Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about all the things, or at least some of the things, that have struck me as interesting since last Tuesday. The Tuesday is available only to NRPlus members: If you would like join NRPlus — and you really should — you can sign up here. You get all kinds of good stuff in addition to the Tuesday — there are six other days in the week, after all.
Prosecute the Powerful
Republicans really want to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Democrats want to talk about January 6. Every partisan has his favorite story.
What if I told you, those are the same story?
They are, in a sense.
By the numbers, there isn’t much reason to care about January 6. The Capitol architect estimates that property damage was something around $3 million, and there were five deaths associated with that tornado of rage, filth, and stupidity. In term of loss of life, the fiasco at Travis Scott’s Astroworld show in Houston was twice as bad — ten dead — and, if you ask the lawyers, the dollar damages were a whole lot worse: They’re currently asking $3 billion in total, with 387 lawsuits from 2,800 alleged victims at last count. (The dollar figures are not strictly comparable: The $3 billion in damages sought in the Astroworld mess includes both property damage and bodily injury.) But I care a lot more about January 6 than I do Astroworld, because — this part matters! — it was an attempt to nullify a legitimate election and thereby effect the overthrow of the government of these United States. I care about that. There are lots of riots and lots of other crime. When those riots take on a particular political character, they are of much more urgent interest.
There are a lot of Hunter Biden types in the world, and I don’t care about most of them. Coke and hookers and all that? I’m a libertarian — that stuff isn’t very good for you, but I’m not inclined to throw anybody into prison over it. Corrupt business practices? I’m not going to say those don’t matter, but I’m a lot less fussy about that than many Americans are — I’m not convinced insider trading should be a crime, for instance. There are a lot of people who have gone to jail for financial crimes who shouldn’t have, in my view: Michael Milken, Martha Stewart, Conrad Black. (I’d be more inclined to put Baron Black of Crossharbour in a dungeon over that Trump book, even if the Supreme Court legalized that kind of performance in Lawrence vs. Texas.) There are a lot of idiot sons on a lot of corporate payrolls. But there is reason to believe that Hunter Biden was accepting payments for political favors secured through his father, and some reason to believe that he was acting as a conduit for payments to his family that amounted to bribes. There is very good reason to believe that Hunter Biden should have been charged with other serious crimes — crimes for which people without his family connections have been charged in similar circumstances. To be clear: There have been no such charges filed, much less charges that have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. But the Hunter Biden situation is serious in a way that the shenanigans of your average moneyed and coddled and drug-addled mediocrity are not — because of their political character.
I’m not really convinced that guys who peddle coke to such idiots as Hunter Biden should go to prison at all. I am very much convinced that politicians and members of their extended families who take bribes, sell favors, or steer contracts to friends and family should be dropped in the nearest oubliette for 20 years.
Where I disagree with some of my friends and colleagues is in the fact that I want heightened attention to politically connected crimes across the board. I think that those who argue that we should be gingerly about investigating such figures as former president Donald Trump because such investigations are bound to produce political convulsions are wrong on the merits: Former presidents should be subjected to a higher degree of scrutiny when it comes to illegal actions, not a lesser degree of scrutiny. If some nobody takes a bunch of classified documents home without going through the proper channels, that nobody is liable to go to prison. If we really mean what we say about equality before the law, then we must not refuse to investigate a former president for a similar offense because we are afraid that doing so will upset some people.
Not all riots are the same thing: Looting a sneaker store is a serious crime and ought to be treated as such, but attempting to overturn an election by means of violence is a very different sort of thing. Not all useless rich-guy drug addicts are created equal, and neither are their crimes. We should be more inclined to prosecute the powerful and the connected, rather than less inclined.
Crimes of a political character erode the foundations of the regime itself and as such are a menace more urgent and more general than what might be suggested by the particular details of the crime itself. In Texas, theft of less than $1,500 is a misdemeanor — but if Senator Bob steals $1 from the Treasury, he needs to go to the least pleasant prison we have for a very long time. A free society has to defend its institutions fiercely and with great vigilance.
The real cost of corruption is much, much higher than the value of the money that changes hands. The cost is high even when no money changes hands.
Words about Words
Last week, I did an online event with Cherise “No Relation” Trump of Speech First, an admirable organization that looks after the free-speech rights of students on our increasingly illiberal college campuses. You should check it out.
Cherise Trump gets asked if she is related to the former president pretty often. But her name is interesting on both ends.
Cherise is from the French word for cherry, cerise; more specifically, cherise is an old regional variation of the standard French word. The s at the end of cherise was dropped when the word was brought into English as cherry apparently because English speakers wrongly thought cherise was plural — but it is singular, the plural being cherises. Many English speakers would have been familiar with the French word chère, meaning “dear,” which may have influenced cherry. Interestingly, that isn’t the only time that has happened: pease, from the Latin pisum, became pea in English, also a back-formation from an erroneously interpreted plural. Caper, from the Latin capparis, probably came s-less into English in the same way.
Some more words about words . . .
I watched just as much as I could stand of Netflix’s painfully unfunny and woefully sanctimonious special The Hall, a kind of hall-of-fame induction for great comedians. Jon Stewart, who is the Michael Jordan of sanctimony, talked bravely about George Carlin and his famous “seven words you can’t say on TV.” Imagine, people getting so upset about mere words! He was preceded by Pete Davidson, whose jokes were, at least in part, about words that may not be said: “Richard Pryor redefined comedy despite tragically giving Chevy Chase the confidence to say the n-word.”
There are far more than seven words you can’t say on television today — words that Jon Stewart would not say on television if you put a gun to his head. We haven’t become a society that is more open to offensive expression — we are a society in which the taboos of one class of people have been supplanted by the taboos of a different, more powerful class of people. So powerful are these taboos that people have been fired for using perfectly respectable words that sound too much like taboo words, most famously, “niggardly.” In ancient times, certain common words were prohibited at times and in situations that were considered especially sensitive on the grounds that those words sounded too much like other words, usually words having to do with death, defeat in war, sickness, that sort of thing. Nothing really changes.
Rampant Prescriptivism
Reticent does not mean hesitant. It means disinclined to speak — maybe hesitant to speak, but not hesitant in general. Do not say: “I was reticent to do anything that would risk hurting my grandmother’s feelings.”
A reader sends in these sentences from Business Insider:
The father said that his daughter had suffered two skull fractures, two brain injuries, broken ribs and burns before he and his wife had adopted her. “My daughter has had her last rights read to her on several occasions as her seizures can be fatal,” he said.
The distressed father and his afflicted daughter have my sympathy. The writer and editor who don’t know rights from rites, less so.
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
Home and Away
You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Wooly Wilds of the ‘Real America,’ here.
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Recommended
Farah Stockman’s New York Times report on the use of U.S. real estate as an instrument of international money-laundering is necessary reading.
National Review considers the missing Republican agenda.
In Other News . . .
The United States of America: Too crazy for Ozzy Osbourne. I hear you, Ozzy. I do.
In Closing
I usually like to end with something inspirational — or even aspirational. This week, I’ll just note that lefty podcaster Will Menaker is, apparently, the dumbest man who has ever lived, and far from the most honest one.
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