Month: February 2014

Late Friday, this bombshell dropped:

The former Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, central to the scandal now swirling around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, said on Friday that “evidence exists” that the governor knew about the closings when they were happening. A lawyer for the former official, David Wildstein, wrote a letter describing the move to shut the lanes as “the Christie administration’s order” …

The screenshot above is part of the response from Christie’s office. No, it’s not from a high school president trashing his old schoolyard friend. It just reads like that. Josh Marshall is gobsmacked:

It’s genuinely shocking that a sitting governor and presidential aspirant finds himself or his key defenders writing a sentence like this: “He was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior.” I mean, is that a joke?

It’s as petty as the alleged crime – and thereby makes it seem more plausible. Josh thinks Christie is toast:

Put it all together: the horrible press, the dipping polls, the political sword of damocles people have to sign on hoping won’t fall and the inherent difficulties of getting a tonally northeastern, relative moderate through the GOP primary process, it’s just too heavy a lift. It won’t happen. And that’s all assuming he’s either innocent or that smoking gun evidence never comes out.

Chait’s view:

Everything here is circumstantial. Christie definitely comes off as the kind of politician who would order a stunt like this. Possibly he didn’t do it. Possibly he did, but it will never be proven. His best-case scenario now appears to be an absence of a smoking gun, and convincing voters not to believe the subordinate pointing a finger at him. It doesn’t look good.

Allahpundit is in the same ballpark:

Even if he says something gassy like, “I have no hard evidence but, knowing how the governor’s office operated and knowing the governor personally for many years, I’m sure he knew,” that’ll be enough for Christie’s enemies. There are so many people, left and right, who want him out of the 2016 field that the accusation alone from someone at the heart of the scandal is seriously damaging. If Bridget Kelly comes out and agrees with Wildstein, I don’t know what happens to the rest of Christie’s term.

MacGillis puts this in perspective:

[A]bove all, there is this: we now know that the man at the center of this whole operation has decided to flip against Christie instead of taking the fall. This should not be surprising – Wildstein signaled his willingness to cause trouble when he responded to a legislative subpoena by providing so many damning e-mails and text messages (including one that referred tantalizingly to a meeting between Christie and Port Authority Chairman David Samson just before the “time for some traffic problems” order was issued); and he got a lawyer without ties to Christie, unlike Bridget Anne Kelly, the deputy chief of staff who sent the “traffic problems” order and has secured as her lawyer Michael Critchley, a top attorney with longstanding links to Christie. Wildstein is, quite simply, the ultimate wildcard – someone who seemingly left politics after a brief stint as mayor of his hometown but kept his hand in the game for years as an anonymous and exceedingly well-sourced political blogger, “Wally Edge.”

Larison sticks a fork in Christie:

Assuming that this former official can back up his claims, Christie is not only finished as a national candidate, but he will probably be forced from office early, and he should be. It is somehow fitting that he should be undone by such petty punitive tactics when he owed his reputation as a national political figure in no small measure to his willingness to browbeat and harangue. Even if Christie hangs on in office for the rest of his term, he will make no headway in getting anything through the legislature, and his second term is effectively over. The main question that will remain at that point is whether any laws were broken and to what extent Christie may be culpable.

But Cassidy isn’t ready to write off Christie:

Last month, when the scandal took off, I said Christie was one story away from oblivion. At least for now, and despite its deadly timing, I’m not convinced the Wildstein letter is that story. With Wisniewski, I am reserving judgement until we hear from Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff. She’s the potential John Dean of this story. She has the power to destroy her former boss, but also to exculpate him, at least partly. Until we know what she’s got to say, Christie will remain in limbo. He’s not quite dead yet.

Raab watches as the governor’s allies vanish:

Christie, and only Christie, is even attempting to defend Christie at this point. Not his allies in South Jersey, including Democrats with whom he cut deals to become Governor in the first place; nor any national Republicans, all of whom have added ‘if’ clauses to every statement of support since the beginning of his crash; and certainly not the hard-right, left muttering sour nothings about liberal media conspiracies and Benghazi.

