Bill Barr vs. Alexander Hamilton

What Kristi Noem told us

Welcome to another of our irregularly scheduled, random, contrarian musings on the idiocracy of our times. We’ll get to Kristi Noem’s veep campaign in a moment, but we need to clear our palates with some obligatory photos of dogs we did not shoot and throw into a gravel pit.

Here’s the gang.

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Four years ago, introducing Eli to the lake…

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Right up until the end, 17-year-old Pete lived his best life. Here he is basking in the sun just a few weeks before he passed away.

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What Would Hamilton Do?

Yurchello108 / Getty

Bill Barr was very much on my mind when I wrote this piece about Alexander Hamilton for the Atlantic Daily (where I’m still sitting in for Tom Nichols). ICYMI: Barr is opting for party over country this year. Via CNN:

Collins: “Just to be clear, you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen … you’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”

Barr: “Look, the 88 criminal counts, a lot of those are —”

Collins: “Even if 10 of them are accurate?”

Barr: “The answer to the question is yes, I’m supporting the Republican ticket.

Well then. Yet another reminder that “The Conscience of Bill Barr” would be a slim volume with blank pages.

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The gravamen of Friday’s Atlantic piece: “Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton. Many public figures in the GOP have shown that they cannot break free of partisanship even in the face of rank criminality.”

It’s important to remember just how hard it was for Hamilton to swallow his differences with Thomas Jefferson in 1800.

Alexander Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson. As rivals in George Washington’s Cabinet, the two fought over economics, the size and role of government, and slavery. They disagreed bitterly about the French Revolution (Jefferson was enthralled, Hamilton appalled). Hamilton thought Jefferson was a hypocrite, and Jefferson described Hamilton as “a man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”

But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his fellow Federalists and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. He was willing to set aside his tribal loyalties and support a man whose policies he vigorously opposed—a choice that saved the nation from a dangerous demagogue but likely cost him his life.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain probably never said. The quote’s attribution is apocryphal, but the point seems apt, because about 220 years later, Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did. They now have to decide whether felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse, and insurrection are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty.

Alexander Hamilton’s red line was Aaron Burr, whom he regarded as a dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” Burr was Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election, in which he defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams. But under the original Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, and the second-place finisher became vice president. Bizarrely, Jefferson and Burr each got 73 electoral votes, and because the vote was tied, the election was thrown to the House, which now had to choose the next president. Many Federalists, who detested and feared the idea of a Jefferson presidency, wanted to install Burr instead.

Hamilton was faced with a thorny choice:

He was a leading figure among Federalists; Jefferson was the leader of the faction known as Democratic-Republicans. And the 1790s were a historically partisan era. Yet “in a choice of Evils,” Hamilton wrote, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.”

Even though Jefferson was “too revolutionary in his notions,” Hamilton was willing to swallow his disagreements, because Jefferson was “yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.” In contrast, “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Defying his fellow Federalists, Hamilton waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to derail the scheme to install Burr…

Most Republicans — like Barr and Chris Sununu — are making very different choices.

So far, only Liz Cheney seems to be taking a position that rhymes with Hamilton’s choice two centuries ago. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said. “My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.” Alexander Hamilton would, I think, approve.

You can read this whole thing here. And by all means please subscribe to the Atlantic Daily.

BONUS: Great read from John Avlon on Washington’s warning about the dangers of hyper-partisanship.

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The Brutality is the Point

By now, you’ve heard about Kristi Noem’s enthusiastic re-telling of how she shot and killed a puppy named Cricket: “Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book.”

Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realized I had to put her down.”

Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.

“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

She had to kill a goat too. His crime? Noem writes that the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” (as goats are known to be) and that this one “loved to chase” Noem’s children, “knocking them down and ruining their clothes.”

Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.

At that point, Noem writes, she realized a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.

“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”

Curious minds immediately asked: Why on earth did she put this in her book, and why didn’t anybody take her aside and gently suggest that she was out of her fuqqing her mind to share this story?

Semafor’s Beny Sarlin speculated: “I am 100% convinced at this point Kristi Noem doesn’t want to be Trump’s running mate, but doesn’t want to offend him by turning it down, and is pulling a Producers instead.”

Let me offer an alternative view by applying Occam’s Razor. The most obvious explanation is that she included the puppy murder because she thinks Trump will like it, because it showed off her toughness.

