The Carpentariat

Say goodbye to Mike Hughes while you can

The Washington Post:

Seeking to prove that a conspiracy of astronauts fabricated the shape of the Earth, a California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal….

[Mike] Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above the Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on….

"It’ll shut the door on this ball earth," Hughes said in a fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group for Saturday’s flight. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps….

[H]e acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science. "This whole tech thing," he said in the June interview. "I’m really behind the eight ball."

 

Roy Moore profits from Trump's false "doubt"

Trump, we're told, harbors a special animosity toward CNN, because of its exceptionally aggressive reporting on him. At times this has been true. But the network's online story by Jeff Zeleny — "Inside Trump's decision to embrace Moore" — is far from aggressive; indeed, it resembles the mindless stenographic "reporting" for which journalism has taken even greater heat from industry critics in recent years.

One of its passages is particularly stunning in its lack of journalistic pushback, or any level of independent analysis:

Trump's decision to embrace Roy Moore on Tuesday was rooted in several factors, but one of the biggest: the noise and confusion from a recent tidal wave of sexual harassment and misconduct allegations from Hollywood to media to politics…. Two Republicans familiar with the President's thinking [said] … the conversation has dramatically changed since November 9, when The Washington Post broke the news of the allegations against Moore. Then, it was simply one bad actor — a Republican. "Since then, it's become much harder to tell who the bad guy is," said [one of the sources].

The Trump-friendly source's conclusion is of course precisely the opposite of recent revelations. Any news-reading chimpanzee could tell you that since November 9, the telling of who the "bad guy is" has been among the easiest of journalistic narratives to follow. The bad guys have been the guys, as their sexual targets' allegations have bodied forth with no apparent taints of dishonest vindictiveness. Yet the White House would have you believe that counter-allegations have been the controversial weapon commonly deployed by the accused — Al Franken? Charlie Rose? — when, in fact, Trump's candidate, Roy Moore, has been the only one to blast away. CNN's Zeleny seems content to also have you believe it.

The thumping truth of the matter immediately follows in CNN's story, although as a kind of addendum: "The President also increasingly found it distasteful to be siding with the Republican establishment in trying to push out Moore, because it put him at odds with his base." Here one reads the influence of Steve Bannon (without it being noted), which once again was nothing more than selling the president on unadorned gutlessness.

Except for its own misleading headline — "Trump privately doubted Moore's female accusers" — Politico straightforwardly reports another truth. "Trump gave personal approval for White House counselor Kellyanne Conway to go after Moore’s Democratic opponent, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, during a Monday interview on 'Fox & Friends'…. The White House want[s] Moore’s vote on tax reform."

Outside of Trump's gutlessness, it's as simple as that. And that's the way it should be reported — as just another example of the president's infinite lack of conscience; none of this nonsense about his evolving difficulty of discerning who the bad guy is.

 

Sympathy for the devils

Eugene Robinson:

Hardly any officeholders have said they believe [Roy] Moore is innocent of — at a minimum — serious moral transgressions. Even Alabama’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, said she has "no reason to disbelieve" any of Moore’s accusers. But Ivey said she nevertheless plans to vote for Moore in the Dec. 12 special election, and her reasons sound more tribal than political.

I understand where Gov. Ivey and all other Moore voters are coming from. In fact I can sympathize with them. Because I would vote for a morally transgressive tube-nosed fruit bat before I'd vote for a Republican, since any pol who'd self-identify with the modern GOP — a racist, misogynistic, plutocratic abyss of loosely organized gangsterism led by an amoral dunce of boundless depravity — would by nature simply have to be worse.

 

H.R. McMaster got two out of three correct

I differ with Mr. McMaster on only one point. 

As you no doubt know by now, "Over a July dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz," reports BuzzFeed, "the top  national security official dismissed the president variously as an 'idiot' and a 'dope' with the intelligence of a 'kindergartner.'"

That Trump is an idiot and a dope is almost universally undisputed. But most kindergartners are curious creatures of considerable intelligence, since callous adults haven't yet pounded their brains into indifference and unshakable ignorance.

