At this very moment I know it’s over for me. Well, I say, it’s not so simple, Shellie. The mob is in an uproar. A fair bit of verbal sparring ensues. Shellie and the other students in favor of the transcendent nature of literature—whatever that means—and me in favor of a more context-based approach. Sure, if I thought that novels were a good way to learn about history then I’d deserve this. I’d deserve all of this.

How can you read these works outside of their historical context? What about Light in August for God’s sake?  The mob lashes out again—not Faulkner fans, go figure—but Shellie shushes them until the classroom is as silent as the dusty hills of Jerusalem. Literature, she says, is timeless. And this essentially breaks me. I begin weeping openly. You might as well kill me, then, I say. They set upon me like a pack of hyenas. 

A moment or an eternity after my head is pulled off my body like the Bacchae in that Euripides tragedy, I hear waves lap against the rocks. I feel in my face the salty breeze of the ocean. I open my eyes to find a beautiful Mediterranean island. It feels neither hot nor cold. The breeze from the ocean feels perfect, as though there were no storms to be found in any corner of the Earth.

Behind me, inland, I hear the sound of approaching footsteps. I turn around to find Vladimir goddamn Nabokov of all people. It’s perfect. So I tell him the story, how I was murdered by my students over two reductive and non-mutually exclusive schools of thought in literature—two schools of thought that are both perfect lenses through which to view Nabokov’s work. When I tell him he laughs his big Russian laugh and slaps me on the shoulder, and I laugh. Then he hands me a butterfly net and we skip through pleasant hills in that vast and timeless place forever and ever.

No. What’s happening? It’s all slipping away from me now. All the memories, the moments, the time, leaking out of my mind to become something ghostly, an image half-developed, a thought unspoken. I lift my head and look at my hands and there I am, lying on a couch in a high school faculty lounge. My hands are unwrinkled. My body is young. There is no Humanities Wing in my name, no tenure, no Audi. No Claire. Was it all just a dream? Could it all have been just a dream? Is it within the realm of possibility that such an absurdly bad trope could have manifested into my life naturally? Or am I the subject of a cruel and untalented god who simply bats me about and writes hack narratives for me to tumble through like some Sisyphean Rube Goldberg machine? Coffee. Need Coffee.

It’s all silly, anyway. Nabokov and myself cavorting through some weird Elysium? Ridiculous. If that was what the afterlife had in store for me, then Nabokov would probably be hanging out with Pushkin and Tolstoy while maybe Dostoevsky and I build a sandcastle. Maybe. But then, in all likelihood, Nabokov, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the other cool kids would kick sand in my face and walk off with whatever beautiful ladies happen to inhabit this weird Russian-literary Elysium that I’ve somehow ended up in. I haven’t thought this out very well.

What was this all about, again? Metamodernism. Easy. Let’s think.

Okay.

As I write this now, behind my computer, watching Youtube videos about sushi, wondering how the sushi will make its way into my writing through mental osmosis (not subtly, it turns out), I look at these instances of me, with the meteoric success or the banal day-to-day life, and I wonder who exactly I am. I am a thousand selves. I am nothing. I am trying to remember into the future who I am. I am a metamodernist—no, I’m not.

[ERS] Once Again I Will Fall In Love With You - Arthur

Route Preview: 

Year 2XXX, Japan….

One night, I was helped from trouble by a man named Arthur who came from France. He wants me to be his guide for his Japan trip. We started to meet everyday, walking together around Japan under that guise.

One day, I found a detective novel written by an author with his name, Arthur C. Somehow, I felt like I have lived this story before….

As though the turns of pages of a mystery novel, our encounter revealed a memory from a distant past.

[This is an unofficial work based on fan-translation. Copyright belongs to Cybird.]

Warning: Spoilers Underneath. 

Route Summary:

Japan, 2XXX.

MC gets cornered in an alleyway by shady men, and she’s internally panicking, thinking of a way to get out of her current situation. Suddenly, Arthur appears and calls her name, pretending to be her boyfriend to drive them away. MC doesn’t recognize him, but a sense of nostalgia washes over her, and she goes along with his act, thankful for his intervention. As Arthur leads MC away, she is confused by the aura of familiarity around him and wonders who he is. 

Later on, they introduce themselves, and MC explains to Arthur that she’s helping her friend look for their puppy - a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

Arthur: “Wow, your name really is MC, then.”

MC: “Is there a problem with that?”

Arthur: “No, it’s just that you have the same name as my most precious person.”

Arthur looks pleased with that revelation, and offers to help find the dog, saying that he has experience with the breed. She accepts, and as they leave to look for the dog, Arthur grabs her hand, saying that it was to make sure they didn’t get separated and to keep he from running into trouble like earlier. They soon find the dog and return it to its owner, and MC thinks to herself that Arthur was just like a detective, finding the dog super quickly after just looking at a map.

As the two walk home, they get around to making idle chit chat. Apparently, Arthur had recently moved to Japan from France, and was living in a hotel. MC insists that she thank Arthur for his help, and he jokingly asks her if he could request anything. She agrees, as long as it was within her ability to fulfill. Arthur teases her for a bit, but all he asks is for MC to guide him around town next Saturday, since he’s still new to town.

Saturday rolls around, and MC leads Arthur down the main road near the train station, saying that there’s nothing really notable about the town. Arthur doesn’t mind, telling MC everything seemed fresh with her around. 

MC becomes suspicious, wondering why he seemed very familiar with everything even though he says he’s new, but Arthur catches her staring at him and asks her if she was falling in love with him. MC answers with a very blunt ‘no thank you,’ and Arthur tells her it was a shame that she hasn’t.

They spend the whole day together walking around, shopping and eating, and when it was time for them to head home, they stop in front of a bookstore that was advertising a mystery novel written by Arthur C.

Arthur asks if she’s a fan of mystery novels. MC tells him she is, and that she enjoys the series, going on about how all its different elements and how the story somehow felt familiar to her. They talk about novels a bit more, and then Arthur brings up their next ‘date.’

MC bluntly tells that she never said anything about this being ‘a date,’ or there being a next time. He points out that he wouldn’t have brought it up if he knew she hated spending time with him, and he laughs, saying that she was still cute, even though she wasn’t being honest. They go back and forth with each other until MC decides to humor him, thinking that Arthur was just lonely since he was travelling alone.

Time passes, and MC keeps spending time with Arthur, all under the guise of ‘guiding Arthur around Japan,’ but there were also days when they’d just get food together after work. MC is convinced that Arthur’s a lighthearted flirt, but he felt so familiar to her that before she knew it, it became natural for her to be by his side.

Two weeks after they first met, Arthur and MC are taking a walk together when she brings up how Arthur would be returning to France soon. He asks if she wants to come along, but MC brushes him off, telling him to stop saying strange things. She thinks back to how he mentioned he had a ‘precious person,’ and she assumes that he was referring to her lover, but as she thinks that, she experiences a sharp pain in her chest.

Suddenly, they hear the sound of a young boy crying for his mother, and Arthur wonder if it’s a lost child. They spot the boy, and after Arthur calms him down, they both help him find his parents. Arthur points out that the boy has dirt on his shoes, which couldn’t have come from any of the buildings that surrounded them. MC then brings up a public garden overlooking the city where families frequented, and leads them to it. There, they quickly find the mother, and she thanks Arthur and MC for finding her son.

Arthur teases MC about how she’s become a detective herself, but she demurs, saying he’s much better at it. She laughs and asks for a high five for a job well done. Arthur is a bit taken aback, before laughing and giving her a high five. MC thinks to herself how that was the happiest smile she’s seen on Arthur, but then he goes on to say that she must have already remembered.

MC’s confused as to what Arthur was talking about, and suddenly gets flashbacks to a scene in Arthur’s Main Story, where they similarly share a high five for a detective job well done.

Chance Meeting End (Sweet End)

MC brushes off the flashes of her memory, thinking that it must’ve been from a mystery novel she had read and how she must have been unconsciously imitating it, since the detective and the assistant in the novel also share a high five after solving a mystery. MC tries to play it off, but Arthur caves. He admits that he thought it would be fine if MC didn’t remember anything, but he takes that back, saying that he has something important he needed to tell her.

Arthur explains it was natural for the story to feel familiar to her because the character of the assistant was modeled after her. He then leads her to a nearby bench, where they sit down, and Arthur asks her to listen to him, even if his story might seem ridiculous and hard to believe.

He asks her MC is she believes in reincarnation, and continues to talk about how they had already met in her past life, back in 19th Century France, after she had wandered through a magic door in the 21st Century. He explains how they lived in France with a myriad of people, and MC recalls having dreams of a European mansion where great historical figures lived. Those days were fuzzy in her memory, but she still felt great happiness during those times. Arthur also reveals that they’re vampires, and pretends to bite MC when she asked if he was joking. She pushes him away, and tells her wouldn’t actually bite her.

MC wracks her memory and realizes that the reason he came to Japan was to look for her. Arthur confirms it, saying he thought it would be easier to search for her in Japan since that was where she was from in her past life. He also tells her that if he couldn’t find her there, then he’d write a book, just in case it triggered any of her memories, and have her reach out to him instead. MC then connects that the author of the mystery novel she’s been reading was Arthur, and Arthur reveals that he’s the Arthur Conan Doyle.

MC’s surprised, and Arthur laughs, saying that she really hasn’t changed over the years. He says everything is exactly the same, although he thinks she’s even prettier than before. She then realizes that the ‘precious person’ Arthur mentioned was her past incarnation, and it finally dawns her that he has  been searching for her for the past hundreds of years.

Arthur tells her that there was no way he’d think of anyone besides her for the rest of his life. He pats her head, saying that even though she couldn’t remember everything, those memories were still in her somewhere and he’s glad for that. However, MC thinks about how long he’s been looking for her, and she wants to remember everything in order to properly return his feelings.

MC shares her thoughts, and he tells her it was fine with him, but in exchange, she has to make a bet with him. Arthur plans on doing his best to court and seduce her, and if he succeeded, then he wins. If MC kisses him, then she loses, and as a consequence, will have to fall in love with him.

He then continues on, saying if memories were no good, then he could always try to make her body remember, and he pressed a kiss on her cheek.

Arthur: I’m going to make you fall for me again. Are you prepared?

MC laughs to herself, thinking that she’s probably already in love with him, but she still confidently accepts his challenge.

MC: (Even without my memories, it feels like my heart already belongs to Arthur.)

She recognizes that even though she’s bound to lose this bet, since it’s Arthur, it was surely going to be fun.

MC: (This happiness that feels like it’s going to overflow… Surely this also belongs to the ‘me’ right now, even if I remember nothing.)

Fated Love End (Premium End)

MC regains her memories from 19th Century France, and they end up back at Arthur’s hotel to catch up.

MC sees the manuscript of a book he wrote on his desk, and Arthur confirms that he wrote the book based on their time together. She’s surprised that Arthur C. is, in fact, Arthur, and explains that he wrote the book, hoping that if she read it, she’d reach out to him.

MC recalls a bet they made in her past life, where she says that if there was such a thing as reincarnation, she wanted to make a bet as to who can find the other first. If Arthur finds her first, then he wins, and if MC finds him first, then she wins.

After regaining the memory of their bet, Arthur smiles and says it’s a very long running bet, but he doesn’t bet on anything he doesn’t have confidence in, and he intends on collecting his reward from MC now.

The kiss, and MC wonders to herself what would’ve happened if she hadn’t recalled all her memories, if Arthur would have just returned to France, but she decides to be content with what she has now, with the happiness she feels being in Arthur’s arms.

Note: This is where the paid Epilogue begins.

Secret End

In France, 2XXX.