Amy Davidson’s two cents:

We’ll have to see the evidence to know if or how Christie lied. But expecting the truth because it would so clearly be foolish for Christie to lie, or for any politician to, is a misguided notion. There have been too many times that it just hasn’t worked out that way. The dumb, disprovable lies often have to do with sex. But there are other disorienting impulses, too, like pride and money and Republican primaries.

Update from a reader:

Let’s say Christie is correct and there is no evidence linking him to the bridge scandal. But look at the petty things he said about Wildstein, who worked for Christie and whom Christie appointed to the Port Authority. Doesn’t it say something about Christie as a manager, that he would hire someone he thought so little of, who has been involved in shady (according to Christie’s point of view) things for so many years?

That’s what Derek Thompson calls Philip Seymour Hoffman:

It’s not clear that there were roles Philip Seymour Hoffman could not do. He had so many lives within him—and more, undiscovered and unseen. Those are the lives, aside from his own, we’ve now lost. “For me, acting is torturous,” Hoffman told the New York Times in 2008, “and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great—well, that’s absolutely torturous.”

Christopher Orr notes how Hoffman “took on roles large and small, in films high-, middle-, and low-brow, and he excelled regardless of the occasion”:

Writing my end-of-the-year prizes a month and a half ago, I included among them “The ‘Philip Seymour Hoffman Makes Any Movie Better’ Award,” for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. It was jokey commendation, of course, but not really a joke. Of the nearly three dozen performances of Hoffman’s that I have witnessed onscreen, I can’t think of a single one that failed to elevate the film in question.

Dana Stevens contemplates the roles Hoffman might have played:

Accomplished as he already was, Hoffman’s career nonetheless had a distinct feeling of being nearer its beginning than its end—he was the opposite of an artist in decline. It’s easy to imagine him performing into his 80s, challenging himself and surprising us in ever-different ways as he grew older, playing Winston Churchill or Falstaff or Captain Ahab or King Lear, directing and producing both for the stage and the screen, mentoring younger actors. That we’ll never get a chance to watch that lifelong creative flowering makes me want to destroy a roomful of furniture with the cold, methodical rage Hoffman’s betrayed jewel thief displayed in Sidney Lumet’s final film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It’s a bravura moment that seems to cite the famous room-destruction scene in Citizen Kane, but with a performance that, in some ways, surpasses Welles’. For years to come—as long as I’m still around to watch movies, which right now feels like a very lucky position to be in—I’ll see other actors playing roles that should have belonged to Hoffman, and feel his loss anew.

Alyssa collects her thoughts:

“A lot of deaths feel sad. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s feels like a robbery,” my friend, Time’s television critic James Poniewozik wrote this afternoon on hearing the terrible news that the actor was dead at 46, leaving three young children. His death was reportedly due to a heroin overdose. Hoffman had sought treatment for addiction in 2013 in response to his relapse after more than two decades clean.

It’s a sadly perfect sentiment. Some artists’ deaths, like that of Heath Ledger’s, seem preposterously tragic because of the extreme youth of the people in question. Their passings force us to make accountings of what might have been possible. But like Roger Ebert, who died last spring, Philip Seymour Hoffman was an established part of the movies for as long as I’ve been watching them in any sort of serious way. We didn’t have to wonder what might have been, when the ways in which Hoffman acted as a blessing to every movie he was a part of is so abundantly obvious. The idea of a year at the theater without seeing Hoffman show up as a shaman of a music journalist, an irascible CIA agent, the founder of a new religion is almost incomprehensible.

Hoffman’s death hits close to home for Jeff Deeney, a former addict:

There is a particularly chilling aspect to Hoffman’s death that only another recovering addict can feel. He had 23 years clean, and then went back out. Just two weeks ago, I celebrated ten years off my own crippling drug habit. Sometimes I feel convinced that I’ll never relapse and experience that kind of pain and insanity again. Recovery programs warn that this kind of thinking can be dangerous. The addicting substance is characterized as “cunning, baffling and powerful.” It sounds like a cliché until someone with more than two decades clean, with a beautiful family and a career that is the envy of the world trades it in for a glassine envelope of dope and a set of works.

A collection of 14 clips from PSH’s films are here.

