During the Christmas season they frequently show a lot of old movies so I thought it might be interesting to reflect on how warped our idea of Hollywood movies is. The table below lists a tabulation of the top 10 box office stars from 1932 to 1944 by the studios for which they worked.

A couple of observations. That MGM would lead the pack with the most stars year after year is not surprising—that was their brand. “More stars than in the heavens” was their advertising slogan for years. Note, too, that Universal had some top box office stars for a couple of years during World War II. That was the Abbott & Costello effect. And even lowly Republic had one big star: Gene Autry.

But here’s my point. You probably don’t think of Fox or Paramount when you think of the top studios. You probably think of MGM or Warners and that’s easily explained: MGM and Warners movies were shown for years on television. If all you know of old movies is what’s shown on television you probably think of The Wizard of Oz (MGM) and Casablanca (Warners). You probably don’t think of Shirley Temple, Tyrone Power, or Alice Faye as being big stars but they were tops from 1934 into the early war years and they were all Fox contract players.

The Wizard of Oz was basically a flop at the box office and Casablanca just did okay. It took television to give them the iconic status they hold today. It’s a Wonderful Life is the same story. It was a flop at the box office but it gained momentum through being shown again and again and again on television.

Television distribution rights have conditioned what we think of old movies and the people who made them. Another factor was that in the 1960s and 1970s black and white modern dress dramas were rarely shown on television. Big budget Technicolor costume movies (MGM) or genre pictures (Warners) were shown frequently.

In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger makes the following observation:

Instead of the political vibrancy of the 1960s, young progressives see their world in the grip of political stasis. They weren’t around for the hard work of building the Great Society, brick by brick, amendment by legislative amendment, the way their elders did, such as—just to pick a name— Rep. John Dingell.

No wonder Mrs. Pelosi was agog at the aggression from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and the rest of the progressive “Squad.” They act as if none of this hard work ever happened and barely acknowledge its legacy exists.

Older leftists and liberals revere the alphabet soup of assistance programs and rotely support all of it. The New New Left treats all this pre-existing government as virtually an abstraction.

Note how Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 37, routinely waves off the achievements of Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s generation: “If you’re my age or younger . . .” The pedestrian dailiness of “government” has become a liability for traditional Democrats, despite all they’ve done. Dismissing U.S. history in general, progressive activists and gentry liberals want their own Great Society program. (For a reality check on the original version, read Amity Shlaes’s “Great Society: A New History.”)

But the left has a problem: The liberal legacy—extraordinarily big government (this year’s spending bill is more than 2,000 pages)—has sucked all the revenue out of the system. Elizabeth Warren’s multiple “plans” financed by beating taxes out of billionaires—like Jeremy Corbyn’s 21st century nationalizations—are the reductio ad absurdum.

IMO their problem is somewhat worse than that. The most effective anti-poverty program of the last 40 years was actually ending a federal program—AFDC. But that’s anathema to progressives.

The federal deficit isn’t being caused by declining federal revenues but by federal spending increasing faster than federal revenues.

And visibly, obviously government at all levels has become a self-licking lollipop. Today its main purposes seem to be occupying other countries, obtaining cushy sinecures for elected officials and raising the wages or paying for the pensions of public employees. These are not the stuff from which a good argument for greatly expanding the role of government can be fashioned.

In his regular New York Times column Bret Stephens characterizes the 2020 presidential campaign like this:

In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styled saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk might just win.

How to avoid that outcome?

The most obvious point is not to promise a wrenching overhaul of the economy when it shows no signs of needing such an overhaul. There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity, including a declining birthrate,national debt north of $23 trillion, the erosion of the global free-trade consensus, threats to the political independence of the Federal Reserve, and the popularization of preposterous economic notions such as Modern Monetary Theory.

But anyone who thinks blowout government spending, partly financed by an unconstitutional and ineffective wealth tax, is going to be an electoral winner should look at the fate of Britain’s hapless Jeremy Corbyn.

What would work? Smart infrastructure spending. New taxes on carbon offset by tax cuts on income and saving. Modest increases in taxes on the wealthy matched to the promise of a balanced budget.

What these proposals lack in progressive ambition, they make up in political plausibility and the inherent appeal of modesty. They also defeat Trump’s most potent re-election argument, which is that, no matter who opposes him, he’s running against the crazy left.

Hence the second point. Too much of today’s left is too busy pointing out the ugliness of the Trumpian right to notice its own ugliness: its censoriousness, nastiness and complacent self-righteousness. But millions of ordinary Americans see it, and they won’t vote for a candidate who emboldens and empowers woke culture. The Democrat who breaks with that culture, as Clinton did in 1992 over Sister Souljah and Obama did in October over “cancel culture,” is the one likeliest to beat Trump.

