(no subject)
Jul. 9th, 2018 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretMy long weekend kicked off to an interesting start when I woke at 6AM Friday to go to minyan. As I was getting dressed, there was a thunderclap and power went out. Fortunately, by the time I got back from minyan at 8AM, power had been restored by the power company. Because I was starting to think the weekend was cursed.
Because of the rain, Friday became more of a home day than I'd planned. I did laundry, baked challah, cleaned and reorganized the room, restocked the bookshelf that fell down Thursday evening... I did go out to see Ant Man and the Wasp in the morning while the dough rose.
Ant Man and the Wasp summary review: Hank Pym still the worst.
But other than that, it was a fun movie! I laughed more than I did at Ant Man 1, I liked a lot of the size play stuff, and I mean, Hank Pym is supposed to be the worst. And I loved Cassie and can't wait for them to give us Young Avengers.
I had a nice Shabbos lunch at one of the neighbors, see previous post.
Sunday was a lot of family. My uncle died last year from brain cancer and per his wishes was cremated, which has made navigating the rites of Jewish mourning trickier throughout. My mother couldn't formally sit shiva, and there was no gravesite to do the tombstone unveiling at, but in lieu of an unveiling, we had a memorial lunch yesterday at the family's favorite Brooklyn deli. To do the sorts of things that you normally do at the unveiling, getting a chance to remember our lost loved one in a less stressful setting than the week immediately after allows.
It was nice. My uncle had a bunch of friends from childhood that he'd stayed in touch with, and a number of them came and told stories, as did his brother and some other relatives. It was nice seeing everyone together again, in general, and introducing my niece as well as my cousin's one year old to the whole family. It was nice to set aside time to remember my uncle, who was such a great person and deserves to be remembered.
But family can be aggravating. My aunts were fighting over who got to control the menu and the venue, and as a result all the planning that went with that was unnecessarily prolonged and full of passive aggressive manipulations.
And... there's this thing I've sometimes noticed mourners do where you generalize your memories of a loved one as meaning more than they actually did. We had a toast in his honor, a shot of my uncle's 'favorite scotch'. My father turned to me and asked "Did you know he had a favorite scotch?" I have some fond memories of drinking scotch with my uncle, and he had definite opinions about scotch, but he was a curious person who loved trying new things, not someone with a fixed taste and a .
And the lower key actually-getting-to-spend-time-with-my-grandmother dinner has fluctuated between tonight, tomorrow night, and Wednesday night for no discernible reason I can figure out except that my aunt can't make up her mind what she wants to do. It finally settled on tonight yesterday, and then half an hour ago I got a text from my mother moving the location.
After getting home last night, I went for a little twelve mile evening bike ride, including some time on the D&R trail. Beautiful weather, as the thunderstorm Friday abated the heat just the right amount.
I also finished a book.
A Higher Truth by James Comey
So the takeaway I got from this is that Comey is a bureaucrat committed to protecting the bureaucracy over anything political. Or in other vocabulary, Comey is part of the Deep State. :P And he wrote this book because he thinks Trump is a threat to the bureaucracy because Trump is uninterested in playing the bureaucracy's games by the bureaucracy's rules.
Whether you think this is a good thing depends on your feelings about the Deep State. Personally, I am pro-Deep State. As a Burkean conservative I approve of inertia in government, of the institution resisting dramatic change and violation of bureaucratic norms. You might be of the opinion that entrenched interests are keeping some desired political outcome from happening and that we are in need of revolutionary change, and if that is your opinion, you probably don't like people like Comey. But on the other hand, you may not like the people who are presently trying to seize the government and enact revolutionary change by violating bureaucratic norms, either.
The most exciting part of the book wasn't the Trump era stuff, though, it was his stories about his time as Deputy Attorney General under Ashcroft during the second Bush presidency. There's an incredibly dramatic story about a race between Comey and White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez to Ashcroft's hospital bed to see who could apply pressure on Ashcroft over a change in Justice department policy over enhanced interrogation.
Because of the rain, Friday became more of a home day than I'd planned. I did laundry, baked challah, cleaned and reorganized the room, restocked the bookshelf that fell down Thursday evening... I did go out to see Ant Man and the Wasp in the morning while the dough rose.
Ant Man and the Wasp summary review: Hank Pym still the worst.
But other than that, it was a fun movie! I laughed more than I did at Ant Man 1, I liked a lot of the size play stuff, and I mean, Hank Pym is supposed to be the worst. And I loved Cassie and can't wait for them to give us Young Avengers.
I had a nice Shabbos lunch at one of the neighbors, see previous post.
Sunday was a lot of family. My uncle died last year from brain cancer and per his wishes was cremated, which has made navigating the rites of Jewish mourning trickier throughout. My mother couldn't formally sit shiva, and there was no gravesite to do the tombstone unveiling at, but in lieu of an unveiling, we had a memorial lunch yesterday at the family's favorite Brooklyn deli. To do the sorts of things that you normally do at the unveiling, getting a chance to remember our lost loved one in a less stressful setting than the week immediately after allows.