What McMaster should have confided to Oracle's CEO is that the president possesses the knowledge of a kindergartner.

 

Democrats have the advantage of negative partisanship

Increasingly I'm of the opinion that all the internal anguish over what Democrats' "message" should be in 2018 and 2020 is utterly off the mark. At root it's an exhausting logic centered on meticulous rationality and civil political discourse, neither of which any longer exists — or more to the point, any longer matters — in Trump's America.

Some Dems argue passionately that the white working class is the marginal key to electoral victory; simply recapture these poor, lost, opioid-ravaged souls through reasoned promises of job retraining and the like, and all will be well. Others argue just as passionately that women and the rising electorate of rainbow colors are the ultimate salvation of modern progressivism; therefore Democratic pols should tailor their appeals almost exclusively to those who brung 'em. Yet others argue some combination of both.

Again, it seems to me, more and more, that all three arguments are based on the (I hope) temporarily obsolete concept of politics as an arena of finely honed rational arguments. If Democrats can just nail down the right "message" — the right slogans, the right promises, the right reasoning — their historical margins of electoral losses will righteously be converted to new days of at least marginal victories. And they've less than a year to come up with just the right one — that magical message of broad appeal that will put an end to the raging madness of the heretofore winning opposition.

Permit me to submit an equally "reasoned" counterargument: Horseshit.

Like it or not, the long arc of late-20th and early 21st-century political history has us mired in Reagan's America, Gingrich's America, W.'s America, and now the unmitigated culmination of intimately related madness — Trump's America. I further submit that if the naked obscenities of this Republican Congress — its cruel health-care "reforms," its twisted joke of a tax plan, etc. etc. — and the monstrous lies of Donald Trump aren't enough to motivate Democrats, liberals, progressives and most centrists to get out and vote, then the latter's disconcerted entirety should contemplate mass emigration instead.

In other words, if the proper ridicule of congressional obscenities and stentorian denunciation of Trump's lies aren't enough by themselves to motivate the rational among us to vote, then all the reasoned arguments and right slogans and righteous promises won't make a bit of difference come Election Day next year, and then two hence. For we are locked in the arena of negative partisanship, not positive and articulate assurances of one's splendid policy alternatives.

This morning it was with no little serendipity that I discovered I'm not alone in this conceit. While reading the once-unlikely ally of Jennifer Rubin I encountered this: "It’s time, I would suggest, to accept an unpleasant reality — there are some Americans who are not operating in good faith and are unreachable by logic or appeals to decency…. Awareness of the irrational part of the electorate does not diminish the value of democracy; it rather requires that people of good will who retain rationality become that much more active in the democratic process. Sometimes you just have to win the vote and then the argument."

Quite right, or so I suspect with increasing, strategic conviction. This then reduces Democrats' present argument to the exquisite simplicity of: vote — and vote negatively, vote against the abominations of this Republican Congress and the manifest horrors of this Republican president. If either isn't enough to motivate the rational to turn out en masse, then nothing is.

 

A very brief anatomy of absurd but effective propaganda

One doesn't need "a treasure trove of documents" tying Russia to Uranium One. One would however need a treasure trove of documents singularly tying Hilary Clinton to Russia and Uranium One.

But Hannity's Fox News and radio audiences lack the ability or willingness to think critically, hence even this wretched level of the propagandistic arts works just fine on the contemporary right. Such was Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany's dynamics of propaganda: almost laughably absurd on the face of it, yet of deep partisan value to fools.   

 

"It’s going to be a long winter"

I have medical appointments today, one of them early, so I need to cut the morning short. But I couldn't let it pass without noting — after also noting, I should add, today's rather peculiar social instructions from Times columnist Charles Blow — the bizarre juxtaposition of these two news stories.

First, from the Washington Post:

White House aides and others in President Trump’s close orbit are increasingly divided in their assessments of [Mueller's] expanding probe and how worried administration officials and campaign aides should be about their potential legal peril.