I think his assessment is about right but his prescription is wrong. The problem that the Democrats face is that American voters just don’t care as much about Trump as the Democratic leadership does, there is no consensus on issues on the part of those voters, and a GOTV campaign is likely to produce the same result as the 2016 election with the additional indignity of an even lower popular vote total.

As evidence I would suggest the following. First, Trump’s net approval rating, based on the RCIA, is the highest in his presidency. That’s after months of complaints, investigation, fulminating, and impeaching Trump, accompanied by non-step in-kind contributions from the press.

The second bit of evidence is that Gallup finds no consensus in the views of Americans on the most important issue. The issue with the greatest response, “the government/poor leadership”, is inclusive not just of Trump but of the House, the Senate, and the civil bureaucracy. Proposing major expansions of the reach of government, as all of the top Democratic presidential candidates have, in essence doubles down on a losing issue.

There certainly is no consensus on building roads and bridges, increasing gas prices, and balancing the budget. That’s nonsense.

What I think the Democrats need to do is both simple and insuperably difficult. They need to convince the voters that they care more about them, the voters, than they do about themselves. And for goodness sake ix-nay on the eplorables-day.

I think I may have shown you this and told you this story before but it’s been a while and I’ll do it again.

My wife and I married in June more than 30 years ago and in October of that year we began looking for a creche, a nativity scene, to use as decoration during the holidays. It took us a while but we finally came up with the one above which suited our style and the apartment in which we were living at the time.

The one thing you don’t get in that picture is the scale. The Samoyed dog (an addition to the original set) by the crib is about as high as a quarter set on edge. The tallest figure is about three quarters tall.

Our Christmas tree this year is a bit lankier than in previous years. I gather that trimming trees back that way is now the fashion. I think that’s probably something I will need to become accustomed to.

It’s still early in the morning. We haven’t even had Christmas yet. Chicago is an unseasonable warm 42° and will probably top out in the 50s.

Our Christmas morning rituals consist of my wife’s and my sitting together in our living room, eating the apricot strudel she has prepared, and exchanging gifts. Before then I’ll probably walk Kara. No fire in the fireplace this morning—too warm.

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays to all of you.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal urge Sen. McConnell to conduct a trial on the impeachment charges approved by the House with all due haste:

Mr. McConnell could tell Mrs. Pelosi to nominate managers by a certain date or he will appoint lawyers to make the case for the House. Or he could announce the start of the trial by a certain date, and proceed without the House managers if they fail to show up. The President’s lawyers could make their case, and then the Senate could vote.

This carries some political risk, but faced with such a choice Mrs. Pelosi is likely to appoint House managers in the end. Political risks also exist if Mr. McConnell continues with his current posture of refusing to hold a trial if Mrs. Pelosi doesn’t appoint managers. She and the Democrats will claim from here to November that Republicans were afraid to hold a trial because they know Mr. Trump is guilty.

For Senate Republicans, their constitutional duty here is also the best politics. Don’t join Nancy Pelosi in defining impeachment down. Honor the Constitution by holding a trial.

I certainly agree that the Senate should proceed with the trial but I would not be a bit surprised if the House were reluctant for the trial to proceed. Present Senate rules require that the Senate wait until it has “received notice from the House” that impeachment manager, effectively prosecutors, have been appointed. That isn’t much of an impediment. The Senate can change those rule or impose completely new ones by a simple majority. In practice that means that four Republicans would need to be persuaded to oppose a rule change. I don’t foresee that happening. How many Republicans can Minority Leader Schumer expect to take his side and who are they?

In addition the Senate can impose rules on the fly, again by simple majority. The Senate has no more power to compel the president than the House does although both the House and Senate acting in concert might have more influence on the “presiding officer” than the House alone would on the courts.

There is an old story about a famous Japanese judge, Ooka. When a poor man is brought before him, accused by a restaurateur of stealing smells, the judge issued his verdict: the poor man was guilty and should make recompense to the restaurateur in the form of the sound of coins jingling.

Based solely on the case presented to date by the House, what should the Senate’s verdict be?

I imagine that very few will agree Gary Abernathy’s column in the Washington Post:

First, it’s okay for Trump’s base to admit that he is too often tactless, and doesn’t set the example we would like to see in our president. He should lay off criticizing dead people. You can still support Trump for president and simultaneously acknowledge that sometimes he’s a jerk.

Second, it’s all right for Trump’s critics to admit that impeachment was a purely partisan scavenger hunt, and that what was described as a “clear and present danger” in need of immediate action was hardly that at all, proven now by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to let the articles of impeachment leave her grasp.