Arthur is packing his bags for his trip. Isaac walks by and asks if he’s going to Japan again, and he confirms it. He tells Isaac that even though he’s been all across the world in search of MC, Japan just felt like the right place to look. Isaac asks him how he’s so sure, but Arthur just teases him, saying that Isaac was being cute for worrying about him. Arthur looks around the mansion and sighs, think that even though time has passed, everything remains exactly the same. Almost as if the mansion was waiting for MC to return. 

Some time after, Arthur is in Japan, strolling along the city and wondering what to do now that he was in Japan, and starts thinking that it would’ve been much more fun if he was there with MC. He says to himself that he wants to see MC again, and just as he says that, he overhears some men harassing a woman. He decides to check it out and help her.

As he approaches, he manages to get a glimpse of the woman’s face. He stops dead in his tracks in complete shock, and without even being aware of it, Arthur calls MC’s name. MC turns his direction, and he’s a bit surprised that even the name was the same.

But then he notices that MC was looking at him like she would any random man that just called her name, and there was no sense of recognition in her gaze.

Arthur: (Ah, so she doesn’t remember… Of course. Even though I had already prepared myself for this scenario–)

Arthur is a bit disappointed, but he quickly gets over it, thinking to himself that even if MC doesn’t remember, then he’ll make her fall for him again. He approaches MC and saves her under the guise of being her boyfriend, even throwing in a cheeky wink along the way. As the scene ends, Arthur thinks that finding MC again had to be fate, and that even if she doesn’t remember him, he’ll make her fall in love once again.

—and then the time that remained frozen until now, once again resumed flowing.

Event Info Post | Napoleon Route | Isaac Route

Peach cental

Good evening from the city of peaches!

Today was a travel day, but it was the least cumbersome of all my travel days, so I still had time to Do Stuff. So I’ve been busy, and I’m definitely going to bed early considering I have already reserved a train ticket for tomorrow at 8:30, haha.

So, from Fukuoka to Okayama! Here we go. As it turns out this entry got long, so apologies in advance...

I got up early to have breakfast in peace, had a very quick check-out, and proceeded to make my way to the station. I think this might be the first day my legs are legitimately protesting, and that’s mostly because I had to drag my suitcase with me. Thankfully, my hotel is pretty close to the station, and the entrance for the shinkansen trains is nearby as well. Of course, I was way too early, so I watched the Nozomi (the fastest of the shinkansen, which I can’t use with m JR pass) come and go before my train showed up, the Sakura.

It was a little under two hours to Okayama, passing Hiroshima and Fukuyama on the way. Fukuyama castle is a literal stone’s throw from the station, but I noticed the main tower was partially covered, so I’m glad I went to see that one last year already!

After a smooth trip, I arrived at Okayama station and all but went deaf upon exiting, because there were all kinds of events going on. Today is a national holiday (Health and Sports day I think), so I guess that had something to do with it. Also, it’s hot! I was already regretting my warm pants, but what can you do.

I’m staying in the same hotel as last year, which is very easily found from the station anyway, so that was only a quick trip. In the lobby, I took out the necessities for my ‘daily backpack’ and then asked if I could leave the rest of my luggage here, as I was too early for check-in. Thankfully I could, haha, because I had Plans that would be significantly troublesome if I had to drag my suitcase with me.

So, out of the hotel I went, following the Momotarou street down to Okayama castle! Okay, two things: Momotarou is everywhere here. He’s a character from a folk tale, in which an elderly couple found a giant peach in the river and upon cutting it open, a boy jumped out. They raised the boy as their own and he ended up becoming a hero, as he teamed up with a dog, pheasant and a monkey and went on to defeat ogres. His name is Momotarou, which basically means ‘peach boy’. The story is more or less set in the region – there’s a prince called Kibitsuhiko whose story might have inspired Momotarou, and the shrines dedicated to him can be found in Okayama. I talked about this for a bit last year too, when I stayed in Okayama for the first time. Anyway, this has a predictable result: peaches and Momotarou everywhere. So down from Peach boy Road, onto the castle!

I visited the castle last year with my friend, but there was a little something we didn’t get to do, so I was taking this chance to rectify that.

Upon arrival however, it turned out there was a festival of some kind going on. Fun atmosphere, but it did mean it was pretty busy, hmm.

Into the castle I went anyway! They want you to start the tour on the top floor, so I meekly followed that advice and made my way down. The Thing I wanted to do would start again at 1 PM, so I took my time exploring the different floors and reading the Japanese signage (not a lot was translated except for titles, but I found the general guide boards pretty easy to follow). There was also a special exhibition with works by Masago Kimiya, who has an affinity for drawing historical figures from the Three Kingdoms and Warring States eras. I had no idea what to expect, but these works were beautiful! They look more like glamorous photos than the stylized portraits from back then, and to top it off, the hall told the story of Ukita Hideie, who completed the castle after taking over from his father. He was a big name, actually. (History lesson to follow!)

The little states making up Japan until 1600 were at constant war with each other, called the Sengoku (Warring States) era. Attempts to unify the country were made by Oda Nobunaga and then Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideie sided with them and ended up being one of Hideyoshi’s five counselors, along with a guy called Tokugawa Ieyasu. Yeah, there he is again, That One Guy. Anyway, after Hideyoshi was assassinated, Ieyasu took control and two camps emerged: the one on Ieyasu’s side, and the loyalists to Toyotomi, including Hideie. At the decisive battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Ieyasu’s side won, unified Japan, and Hideie was to be punished. He fled to what is now Kagoshima until he was eventually betrayed and exiled to the island of Hachijojima, Tokyo, where he lived out his life until his 80s (!). His wife, princess Gou, stayed loyal to him and kept sending him support (like food, since rice barely grew on the island) until she passed away.

Later the castle went to the Ikeda clan, and it was being maintained until the Meiji Restauration in 1869. The Meiji government wanted to break with the samurai era and actually tore down a lot of castles, although it left Okayama castle alone, filling the outer moats and leaving the rest as it is. In 1945, bombers destroyed the castle as yet with the exception of the Tsukimi Yagura (watch tower for moon watching), and so the current reconstruction is from the 1960s. The lion-fish on top are gilded now, but in the old days, the main keep had gilded roof tiles too. It was thus also known as the Golden Crow castle, since the exterior is mostly black.

Whew, so far for a lot of history, haha. Can you tell I really like this castle? I definitely do. So much so that I read up on it, haha, although the exhibition hall was also very informative and had information in English.

On the second floor, there were some photo spots and the Thing I wanted to do: dressing up as a feudal era princess! Okay, look, the kimono on display is really pretty and the dress up is free, come on, I’m not gonna pass up on that opportunity. I had to hang around here for quite a while, as I was about an hour early, but once it was time, I was first in line! And wow, they’re not playing cheap here even though this is free. I got dressed up in a fancy kimono, got to pose all over the special room, got a wig on, got dressed up in another fancy kimono, and overall really got to make the most out of this experience. I checked my camera; there are literally a hundred pictures on there! One hundred! Wow.

So that was a really fun activity and I’m really glad I came back for it. I got a castle parfait at the café (with peach, of course, I was surprised they even offered strawberry as a different choice), and then went back outside again. I think the festival had a stage for a Momotarou something or another, geesh…

I made my way back to the station, foregoing checking into my hotel as I had another destination in mind: nearby Kurashiki!

You might remember last year’s floodings which hit Japan hard. Kurashiki was one of the cities hit, and so we didn’t end up visiting despite how close it is. So now for a second attempt, I took the local train bound for Kurashiki, which took like fifteen minutes. Told you it was close, haha.

Kurashiki is mostly known for its Bikan historical area, which is the old merchant quarter from back when the city became a river port and was so important it was placed under direct control of the shogunate. Many of the buildings are 17th century style wooden warehouses, now filled with restaurants and shops for the most part. There are also some curious museums nearby. (There was also a little shop with a board outside for figure skater Daisuke Takahashi, and that’s how I found out that both he and Keiji Tanaka hail from Kurashiki, haha. The more you know!)

I mostly went for the views, which were definitely a treat once I found the Bikan historical area: the description ‘Venice of Japan’ is surprisingly apt. There are tourist boats going through the canal area and they’re beautifully framed by the willows here. It’s also apparently a very popular backdrop for cosplayers, since I saw a TON of people dressed up as their favourite characters and posing for pictures here, haha. Guess that’s what I get for going on a holiday. It was fun to see though!

Nearby was Ivy Square, also aptly named as it contains buildings overgrown with ivy. It was the area where the first modern cotton mill of Japan was built, and the company from back then is actually still active.

I only wandered around here for a short bit though, and then found one of the little museums I mentioned. I hopped into the Momotarou Karakuri museum! Yep, peach boy strikes again. Karakuri apparently refers to a type of doll, which I did indeed see here, but the museum itself as a strange mix between optical illusions and a museum of Momotarou memorabilia. Not the first combination I would have thought of myself, but the staff was enthusiastic and led me through the illusions (all Momotarou/peach themed of course), encouraging me to try them out and taking a picture with my head through a giant peach, so now I can pretend I’m Momotarou myself, haha. Granted, the illusions weren’t super new, but they were very open about that (‘trick first invented 150 years ago’ listed), and it was still fun going through them. Next was a delightfully trippy little maze full of ghosts and ogres, since Momotarou had gone on a quest to defeat the ogres after all. I got better scares out of this one than out of the self-proclaimed haunted house in Huis ten Bosch, Sasebo some years ago, haha.

I was then led upstairs, which was very interesting as this was the museum part, showcasing all knids of Momotarou goods dating back hundreds of years in some cases. There was also a little English book with the story on display, and apparently they made a Mickey Mouse set at one point with Donald, Goofy, and Chip and Dale as the animal companions, haha.

This was a nice little break. Parts of it were definitely aimed at kids, but that didn’t make it any less fun.

 I had another museum planned, but I was getting rather tired, so after a quick round on Ivy Square, I walked back to the station. This time just taking the main road, because I had tried to take the shopping street route on my way here, but I somehow managed to – uh, mess up on going right ahead and had to google Maps my way out, oops. So the walk back to the station was significantly shorter, ahem.

After a matcha latte at the station, I went back to Okayama and decided to reserve some tickets for trains. Of course I had to secure my one-way trip to Tokyo, as that one will take about 4 hours, yikes. I should arrive at Shinagawa station around 12:30 now, plus half an hour added to get to Ikebukuro, so at least that’s not the entire day wasted on trains, haha. Although the shinkansen are super nice. There’s enough space for me to put my luggage in front of me, although it can get a little cramped for hours on end.

And then my second ticket: tomorrow, to Matsuyama! This is also quite the trip, over 2.5 hours, but it’s just one train, so I can hop on, doze off, and hop out at the terminal station, haha. I wanted to visit Matsuyama last year, but due to the same floodings, it was impossible at the time. And so I wasn’t going to wait much longer and made it my first daytrip from Okayama this time.

Anyway, after checking in to my hotel, I went back to the station for dinner, lamented the fact that one of my favourite restaurants from last year was closed for renovations along with a big part of the food court, found a different restaurant, and promptly ordered their super cute Halloween plate, haha. And now I’m back at the hotel for tonight!

 I suspect my report and photos will be up a little late tomorrow, ahem. Have a good evening, see you!

Writing a historical novel #6 – research is intimidating (but has to be done) pt 4 of 4 – breakthrough

(image: ’Black Angels’ by George Barnard)

For the past ten years I have been working on a historical novel, Drapetomania, Or, The Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, lovers, set in slavery times in the American Deep South, and telling of the passionate love between two men, Cyrus and Abednego, and their bid for freedom from bondage – out now! As I worked on a final edit of the 183,000 word manuscript, I began reflecting on the process. These are some of my thoughts.

