Politics Washington as Seen From Georgetown Salons It was “beautiful,” but no more. Credit: Roman Babakin “You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.”Harry S Truman Sally Quinn was on NPR’s “Here and Now” earlier this month discussing her New York Times op-ed about springtime in Washington. The op-ed appeared in May which is, the former Washington Post columnist tells us, the “most beautiful time of the year” thereabouts:  Dogwood, forsythia, cherry trees, tulips and daffodils decorate every sidewalk, wisterias weep from porch overhangs, and redbuds pop up at every corner. The air is redolent of blossoms, a soft breeze sharing their scent through the streets. It’s the perfect backdrop for the columned monuments and buildings that remind us of the miracle of our democracy. Cherry trees “on every corner”? That’s not even true in bosky Georgetown, where Quinn and the late Ben Bradlee, the Post’s long-time editor, held their famous salons. And “our democracy”? It seems not to occur to Quinn that early summer is also the time that her crowd flies off to their properties in the Hamptons, precisely to escape the oppressive heat and other icky inconveniences of the city about which she has just waxed rhapsodic. Some Washingtonians don’t even have air conditioning.  But this year, alas, springtime in Washington was not as it used to be—or at least as this former society columnist likes to remember it. Washington this year “is a city in crisis. Physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.” (The tulips and daffodils, presumably out of spite, still decorate every sidewalk.) It’s as if the fragrant air were permeated with an invisible poison, as if we were silently choking on carbon monoxide. The emotion all around—palpable in the streets, the shops, the restaurants, in business offices, at dinner tables—is fear… Nobody feels safe. Nobody feels protected. Who outside of the higher reaches of Washington society ever felt “safe” or “protected”? Most born-and-bred denizens of the city did not come to town for careers as lobbyists, journalists, or lawyers. They didn’t arrive fresh out of graduate school to work for the federal government or a think tank to influence said government.  They lived in places like Anacostia, Shaw, Le Droit Park, or the far reaches of Capitol Hill—places that are rapidly being gentrified, driving out the less desirable residents to make way for the come-here careerists. This, to someone of the status of Quinn and her chums, must be a welcome development, assuming they are even aware of it. For less privileged Washingtonians, life has never been easy. Lawlessness, depending on where you live, has always been a problem. “If you take out the killings,” the former mayor Marion Barry claimed, “Washington actually has a very, very low crime rate.” He said that, while still in office, at a National Press Club luncheon in March 1989. Less than a year later, he was arrested for smoking crack and spent six months in the slammer. Five years after that, he was re-elected. In Quinn’s Washington, people no longer have dinner parties the way they used to. Those were the good ol’ days, when Republicans and Democrats would break bread together at Georgetown dinner parties and establish convivial social connections. When that was not just possible, but encouraged, it was less disagreeable when they disagreed (supposing they remembered to do so) on the Hill the next day.  Washington, in those long-gone days, was just so much better. Those were the glory days when Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, esteemed for his high-minded pontification, was—it was later revealed—practically on Joe Kennedy’s payroll.  Then, a little later, came Stewart and Joseph Alsop—descendants of T.R. Stewart—alongside Phil Graham, then the Washington Post’s publisher. The trio went to the 1960 Democratic convention where they met privately with Jack Kennedy, persuading him to pick LBJ as his running mate. Stewart—this came out later—also used his cover as a foreign correspondent to write columns requested by the CIA. Yes, once upon a time, political Washington was indeed cozier. People got their political news from the Post or the Times, or Walter Cronkite—not feisty Fox or MSNBC. And, if you were a regular at the right dinner parties, it no doubt was a lot more pleasant. It certainly must seem so, looking back. (Jack Anderson? Who is he?) “I lived through the paranoia and vengefulness of Watergate. This time in Washington,” Quinn tells us, “it’s different.”  Well, yes, and what isn’t? (And we all know whose fault that is, don’t we?) When Rand Paul announced his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, he said Washington was “horribly broken.” Americans have “to take our country back from the special interests that use Washington as their personal piggy bank, the special interests that are more concerned with their personal welfare than the general welfare. The Washington machine that gobbles up our freedoms and invades every nook and cranny of our lives must be stopped.” He didn’t win, obviously. Donald Trump won, appealing to the same frustrations Paul did—and, of course, some others as well. Are Trump and his appointees “more concerned with their personal welfare than the general welfare?” Even if not, do they have the knowledge, the skills and the savvy to deliver? That (as the sign outside the funeral home reads) remains to be seen. Trump has