[Some of them believe] in the reassurances of White House lawyer Ty Cobb that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III will be wrapping up the probe soon and the president and those close to him will be exonerated.

"[Trump] himself … has warmed to Cobb’s optimistic message on Mueller’s probe," [anticipating that the probe will be over by year's end].

And then there's this, from ABC News:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team … has now directed the Justice Department to turn over a broad array of documents….

[I]t means Mueller is now demanding documents from the department overseeing his investigation…. Mueller's investigators now seek not only communications between Justice Department officials themselves, but also any communications with White House counterparts.

Some legal analysts believe Mueller's investigation will sprawl well into 2018, and others believe it will extend even beyond that. At a minimum, however, this "Republican operative in frequent contact with the White House" has some wise words for the deluded: "It’s going to be a long winter."

 

Well I'll be darned

Has it come to this? Are American men really so Neanderthalic that this sort of thing must be spelled out?

In business environments, rubbing your penis against people — known as Frotteurism, in case you’re wondering — masturbating in front of them, or even showing your penis is wrong and humiliating and possibly illegal. In fact, doing these things in almost all environments is wrong and possibly illegal.

— Charles Blow, NY Times

 

Trump's self-wounding tweets

Yesterday morning, this seemingly inexplicable tweet from POTUS dumped into sight on my Twitter feed just seconds after it had been sent:

(A brief aside: The tweet's internal logic was — I note unsurprisingly — unkempt. By staying in the spotlight Hillary is "so good for the Republican Party," so Trump encourages her to go away?)

His tweet of embarrassing, seething resentment and sarcasm — seemingly out of nowhere — was inexplicable only momentarily. I should have known without running across it in the news, which I promptly did. Hillary had, the day before, told New York's ABC Radio that Trump "has disgraced [his] office," adding that "I didn’t think he’d be as bad as he turned out to be." She also said "No, the answer is absolutely no" when asked if she "admired" anything about his presidency.

This sort of public criticism, directed at any given president, is of course common. Obama and his presidency were labeled a disgrace by the right before he was even sworn in. But Obama, being an adult, let it slide — indeed he graciously let it all slide for eight ensuing years. Yet Trump, being a child, is incapable of reserve. And Jim Messina, who managed Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, believes therein lies Trump's undoing in 2020 (assuming, you know).

The Messina Group [a consulting firm] recently completed a long-term research project looking at a specific group who helped decide the 2016 election: white voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who supported Barack Obama in 2012 but in 2016, did not vote for Hillary Clinton, instead choosing to either stay home or vote for Trump or a third-party candidate….

[Although] Trump endlessly brags about his stock-market numbers, these voters aren’t seeing the improvement in their own lives. And, most worryingly for Trump and Republicans, the president’s outlandish statements cause the voters we spoke with to believe that he’s focused more on his own petty dramas than on improving their families’ lives…. [T]he white Obama-Non-Clinton voters we surveyed were clear: If the economy does not improve measurably, they are not going to give Trump a second chance — and they already have a clear reason to explain his failure: Twitter.

Also unsurprising is Messina's consequent advice to Democrats. "[They] … should be driving this message relentlessly: Donald Trump is more focused on helping the rich and picking fights on Twitter then he is with making people’s lives better."

Messina's recommended narrative may seem self-evident. Yet when was the last time you heard a Democratic pol tie its threefold components together, while stressing the centrality of Trump's Twitter rage as a self-imposed divergence from doing his job? In poll after poll and focus group after focus group, Trump voters consistently complain about his tweeting obsession — which, in part, Hillary so economically described as a disgrace to his office. The more Trump tweets the more disillusioned his voters become.

Perhaps the most appealing part of Messina's advice is that Trump won't take the advice of his own strategists, who have just as consistently urged him to knock off the obsessive tweeting. No one tells Donald Trump what to do, and if they do so nevertheless, he'll do it even more. He's convinced of his own strategic brilliance, which has brought down more than one fascistic blowhard.