Plowing through 1700pp of slavery narratives, alongside historical accounts, contextualizing information and contemporary fictions (including, belatedly, Huckleberry Finn, which I realised I had never read, and is, it turns out, a post civil war tale of pre-war slavery times and thus a curious, paradoxical exercise in recent nostalgia), was ultimately liberating, and in several ways, some obvious, some less so.

The most basic change was simply this: I had moved from knowing nothing (much) to knowing a great deal about historical representations of slavery experiences and the context in which they arose. Funny how one can internalize ‘not knowing’ as an identity, but I realised that for half a decade I had done so.

While modern history is extremely useful in framing the past, there’s nothing like reading contemporary material to give you a feel for the idiom, for the aesthetic and therefore mental landscape of a period; and allowing some sense of that to enter your writing fairly much automatically creates an authenticity of tone without a need to overdo quaint dialogue or overwork period terms or references (which is very tempting): sometimes a mule cart can just be a mule cart and need not be a barouche or phaeton, and so on.

Behind that commonsense evocation of another time is an interesting – and in its way somewhat liberating – philosophical point: what makes a historical novel feel real to any (non-academic) reader is how far it seems to embody the tone and timbre of novels that were written at the time in which it is set. Yet those novels – that is, those fictions – were and are themselves cultural constructs, informed by the personalities and perceptions, quirks and kinks of their authors, as well as by what was generally permitted at their time of writing. Did real people ever talk as Dickens’ characters talk? Or Jane Austen’s? Probably not. Or maybe yes, kind of. Did they also say shit or cunt? We can’t penetrate very far beyond that essentially literary limit of possible knowledge – we literally cannot know, as there are no other records of direct speech, (beyond court testimonials, themselves generally ‘written up’ by officials who sometimes added literary flourishes of their own, and would have at the least redacted swearing and blasphemy), how people really spoke back then – and so (I believe) the modern writer is free to permit him/herself to improvise around general impressions without being too weighed down by forensic fears about historical accuracy of register once obvious anachronisms have been tidied away.

A further level of literary reflexivity arises in consideration of slave narratives, which, being as they tend to be billed as ‘the true account of’, it’s natural for us to approach initially as if they are simple primary sources. This is to ignore the attention those who escaped slavery paid to ensuring that their autobiographies conformed both to the existing novelistic conventions of the time, and (soon enough) to the evolving (oftentimes best-selling) new genre of The Slave Narrative itself. So these historical artifacts are not simply ‘true’ – they too are literary constructs; and indeed, reading them I was struck by how often they cleaved to conventions of romance novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – this is perhaps most strongly evident in the narrative of Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent), one of the few women to write her story (& she was proprietorial about it too). Ironically, to a modern reader, the flourishes – the ‘Picture if you can, dear reader’ asides – that would have drawn in a nineteenth century reader are somewhat off-putting nowadays: we hope for the unvarnished truth of experience, or a truth that seems unvarnished, anyway.

Helpfully for the fiction writer, the narratives reveal that slaves endured wildly differing conditions synchronically as well as diachronically, and that plantations differed hugely in how they were run, what those enslaved could hope to get away with, what freedoms were allowed or curtailed in terms of movement, what punishments imposed; even such grimly basic matters as whether shoes were available. So as a non-academic I could write my story without too much anxiety that I was failing to capture some single, singular, detailedly true and therefore authentic monolithic account of things only accessible to scholars. There were many experiences, and those we have are only those recorded: other experiences were possible.

Another point to note as far as using slavery narratives as a resource is that the published tales – some ‘as told to’ and therefore mediated to unknown extents by their white amanuenses – were intended to be read by a white audience. Therefore there is behind them of necessity a hidden, largely unspoken version that just occasionally breaks the waterline: the account that might have been written for a black readership, had such a thing then been imaginable. This sense of things unsaid, of things left out, was liberating to me from the point of view of presuming to create a fictional tale: the realization that there was something beyond a greater level of explicitness about the facts of life that might legitimately be added to both historical records and autobiographical writing, something beyond my simple initial impulse to realistically render passionate same-sex love in such a time and place.

While the slave narratives are moving, disturbing and full of insights, they often lack contextualizing detail for the modern reader of 150-200 years later. Writing about my own life now I might say something today like, ‘I topped up my Oyster and got the tube to town’ – perfectly comprehensible to any reader in C21st London. However, in 200 years’ time every element of that statement might be wholly obscure, (‘perhaps he means he ate a heavy meal of shellfish before setting out?’) and it’s certainly lacking in evocative detail – use of money or a payment card, yellow disc on ticket machine, automatic barriers, escalators, sliding doors of carriages, name of tube line etcetera. All this kind of information tends to be absent from primary sources, the more so as their intent was campaigning and therefore contemporary in focus.

Unexpectedly liberating in this regard was the British abolitionist MP J.S. Buckingham’s 1839 Journey through the Southern Slave States. While in many ways a dry read, precisely because he was a tourist (& one critical of slavery, which the British had finally abolished in 1833, to white southern consternation) Buckingham records many details a local would omit, including potted summaries of the economic workings of many of the towns and villages and estates he passed through; competition and lack of competition in stagecoach lines; quality of rooms and food in inns and so on. This – finally – gave me greater confidence in sending my protagonist out into a wider world beyond the plantation’s bounds.

As settings fell into place, the internet was invaluable as an adjunct, of course. What type of pistols were used in 1850; what carriages ridden in; what hats worn? One academic website has assembled advertisements for runaway slaves decade by decade, and you can study the way the phrasing altered over time, and the amounts offered for recapture; and so, without ever stating the year, (because ultimately I felt it would never mean anything to my protagonists), I could embed the tale ever more densely in its period.

All this meant that Cyrus could now leave the wilderness into which he had first run, into which he had been pursued by dogs, and from which he had emerged following a sort of psychic rebirth, and find himself once more among people. And so a break in the writing that lasted nearly five years was ended, and I accelerated forwards.

Buy Drapetomania here (US) & here (UK)

Bad Feeling - Benedict x reader

A/N: Err... Well, I'm still alive! It's been a while, but I'm finally free from any responsibilities for now, so here's this night's first request! I'll be posting lots of stuff tonight, so for my fellow night owls out there; enjoy the ride ;D Also, sorry for the shitty name, i have no imagination whatsoever

Requested by @thestrawberryblondehobbitbatch​: Benedict x reader. Benedict comes home early from filming. To surprise his girlfriend. Only to find police and the press outside their home because they were broken into while his girlfriend and their new puppy were inside when it happened

Word count: 1774 Warnings: none

The day had seemed like a normal one for Benedict when he woke up in the morning.

It had been bright and busy like any other day of the week; with London's usual partially cloudy sky and streets that bursted with life. He'd gone to work and spent the day doing everything he usually did; repeated his same old routine and longed for a day in which he wouldn't have to do it all over again.

He would later learn to be careful what he wished for.

"Benedict," his manager had said through the phone with a light tone to his voice. Benedict had just left a script reading session for his latest project, and had been collecting his things when his phone rang. "Johnny had to call off the eight o'clock meeting- something came up at the studio, apparently," he'd explained quickly, "you have the night off."

Benedict had smiled. It was probably his first night off in months, and he had no idea when would be his next. He'd packed his things and left the building feeling like a winner.

He figured you'd be in for a lovely surprise. Maybe you could even open that old bottle of wine your parents had given the both of you for Christmas...

It wasn't until he was in his car - his hands gripping the steering wheel while he was stuck in traffic - that things started going south.

Benedict turned on the Bluetooth on his phone and waited for it to connect to the stereo. "Siri, call my wife," he said as soon as he heard the familiar beep that indicated there was a connection.

The phone rang five, six, seven times before it hit voicemail. "Hello, this is (Y/N) Cumberbatch. I'm not available at the moment, but please leave a message after the beep," your voice boomed through the speakers, and Benedict didn't wait before he pushed the call button on the steering wheel again. Still no response.

In front of him, the line of cars started moving, and he tried to tell himself everything was okay.

It was useless to keep worrying simply because you hadn't picked up the phone. Half of him reasoned that you were probably on the shower or listening to music in your studio. The other more anxious half of him insisted that there was something wrong, though.

Benedict couldn't keep the cold shiver than ran through him and settled in the pit of his stomach as he pushed his feet into the gas pedal.

He thought that perhaps if he pretended to be calm the feeling would overcome the worry that had been growing inside him, but if anything, it seemed to intensify it. He approached his driveway with a dreadful feeling on his stomach, one that was confirmed when he saw the blink of police lights.

Benedict's heart nearly dropped on his chest.

There was cold sweat dripping down the nape of his neck and his hands were trembling when he stopped the car a few feet away from his house, the police cars occupying the whole width of the street.

Benedict exited the car and didn't even bother to close the driver's door behind him as he stumbled toward the scene unraveling in front of him. His hands pushed past the curious bodies of his neighbours and his eyes roamed the faces around him for a glimpse at you.

He didn't have any more time to look around as a policeman stopped him in his tracks. "I'm sorry, sir, but I can't let you go through," he said calmly, and Benedict removed the hand that was holding him back forcefully.

"I-" he tried, but his voice came out like a rough grunt. "That's my house," he finally managed in a breathless whisper, and walked past the officer before he could do anything to stop him. Benedict stumbled through the gravel, unable to think straight or keep his hands from shaking and his shirt from becoming drenched in sweat.

He couldn't find you among the crowd of police officers and passers by, and he was starting to feel the overwhelming panic that came with it.

Benedict honestly didn't know what he would do without you.

Then he felt something stir between his legs and looked down to see Kit, your loyal basset hound, running in circles around him. Benedict remembered the day you'd given him that name. He had suggested something a little more historical, like Henry or Charles after England's greatest kings, but in the end the both of you'd stuck with the one you'd chosen.

Kit waggled his tale desperately, as if both excited to see his owner and worried at the whole situation. He jumped and barked and circled Benedict again, and he squatted next to the dog to pat him affectionately. "It's okay, boy, it's alright," he said in a calm tone that didn't reflect the way he was feeling inside. Benedict was perhaps even more desperate than his dog, but he didn't let it show as he caressed its fluffy fur. Kit, however, didn't calm down in the slightest, jumping around and refusing to stay still in the same place, and Benedict watched as it turned around and ran towards an ambulance parked in the front of the house.

He followed the dog with his eyes and felt his heart squeeze so painfully inside his chest that he thought he might be dying.

You were there, sitting on the steps that lead inside the ambulance - holding a blanket around your shoulders and with a bloody cut etched across your temple.

Benedict ran faster than he ever had in his entire life. His feet carried him and when he finally reached where you were, you were already standing up and coming to his encounter as well.

The both of you met halfway in a hug so desperate that it took the air out of both your lungs.

Benedict clung to your clothes and your hair and your back as he squeezed you against him in a desperate attempt to be closer to you. His heart was hammering almost painfully inside his ribs, and he squeezed you one last time before pulling back to look at you.

The cut on your forehead was still dripping with the slightest bit of blood, but most of it was already dry, and he suspected that it had already been cleaned.

"God, what happened, love?" he asked, unable to keep his voice from faltering at the end. His hands went to cup your face gently, and he ran his fingers through the edges of your bruises and drew a shaky breath. "Are you hurt anywhere else? You shouldn't be standing up. Come on, let me take you-"

"I'm fine, Ben. It's okay," you assured him, though your voice was rough and your throat dry. "I don't- there was a break in..." you answered, holding the blanket even closer to you as a reflex. "There were these two guys, and they locked me in the cupboard, and... and they had guns, and-"

"Shh," Benedict placed his hand on the good side of your face, pulling you closer into another embrace. His other hand ran through your back comfortably, and he felt your shoulders shake as you cried silently. "You don't have to tell me now. I'm going to call your sister to let her know we're coming over," he said as an afterthought, and you just nodded into his shirt, taking deep breaths to try and calm down.

You parted ways so Benedict could make the call, and you went back to the ambulance with Kit while he approached the police officers a few feet away.