Third, it’s acceptable for Trump supporters to admit that, while impeachment was an overreach, Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not “perfect,” and he should have avoided even the appearance of holding up foreign aid for political purposes. It will be a legitimate campaign issue for the Democrats.

Fourth, it’s time for the mainstream media to admit that the left is sometimes wrong, and concede that not all “right-wing conspiracy theories” are unfounded, which we know from the debunked Russian collusion narrative and the mounting evidence that some in the FBI indeed, made mistakes as they conducted their investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016.

I only disagree with those four points to the extent that I think he is tactfully understating each. Trump is worse than “a jerk”. The “purely partisan scavenger hunt” has been going on since before Trump was elected president. I have written multiple times in the past that not only was the call not perfect, it was the wrong thing to do done in the wrong way. And those were not merely “mistakes” made by the FBI. The preponderance of the evidence suggests they were crimes.

Columnists and contributors to the Washington Post are outraged that no members of the Saudi royal family were charged in the gruesome murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.

The Khashoggi case represented a breach of trust — not with the kingdom’s critics, but with its longtime supporters at the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and Congress. Officials from all those branches of government have told me repeatedly over the past year that to rebuild a strong U.S.-Saudi relationship, the kingdom needed to demonstrate that it had turned a page — and that such a murder of a dissident U.S.-based journalist could never happen again. Monday’s action is likely to widen that trust gap rather than repair it.

The CIA still believes that the crown prince bears ultimate responsibility for Khashoggi’s death. That’s why this case cuts so deep.

A sign of the fractured U.S.-Saudi bond was the decision this fall by the State Department, backed by the CIA, to reject a proposal to train the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency, as their spy service is known. U.S. officials think such training would be helpful, and they credit the GIP as a good partner over the years. But that’s not the problem: American Foreign Service and intelligence officers worry that the impulsive crown prince hasn’t learned a lesson from Khashoggi’s death — and could make more catastrophic mistakes.

These verdicts are the antithesis of justice: the hit men are sentenced to death, potentially permanently silencing key witnesses, but the apparent masterminds walk free — barely touched by the investigation and trial. This is exactly what impunity looks like, and it must be denounced. Anyone who cares about freedom of the press — governments, as well as members of the public — must denounce this travesty until an actual impartial investigation holds those at the highest level responsible.

Actually, it’s exactly what despotic aristocracy looks like and to expect anything better is unrealistic in the extreme. As far as Saudi’s rulers are concerned the country has no purpose, no meaning other than to enrich its royal family, shield them from criticism, and preserve them in power.

Sadly, when our politicians become wealthy in a lifetime of alleged “public service”, I can only wonder how far away from that we are ourselves.

Meanwhile, just how useful is Saudi Arabia to U. S. interests, really? As their conflict with Yemen has amply demonstrated they are both cruel and incompetent. Why we are supporting them in it eludes me. Any notion that they’ll provide some sort of balance against Iran is fatuous.

At the New York Times Bret Stephens and Gail Collins discuss the impeachment drama such as it is. After some meandering, Bret Stephens gets around to what I think are the crucial points:

Bret: Pelosi is very sharp, but she has a quandary. If she tries to bottle up impeachment in the House on grounds that the Senate won’t call witnesses like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney, she’ll look hypocritical, for two reasons: First, the House went ahead with impeachment without waiting to hear from Bolton and Mulvaney. And second, she’ll be obstructing the very Constitutional principles that Trump’s impeachment are supposed to vindicate. One Harvard Law professor, Noah Feldman, claims impeachment doesn’t actually happen until the House forwards the articles to the Senate. Whether that’s true or not, most Americans expect that impeachment in the House, if it is to mean anything, must mean some kind of trial in the Senate.

Gail: Only about six people in the country understand this issue. As far as public opinion goes, Trump’s wishes have come true: it’s all about whether you love him or hate him. But go on …

Bret: On the other hand, if Pelosi lets the Senate take over from here, Mitch McConnell will arrange an expedited trial leading to guaranteed acquittal, leading much of the public to conclude that the entire process was a waste of time.

Honestly, I’m not sure how she finesses it. What am I missing?

Ms. Collins never actually answers his question, merely responding with the equivalent of “Go Cubs!”:

So in 2020 maybe the Democrats will win the presidency and control of both houses of Congress.

or, maybe Speaker Pelosi has just engineered Trump’s re-election. I think there’s a reason Ms. Collins doesn’t respond. There is no particularly good response unless you take the view that I have articulated here. Maybe the entire impeachment inquiry wasn’t about defeating Trump so much as intra-party politics. Then it all makes sense.