Messina's advice may seem too elegantly simplistic, but on such singular simpleness turns many a democratic mind — especially those so fickle as to vote for reserved Obama one year, and excitable Trump another.

 

Sen. Gillibrand's confusing and confused take on The Problem of Bill Clinton

Only a New York politician or slick Southern demagogue could make two opposing points with equal conviction, leaving the reader to decide which to agree with. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was just such an instance of the former, telling the Times Thursday, "Yes, I think that is the appropriate response," when asked if President Bill Clinton should have resigned because of the Lewinsky scandal.

Politico proclaimed this a historic moment: Gillibrand had gone "where no other prominent Democrat had before"; her "stand shocked even some of her close allies." Clinton allies, however, were more incensed than shocked. Former HRC aide Philippe Reines tweeted: "Ken Starr spent $70 million on a consensual blowjob. Senate voted to keep [President Clinton]. But not enough for you @SenGillibrand? Over 20 yrs you took the Clintons’ endorsements, money, and seat. Hypocrite. Interesting strategy for 2020 primaries. Best of luck." Former WJC aide Paul Begala retweeted Reines', let's say, disappointment in Gillibrand.

Reines somewhat softened his assessment of the NY senator's remark on Friday, telling Politico that "You might not like what [Bill Clinton] did, but the idea that he got away with something in the context of what’s being discussed now is a little absurd, and I don’t think [Gillibrand] was trying to do anything, but for her to allow it to be put in the context of a Roy Moore is not right."

Yet — and this is what's being underreported — Gillibrand herself had contemporaneously and subsequently softened her assessment. To her original remark she added (my emphases) that "Things have changed today, and I think under those circumstances there should be a very different reaction." And later, a Gillibrand spokesman said she "was trying to underscore that Mr. Clinton’s actions, had they happened in the current era, should have compelled him to resign."

Still, take your pick. Gillibrand said both that Clinton's resignation would have been appropriate at the time, and that times have changed, which would have made his resignation appropriate. Her position is the reader's choice.

As a few million Democrats have pointed out since Thursday, however, Clinton's scandal-soaked second-term tenure was hardly marked with impunity. The man was impeached and then duly tried before the Senate, thus either Gillibrand interpretation seems not only a bit harsh, but blind to historical events.

Yet what gets lost in the Gillibrand kerfuffle is that Bill Clinton's troubles — quite unlike Roy Moore's — were, as Reines so forcefully pointed out, over "consensual" sex. It's true that he had lied to a grand jury in his Paula Jones testimony. But as hordes of defense lawyers also pointed out at the time, federal prosecution of an unrelated sex fib was unheard of. In brief, President Clinton paid a far higher price for his indiscretions than any average citizen would have — which failed to meet the standard of equal justice under the law.

I'll give Jonathan Chait the last word, which is a poignant summary of what Clinton's impeachment was really all about:

"I wish we liberals had done more to take seriously the [Clintonian] episodes of alleged rape and sexual assault…. [But] at issue was the procedural extremism of a Republican Party that was transforming before our eyes into the uncompromising fanatic faction whose character is fully manifest in the party of Donald Trump and Roy Moore. I don’t think we got that wrong at all."

 

"They're With Stupid"

This brief post, inspired by the Times' Timothy Egan and his latest column, "We're With Stupid," will be of interest only to those who follow with some curiosity the history of philosophical thought — and revel in profound ironies.

How did Egan inspire? "If," he writes, "the point of the Russian campaign, aided domestically by right-wing media, was to get people to think there is no such thing as knowable truth, the bad guys have won." (Well, they did to the extent of bamboozling some 63 million Americans.)

There is an academic name for this contemporary right-wing project of mass muddlement: post-modernism. It holds that there is no knowable truth with a capital T, no universal applications, no objective reality. Truth, the post-modernist will tell you, is but "socially constructed" (a cherished phrase of academics in search of publication and tenure). Post-modernism itself arose from post-structuralism, a linguistic torture invented by intellectual sadists such as Michel Foucault. (You don't want to know. And even if you knew, you'd wonder what it is that you know.)