"Could anyone explain to me what happened?" he asked, his voice demanding and deep. He was angry at anyone and everyone that allowed you to get hurt, which also meant himself.

"The burglars got in through the open balcony," one of the officers began. "Mrs. Cumberbatch was in the kitchen when they came. They took her by surprise," he said, and Benedict felt his teeth clench. "According to her, they took her to the cupboard and one of them stayed there with her while the other went to search the house," the man explained and Benedict had to keep from lashing out at anyone else. He balled his hands into fists and looked somewhere in the distance, breathing in and out in sharp heaves. "We caught one of the burglars, but the other one managed to escape before we arrived-"

Benedict didn't wait for him to finish, just nodded once and turned on his back. He considered paying the burglar a visit in one of the police cars he was being kept at, but decided against it. The press was starting to gather around the scene, and things were bound to get ugly if he did so. He went back to you instead.

You'd stopped crying already, and he sat beside you on the metal steps of the ambulance and put a comforting hand on your back. He didn't even care if anything was taken from the house. What mattered was that you were there and you were safe.

"I'm sorry, love," he murmured after a while, making you stop caressing Kit's head to look up at him. "I should have been home with you," Benedict lowered his head in defeat and you scoffed, lifting his head with a hand on his chin to meet his eyes.

"Stop that, Ben," you said with a tone of finality to your voice. "You had nothing to do with this. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine for letting the balcony open in the first place." You left no room for discussion, so Benedict just nodded. You could see the sadness in his eyes though, so you pulled him closer by the arm and pressed a sweet kiss to his lips, letting your mouth linger close to his afterwards and brushing your nose against his.

His hand moved from your back to your arm, and he rubbed it against it in an attempt to keep you warm. "I love you," he said with his cheek pressed to the top of your head, and you smiled slightly as you scooted as close to him as possible.

You resumed the caress on Kit's back, placing your other hand on Benedict's bent knee and rubbing your thumb over his jeans in an attempt to make him feel calmer. You felt him sigh beside you, and he pressed a kiss to the top of your head before the both of you allowed yourselves to finally relax.

"I love you too, Ben."

[Masterlist] [Request list]

For a few moments, let’s forget about the virus. Let’s pretend it’s the Before Times. Let’s talk about something that Memphis loves to argue about: food. I made and posted one of those “you can only pick three” memes on Twitter last night—and my phone exploded with notifications. Hundreds of people have chimed in, and some had some strong words about the exercise. “Impossible”  – @csbgtg “Absolutely savage” – @kvnwn “Hardest decision of my life.” – @alansweet “This is just evil.” – @CoachSetler “Possibly hardest food list I’ve seen.” – @maximums420K “I’ve been staring at this list all day. I can’t do it. I just can’t.” – @TVKelliC But back to the meme itself… I know it’s a horrible, hard choice but I don’t make the rules, the Internet does. And in this case, the “pick three” meme says you can only keep three. The rest get tossed into the Mississippi forever. Which three Memphis signature dishes do you choose? Let me know in the comments. Naturally, there was some discussion about the options. Are they restaurant-specific? Where are the wings from? Where can you get a Pronto Pup? Etc. I understand that your decision some matchups, i.e., BBQ nachos v. BBQ sandwich, may depend on which restaurant you’re ordering from. My intention was that each image represented a type of well-known Memphis food, and you could substitute whatever your favorite version of that food is. That didn’t stop people from trying to guess where the photos were taken. I’ll reveal that below: 1. Memphis Fried Chicken Number one stands for “Memphis fried chicken” from any of your favorite fried chicken places. May I suggest the Memphis-based, truly world famous Gus’ Fried Chicken? Or perhaps Uncle Lou’s, served with their honey butter biscuits? Other local favorites for fried chicken include Cash Saver, Jack Pirtle’s, Four Way, Alcenia’s, Southern Hands, and Joe’s, to name a few. The photo in the meme (full version above) is from Gus’ World Famous Fried Chicken on Front Street in downtown Memphis. Photo credit: David Meany. 2. Pancho’s Cheese Dip Option number two of our rude game is the one and only Pancho’s cheese dip, now available nationwide at grocery stores but originating across the river in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. To avoid bloodshed and gnashing of teeth, I’ve included a representation of both white and yellow variations. Pancho’s is good for dipping, drizzling, and pouring over practically anything; it works best with Las Delicias tortilla chips, but any chip variation will do. Pancho’s is perfect for backyard barbecues, those gatherings where everyone ends up in the kitchen, holiday parties, weddings, christenings, and state dinners for international dignitaries. The photo is courtesy of Pancho’s website. Read more about the Pancho’s restaurant in West Memphis here. 3. Memphis Ribs Number three is probably the best known Memphis food item around the world: ribs. For our three Memphis barbecue options on this impossible meme (numbers 3, 5, and 9) please imagine each item supplied by your favorite BBQ restaurant for that item. By our count, there are about 100 such establishments in Memphis, and you can learn more about them on this BBQ guide. I also like include this list from Memphian Craig Meek. Where are your favorites? Where can you get the best tender Memphis pork ribs? Wet or dry is up to you. The photo was taken at Central Barbecue. Photo credit: Justin Fox Burks. 4. Pronto Pup Number four is not a mere corn dog. It’s a Pronto Pup. The difference is mostly in the batter—the basic corn dog batter has cornmeal while Pronto Pup dogs are dipped in a rice- and wheat-based batter. When you order a Pronto Pup, you usually have two choices: regular or footlong, and mustard or no mustard. Geoff Calkins did a great story on the Pronto Pup’s Memphis connection and recipe here. You can find Pronto Pups at Memphis events and festivals, including the Delta Fair, the Mid-South Fair, Memphis In May events, Cooper Young Fest, Tigers football games at the Liberty Bowl, and other events. Sadly this means we might have to wait a while to have our favorite deep-fried wiener painted with tangy mustard, but it will be worth it. This photo was taken at the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational in 2019. Photo credit: Alex Shansky. 5. Pulled Pork BBQ Sandwich Number five brings us to another Memphis barbecue darling, the pulled pork sandwich topped with sauce and slaw. Again, you can order these delicacies at dozens of BBQ restaurants in our area. The common thread is that the sandwich is made with smoked pork shoulder and that it’s topped with slaw.  Every restaurant has their own take on the coleslaw style, barbecue sauce, and bread (my favorite variation is Texas Toast). This particular photo was taken at Leonard’s BBQ. Photo credit: Justin Fox Burks. 6. Memphis Wings Number six scares me. The passion for Memphis hot wings honestly rivals the passion for Memphis barbecue. I’ve seen friendships ruined, families torn apart, and business deals go south because folks couldn’t agree on who has the best damn hot wings. Just kidding, I’m exaggerating. But only slightly. Whether you’re going for the classic Memphis honey gold sauce, smoked wings, or some other variation, Memphis has you covered. This photo is at Riko’s Kickin Chicken. Photo credit: Alex Shansky. 7. Soul Food If you’re not hungry by now, our seventh impossible food choice is bound to get your mouth watering. Number seven stands for delicious Southern home cooking, available at fine soul food restaurants around Memphis and the Mid-South. I’m talking about fried catfish plates, turkey and dressing specials, meat-and-threes, and more—plus a bunch of tasty “vegetable” sides which could include but are not limited to: greens, sweet potatoes, mac ‘n’ cheese, mashed potatoes and gravy, cabbage, green beans, dressing, and okra. And cornbread. With so much variety packed into one choice, number 7 of our food meme chart is hard to beat. I think we should allow the substitution of spaghetti as a side for choice number 7, especially if your soul food dream plate is catfish-based. This photo is from the historic Four Way restaurant. Photo credit: Alex Shansky. 8. Your Choice of Memphis Burger Things get messy when you dig into Memphis food rankings. Trying to figure out which style of burger will best represent the city’s cheeseburger offerings is as impossible as choosing between that burger and all the other options on this Evil Chart. Will you go with Dyer’s, fried in 100-year-old Memphis grease? Or the Soul Burger, which is so compelling it is literally the only menu item at Earnestine & Hazel’s? What about the Tops Burger, the choice of the born-and-bred Memphian? Don’t forget Huey’s, the ubiquitous but dependable option with a burger list full of variety? You decide. What hamburger you bring to the competition to stand in for Number 8 is between you and the Lord. (But feel free to let me know which one you two choose.) This photo is from Earnestine & Hazel’s. You know it’s real because it’s a blurry picture taken by yours truly on a phone late at night. 9. BBQ Nachos For our final food fight contestant, and the last number trying to win your heart as you throw the other six choices away forever, is number 9: BBQ nachos. Again, you can pick any restaurant or nacho provider as your selection, but it has to be topped with barbecue. There are plenty of ways that restaurants and ballparks customize their nachos, using shredded cheese or melty nacho cheese, serving on house-made potato chips or classic round tortillas. You can choose your own Memphis nacho adventure. This photo is from One and Only Barbecue. Photo credit: Justin Fox Burks. The moment of truth: which three will you choose? I know it hurts, but it has to be done. For Internet Science. Good luck. Are you a home owner in Memphis, with a broken garage door? Call ASAP garage door today at 901-461-0385 or checkout https://ift.tt/1B5z3Pc

https://ilovememphisblog.com/2020/04/pick3memphisfood/

This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you’d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

https://ift.tt/2s9B6Gm

This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you’d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2s9B6Gm

This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you’d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2s9B6Gm https://ift.tt/393qtWj

This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you’d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2s9B6Gm

Bitter pill

Arkansas is second in the nation when it comes to opioid prescription rates. Those numbers are edging down, but some say the worst of the epidemic may be yet to come.

Though Lane Huie was 27 years old when he died in a car crash on July 4, 2013, his mother, Darla Huie, never knew her son as a fully functional adult. She could see his potential, of course, as every parent can see the potential in their child. But from the time he was 17 years old, the man he might have been otherwise was always distorted by a crippling, seemingly unbreakable addiction to opioids.

When he was 17, Lane hurt his hand playing football, a fracture that would take, at most, a month or two to heal for a boy his age. He left the doctor's office with a prescription for the opioid pain reliever hydrocodone. Within a week, his mother said, she saw a change in him, from a happy-go-lucky boy to a person she almost didn't recognize. Within a month, she said, he was hopelessly addicted.

"We didn't have the skill set to deal with it," Huie said. "We didn't know what we were looking at, and didn't understand the physiology of the drug. Because we'd never been exposed to it, we didn't know. Lane was a happy kid who traveled and had a good time, a very friendly person, excited and exuberant about every day. He went from that to angry and screaming. We had no clue what happened."

He would remain an addict for the rest of his life, in and out of rehab and in trouble with the law as he tried to keep pace with his habit. Eventually, he turned to heroin.

Once, after he finished yet another rehab, Huie said she came into his room to find him loading a shotgun to kill himself. She wrestled the gun away. "He was like, 'Mom, I can't,' " Huie recalled. " 'I can't fight this. I don't know who I am. I've fucked up my life. Nobody in our family has ever been to jail. What am I doing? I don't know how to handle this. My brain, I fight it all day. I'll get up and I'll say, I'm not doing this. I'm not going to do it ... . I tell myself, I'm going to have a good day, a great day. I'm going to make them proud. By 3 o'clock, you know how you get a song stuck in your head? It starts playing, Just do it. You did good. Just do it. Do it again. Put yourself out of your misery and go to sleep. ' "

Lane was making one last, desperate attempt to wean himself off opioids cold turkey, Huie said, when he died. She believes he may have had a seizure behind the wheel, brought on by withdrawal. She uses a metaphor about the last 15 years of her life that would be heartbreakingly beautiful if it wasn't so tragic: that it was as if she spent a decade crawling along in the dust behind her son, begging him to get well, and has spent the five years since she lost him trying to stand.