It was nice. My uncle had a bunch of friends from childhood that he'd stayed in touch with, and a number of them came and told stories, as did his brother and some other relatives. It was nice seeing everyone together again, in general, and introducing my niece as well as my cousin's one year old to the whole family. It was nice to set aside time to remember my uncle, who was such a great person and deserves to be remembered.
But family can be aggravating. My aunts were fighting over who got to control the menu and the venue, and as a result all the planning that went with that was unnecessarily prolonged and full of passive aggressive manipulations.
And... there's this thing I've sometimes noticed mourners do where you generalize your memories of a loved one as meaning more than they actually did. We had a toast in his honor, a shot of my uncle's 'favorite scotch'. My father turned to me and asked "Did you know he had a favorite scotch?" I have some fond memories of drinking scotch with my uncle, and he had definite opinions about scotch, but he was a curious person who loved trying new things, not someone with a fixed taste and a .
And the lower key actually-getting-to-spend-time-with-my-grandmother dinner has fluctuated between tonight, tomorrow night, and Wednesday night for no discernible reason I can figure out except that my aunt can't make up her mind what she wants to do. It finally settled on tonight yesterday, and then half an hour ago I got a text from my mother moving the location.
After getting home last night, I went for a little twelve mile evening bike ride, including some time on the D&R trail. Beautiful weather, as the thunderstorm Friday abated the heat just the right amount.
I also finished a book.
A Higher Truth by James Comey
So the takeaway I got from this is that Comey is a bureaucrat committed to protecting the bureaucracy over anything political. Or in other vocabulary, Comey is part of the Deep State. :P And he wrote this book because he thinks Trump is a threat to the bureaucracy because Trump is uninterested in playing the bureaucracy's games by the bureaucracy's rules.
Whether you think this is a good thing depends on your feelings about the Deep State. Personally, I am pro-Deep State. As a Burkean conservative I approve of inertia in government, of the institution resisting dramatic change and violation of bureaucratic norms. You might be of the opinion that entrenched interests are keeping some desired political outcome from happening and that we are in need of revolutionary change, and if that is your opinion, you probably don't like people like Comey. But on the other hand, you may not like the people who are presently trying to seize the government and enact revolutionary change by violating bureaucratic norms, either.
The most exciting part of the book wasn't the Trump era stuff, though, it was his stories about his time as Deputy Attorney General under Ashcroft during the second Bush presidency. There's an incredibly dramatic story about a race between Comey and White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez to Ashcroft's hospital bed to see who could apply pressure on Ashcroft over a change in Justice department policy over enhanced interrogation.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-11 09:12 pm (UTC)I think his Clinton reveal was not following those norms, especially given the Trump investigations that were NOT revealed but were happening around then (?) But yeah, in general I like that sort of thing too. It's one of the reasons I'm fond of Britain's neutral civil service.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-11 09:44 pm (UTC)You're missing the point. Comey is Deep State. He's not pro "enhanced interrogation" or anti "enhanced interrogation". He's pro following the law. (He seems to be, in his personal beliefs, of the belief that torture doesn't work, which as my brilliant ex-roommate pointed out recently, is not the same as being of the personal belief that torture is immoral.)
In that situation, his subordinates at the Office of Legal Counsel had determined that the immediate post-9/11 DoJ rulings on torture were hastily and badly written from a legal standpoint and needed to be revisited. Their new determinations would rein in some of the torture techniques practiced by the CIA after 9/11, but not all of the controversial ones. Meanwhile, factions in the Bush White House believed these techniques worked and thought that national security and exigency overruled adherence to the law.
I think his Clinton reveal was not following those norms, especially given the Trump investigations that were NOT revealed but were happening around then (?)
It's hard to figure this part out. 'Norms' in this area are highly sensitive to politics. In the book, Comey parses out certain fine distinctions between the Clinton investigation and the Trump investigation in terms of how public they already were before the FBI got involved, but they're a little tenuous. It feels like maybe they made tactical decisions in the moment without really thinking out the overall strategic plan. The bureaucrat's motto is always cover your ass, and I think ultimately that's what drove Comey's choices. He complains a lot in the book that because of how sensitive politically these investigations were, he was screwed no matter what he chose. He may be right.
I think the question that most struck me is why they had to reopen the Clinton investigation at all. Comey writes that after some months of investigation, a good investigator has a general sense of how an investigation is going to play out. It doesn't always happen, you do your job as an investigator diligently regardless and sometimes there is last minute evidence that changes things, but usually you know how things are going to go. And in the case of the Clinton investigation, he had a strong sense that no charges would be filed, months before they closed the case. So then it emerges accidentally while investigating Anthony Weiner that a laptop belonging to Huma Abedin may have some never seen Clinton emails. It's outside the scope of the warrant in the Weiner case, so they need to get a separate warrant to search the Clinton emails, and it's the kind of borderline ethical thing that moral investigators really shouldn't do, and modern Fourth Amendment case law is kind of trying to keep them from doing. So why wouldn't you just say "Forget anyone ever told you about the Abedin laptop, the case is closed and we believe that if we reopen it we're still unlikely to find anything worth charging Clinton with, so why would we waste time on this?"
My suspicion is that the answer is that either Clinton or one of her subordinates really pissed off one of the FBI investigators by deleting some of the emails, and that FBI investigator wanted to get in one last shot at the Clintons.