Anyhoo, for years movement conservatism, originating as it did in the universal truths of Judeo-Christian groundings, detested and denounced post-modernism. The latter's denial of universalities and unshakable truths (such as a Creator) made it a natural philosophical foe of the conservative mind. But in short order came the easy falsifiability of, say, conservatives' supply-side economics, climatological gibberish, and the like.

Thus "alternative facts" to actual factualities had to be confected; it was that or pretty much all the foundations of movement conservatism would disintegrate. And with that the invention of Trumpian politics — much older than Trump's political career — came about. It sought to destroy beliefs in knowable truths and objective realities, so that any populist hogwash appealing to the ignorant masses could be successfully peddled. Naturally, the concept of malignant "elites" — e.g., professional climatologists or knowledgeable macroeconomists — had to be sold to the masses as well, otherwise the pedestrian virtues of the mindless Everyman could not be elevated to high democratic wholesomeness.

And so movement conservatives — Judeo-Christian groundings and all — joined the post-modernists, once deeply detested. And they've been mucking up the world of thought ever since — "get[ting] people to think there is no such thing as knowable truth," except theirs, of course.

 

Doug Jones might actually be 8 points ahead

That recent National Republican Senatorial Committee poll, showing Doug Jones with a whopping 12-point lead over Roy Moore, looked mighty suspicious. This Fox News poll appears more believable. "[It] shows Jones leading Moore among likely voters, 50 percent to 42 percent."

The internals make sense. "Jones wins 91 percent of Democratic voters, while Moore is at 78 percent among Republicans"; "Among voters under age 45, Jones has a 31-point lead"; and "Jones has a wide advantage among women, 58 percent to 32 percent."

Moore's reputation has taken such a hit, Alabama's old-time political religion just doesn't work any longer. As the disgraced judge's campaign chairman said earlier this month: "Alabama sees through Doug Jones and his radical left-wing agenda. Doug is a liberal trial lawyer, an Obama 2012 delegate, and a supporter of the radical policies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren."

Even if "Doug" were all those things, he's not a child molester. And it seems that makes a difference, even in reddest Alabama.

 

In defense of Al Franken - and Roy Moore

With yesterday's news of Al Franken's sexual transgression and the ferocious reaction to it, I'm beginning to feel as though we as a nation are collectively writing an updated version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, the Broadway allegory of McCarthyism's hysterical witch-hunting.

Within hours of Frankenstein's debut, the long and lethal knives came out for a summary political execution. Sen. Franken should resign, said Minnesota's Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party's state auditor, as well as the president of the party's "official" feminist caucus. The NY Times' Michelle Goldberg agonized in the extreme: "I thought he was one of the good guys. (I thought there were good guys)…. I found [his statement of self-disgust] persuasive and would like to see Franken redeem himself, but I … don’t think he can….

"I worry that there will be overreach," continued Goldberg, "and then a fierce and ugly backlash, as men — but not only men — decide we can’t just go around ruining people’s lives and careers by retroactively imposing today’s sexual standards on past actions…. [Yet] the question isn’t about what’s fair to Franken, but what’s fair to the rest of us. I would mourn Franken’s departure from the Senate, but I think he should go."

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand rather suddenly decided "that Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency after his inappropriate relationship with an intern came to light nearly 20 years ago." After deeper reflection, she issued a clarification through a spokesman: "[She] was trying to underscore that Mr. Clinton’s actions, had they happened in the current era, should have compelled him to resign." As for Franken, she stopped at “It’s very disturbing. I was very disappointed." We all were. But based on Gillibrand's original assessment of Bill Clinton's affair, the reflexive sentiment was clearly that Franken should resign.

No he should not. And neither should Judge Roy Moore withdraw from Alabama's senatorial race. Let the voters decide on Election Day if each "meet[s] the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate," as Republican Sen. Cory Gardner rather laughably framed that imaginary construct. Pharisaical lynch mobs should not be the arbiters of democratic representation.