"You can't sleep," she said. "You don't have healthy relationships. I would literally have friends wanting me to do things, and the whole time I was thinking, 'What about Lane? Is Lane OK? What's wrong with him? Asking for help. Trying to help him. Going to counseling. Sending him to rehab.' "

R.J. Looney also knows what it is to fear for an addicted loved one. His son, Zachary, now 29, has been in prison since 2016 on theft charges, which Looney said Zachary committed to support an opioid addiction. After becoming addicted to opioids purchased on the street when he was about 14, the younger Looney progressed from snorting crushed pills to injecting heroin when he was a junior in high school.

"It just led to the destruction of his teenage years," his father said. "Everything he lived for was just for getting high. ... He stole firearms, chainsaws, window air-conditioning units, debit cards, anything that wasn't nailed down." At one point, Looney said, his son blew through a $2,500 college fund in a single week. Finally, in 2015, after losing his job and unable to find money to feed his habit, he committed a robbery in the parking lot of Little Rock's White Water Tavern. Arrested, convicted and sentenced to five years of probation, he landed in prison last year after violating the terms of his probation.

With his son scheduled to be released at the end of April, Looney knows the feeling of being trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea: He wants Zach to be free, but knows that once he's released, he may return to his addiction. A wave of recent overdoses and deaths by heroin users in Little Rock is constantly on Looney's mind.

"Really early, before I go to work, is when the black dog wakes me up and I start thinking about things," he said. "It's always in the back of my mind: the recidivism rates that I've read about. ... I've always said, 'If you love an addict, you'll get to a point where it's about self-preservation, so they don't take you down with them.' They will. You can give up on trust. There's no way I'd ever trust him again, unless it's after years of being clean. But the two emotions you can't give up on are love and hope. That's about all you've got left for them. You always love them. You always hope they'll get better."

Stories like these are the tip of a looming iceberg the state and nation are only starting to comprehend. America consumes over 80 percent of the global output of prescription opioids, and 99 percent of the world's hydrocodone. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Arkansas has the second highest legal opioid prescription rate in the nation: 114.6 prescriptions for every 100 people in the state. Only doctors in Alabama prescribe more opioids. Greene County in Northeast Arkansas has the highest prescription rate in the state, with 122 prescriptions per 100 people. In counties on the other end of the spectrum, the rates are half that. Troublingly, nobody — not addiction specialists at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, nor the state Department of Health, nor the state drug director — can definitively say why there is a difference in prescription rates from county to county.

What is known, according to the health department's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, is that doctors and pharmacists in Arkansas legally prescribed and distributed a staggering 235.9 million opioid pills in 2016 alone. Forty-six percent of Arkansans over the age of 18 filled at least one prescription for an opioid drug that year.

With all those pills floating around, opioid theft for illicit use — what police and policymakers call "diversion" — is rampant. The CDC ranks Arkansas first in the nation when it comes to children aged 12 to 17 who have misused opioids. While opioid-related deaths seem to be edging downward since the introduction of prescription monitoring, opioid overdoses in Arkansas have tripled since 2000.

Meanwhile, a study released last March of 1.2 million UAMS patient records collected between 2006 and 2015 found that the likelihood of becoming dependent on opioids long term increases by leaps and bounds with every day beyond three that a patient takes the drugs for pain. The study found that patients who were prescribed an 11-day supply of opioid drugs had a 1 in 4 chance of still being on opioids a year later.

In short, it's clear we have a problem that isn't going to be resolved with thoughts and prayers. Just how to go about solving it, how it got so bad in the first place, and how to pay for a fix is still being debated, but things are moving quickly now. Recent months have seen the Arkansas State Medical Board working on new guidelines to try to rein in prescription rates and problem prescribers, the Attorney General's office announcing it intends to investigate drug manufacturers and bring charges if warranted, and the Association of Arkansas Counties filing a federal lawsuit — and planning to soon file a series of further suits in state courts — against some of the nation's most prominent drug companies and distributors.

Meanwhile, many chronic pain patients with debilitating injuries are terrified that a crackdown will take away the painkillers they say allow them to lead something approaching a normal life. While efforts such as the state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program have led to an overall decrease in the amount of "doctor shopping" — hopping from one doctor to another while trying to get opioid prescriptions — and a historic drop in the number of opioid overdoses in the state, state Drug Director Kirk Lane and others the Times spoke with say they believe the worst days of the epidemic are still ahead, as regulatory efforts and stricter prescription guidelines make pharmaceutical drugs like hydrocodone and oxycodone harder to get from doctors and more expensive when diverted to the streets and as prescription opioid abusers turn to much cheaper heroin — some of it laced with the brutally potent synthetic opioid fentanyl.

Whether those efforts succeed in moving the ball on opioids in a positive direction or not long term, it's clear that the issue is much more complicated than old-fashioned pill mills.

A plague in a bottle

Though doctors have known the addictive and often deadly consequences of using opioid drugs since the days when snake oil containing opium and heroin was readily available on drugstore shelves, the last two decades of the 20th century saw a wholesale rethinking of opioids and their addictive properties in the medical community, including the idea that the powerful drugs could be safely prescribed for temporary "acute" pain and chronic pain without fear of addiction. As seen in a number of lawsuits filed across the country over the last 10 years, including the one filed in late 2017 by the counties association, a case can and has been made that much of that rethinking by physicians, and the attendant explosion in opioid prescription rates, corresponds with a decades-long, multimillion-dollar marketing push by pharmaceutical companies beginning in the 1990s, the goal of which appears to have been to convince physicians that no patient need ever be in pain, that opioid painkillers are neither as dangerous or addictive as previous generations believed, and that those drugs could therefore be safely prescribed for pain other than that experienced by late-stage cancer or hospice patients.

The counties association filed suit last December in federal court against several of the biggest makers and distributors of opioid painkillers, including Purdue Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, McKesson Corp. and others. The lawsuit calls the effort to sell physicians on the idea that opioid medications were safe and nonaddictive a "marketing scheme designed to persuade doctors and patients that opioids can and should be used for chronic pain." It reads like the bleak color commentary on a slow-motion train wreck, laying out the history of how opioids came to be so widely prescribed in Arkansas and America, including claims that drug companies spent millions to downplay the risks of opioid addiction and dependency by using paid "opinion leaders," employing "front groups" masquerading as impartial patient advocates, spending tens of millions of dollars to advertise in medical journals and using drug reps to make the case for shaky concepts such as "pseudoaddiction," the idea that if patients taking opioids were found to be engaging in behaviors indicating addiction, that meant their pain was not well managed and their dosage should be increased. Citing what she called "staggering" statistics, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge announced Jan. 24 that her office would bring in extra legal help to investigate several yet-to-be-named opioid manufacturers and will potentially bring lawsuits or charges against those firms if warranted.

The counties association lawsuit points out several of what seem to be damning facts: The named defendants spent over $14 million to advertise their products in medical journals in 2011, triple what they'd spent in 2001, and spent $168 million in 2014 alone to market opioid drugs to doctors through "detailers" — friendly drug company sales reps who visit physicians in their offices — double what they'd spent on opioid detailing in 2000.

"Manufacturer defendants also identified doctors to serve, for payment, on their speakers' bureaus," the lawsuit goes on to say, "and to attend programs with speakers and meals paid for by Manufacturer defendants." Among other damages, the lawsuit calls for funds specifically to pay for opioid addiction treatment costs in Arkansas in coming years.

Colin Jorgensen is litigation counsel for the Association of Arkansas Counties Risk Management Services. He said there are obvious parallels between the lawsuits filed against opioid manufacturers and those filed in the past against Big Tobacco, but also significant differences.

"The parallels are mostly in the legal theory and the misrepresentation in the marketing by the companies," Jorgensen said. "That's what's similar between tobacco and the opioids — the deliberate deceit about the addictive nature of these products, knowing full well the truth. The damages are not exactly the same. We've got a lot more local-level impact this time with the opioid epidemic than with tobacco. ... We need education, prevention and treatment, and all three of those things are extremely expensive, and they're best deployed at the local level." The price tag for that intervention could easily run into the billions of dollars nationwide, Jorgensen said.

Jorgensen said he believes physicians have been duped about opioids just like patients, but are quickly working to turn things around. "The awareness in the medical profession is shifting dramatically," he said. "I think you're probably going to see a pretty substantial drop-off in the prescription rates and things moving forward. The doctors are in a tough position because they don't necessarily have effective alternative treatment, but they're learning now that [opioid] treatment is ineffective, too."

Association of Arkansas Counties Executive Director Chris Villines said the financial and social impact on counties and cities in the state is shaping up to be much more costly than that posed by tobacco addiction in the past. "We didn't fill our jails with people using tobacco," he said. "We didn't have to go out and police the street for tobacco users. [Tobacco] really had more of a direct impact on health care than anything. This plague has had an impact all over: the court system, the county hospital, the county jail, policing, law enforcement, coroners, everybody."

Villines noted that while there is a clear need to curb the prescription opioid rate in the state, slowing the supply does nothing to stop the demand from those addicted to opioids. Like several the Times talked to, Villines fears that attempting to restrict the number of legal prescriptions without a corresponding increase in funding for drug treatment — money that is going to be very hard to find in a cash-strapped state like Arkansas — may well result in a new scourge.

"Between 2005 and 2009, Mexican heroin [production] increased from 8 metric tons to 50 metric tons," he said. "Almost all of that increase is going straight to those who are getting off of opioids. So if we talk about the solution being, 'Let's cut back the flow of opioids,' we're not helping. We're actually driving addicts more quickly into illegal heroin than we would be if we had a good plan in place to help get them off of opioids."

Jorgensen said the association plans to file lawsuits somewhat similar to its federal action in state courts this spring. He said the fact that the vast majority of the counties in Arkansas — 70 out of 75 as of this writing — quickly signed on to the forthcoming state lawsuits shows the extent of the problem in both cities and rural areas, and officials' frustration with the issue. The association will also be partnering with the Arkansas Municipal League on the state lawsuits; the municipal league has signed up over 100 cities across the state, including the largest cities, Jorgensen said.

He and Villines said that in talking to groups around the state, they're seeing that police and leaders understand that it's impossible to arrest their way out of the opioid crisis, and are willing to view opioid addicts as victims of a scheme rather than criminals.

Though Jorgensen said it's his belief, based on the available evidence, that drug companies set out to get people hooked on dangerous opioid painkillers, he said the lawsuit need only prove the companies knew their drugs were dangerous and addictive and deceptively marketed to prevail. The lawsuit is not about trying to tell doctors how to practice medicine, he said.

"Ending the deceptive marketing scheme and hopefully enjoining and compelling the companies that produce these pills and the companies that distribute these pills to market them truthfully, that may change the culture among doctors," he said.

The candyman

Retired for the past three years, Benton physician Dr. Sam Taggart has long been something of a Paul Revere on the subject of opioids. Both a medical historian (he'll soon publish his second book on the history of the profession in Arkansas) and an early proponent of the idea of "wellness" — the idea that if you eat right, get exercise, stay near an ideal weight, don't smoke and follow other healthy guidelines, the body doesn't need much medicine — he said that the idea of "a pill for everything" has been pushed by the pharmaceutical industry since the turn of the 20th century, starting with vitamins. The result, he said, is that America is a drug culture that has been training its population to look for health in pill form for over 100 years. The problem with that, according to Taggart, is that the pharmaceutical industry is in the market to create customers, not to produce cures.