already alienated a potential ally in his professed desire to dismantle the “Deep State” so beloved by Sally Quinn, the daughter of a much-decorated army officer who also served as deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and chief of operations of the organization that became the Central Intelligence Agency. The potential ally Trump has alienated is Rand Paul, who has dared criticize the president’s “big, beautiful bill.” Paul, Trump responded, has “very little understanding” of the bill and the “tremendous GROWTH” it will bring. Paul “loves voting ‘NO’ on everything.” His ideas “are actually crazy (losers!)” and “the people of Kentucky can’t stand him,” so there! We can only imagine what Quinn and her friends are saying about all this over cocktails in the Hamptons. Quick! Fetch the smelling salts! The post Washington as Seen From Georgetown Salons appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture Godspeed, Brian Wilson  The Beach Boys leader passes at the age of 82. Who knows what really happened to Brian Wilson? By the time modern audiences came to know and love his work, something was deeply, observably amiss within the mind and body of the California-born musician. Some blame the overbearing father. Others just chalk it up to the mundane stuff of life. Psychosis, heartbreak, dementia, etc. Most people say it was the drugs. Okay—it probably was the drugs. In this life, some get sick, some don’t, but in the end, everyone dies. On Wednesday, Wilson died and we all lost an American Mozart.  And so, I spent Wednesday listening to Pet Sounds. And then Surf’s Up. And then Loves You. And finally, as the day was coming to a close, I put on the Smile Sessions. What a career. Thank you, Dennis and Carl and Mike and Bruce and Al. But most of all, thank you Brian. What art. What great, uniquely American art. Sun-drenched and timeless. Not unlike the California coast he and his bandmates called home. In the home where I grew up, the Beatles reigned supreme. Then it was the Stones. After the Brits, Gram Parsons, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Merle Haggard were the sort of standards that blared from the Technics record player that lived in our dining room. Beyond the quintessential pop standards of the late ’60s, my father really was a fan of the great western songwriters of the prairie republic that spreads out between Texas and California. One thing we rarely listened to was The Beach Boys, so, for the early part of my life, all I knew of the Boys was surfboards and Mike Love.  I think that’s what a lot of Americans know of The Beach Boys. Not Pet Sounds, but “Surfin’ USA.” The hang-ten, forever summer stuff. And that’s just fine. Listening to the catalog this week, I couldn’t help but circle back to the early stuff. Much like the Beatles, it’s easy to focus on the later career work that came to define the myth. But the early stuff is great too. “Surfing Safari,” “California Girls,” “I Get Around,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Those songs weren’t generationally successful pop tunes by sheer luck. They rock. They so clearly envision a vision of that pure Americana where the days are fun, and the girls are gorgeous, and the harmonies ripple out across the ether for all of eternity. The sound is so clean, inviting, and hypnotic it invites every listener to pick up their own private surfboard in the undulating waves of their mind.  Speaking personally, it wasn’t until well into my late 20s when I really came to understand the appeal of the Boys, and specifically its ringleader Brian. I was in my Paul McCartney phase then and learned that McCartney considered Wilson’s “God Only Knows” the greatest song in the history of pop music. “It’s one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it,” McCartney told BBC Radio 1 in 2007. “It’s really just a love song, but it’s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian.”  The track McCartney crowned the greatest of all time is one of 13 on Pet Sounds, released in 1966. The groundbreaking album has become mythologized by rock fans and critics alike. It was a critical hit, but a commercial failure. Working on it, Wilson battled private demons in and out of the studio. He worked as he often did, in an obsessive, singular manner that isolated those closest to him in his pursuit of greatness. The result: swirling vocal harmonies and endless studio experimentation, a supernatural pop aesthetic that still makes today’s great musicians marvel. The millennial music project wouldn’t be possible nor complete without the inspirational tones and sanguine lullabies of one Brian Wilson. Animal Collective, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, Beach House, Fleet Foxes, Panda Bear, Vampire Weekend. All those groups have more in common with the Southern California groove Wilson manufactured than the sonic template of the Brits from that era.  Wilson’s inability to coherently and cohesively engineer a finished product would come to haunt him in future studio projects. The Boys abandoned Smile, the follow up to Pet Sounds, due to a mix of personal, logistical, and creative reasons. Though the single “Good Vibrations,” one of Wilson’s best inventions, was released from those sessions, the album he teased as a “teenage symphony to God” was shelved, not to be released in full until decades later. Given the obstacles of those years, it’s a wonder Pet Sounds was finished at all.  