Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) exposed Colleen Shogan, Biden’s nominee to lead the U.S. Archives, as both a deep-dyed partisan and a lying Jumbo-ist, and not a very deft one at that. In the video above, he brings up a 2007 academic article she wrote for the American Political Science Association, titled “Anti-intellectualism in the Modern Presidency: Republican Populism.” Shogan resolutely denies that she wrote what she wrote, then that she meant what she wrote, and finally, that she can’t be trusted to behave like someone who would write what she wrote.
She looks and sounds insincere, dishonest and untrustworthy, because she is insincere, dishonest and untrustworthy. On the basis of character alone, no Senator of either party should vote to confirm her.
Jimmy Durante, when he replied (in “Jumbo”) to the sheriff’s query “Where do you think you’re going with that elephant?” with “Elephant? What elephant?,” at least had the sense not to begin his futile deflection with, “Thank-you, Sheriff, for that question.”
Ethics Alarms 
“Thank you, Senator. May I have another.”
🙂
I don’t know what Hawley’s policy positions are, but I appreciate that in this clip he shows the public what incisive and articulate questioning looks like, even if the public might not fully understand how it works. He hits the key points without being redundant. He calmly and clearly asserts his conclusions without hammering them in, and explains his reasoning. My hat’s off to him here.
Excellent observation. He is, I assume, a former prosecutor (let’s check—no! But he is a former litigator and highly credentialed lawyer). That’s how cross-examination is supposed to be done.
Oh, that whole bit reminded me of a video in the past two years with a scientist, walking outdoors with an interviewer. The scientist is lamenting that university students coming out of school are failing in the field because to them, everything has to be academic and be supported by a peer reviewed article and that they can’t accept hypothesis or directly observed evidence. Dang – I wish I could find that.
I mean, I sort of get what she’s purported to be writing about. I’d actually have to read her 200+ page writing to understand if she was using that in an impugning manner. There’s probably some level of irony that in her scholarly article she was being “too intellectual” about people avoiding intellectual discourse.
We maybe could use the abortion train-wreck to discuss ad-nauseum about the different tragedies women can experience at any point during a pregnancy; and yet, that won’t amount to a hill of beans to a person who values the innocent life of a child. There’s a different kind of intellectual prowess associated with maintaining a value system vs being being coldly logical and intellectual.
Jack,
The smallest of corrections but, as I’ve mentioned before, the quote from the film is simply “What Elephant?!?”
Thanks. I’ll note that the next time around for a Jumbo.
You might want to adapt the story of Zero Mostel, the bus, and the dog (si no e vero, e ben trovato).
The tale tells that Mostel, wishing to board a bus with a small dog of Pekinese size, and noting that the bus had a sign barring all dogs but seeing eye dogs, simply borrowed a cane, put on sunglasses, and boarded the bus with his dog anyway. On being challenged, he claimed that it was a seeing eye dog, at which the driver said “Seeing eye dogs are big, like Labradors”, to which Mostel replied, “you mean, it isn’t?”