Since the opioid boom, Taggart believes, the result of that century-long training of American consumers has come home to roost in nearly every Arkansas city and town. "A lot of towns have a candyman," he said. "They have a guy that everybody in town knows: If you need something, you go to this guy. I honestly didn't want to be that person under any circumstances. So I began very early thinking about those kinds of issues and saying, 'How do you keep that from happening?' "

While it was starting to change by the time he left his practice, thanks in part to the state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program and other efforts, Taggart said the local "candyman" would often persist for years because those physicians flirt with the edges of the law and Medical Board regulations. "I don't want you to misunderstand me, and please don't misrepresent this: I'm not being judgmental of my fellow physicians, except to say that, in every community, and I believe this is still true ... if you go into the drug-seeking community, there is a network and they know who prescribes drugs," Taggart said. "They know who will do it, they know where they can get it, they know how much they can get."

Part of being the change he hoped to see in the world was insisting on something that has grown much more common among doctors in recent years: that chronic pain patients in his care be evaluated by a chronic pain management specialist. "If it looked like they had a problem," Taggart said, "something like a severe back problem and there was nothing that could be done, or a severe hip or leg problem and nothing could be done about it, what I would do is start warning them after about three weeks, 'This is not long term. We're not going to do this long term.' I wouldn't write big, long-term prescriptions. I'd say, 'If we decide that this is what you're going to need, I'm going to send you to a chronic pain management specialist,' but with a caveat: 'OK, we'll let them evaluate you. If they think you need this medicine, I'll continue writing the prescription.' "

During his years in practice, Taggart refused to hear the pharmaceutical companies' sales pitch on opioids. As early as 1983, Taggart said, he stopped seeing "detailers" who asked to come to his office to market drugs. Once, Taggart said, most drug company sales reps were former pharmacists who were informed about medicine and patient care. But during the early 1980s, that changed. "They'd send out pretty young girls, pretty young guys, and they'll send them out with a study that might have six people in it, which is no study at all," Taggart said. "They have direct access. They come right into the doctor's office. They bring food for the whole office staff. They're salesmen. It's sales, is all it is." The sales pitch often worked, Taggart said, because doctors are just suceptable to a friendly face offering direct marketing as anyone else.

"For a long time, they provided all kinds of freebies," Taggart said. "They would hire physicians to be speakers at meetings: 'We want you to be part of our staff.' That part was ultimately outlawed, I think. I was never part of that. I was never interested in it. I had way too much to do and I wasn't interested in what they had to say. I'd rather get my information from a reasonably objective source."

Denise Robertson has served as administrator of the health department's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program since it started in 2012. The job has given her a daily view of the flowering of the opioid crisis in Arkansas. Established by Act 304 of 2011, the program collects daily reports from pharmacies, allowing doctors and pharmacists to see with just a few keystrokes whether a patient is engaging in "doctor-shopping" behavior to get more pills from multiple physicians.

Act 820, passed in the last legislative session, made it mandatory for doctors to consult the drug-monitoring program before writing opioid prescriptions, and for pharmacists to update the registry whenever they fill a prescription. The change from voluntary to mandatory has been controversial, Robertson said, but it is helping to slow the spiraling opioid prescription rate in Arkansas. She noted that since the program was instituted, there has been a 20 percent decrease in prescription opioid overdose deaths in the state. That's the fourth largest decrease nationwide, according to the CDC.

Robertson said one issue that drives opioid abuse in Arkansas is the fact that Missouri is the only state in the nation without some form of prescription drug monitoring system. The Missouri legislature has made attempts to establishing a system for tracking opioids in their last three sessions, but has failed each time (lacking guidance from the state, St. Louis County and bordering counties finally started their own system, which has helped). Looking at Arkansas county-by-county maps of overdose rates, Robertson said, you can actually see the deadly results of addicts hopping the border into Missouri to doctor shop. "You'll see a lot of that concentrated up there on the border of Missouri," she said. "We have no idea, really, what's going on across that border."

Drug Director Lane agrees that Missouri's lack of a drug-monitoring program is contributing to the problem in Arkansas. He said the impact of prescription monitoring can be seen in the two states' opioid overdose death rates. "Before we started our program, we ranged about 12 deaths for every 100,000 people," he said. "Missouri tracked right along with us. We were side by side, Missouri and Arkansas. We kicked into our PDMP, and our death rate remains the same today. Based on the current figures, we have around 12.5 people per 100,000. Missouri is at 20 [deaths per 100,000] now. So they have grown. We've maintained."

Formerly the chief of police in Benton, Lane has seen firsthand the impact of the opioid crisis in the state. He said that prescription opioids go for about a dollar per milligram on the street. "If you have a 10- to 15-pill-a-day habit, you can add up the money there," he said. "It comes from taking from medicine cabinets, stealing or other criminal activity to raise the money and feed the substance abuse disorder. Eventually, you move to heroin because it's cheaper. The supply of heroin is coming into the state very rapidly now."

Because smugglers have upped supply to meet demand, an amount of injectable heroin to satisfy an opioid habit that would cost thousands of dollars a day goes for about $10 in Arkansas, Lane said.

Much of the heroin seized in Arkansas in recent years, he said, tests positive for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that's 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and that — unlike heroin — can be absorbed through the skin. The drug, normally only used in patch form by late-stage cancer patients, is now being synthesized in cartel labs in Mexico and smuggled into the U.S. in tonnage quantities, sold either alone or mixed into heroin. Because of fentanyl's potency, the fact that it looks identical to heroin and has the ability to pass through the skin, Lane said, the drug has been linked to overdoses across the nation in not only opioid users, but cops, drug dogs and family members who stumbled upon a loved ones' stash.

"Where heroin will be fatal slowly by slowly depressing the respiratory system," Lane said, "fentanyl acts very quickly. And carfentanil, which we haven't seen in the state yet to my knowledge, is 100 times more potent than fentanyl." Carfentanil, which has popped up in some opioid hotspots around the country, is normally used by veterinarians as a surgical anesthetic for very large animals, including elephants.

The risk of addicts turning to heroin, the danger of fentanyl and the attendant overdose deaths and needle-related diseases that will result, are why Lane believes the worst days of the crisis in Arkansas are still ahead. It's part of the reason he helped lead the state's effort to make the lifesaving drug Narcan, which can temporarily reverse an opioid overdose and give first responders time to rush a patient to the hospital, available over the counter in the state. First responders have used Narcan to save over 30 overdose victims in Little Rock alone so far this year, including a 17-year-old who overdosed in a bathroom at Little Rock Central High School. Lane said the state has received $3.5 million in grants to provide Narcan to first responders in the state over the next five years. The state's drug takeback program — online at artakeback.org — has 194 secure boxes in the state where patients can dispose of their unused narcotic drugs 24 hours a day. Lane said that between the boxes and statewide takeback events — the next one is Saturday, April 28 — the state has collected and destroyed 131 tons of prescription drugs — enough to fully load over three tractor trailer rigs. About a third of the surrendered drugs, Lane said, have been opioids.

Lane couldn't give a definitive answer as to why the prescribing rates are so high in certain counties. The issue of prescription rates, he said, is multifaceted and the reasons may vary from county to county. "Some Arkansas counties have a lot of retired folks who move here from other states," he said. "Older people have more medical problems than younger people and because of that, they have more medications than younger people. So that may be part of the issue on the prescribing rates. Some of it could be the physicians themselves. ... Some of the problem [may be due to] the older prescribers, who are set in their ways and were trained that opioids were OK in the past. Basically, trying to retrain them and reprogram them to the latest techniques to deal with the opioid epidemic is a big push, not only in Arkansas, but in the U.S."

One issue as the state moves forward, Lane said, is that Arkansas is in the bottom 10 percent in the nation when it comes to the availability of drug treatment, a problem especially acute in rural areas.

"Good medically assisted treatment isn't just giving somebody Suboxone or methadone [drugs that mimic opioids but don't cause a high] and letting him walk out the door with a prescription," he said. "Good medical-assisted treatment is the constant monitoring of somebody, urinalysis, and also a piece with peer recovery — not only getting that person clean but maintaining that sobriety and giving them tools." There is also, Lane said, the issue of breaking the stigma of addiction so people can come for help without shame. For a lot of opioid addicts, he said, using is not about getting high; it's just about feeling normal and not getting sick. While that drive can cause addicts to engage in criminal behavior, Lane said that people who have been punished need to have a way back to the community and a sense of worth.

"We as a society have to understand that and give these people a second chance," Lane said. "It's kind of hard for a longtime cop to say that, but it's a realization of the problem we have and what pushes people into these behaviors. It really takes all of us working together to understand the problem. We created the problem. We can fix it. ... You can't turn addiction off like a light switch. You just can't do it. It takes hard work and support, and it takes a community to solve the problem."

Dr. Rick Smith chairs the UAMS Department of Psychiatry and serves as director of the hospital's Psychiatric Research Center. He works with patients to break the cycle of opioid addiction every day. "You've got a situation where there are a lot of pills out there. A huge number. Too many pills are out there that are not taken," he said. "There's this diversion phenomena, so the adolescents and young adults get hold of them, and then they end up graduating from pharmaceutical grade opioids to heroin. There used to not be a market in Arkansas for heroin. Heroin would pass through Arkansas on the way to Chicago and other cities up north, but there wasn't enough market to stop here. Now there's plenty of market to stop here because [addicts] can't afford the prescription-grade opioids."

While it's impossible to determine who will become addicted to opioids and who won't, Smith said there is clearly a genetic susceptibility to opioids in some people linked to their body's activation of opioid receptors in the brain — the golf-tee-like sockets that opioid molecules plug into.

Educating or reeducating doctors about the danger of the drugs is key, Smith said. In the past, doctors were often misinformed about opioids during their initial training. "The pharmaceutical reps were saying: These drugs aren't dangerous and folks aren't going to get addicted to it if they're having post-surgery or post trauma [pain], which is just not true," Smith said. "I was taught that in my fellowship. I did my fellowship in 1981, and we were taught that if somebody was given a pain medicine after surgery or after trauma, they would almost never get addicted to it."

Smith said there is a common euphemism for the four categories of doctors who prescribe too many painkillers: those who are dated in their knowledge, those who are duped by their patients into overprescribing, those who are disabled by an addiction to medication themselves, and, the last category, which Smith said is much more rare — doctors who are dishonest and overprescribing for personal gain. "The Prescription Drug Monitoring Program helps sort those out, especially the last group," Smith said, "which is really the responsibility of the DEA and the Medical Board. Reports are sent from the PDMP to the board."

Helping patients get off long-term opioids must be done slowly and carefully, Smith said. The approach that works best right now is what's called medication-assisted treatment. "The one that we're hoping works and gets widespread use in Arkansas is treatment with Suboxone," he said. "That can be done in a primary care physician's office. They have to have counseling as well as this drug in tapering doses, tapered over a number of weeks. If they're on really high doses of opioids, you have to lower the doses of opioids first, and then get them on Suboxone."

Asked whether prescribing medical cannabis instead of opioids for pain might help in solving the opioid crisis in the state, Smith said he doesn't believe so. "We know from research that it's a gateway drug," he said. "Adolescents especially will start with marijuana because our society believes that marijuana is harmless or even helpful. So they start using marijuana and they oftentimes graduate to other drugs. It's not always, but it's statistically significant."

Smith believes the state is moving in the right direction to combat the opioid crisis, taking very aggressive action and instituting programs, like the PDMP, which help stem the tide. "The health department has taken a strong lead, the Arkansas State Medical Board is, the Medical Society is," he said. "Everybody is concerned about the problem, and I don't see anybody really holding back. It's just a very complex problem. We shouldn't and can't blame this on the patients. The patients are suffering. We have to put the patients' best interest first. We can't just ban the drugs. When I had a leg injury, I needed the medicine for a day or two ... There's a battle about: Is this a moral flaw? That's the stigma. No it's not. This is physiological. This is brain physiology — brain and body physiology."