The film director Bill Pohlad captured the chaotic energy of Wilson’s mindset and recording practices in his absorbing 2014 biopic Love and Mercy, a joy ride for serious and casual audiences alike. Paul Dano is brilliant as the slowly-detaching Wilson, desperate to finish the unconventional recording of Pet Sounds as pressures mount in all directions. Though the album was finished, Wilson suffered great psychological turmoil.  “Brian Wilson, Pop Auteur and Leader of the Beach Boys, Dies at 82” read the breaking news headline in the New York Times on Wednesday afternoon. I immediately walked to the stereo and cranked it up. All the way up. “Mona,” “Cabin Essence,” “Caroline, No,” “Heroes and Villains.” Even “Shortnin’ Bread,” the song that drove Iggy Pop to run out of Wilson’s studio and proclaim, “That guy is nuts!” They’re all getting fresh spins and new listens today.  Wilson went out doing what he loved the most—recording. In a post shared to Instagram in April, Wilson was in the place that came to define his life and legacy, the recording studio, surrounded by friends. He transformed the American experience in the way only artists can. The great loves and bitterness of life—Brian was there for a lot of them. His music played over many of America’s big moments in the late 20th century. The film director Cameron Crowe may have said it best in his brief eulogy of Wilson on Wednesday: “Those transcendent words and happy/sad melodies will be there for all time, waiting for each new generation.” The post Godspeed, Brian Wilson  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Latin America Colombia Comes Apart The assassination attempt on Miguel Uribe Turbay is symptomatic of the region’s larger problems. Colombia, in the full swing of a turbulent presidential campaign season, was shaken this past week when Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a prominent right-wing politician and candidate for president, was shot in the head on Saturday. Uribe was out campaigning in the capital city of Bogotá when a gunman opened fire from the crowd, hitting him twice in the head and once in the leg. Videos of the chaos following the shooting quickly went viral on social media: the senator’s supporters desperately pressing shirts to the side of his head in an attempt to stem the bleeding, the gore smearing the hood of a nearby car.  Amazingly, Uribe was not immediately killed, and was rushed to surgery at a nearby hospital in Bogotá. He remains, at time of writing, in critical condition, hovering between life and death. The would-be assassin, captured at the scene after a brief shoot-out with pursuing law enforcement, was a young hired killer just 14 years old—not an uncommon sight in Latin America, where cartels and other criminal organizations often employ such sicarios as cheap and disposable agents. The shooter was the least important member of a significant conspiracy that planned and executed the assassination attempt against Uribe; police have identified no fewer than five other participants who surveilled the location and helped plan the attack, and even provided the weapon used to shoot Uribe. Attempts to identify and locate the rest of the conspirators, as well as their contacts or superiors, have thus far been (at least from what has been released to the public) to no avail, so the exact motive for the shooting remains unknown. However, it would be far from surprising if it is eventually discovered to be an operation conducted by one of the cartels or revolutionary movements Colombia hosts in abundance. One such group of militants followed up the assassination attempt with a wave of 19 terror attacks on Tuesday, bombing cars and shooting at civilians across the southwestern region of the country. The attacks killed 7 people and injured over 50 more, making it one of the larger attacks by organized crime in recent history and leaving Colombians wondering if the troubled times of civil unrest of decades past are beginning to return. While Colombia had managed to tame the worst excesses of organized crime within its borders—steadily lowering the murder rate from over 80 per 100,000 in the 1990s to about 25 per 100,000 in 2024—in recent years progress on crime and internal security in the region has slowed and begun to reverse. Colombia’s current president, Gustavo Petro, came to power on the platform of “Total Peace,” his name for a government program of open negotiation with all of Colombia’s revolutionary groups. Petro himself is a former guerrillero, having fought for the M-19 revolutionary movement in his youth until it signed a demilitarization agreement with the government, and is a strong proponent of convincing revolutionaries and guerrilleros to lay down their arms and rejoin civil society.  