The puppy murder was an illustration of her willingness to do “difficult, messy, and ugly” things. She probably thought it would work because of Trump’s obvious fetish for brutality. I refer you to something I wrote last year: “Trump's 2024 MAGA litmus test/ This time, cruelty is no longer enough.”

His enthusiasm for violence — including torture, extra-judicial murder and shooting both migrants and protesters — has been a consistent feature of his politics for years.

As Serwer noted, Trump has long cultivated cruelty as a political weapon. But he has not confined his cruelty to mere rhetoric. Indeed, the “pro-life” former president makes no secret of his passion for actual violence — including the maiming, wounding, flesh-tearing, shooting and killing of human beings.

And this appetite for brutality will soon become a litmus test for right-wing politicians, including any of his GOP challengers.

Speaking to supporters at Mar-a-Lago in November, Trump threatened that, as president, he would send the military into American cities, even if local officials objected, and repeatedly stressed his eagerness for executing drug dealers and human traffickers after quick, summary trials….

s president, Trump not only wanted a border wall but frequently talked about having it electrified, with sharpened spikes on top, and had aides draw up cost estimates for moats filled with alligators and snakes. He publicly suggested that soldiers shoot immigrants who threw rocks, and, when told that would be illegal, “suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down.”

Noem’s message: Donald, look at me, I’m willing to kill puppies.

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Nota Bene

George Packer:

Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

Deborah Lipstadt on Antisemitism’s Threat to Democracy

Lipstadt: I used to talk about a spectrum. Now I talk about a horseshoe and I talk about extremism. It’s true that most of the lethal actions, certainly in the United States, have come from the right. Pittsburgh, Poway, etcetera. But those on the left, the extreme left, have shown themselves to be horrendously willing to absorb and promulgate antisemitism in a way that, if it weren’t so dangerous, would be laughable. The Democratic Socialists of America chanting “Hands off Iran! Hands off Iran!” Do they know what the women there are dealing with?! Or, “Houthis, Houthis, make us proud!” They have slaves! 

Ioffe: Sure, but what are the similarities and differences between left- and right-wing antisemitism?

Lipstadt: One is talking about a white, Christian, homogenous society—so the Jew as interloper—whereas the other is talking about the Jew as oppressor. Compare the former, for example, to right-wing racism. The racist on the right is generally punching down: “Blacks are okay as long as they know their place. And their place is not in the White House and their place is not at my kid’s school or as my boss. Their place is still somewhat under me.” And that’s true of how the right wing sees Jews, too. What’s different with antisemitism on the left is that it sees itself as punching up. It’s going back to the template: “Jews are more powerful. Jews are richer. Jews want to control me. I have to protect myself ‘by any means necessary.’”

Nellie Bowles:

Even this week, when TikTok’s supposed head of public policy, Michael Beckerman, sent a letter to Congress, the metadata on the letter said it was created by a man named Zheng Han. Who is Zheng? An intern? What’s he up to? We have no idea! And isn’t it odd that the CEO of TikTok, who’s about to make a lot of money in a sale, is so upset by all this? The Chinese Communist Party is thinking that when they sell TikTok, they won’t sell the algorithm. It would be too damning if American technologists had a chance to peek under the hood.

They’re also considering just shutting the whole thing down.

Having unfettered access to America’s youth is an extraordinarily valuable thing for the CCP, who are thrilled to remind our teens that Tiananmen Square never happened, the Uyghurs are happy, Hong Kong Is Part of China Forever, identifying as a part-bird system of multiple personalities is valid, and Death to America. 

Helaine Olen:

The Federal Trade Commission earlier this week voted to ban noncompete contracts for most workers in the United States. These contracts, research shows, depress wages, stifle entrepreneurial innovation and trap people in jobs they’d prefer to exit. Taken all together, says FTC head Lina Khan, they are “robbing people of their economic liberty.”

Who would want to be against economic freedom, not to mention raises for America’s workers? The answer is both Republican FTC commissioners and business interests. And in so doing, they proved that President Joe Biden’s FTC is calling out both the GOP and the business lobby on one of their biggest lies to workers: that they are defenders of economic liberty.

Since many workers can’t get by minus a salary, a noncompete leaves them effectively trapped in a job — which is almost certainly the point….

Employers claim they need these contracts to protect everything from trade secrets to investments in training their workers. Since many workers can’t get by minus a salary, a noncompete leaves them effectively trapped in a job — which is almost certainly the point. They are, not surprisingly, widely loathed. An Ipsos poll taken last year found two-thirds of employed Americans want them banned.