The fall

The state Medical Board met Feb. 1 to hear comments on a proposed regulation that would give the board the power to revoke or suspend the medical license of any doctor found to have prescribed "excessive amounts of controlled substances to a patient, including the writing of an excessive number of prescriptions for an addicting or potentially harmful drug." As defined in the proposed rule, "excessive" wouldn't include medications given to patients in hospice, being treated for active cancer, emergency inpatient care or end-of-life care. For the treatment of acute, temporary pain from surgery or an injury, the regulation would define "excessive" as any pain medication prescription written for more than seven days "without detailed, documented medical justification." The board will hold another public comment session on the proposed regulation in April.

As the audience for the meeting filed into the chamber in the Victory Building in downtown Little Rock, it was easy to see which people were there to speak against the proposal — the half-dozen or so, many of them older, who hobbled in on walkers or canes. One man was girdled with an extensive black back brace. One woman in a surgical mask groaned as she lowered herself gingerly into a chair.

Along with Drug Director Lane — who, citing the UAMS study of addiction rates, advocated for the board to go further and limit opioid prescriptions for acute pain to five days — and Smith and other experts, several patients spoke before the board, saying that opioids had curbed their pain enough that they were able to live fuller lives following a crippling injury. Nearly every patient who spoke said their doctors, fearing repercussions from the Medical Board, had cut back on the amount of opioid medication they would prescribe. Some said they had been cut back to a point where they could no longer function. One patient, on opioids for a back injury for over 20 years, related that without the drugs, he feared he would have to go on permanent disability, close his small business and put his employees out of work. Board members, saying they wouldn't revoke the license of a doctor prescribing long-term opioids for legitimate chronic pain cases, repeatedly encouraged patients who spoke of skittish physicians to have their doctors call the board for reassurance and education about the regulations concerning opioid prescriptions for chronic pain.

Kelly Jones sat and listened as long as she could bear it, then left the room in tears, saying that the board would do nothing for a person like her. In the hallway, she leaned on a walker and cried as she related her story of living two decades in constant pain. In 1998, while hiding her children's Christmas presents, Jones said, she fell 10 feet from an attic to a concrete carport, rupturing nine disks in her back and neck and crushing an ankle so badly it had to be pieced back together with screws. Since then, bounced from surgeon to specialist, she has been in constant pain that turns to agony without high doses of opioid medication. Bent and wan, an oxygen hose threaded around her head to her nose, Jones said she spends most of her life in bed, the windows of her room heavily curtained because squinting in sunlight gives her headaches, thanks to the neck injury. Like several who spoke, Jones said her doctor has recently cut back her opioid medications, fearing his medical license might be in jeopardy if he continued to prescribe high doses. Dabbing her eyes with a tissue, Jones said she and other chronic pain patients are being punished for the crimes of others.

"It's like I'm paying for the sins of what other people have done with their medicines," she said. "I can't be there to control what other people do with their medicines. But because they can't control themselves, I'm paying for it. I can't sit in there any longer. I kept asking them, 'Can I please talk? I have to go home and go to bed.' They keep bringing up people from the governor's office to talk. They won't let people talk."

She knows through being in pain management, she said, that she will never be pain free, but opioids allow her to at least control her pain. She prays for cancer, Jones said, so that at least she can get her medicine and be pain-free again for a little while before she dies. She said the members of the Medical Board will never understand pain like that.

"I pray to die," she said. "I pray every night to die. My husband actually took the guns out of the house because he was tired of listening to me threaten to do it. ... I'm on scraps of medicine. I can't live my life like this. They don't understand, because unless you have chronic pain, you will not understand what people with chronic pain are talking about. I can't talk anymore. I have to go."

At that, Jones turned and hobbled away, shuffling, pushing her walker along the carpeted hallway until she rounded the corner and disappeared from view, back to her darkened bedroom somewhere in Arkansas.

Bitter pill

How artist Paul Schütze began his journey from paper to perfume

Before photographer, artist and musician Paul Schütze even dreamed of designing fragrances and launching his own line, his obsession with the oft-overlooked sense of smell was already apparent the moment you stepped in to the gallery…

In 2014 Schütze exhibited Silent Surface – a collection of photographs comprising books on fire and with missing words – within the fitting surroundings of an antiquarian bookshop. A central piece of a blackened book resting atop a plinth wafted an other-worldly aroma he’d sprayed the pages with and, under the lights the fragrance diffused to fill the space. The piece was called IN LIBRO DE TENERIS, and the majority of visitors asked if they could buy this inky, woody, book-ish scent (they couldn’t, it hadn’t been created to wear on skin, just as a one-off aroma to enhance the experience of the show) but from that moment, his fragrant fate was sealed.

From then, Paul went on to immerse himself in the world of perfume, working with noses to design his very own trio of fragrances, all borne from olfactory memories of his extensive travels and the inherent artistic sense he has of interpreting the world around him.

Cirebon is a glowing citrus swathed in Tunisian orange blossom, inspired by Paul’s memory of a ‘… Night on the island of Java: by the edge of a lake; the perfumed sounds of a court gamelan orchestra drift across the water, hovering in the air like a constellation of shimmering insects,’ while Tears of Eros is an incense like no other, weaving a scent trail that takes you to ‘…The artist’s studio: Winter; incense from Kyoto’s Sanju Sangendo, a bowl of discarded clementine peel and a night blooming hyacinth; moonlit air from the open windows: these fragrances coalesce into a narcotic, heady, living incense.’ The last of the three so far – Behind the Rain – expands the beauty of mineralic petrichor (the smell that follows a downpour) with a trip to  ‘…An island in the Aegean: a sudden violent rainstorm: as the storm ends, the warmth of the emerging sun on bruised foliage coaxes waves of resinous fragrance that wash down onto our place of shelter under a stand of conifer trees.’

Fascinated to learn more of Paul’s fragrant travels, we asked him to guide us through the most evocative, his personal favourites, and the scents that always inspire him…

What is your first ‘scent memory’?

Chlorine: I have loved swimming in pools since I can remember. I do my best thinking while plowing up and down the lanes letting the world slip away. The huge pleasure of it is inextricably bound to the smell of chlorine. The faintest whiff and I’m transported

When did you decide you wanted to design your own perfume?

I’d always wanted to but it was only four years ago that I realised it might be possible.

What are your five favourite smells in the world?

Well, chlorine – obviously, the interior of the Sanju Sangendo in Kyoto, the flesh of a perfect white peach, our dog Gilbert’s head smells delicious and finally the epicenter of Queen Mary’s Rose Garden (Regent’s Park) in the middle of Summer: the most dizzying, hallucinatory storm of perfumes imaginable.

What’s the worst thing you ever smelled. (Honestly!)

Red Bull: utterly nauseating! I have moved decks on the bus to avoid it.

What is the fragrance you wish you’d created?

Sycomore from Chanel’s Les Exclusives series

Do you feel (like us) that this is one of the most exciting times in fragrance history, because of the creativity being expressed by perfumers? Why do you think that is?

I think we are in a time of intense activity both in commercial perfumery and in the outer edges of experiment (Sisal Tolas and Peter De Cupere). Also because people are realizing that the classical way is not the only way. I think there are parallels with the birth of contemporary music and with visual abstraction.

If you could have created a fragrance for a historical figure, who would it be?

If I might be allowed a fictional historical figure then Des Esseintes the protagonist in Huysmans À rebours.

What’s the first fragrance you bought. And the first bought for you…?

The very first fragrance I bought was Grey Flannel. The first bought for me was Tabac Blonde.

Do you have a favourite bottle design?

I recently made a unique, triple strength version of Cirebon for my partner Chris’s 50th Birthday. I gave it to him in a very beautiful antique, stoppered bottle with a hinged gold cap. It sits in a leather sarcophagus-like case (see photo, below.)

How many perfumes might you be working on, at one time?

Depends, I prefer to work on only one but if I have commissions then it can be three or four at a time.

Does your nose ever ‘switch off’?

It does. Then I know to turn my attentions elsewhere. You can’t force things.

How long, roughly, does it take to create one of your fragrances?

The fastest was a single day the longest so far has been a little over a year.

Is designing a fragrance ‘visual’ for you, as well as something that happens in the nose/brain of the perfumer? If so, in what way…? Is a mood-board helpful?

No, barely visual at all. Very musical though. I often find myself confusing sounds and smells. I listen to music while I work and it is chosen with infinite care. I find time spent in certain architectural spaces hugely helpful in getting a bead on the “right” feel for a fragrance.

What can each of us do to enhance our appreciation of fragrance?

Smell everything. Stop deciding how things smell by merely looking at them. Grab things and burry your face in them. That goes for people too!

What is your best tip for improving a person’s sense of smell?

Again, just smell things: never buy food without taking the time to smell it extravagantly. Never begin to eat until you have savored the aromas of your food. If you find yourself in a lift, close your eyes and imagine the other people from the aromas surrounding you. Open windows and inhale. Never walk past plants, flowering or otherwise without taking the time to sniff them. Never, never worry about how nuts all this makes you seem!

If you had one fragrance note that you love above all others, what would that be?

Vetiver.

We couldn’t leave it there, because we particularly wanted to know about two unusual notes used in the fragrances, and so Paul explained why they are used.

Green Incense: I’m obsessed with incense both as a ritual item and as a family of smells. I love the idea of an incense which is living, green, not-yet-burnt.

Tamarind: Wonderful aroma which hits you in the taste buds as much as the nose. I can’t smell it without my mouth watering. It has a phenomenological impact on the body which I find really seductive.

With such instantly evocative and unique fragrances to launch the range, we can’t wait to see (and sniff) where Paul Schütze will take us next…

Written by Suzy Nightingale

The post How artist Paul Schütze began his journey from paper to perfume appeared first on The Perfume Society.

from The Perfume Society https://perfumesociety.org/166059-2/

Photo by Steven Gagliano

Cinderella arrived wearing a red and blue uniform and cleats at the SEC Softball Tournament, a previously unknown junior college transfer by the name of Kaitlin Lee.

“She has won over the country,” said Ole Miss coach Mike Smith, who in his third season led the Rebels to their first-ever SEC Softball Tournament championship one year after taking the program to the NCAA Tournament for the first time.

“The energy Kaitlin brings on the field, it’s infectious,” Smith said, having seen the 5-foot-6, 130-pound prospect pitch four complete games in four days, allowing just 3 runs and 1 walk. “(USA Gold medalist) Jennie Finch tweeted in the middle of the game about her, so when you get arguably the best pitcher in the history of the game to tweet on Kaitlin Lee, you’ve pretty much arrived.”

Lee is indeed the sort of rags to riches story that’s hard to resist. Coming out of Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, she didn’t have any Power 5 conference offers.

Smith said all Lee wanted was a chance at Ole Miss, as hungry for opportunity as one might expect from someone who grew up with five sisters and three brothers on the Mississippi coast in Gulfport.

‘Who is this girl?’

Lee and the Rebels came a long way to get to the point of beating LSU 5-1 in the SEC Softball Tournament title game on Saturday night in Knoxville.

RELATED: Hotty Toddy, historic win for Ole Miss over LSU in title game

The fall softball season can be a grind for the players, as it’s filled with individual workouts and intrasquad scrimmages that can be chippy as players compete for positions.

Ole Miss senior Miranda Strother remembers her impression upon meeting the energetic Lee for the first time.

“When she first game in, I was like, ‘Wow, this girl is balls to the wall, who is this girl?” Strother said. “Now, we’re like. ‘Let’s go!’ She’s that person you don’t want on the other team, but you want her on your team.

“We really vibe off Kaitlin, her coming to the program has brought a high, intense energy.”

Lee said it’s all about her passion for the game.

“It’s 98 percent emotion,” Lee said. “They asked me what’s getting me through this, and it’s all my adrenaline and energy.”

Smith, a former minor league baseball pitcher who found his way to the Ole Miss coaching position three years ago after a successful NAIA run that included a 2009 national championship, knew the team would need to mesh.