To share in this way is courageous, powerful and generous. Please read: http://t.co/RKKREFB8hM
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) February 1, 2014

A reader writes:

I understand your perspective on Dylan Farrow and respect what you have written.  I, too, am deeply sympathetic to her and refuse to dismiss what she has said.  Nonetheless, the account published by The Daily Beast offers a clear and cogent defense of Woody Allen, and I would urge you to consider it. I do not know what to think, but I am starting to wonder if the issue at stake is not whether we allow a man’s morality to overshadow the quality of his work, but rather whether we truly have enough evidence to discount the morality of the man.

I’m glad to link, and eager to air that side of the issue. But I remain, as I have to, agnostic about the actual accusations – but not the evident pain and anger in the letter – which remains compatible with what Dylan says happened to her. But my point was not about who may or may not be right. I cannot know with any certainty, although I tend to sympathize with most victims in cases like these. My point was simply about how the moral compromises involved in grappling with flawed artists are basically unavoidable. Another adds:

Allegations such as these are so perverse, nobody ever wants to believe someone would be willing to simply make them up.  But as the Duke lacrosse team case taught us, the accusations aren’t always true.

Another dissents:

I’m struggling with why you weren’t this measured and circumspect when you responded to abuse within the church and by Sandusky at Penn State. You’re not exactly known for your friendliness to child molesters. Jefferson, Eliot, and Larkin all thought and did things that were morally repugnant, sure, but none of them directly involved the sexual abuse of a small child. Wasn’t Maciel just as accomplished an auteur (within his chosen sphere) as Allen? Should we sit here and marvel at the brilliant talent and the subtle artistry with which he manipulated his audience?

If Ms. Farrow’s allegations are as true as you and I seem to believe they are, your comparison to concussions in the NFL is inapt. For all the evil of the concussion crisis, those grown men agreed to that environment in a way that Ms. Farrow did and could not.  A more general comparison to football, however, may be on point in that apparently all fans are incredibly willing to overlook or at least contextualize the sins of their preferred entertainment.

So, why the restrained invective when it comes to Woody Allen?

Because I do not know for sure. And an individual possible case like this one is not the same as institutionalized child abuse whose impact can be so much greater and where institutional and social power can enforce silence in ways not imposed on Dylan Farrow. Another reader draws from experience:

Rage expressed towards a parent by an adult kid may be due to real abuse, but it is not proof of abuse. I participate in support groups of estranged parents, principally mothers, who have been estranged by their adult children.

It is common in these groups for these mothers to share their grief, heartbreak, confusion and their own anger over their kids’ rewriting of history and allegations of things that did not happen. There is also something called Parental Alienation Syndrome, which is said to occur in situations of a bitter divorce where one parent – generally the parent who is living with the child at the time of the divorce – is so bitter that their feelings and their behavior towards the other parent influence their children to react to the formerly loved other parent as though they are of no worth, resulting in complete rejection of the other parent. The rejection can be so complete that nothing that the alienated parent can do will convince the child of their worth.

It is hard to imagine that anyone could have been angrier at Woody Allen than Mia Farrow at the time of their breakup. I can imagine that it was tough to have been a child living in her household then. It isn’t hard for me to believe that in her own rage at Allen that Mia would have gone to the extent of using her children as weapons against Allen. A child of 7 is no match for a mother in a rage.

I don’t know what really happened, but for me the proof of what happened does not lie in Dylan’s rage. I have seen adult kids grow up believing that good parents were bad parents. It is a tragedy for everyone.

One more reader:

We know nothing about Dylan.  Nothing about her mental health.  Nothing about how her mental health was assessed as a seven year old (or as a three year old, for that matter).  She cannot be questioned or cross examined.  The report stemming from the six or seven month investigation of her allegations has never been made public, but what little we know of it suggests every reason to doubt Dylan and Farrow.  And according to the Daily Beast, her brother Moses – also adopted by Allen – has now decided that living with Farrow involved “brainwashing.”

I do not believe Dylan, not her particulars at least (which are, in fact, not very particular). Which is not to say that I find Allen blameless.  Adoptive children are often very fragile. I have two. Even children adopted as infants experience tragedy very early in life and tragedy damages children.  To jointly adopt two fragile children with a woman to whom you have not made a lifetime commitment, a woman who is most assuredly a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and then to cheat on that woman with her own adoptive daughter is to invite bedlam. Allen may not have foreseen the details of that bedlam, but when we do bad things we don’t get to dictate the parameters of the suffering that ensues.

