"In the final months of his life, when it was clear that he wouldn’t recover, Atwater lamented the dirty, divisive campaigns he’d run, and apologized far and wide for them."

"His memoir calls on politicians to instead follow the Golden Rule. Roger Stone, who formed an early consulting and lobbying firm in the Washington area with Atwater, along with Paul Manafort and Charles Black, remains unconvinced about Atwater’s spiritual awakening. 'Lee was a great storyteller,' Stone told me in a recent interview. 'But, in the end, he was just grasping at straws. The Atwater family disagrees and has no doubt that he became a Christian. But at that point he was also Buddhist, Hindu, and everything else.'... In Stone’s view, however, Atwater was more of an opportunist. 'We both knew he believed in nothing,' Stone told me. 'Above all, he was incredibly competitive. But I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it.'"

Writes Jane Mayer in "The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized/An infamous Republican political operative’s unpublished memoir shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost" (The New Yorker).

Gah! Why don't I have a "Lee Atwater" tag? I have about 10 old posts with his name. I'll bet every time I thought something like: No, he's a secondary character from a bygone age, not likely to come up enough to deserve his own tag. Meanwhile, I've got hundreds of tags for individual names that I've only used once. Atwater comes up a lot because his name is synonymous with "dirty tricks" and because he supposedly regretted it all when he came face to face with Death.

So that explains why I'm blogging this snippet from The New Yorker: It casts doubt on the deathbed conversion story. But it's just Roger Stone. We never actually believe Roger Stone. Then again, does it matter? Does it matter that a man regrets his evil deeds when he's no longer in a position to benefit from them? He took all his advantages when it worked in his favor, but he tells you to follow the Golden Rule. What's the basis for believing him?

FROM THE EMAIL: Richard writes: 

The New Yorker headline of "Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized" is ironic in so many ways. First, "Scurrilous Tactics" rather well describe the Democrat attacks on Trump, beginning with the Russian Collusion myth and the Impeachments. Second, the Daisy Nuclear Holoucast ad that the Democrats ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964- an ad that ordained Baptist minister Bill Moyers approved- points out once again that Democrats are not unfamiliar with using "Scurrilous Tactics" themselves.

Consider the Willie Horton ad. Willie Horton was a convicted murderer, in prison for life without parole. He committed rape and armed robbery in Maryland while on a weekend furlough from prison in Massachusetts. First, Governor Dukakis vetoed an addition to the inmate furlough program that would have prohibited convicted murderers from being eligible for weekend furloughs. Second, Al Gore was the first to bring up the furlough program during the campaign, though he didn't mention Willie Horton.

Finally, while The New Yorker and assorted Democrats may disagree with this point, "soft on crime" was a valid description of Dukakis. Willie Horton wasn't the only example. In one of the debates, Dukakis stated that he opposed the death penalty for someone that had raped and murdered his wife.

And Shane writes:  

Without excusing whatever was done or believed to have been done in 2016/2020, I just don't understand the "Trump normalized" nasty politics and racial fear-mongering thing. "Put y'all back in chains"? "Binders full of women"? the stupid high school forced haircut? Bork and Clarence Thomas? Biden saying his wife and child were killed by a drunk truck driver, when by all other accounts the truck driver was heroic and suffered for Biden's lies. Politics at a local level can be nasty, but once you reach the statewide, let alone federal political arena, its bare knuckles as it has been for centuries. Jefferson/Adams, Grover Cleveland, Harding, FDR and JFK personal lives cover up. Trump only normalized the media exposing their blatant taking of sides, and then only after they dumped him as a useful foil that backfired on them.

"Is it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t mean contemporary sculpture..."

"... whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s new. I don’t mean ancient or even non-Western sculpture, either. I mean traditional European sculpture — celebrities like Bernini and Rodin aside — and American sculpture, too: the enormous universe of stuff we come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums like the Bode. The stuff Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, notoriously derided as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a painting.... [S]culpture skeptics from Leonardo through Hegel and Diderot have cultivated our prejudice against the medium. 'Carib art,' is how Baudelaire described sculpture, meaning that even the suavest, most sophisticated works of unearthly virtuosity by Enlightenment paragons like Canova and Thorvaldsen were tainted by the medium’s primitive, cultish origins. Racism notwithstanding, Baudelaire had a point. Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. The marketplace ratifies our myopia, making headlines for megamillion-dollar sales of old master and Impressionist pictures but rarely for premodern sculptures...."

From an essay by Michael Kimmelman, published in the NYT in 2008, which I'm reading this morning because I blogged it at the time with my tag "sculpture" and I'm going through all my old posts with that tag looking for things that deserve my new tag "destruction of art."

The new tag is something I'd thought about creating for a very long time. I've been interested in violence directed at art much longer than I've been writing this blog — at least as far back as 1974 — but somehow my resistance to tag proliferation kept me from breaking this subtopic out of my generic topics "sculpture" and "art." There was also the "protest" tag. "Destruction of art" is (usually) a subtopic of that one too. But the pulling down of statues of Junipero Serra and Francis Scott Key — last night in San Francisco — finally dragged me over the line.

Speaking of Junipero Serra, I remember Richard Serra and his "Tilted Arc." I was one of the workers of lower Manhattan in the 1980s who rankled at the hostility the artist expressed toward mere pedestrians. I've written about that a few times. The people in the plaza have feelings and interests and may richly resent the impositions of artist ego and elitist civic pride. Once art is in place, it demands admiration, and what happens? It might be ignored — that's what Kimmelman fretted about — and it might be attacked — the present-day rage.

I'd like to look up what the "sculpture skeptics" — Leonardo, Hegel, Diderot, Baudelaire, et al. — had to say. Oddly, they — at least some of them — expressed racism. The sculpture skeptics of today style themselves as anti-racists. But there's resonance in Kimmelman's summary of the skepticism:

Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. 

We — some of us — prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on the flat surface of the embedded video on Twitter as protesters drag down another stately chunk of metal. 

"Sleepy Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to 'DEFUND THE POLICE'"? Well... they probably won't quickly deny it.

Sleepy Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to “DEFUND THE POLICE”. I want great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT. I want LAW & ORDER!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2020

Just asking.

Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help? I am open to discussing anything, but just asking?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2020

"The Biden 2020 campaign isn’t about following its nominal leader, or even listening to him; it’s about the party pushing him over the line collectively..."

"... and about making plans to give him the necessary support once he’s in office, as Booker’s endorsing statement alluded to in references to 'winning races up and down the ballot' and thinking of a presidential victory as the 'floor' rather than the 'ceiling' of Democratic Party potential. Biden’s sudden viability coincided with popular Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock’s announcement that, after fending off months of entreaties to enter his state’s Senate race, he will go ahead and attempt to flip the seat, while Arizona and Maine flip-aspirants Mark Kelly and Sara Gideon have also expressed a preference for running down ballot of Biden rather than Sanders. Progressives eulogizing Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign have emphasized the prominent role that she can still play, going forward, in the Senate...."

From "Joe Biden Has Cured Democrats of Their Belief in a Savior President/Joe does NOT have this without everyone else’s help" (Slate).

"[T]he president was able to take quick action to limit the number of people coming in from China that had exposure to coronavirus, but the No Ban Act would make it more difficult..."

"... for the president to keep Americans safe by addressing needs as we see other countries like Iran — you're seeing a large, potential large outbreak in Iran — Iran is one of those countries that we currently have a travel ban on because they don't allow us to properly vet that terrorists aren't coming into our country.... The president ought to be able to keep potential terrorists from coming into our country, but now with this outbreak of coronavirus, the president also needs to have all the tools available to limit, people coming in from countries with a high propensity of coronavirus... You wouldn't want legislation that would make it more difficult.”

Said Steve Scalise, quoted in "GOP leaders call on Pelosi to pull travel ban bill over coronavirus" (The Hill).