There is as well the looming menace of the scheming, false accusation as the assassin of political careers. Should, say, a Roger Stone suborn a tale from a comely young lady about presidential candidate Chris Murphy having groped her, should Sen. Murphy thereupon resign from the race? I can guarantee you that 2020 will be flooded with such skulduggery, and the body count will be high indeed if accusations alone become the determinants of who's out.

What's more, Goldberg is correct in her prediction of a "fierce and ugly backlash." But not only because the citizenry will decide that "we can’t just go around ruining people’s lives and careers by retroactively imposing today’s sexual standards on past actions." They'll decide it — belatedly and thus tragically in some cases — because of the plethora of false, politically motivated ruinations.

Finally, no politician should be run out of politics because of his sexual indiscretions as long as the serial groper Donald Trump is allowed to sit unmolested in the Oval Office. Fair is fair — and fairness starts at the top.

 

See? You should have never taken the government's help.

The NY Times:

The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s bipartisan referee on tax policy, said on Thursday that the amended Senate’s version of the tax bill will raise taxes on low-income Americans beginning in 2021, in what appears to be a side effect of the bill’s decision to repeal the so-called individual mandate that requires most people buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Because of this decision, the joint committee’s analysis showed that taxpayers earning less than $40,000 would see their tax bills go up in the second half of the next decade.

What was Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch's defense of, or counterargument to, this finding? As the Times paraphrased his assessment: "Because people will no longer have to purchase health insurance, they may no longer receive tax credit subsidies for insurance that they do not purchase."

Put another way, lower-income taxpayers will no longer be burdened with health insurance — freedom! — and the subsidies that came with it, hence their tax liability will see an "uptick," as Hatch specifically put it. But, you see, it's all kind of a "mirage." For if lower-income Americans had never had the insurance and subsidies in the first place, their tax liability would have never changed.

Thus did Hatch rhetorically convert health-care coverage into an evil — but only for lower-income Americans.

It's Republican horseshit like that that leaves one's head spinning.

 

There go Al Franken's 2020 hopes

From 2006:

That, after Franken insisted to this fellow USO performer

that actors really need to rehearse everything and that we must practice the kiss. I said 'OK' so he would stop badgering me. We did the line leading up to the kiss and then he came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.

I immediately pushed him away with both of my hands against his chest and told him if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time…. I felt disgusted and violated.

Franken has issued a statement: "I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit in the same way, but I send my sincerest apologies to Leeann. As to the photo, it was clearly intended to be funny but wasn't. I shouldn't have done it."

***

Update: And Mitch McConnell wasted no time in asking for a Senate Ethics Committee probe.

 

The Republican tax bills are smelling up even the swamp

"This bill seems to get worse by the hour," says Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Mitch McConnell's 2018 Republican Preservation Act. And GOP Sen. Ron Johnson seems to agree. But appearances can deceive.

The Wisconsin senator is still pissed that McConnell opposed the Johnson Preservation Act of 2016 — i.e., the majority leader oversaw the termination of party assistance to Johnson's reelection bid when it looked as though Russ Feingold was unbeatable — hence the Wisconsinite is now threatening to "not support either [the Senate or House tax bill] in their current versions." He made a similar, hurt-feelings stink about the Senate's Obamacare repeal bill, which, in the end, he supported. To McConnell, Johnson is a bit of a drag — a real drama queen — but doubtless the latter can and will be bought.

Sen. Susan Collins is another story. She's upset that her tax-slashing colleagues wish to kill the ACA's individual mandate so that $300 billion can be saved over the next 10 years — a step that would cause the minor inconvenience of 13 million Americans losing their health care. Some Republican senators are just impossible to please. Or at least one is. With the loss of Collins' support (assuming the mandate's termination is retained in the bill), McConnell would be left with 51 Republican votes — one more than needed.

Yet, more than one is squawking. Bob Corker says he is "not a yes," though he's also "not a no"; the retiring Tennessean is reportedly cranked about the "deficit issue" that the party's tax bill will unquestionably exacerbate. But that's where the sorcery of creative accountancy comes in — the mainstay of pseudoconservatives' "fiscal responsibility."

