Perhaps I’m just so dispirited after a year of being forced to analyze and discuss Joe Manchin on a daily basis. But I find myself compelled to resort to media criticism for the second time in a week. I read this morning that Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended for two weeks from The View for her earlier comments about the Holocaust. This whole episode is a testament to the general insipidness of our public culture.

Goldberg’s comments were clearly rooted in ignorance rather than malevolence. She not only issued a genuine apology rather than a half-assed ‘I’m sorry if anyone was offended’ type apology. She also spoke to people, privately and publicly, and seemingly learned why her comments were wrongheaded and corrected herself. ABC’s suspension was needless and stupid. It will be derided as “cancel culture.” But it’s really more the kind of corporate ass-covering that only discredits the values it purports to serve. It’s a consequence that, as far as I can tell, basically no one was asking for.

I confess to some feelings of pessimism (something I’m usually characterologically and ideologically opposed to) and drift about the current political moment. But despite the frequent and understandable claims that none of it matters, there’s more going on than people maybe realize with ex-President Trump and the January 6th investigators. Here I don’t mean specifically what the investigators are coming up with — though I think there’s a lot going on there too. I’m talking about Trump’s efforts to manage the Republican response to those findings and its on-going work.

You’ve probably seen this controversy with Joe Rogan and his podcast which now involves Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and a series of other musicians whose heydays were decades ago. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Most of the things I listen to are at least three or four decades old.) I noticed a Twitter exchange this morning that basically asked, ‘How is this controversy going on for so long?’ Maybe something is in the water. Or — given the centrality of COVID to this — in the air. But last night I had a similar thought: How are we still talking about this?

The whole thing seems more mundane and pedestrian than the way it’s being portrayed. Some of it is the focus on “disinformation” or “misinformation” in public discussions which traces back to or at least became ubiquitous after the revelations about Russian disinformation campaigns during the 2016 election.

We’ve discussed John Durham’s crooked and parodic investigation into the “origins” of the Russia probe a number of times before. It’s shaping up to have the outlines of the notorious special counsel investigations (technically office of independent counsel investigations) that led to the old independent counsel law being allowed to lapse in the late 1990s. Durham’s probe into the “origins” of the Russia probe has now gone almost a year longer than the Mueller probe itself.

As Josh Kovensky notes here, last week Durham revealed in a court filing that he had obtained new documents he’d never seen before relevant to his prosecution of Michael Sussman, who he indicted last year for lying to to the FBI. Then on Sunday Durham dropped a new filing in which he admitted that in fact he’d been told about the documents back in 2018.

Over the weekend ex-President Trump suggested he’d pardon the various insurrectionists now either facing charges or serving time for their role in the January 6th insurrection. He’s also increasingly open in justifying his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Those promised pardons are better seen as inducements to future acts than anything directed at those involved in January 6th.

SNIPPETS FROM A POLITICO interview with European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Kadri Liik.

Does Putin see Biden as weak — after Afghanistan? “I don’t think so. I think people in Moscow, at least people who matter and who are influential in foreign policy debates, their thinking was rather that Biden is smart. He’s trying to limit his frontlines. He’s not fighting each and every battle. Plus, Biden is someone who can speak on behalf of the West. During the whole Trump period, there was no one like that.”

A few weeks ago I got onto one of the genealogy kicks I get on every few years in response to a new family history revelation. Since genealogy was in the air my wife decided to follow up on some information she’d discovered a few years ago about a relative who died in the Holocaust. My lineal ancestors were all living in the United States no later than 1920. Others arrived in the late 19th century; some arrived in North America as far back as the 1630s. My wife’s background is quite different. Her grandparents immigrated to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. Much of her family three generations back were murdered in Hitler’s Final Solution.

The most important thing about the federal judiciary today is that it has been thoroughly corrupted by the judicial right. But there are other important things. And one of them is the capture of the federal judiciary by the elite legal academy. There was a time in our history when it was expected and frequent for elected politicians to be placed on the Supreme Court. Indeed, some of the best and most influential justices came out of the political world.

I confess I’m as much entertained as surprised that Madison Cawthorn’s lawyer is taking this tack to defend his standing to serve in the House of Representatives. James Bopp Jr., a storied right-wing power lawyer, argues that Congress already issued a blanket amnesty to all insurrectionists back in 1872. So Madison is good to go in terms of serving in Congress. Bopp is granting — at least for the sake of argument — that Cawthorn did commit insurrection. It amounts to saying: ‘Congress already absolved young Mr. Cawthorn back during the Grant administration for any insurrections he might do. So whether he committed a rebellion against the United States last January is moot.’

“I know we all have fatigue, but we have to get through this and right now in Butler County, it’s off the hook. My attitude has changed immensely. I’ve had three employees in the sheriff’s office in the last few months die of COVID.” – Butler County (Ohio) Sheriff Richard Jones.