This is not necessarily an absurd proposal; Colombia did secure some relief from its internal conflicts after president Juan Manuel Santos signed a peace agreement with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). But that relief has proven limited indeed—many militants simply refused to demobilize, shattering the old organization into a multitude of independent fragments fighting over the territory and drug markets. Humiliatingly for Petro, few guerrilleros in the country apparently share his enthusiasm for peace. His open negotiating table has been a complete failure; not even one militant group has signed a demilitarization agreement with the government. Instead, they have begun to ramp up their violent activities: In January, the largest guerilla movement in the country, the National Liberation Army (ELN) broke the ceasefire it had negotiated with the government and began a war with other cartels and revolutionary groups over lucrative coca-producing land in the Colombian wilderness. Nor is Colombia the only country in the region that is seeing a surge of violent, organized crime. Its southern neighbor, Ecuador, has been embroiled in devastating gang violence for several years now, with its murder rate nearly sextupling between 2020 and 2023. Indeed, Ecuador may even have served as inspiration for the attempt on Uribe’s life: during the 2023 presidential election, Ecuadorian right-wing presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated after a gunman shot him in the head after a campaign rally. Uribe, like Villavicencio in Ecuador, favored a confrontation with cartels and other forms of organized crime as opposed to the conciliation or negotiation Petro has based his security strategy on. Uribe has personal experience with the devastating consequences of Colombia’s narcoterrorists: His mother, a well-known journalist, was kidnapped and murdered by militants when he was just 5 years old. Since Villavicencio’s death, Ecuador has attempted to crack down on the gangs under President Daniel Noboa to little avail. The country is still awash in crime and chaos, leaving it with the second-highest murder rate in the world. Many of those gangs are directly linked to Colombian cartels and narcoterrorists. Some of that chaos may now be bleeding back up into Colombia itself. If the country does not take serious measures to cripple the cartels, it may soon find itself in a familiar and unpleasant situation. The post Colombia Comes Apart appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Mistake is Trump’s to Make in Iran Israel’s impressive tactical success should not tempt the president into an open-ended conflict. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Despite the apparent success and tactical surprises of Israel’s strikes, what was true before remains the case: Israel cannot end Iran’s nuclear program by itself. Iran is vast, and nuclear enrichment can be done at multiple facilities and in secret. Unless the Iranian regime is overthrown—and there is really no precedent for air power alone accomplishing such a thing—Iran’s nuclear program will continue. Israel has thus started a war with no easy way to finish it.  It is possible the Iranian regime will strike back at American targets, more or less compelling the Trump administration to join Israel in its war, but it is not easy to see why a rational regime would do so. If Trump wanted to disengage from the Middle East, he probably needed to negotiate something along the lines of Obama’s JCPOA, where Iranian nuclear enrichment was monitored and limited. Such a deal would have been good for the United States and the region, and would probably have eroded the clerics’ hold over Iran in the medium term. Iran is desperate for sanctions relief and Western investment, and it is difficult to see how the clerical regime—quite unpopular among Iran’s educated young—would have survived a much-desired economic renaissance.  Now nothing of the sort is forthcoming, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has probably scuttled American and Iranian negotiations for a long time, which was certainly one of his goals. But it is really up to the Trump administration to see whether Netanyahu gets his way completely by drawing Trump into his war.  Netanyahu has leapt into the dark, starting a war with no obvious end to it. Iran is a huge country, with the brain power to develop their own nuclear engineers. It will probably respond with terror or low-key assaults and possibly with efforts to shut down oil shipping that would severely damage the world economy.  Israel is hugely unpopular in the world right now. To a great extent it is unfair to call what it has been doing in Gaza genocide, but most of the world sees Israel killing children with impunity and doesn’t like it. There has been little focus on Israel’s larger war aim, which is to ensure for itself a nuclear monopoly in the Mideast. But that too will increasingly be questioned, and not just by the global left.  The most logical thing Trump can do for the United States is to stay out of the war, which will probably be long-lasting and full of surprising twists and turns. It is natural to admire the tactical prowess of Israel’s military, which in this case seems to have done amazing things. But is mistaken to overlook Israel’s larger strategic failure: failing to be accepted as a somewhat normal country in its region. That goal may now be more remote than it was in 1948. Certainly Israel’s diplomatic currency with the West is lower than it has ever been, and its society is riven with internal political splits. Netanyahu has long shown he can master Israel’s domestic politics, but it is not clear his mastery will endure an irregular war with a large country with no end in sight. In any case, Trump would be wise not to tie the fate of his own administration to that of Netanyahu. The post The Mistake is Trump’s to Make in Iran appeared first on The American Conservative.

"An anthem for everybody."

Spain’s Impossible Dream of ‘Green’ Electricity

Is LA Mayor Karen Bass Still Working for Cuban Intelligence?