Mia Farrow’s brother, by the way, is currently jailed for child abuse,  and the vast majority of abusers started out abused.  I wouldn’t be surprised if both brother and sister were victims.  Moreover, I suspect Dylan, out of empathy for her mother’s very vocal rage, truly did not want to see Allen after their separation, and that when she did not want to see him, Farrow, based on her own experience, suspected and then suggested the possibility of sexual abuse.  And after days and months of questioning and prodding, I suspect that Dylan came to believe that she had been abused.

If we care about facts, and want to hash them out in the media, the report should be released as well as transcripts of all interviews – including with Dylan.  But we are not concerned about facts. We are concerned with vengeance and anger.

Ioffe profiles Russian activists. What to worry about:

The increasingly real threat of economic turmoil is already chipping away at Putin’s power with more effectiveness than any protest movement. There is bound to be a vacuum when the forces of economics prevail. But a movement that is pulled in myriad different directions, that cannot decide on an identity, and yet lacks variety in its leaders cannot fill the void. By crushing the opposition, Putin has all but ensured that, once again, Russia’s history will repeat itself, and only the wrong people will be there to step in—the ultra-nationalists, childlike faddists, and dangerous purists. And Putin’s own story may not end as happily as he imagined.

On this most recent trip to Moscow, I asked one government official what the culmination of Putin’s reign would look like. “We don’t have this tradition of, OK, you served two terms and you leave,” he said. “We have no other tradition but to hold out to the end and leave feet first.” He meant in a coffin.

The Economist breaks down the problems with the Russian economy:

In today’s Russia, oil and gas account for 75% of all exports, compared with 67% in 1980. Although Russia no longer buys grain from America, as it did in the 1980s, 45% of what Russians buy today is imported. Walk around a department store in central Moscow, and it is hard to find anything that is produced locally. The state remains the single largest employer, while its corporations—controlling natural resources, infrastructure, banking and media—dominate the economy.

As Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, two American economists, have argued, the highly inefficient industrial structure of the old Soviet economy, based on misallocation of both resources and people, remains intact. The oil rent reinforced and perpetuated it: it has bought political stability and the loyalty of the population, but has slowed down modernisation. Inevitably, the result is stagnation.

Insisting that “elections are flawed,” Alexander Guerrero proposes an alternative method of selecting representatives that he calls “lottocracy”:

First, rather than having a single, generalist legislature such as the United States Congress, the legislative function would be fulfilled by many different single-issue legislatures (each one focusing on, for example, just agriculture or health care). … These single-issue legislatures would be chosen by lottery from the political jurisdiction, with each single-issue legislature consisting of 300 people. Each person chosen would serve for a three-year term. Terms would be staggered so that each year 100 new people begin, and 100 people finish. All adult citizens in the political jurisdiction would be eligible to be selected. People would not be required to serve if selected, but the financial incentive would be significant, efforts would be made to accommodate family and work schedules, and the civic culture might need to be developed so that serving is seen as a significant civic duty and honour. In a normal year-long legislative session, the 300 people would develop an agenda of the legislative issue or two they would work on for that session, they’d hear from experts and stakeholders with respect to those issues, there would be opportunities for gathering community input and feedback, and they would eventually vote to enact legislation or alter existing legislation.

The advantages he sees:

Single-issue focus is essential to allow greater learning and engagement with the particular problems, especially given the range of backgrounds that members would bring to the institutions, and the fact that these individuals would be amateurs at the particular task of creating legislation. Lottery-chosen representatives would have more time to learn about the problems they’re legislating than today’s typical representatives, who have to spend their time learning about every topic under the sun, while also constantly travelling, claiming credit, and raising funds to get re-elected. In the lottocratic system representatives will be — at least over a long enough run — descriptively and proportionately representative of the political community, simply because they have been chosen at random. But they will not have in mind the idea that they are to represent some particular constituency. Instead, they will be like better-informed versions of ourselves, coming from backgrounds like ours, but with the opportunity to learn and deliberate about the specific topic at hand.