“It was tough at first because she has a domineering personality, not in a bad way, but that dominant personality,” Smith said. “But the players knew.”

Just to be sure, Smith said he met with senior team leaders Strother and Courtney Syrett about how Lee could bring more leadership to the team.

Pivotal hire

Smith set the table for Lee to have ideal success before he had even recruited her when he hired former Arizona All-American and national championship pitcher Taryne Mowatt as his pitching coach in August 2015.

“Coach T makes these minor adjustments here and there and tell me tiny things I need to think about, because I’m a real thinking pitcher,” Lee said. “I look at her as a straight mentor, she leads me and calms me when I need to be calmed, and pushes me when I need to be pushed.”

It was Mowatt — like Lee a diminutive blonde — who turned in a legendary performance in winning 2007 Women’s College World Series MVP honors by throwing 8 complete games and 1,035 pitches in seven days.

“I think I’ve given short girls that want to pitch hope they can do it,” Mowatt told The Oklahoman in 2008. “You don’t have to be tall. You don’t have to throw 70 miles per hour.”

Mowatt outdueled NCAA all-time wins and strikeouts leader Monica Abbott in 2007, Arizona scoring 1-0 and 5-0 wins in shutting out Tennessee over 17 innings and stranding 26 runners in those two championship series games.

It led to Mowatt being named ESPN’s “Best Female Athlete” of 2007.

“I think it’s very similar between the two, small stature, both have good changeups, screwballs,” said Alabama coach Pat Murphy, who faced both, including a 4-1 loss to Lee and Ole Miss in the SEC Tournament semifinals on Saturday.

“I think that’s a perfect combination. That kid is perfect with Taryne.”

Smith is hoping the story plays out the same in the postseason, as his No. 19-ranked Rebels (40-18) await the NCAA Softball Tournament seedings and brackets (Sunday, 10 p.m. ET, ESPN).

“Kaitlin is a lot like Taryne Mowatt — Taryne was exactly the same way,” Smith said. “People didn’t think that she was going to be the pitcher that she was. I think that you can put her as slowly starting to get to that Taryne Mowatt stage.

“If she can pitch us through a regional, a super and into the College World Series … I mean what she was able to do this week is beyond amazing.”

How does she do it?

Lee has nine different pitches in her arsenal, but what she throws varies by game, depending on what she’s throwing well and what the scouting report calls for.

In a 2-0 shutout over No. 1-ranked Florida, Lee said the only pitches she threw were a curve, screwball and changeup.

“She threw a changeup for a strike almost every time, threw pitches on the outside corner and most of the result pitches were out of the strike zone,” said Gators coach Tim Walton, whose 50-6 team was shut out for only the second time this season. “I thought we swung at a lot of bad pitches and took good pitches, or she made good pitches and then made better pitches.

“I thought she hit her spots and at the end and she got us to wave at the pitches she wanted to get us out with.”

Alabama’s Merris Schroder said Lee’s changeup creates doubt for hitters.

“She hits her locations when she needs to, and she has a very good changeup too,” Schroder said. “As a hitter, she keeps you on your heels, because of that changeup.”

Lee maintains an aggressive approach even if her pitches aren’t overpowering, as she surrendered just 1 walk in pitching 4 complete games over the 28 innings and four days she pitched at the SEC Softball Tournament.

“I don’t like to give up freebies, so if you’re going to be beat, you’ve got to beat me with my best stuff,” said Lee, who beat Mississippi State, Florida, Alabama and LSU, in order. “And that [one walk], the pitch was a strike … I’m sorry I’m still salty about it.”

Kaitlin Lee’s personality

Lee’s demonstrative nature in the pitching circle rubs some of the competition the wrong way, but LSU coach Beth Torina admitted that over time it’s more appreciated.

“I think she’s a competitor,” said Torina, whose team was 0-4 vs. Ole Miss this season, with Lee earning three wins and a save in those meetings. “I think she kind of grows on you a little bit.

“At first, the smile, you don’t know what to make of it but as she continues to compete she really grows on you and I have a lot of respect for her and what she did this week,” she said. “Obviously, we don’t have her figured out.”

Smith joked throughout the tournament that Lee was making all the coaching decisions, as far as telling him she was going to start the game.

Lee’s energy does have it bounds, though.

After dancing during pregame introductions and cheering when her teammates were batting the first four innings of the title game, Lee grew dizzy.

Smith said the Ole Miss trainer instructed her to sit down in the dugout to conserve energy.

Lee shrugged it off and said she could have pitched a third game on Saturday night had the situation called for it.

“If we played a game right now, I’d punch him [Coach Mike Smith] if he said I couldn’t pitch,” Lee said with a chuckle. “That first game [4-1 win over Alabama] I was tight and I was working myself out and didn’t have my best game.

“That second game I was warming up and I said ‘Coach T (Mowatt), I’m warmer than I’ve ever been.”

Lee, whose Twitter account encourages people to “be the person your dog thinks you are,” appears comfortable in her new role as a star pitcher.

Upon arriving for the championship press conference, she took off her shoes once entering the room, making herself comfortable at the front table.

“I was like, ’sit back, take a deep breath, it’s Jennie Finch,” Lee said of the tweet from the USA Olympian. “I try not to let it hit me because it’s overwhelming. I think I’m a great person for all the young’ins to look up to and I’m proud to be that for them.”

This story was originally written by SEC Country’s (Mike Griffith). It was republished on HottyToddy.com with permission from Cox Media Group. 

For questions or comments email us at [email protected]. 

Follow HottyToddy.com on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat @hottytoddynews. Like its Facebook page: If You Love Oxford and Ole Miss…

The post SEC Country: Ole Miss SEC Tourney MVP Kaitlin Lee Is Softball’s Latest Cinderella Story appeared first on HottyToddy.com.

  Capturing the Captain (America Pirate Romance #1)

by C.K. Brooke

Genre: Adult Historical Adventure Romance

Release Date: April 26th 2016

Limitless Publishing

Summary from Goodreads:

In 1720, it’s a pirate’s life for Abigail Clear, daughter of a notorious colonial pirate captain…

But when a rival crew invades Abigail’s ship, she is taken prisoner. Now aboard the enemy vessel, she must contend with its formidable captain. But who is the real captive?

Locked away in the belly of The Indomitable is no place for a woman…

Captain James Morrow is more than displeased to discover his sole captive to be none other than an untamable young lass who will earn him no bounty. Yet if he can soften the little rogue, she just might switch her loyalties to him, and reveal the whereabouts of the infamous thief who sired her—and his stolen treasure. But two can play that game, as Abi is equally inclined to charm the dogged sailor off her father’s tail.

Might she and Captain Morrow run the risk of falling for their own charades?

They dance about their disguises as genuine developing emotions clash against deeper motives, and suspicion runs high. When the captain finally steals a first kiss, Abi decides it’s high time to make her escape—fleeing not only his vessel, but her fondness for the man who intends to see her father hang.

The high seas heat up as Captain Morrow’s quest to recapture Abi is halted by her pirate father, Captain Clear. Will James succeed in pursuit of his captive love, or will his desires conspire to make him a captive himself?

Buy Links

Amazon | B&N | BAM | Limitless Publishing

Excerpt:

“Well, don’t just stand there, gaping like a codfish,” snapped the captain, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I want my decks shining by noon.”

If Abi had been gaping before, now her jaw truly dropped. “You want me to wash your decks?”

Morrow stepped in. Nearby, more sailors looked up from their labor to watch. “Scrub it spotless,” he growled.

Abi rested her hands on her hips. “I’m no one’s swabber. I did no such task on my father’s ship, and I sure as hell ain’t doing it on yours.” She shook her head. “Clean an enemy vessel,” she scoffed, turning back.

A large, cool hand gripped her arm, just above her elbow. Abi had to stop. “Excuse me.” The captain reeled her in, speaking under his breath. “But do ye notice anyone absent here? None of my crew is above maintaining the cleanliness and orderliness I expect. Least of all, you. Pirate.”

Abi knew he must have meant it as an insult, the way he spat the last word. And yet, her pride couldn’t help but inflate. “You’re right.” She looked him square in the eye. “I am a pirate. Which means I’m not part of your crew.” She whipped her arm out of his hold. “And I don’t have to answer to you.”

About the Author

C.K. Brooke is a 2015 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie author with a five-star rating by Readers’ Favorite. She holds numerous fantasy and romance publications with 48fourteen, Limitless Publishing, and Elphame Press. Her lifelong passion is books – reading, writing, editing, publishing and blogging about them. When not blissing out in literary land, she enjoys info-tainment podcasts, singing, songwriting and playing the piano. She lives

in Washington, Michigan with her husband and young son. There’s tons to check out at the new CKBrooke.com, so come and see what she’s up to! Check out her V.I.P. Readers Club (Subscribers get a free eBook!)

Author Links:

Website│Goodreads│Twitter│Facebook│Amazon Page

Giveaway

Subscribe to the author’s newsletter (www.ckbrooke.com/vipclub) and get a free eBook!

Quick Reasons: well-crafted, gorgeously-written historical fiction; pirates! because who doesn’t love pirates?; complex, intriguing, well-rounded characters; action and adventure; forbidden/star-crossed lovers; C.K. Brooke has captivated me once again

#gallery-0-6 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-6 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 20%; } #gallery-0-6 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-6 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

fishing for more

entertaining

devoured it

purple prose

hot and steamy

Huge thanks to C.K. Brooke, Limitless Publishing LLC, and YA Bound Book Tours for sending me a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review! This in no way altered my read of or opinions on this book.

I would wax poetic about how much I adore C.K. Brooke and her mastery of the written word…but I feel like I do that every time I review a book from her, and you guys have GOT to have gotten the point by now, right? If you haven’t picked up a book from this author, I just… WHY NOT?! Go do it. Seriously, she knows how to write characters, her plots are always complex and action-packed, and I swear you are bound to fall in love with everything she writes. I know I have, and continue to do so.

That being said–this book managed nothing less than I was expecting. When I first discovered this book tour, I was super excited. I mean, why wouldn’t I be–there are pirates, and a love arc, and adventure, and… WHO could say no to all the awesome that this book’s blurb promises? I certainly couldn’t–and I wasn’t disappointed in any way. Abi is exactly the sort of strong-willed, powerfully independent woman I was hoping for going into this read. Her interactions with and reactions to the rest of the characters that come gallivanting along were realistic and, at times, super entertaining. There were so many moments I found myself awing over her level-headed fierceness, and wishing I could be friends with her in the real world. Seriously, the girl is a tiger–I could learn a lot from her.

As always, the plot was engaging and action-packed. C.K. Brooke has a mastery over weaving complex, exciting adventures that will leave you on the edge of your seat, thirsting for more. She also knows how to write realistic, believable romances into the mix–and how to do so subtly, with a focus on relationship growth that not many authors think about while writing. I adore how easy C.K. Brooke makes reading her books seem–the pages fly by me seemingly without a breath, keeping me enthralled and pushing forward without realizing the passage of time. Seriously, once I dive into one of C.K. Brooke’s novels, I lose track of everything–except what’s happening in the book.

As always, this was another adventure-packed, complex read from an author high on my favorites list. The characters are realistically-written and entertaining; the prose is authentic to the time period; and the journey is fast-paced and, at times, heart-wrenching. I definitely recommend this title to readers of pirates, historical fiction, and star-crossed lovers. C.K. Brooke wields her words like a pistol; perhaps you should take a bullet and let her set your reading world aflame.

Blog Tour Organized by:

Blog Tour, Excerpt, Giveaway, and Review: Capturing the Captain Capturing the Captain (America Pirate Romance #1) by C.K. Brooke Genre: Adult Historical Adventure Romance Release Date: April 26th 2016…