"The support of … other Republican senators was not assured," reports the Times, including John McCain and Lisa Murkowski. McCain is indeed a wild card, however Chairwoman Murkowski's Energy and Natural Resources Committee "voted on Wednesday to approve legislation that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling" — legislation that would be attached to the tax bill, thus so much for questioning Murkowski's support.

That leaves only McCain as a very possible no, which leaves McConnell with 50 votes. And Veep Pence makes 51. That's my projection, anyway.

Meanwhile, Majority Whip Steve Scalise said that the House's tax-bill vote today is "looking real good." He added that "I think most people know how important it is to cut taxes and get the economy moving again," even though Boss Trump is running around country and world braying that the U.S. economy has never been better.

My larger projection: Republicans need this bill, and Sen. Wyden is correct that the bill is getting worse by the hour to get it done. Or, as Democratic Sen. Mark Warner put it, "Why do people think this is a swamp? This is Swamp 101."

 

North Korean editorial: Trump deserves to die

Via USA Today — from the Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of record for Kim Jong-un's Workers' Party of Korea:

The worst crime for which [Trump] can never be pardoned is that he dared to malignantly hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership. He should know that he is just a hideous criminal sentenced to death by the Korean people.

So much for editorializing polemics. Yet Rodong Sinmun's straight news section contains some surprisingly accurate reports, such as "Trump, during his visit [to Asia], laid bare his true nature as destroyer of the world peace and stability," that Trump is a "dotard," and that Trump made "'lunatic remarks' to the United Nations General Assembly in September."

Still, what staggers the normal American psyche is the deeper reality that North Korea's supreme leader and the president of the United States are indisputable equals when it comes to the realm of schoolyard taunting. Try to imagine a Dwight Eisenhower or even a Richard Nixon publicly belittling a hostile foreign leader for being "short and fat."

Some folks believe that the next Democratic president, in 2021, will face an enormous and prolonged challenge in recovering America's world reputation. With this, I profoundly disagree. Just not being Trump will, overnight, do 90 percent of the work that so desperately needs to be done.

 

Don't go soft on us now, Mr. Bannon

The Daily Beast:

Over the past few days, Bannon has begun privately taking the temperature of those in his inner circle to see what they think of the Moore allegations.... Late last week, the Breitbart chairman said, "I will put him in a grave myself," if he determines that Moore was lying to him about the numerous accusations.

If he determines …

The Beast's next passage throws a bit of doubt, however, on Bannon's ability to rationally determine realty from fraudulance.

[Bannon] wasn’t convinced that the initial flood of on-record testimony, starting with the first Washington Post story last week, was anything more than a hit job. And he believes it may have been planted by #NeverTrump operatives to put the screws to Moore’s campaign.

As for the first block quote — that Bannon is "taking the temperature of those in his inner circle to see what they think"?

Several of Bannon’s most trusted allies have already told him that it would be "insane," as one put it, to believe at this point that the Moore accusations are baseless.

Not until today did I realize that Bannon isn't a calculating crackpot who is taking the rabble for a ride. He is, instead, a rabble-rouser who is a genuine crackpot.

 

Mitch McConnell deserves no credit for dumping Roy Moore

How cheaply our political affections can come.

"Mitch McConnell made history this week with a scant four words: 'I believe the women,'" fawns the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker. "[He] suddenly became irresistibly magnetic. Admit it: You wanted to hug him."

No, I'd still prefer to slug him.

Judge Roy Moore's 40-year-old offenses are either unforgivable in their own right, or, as Parker adds, "we tend to believe that people can change and be forgiven for past transgressions.... But forgiveness requires that one confess and repent — and Moore has done neither."

Neither has Mitch McConnell — and this rather reverses his "irresistible magnetism." His offense was much more recent and far more damaging to the American soul than anything Mr. Moore had done. In 2016 McConnell upended constitutional norms and sabotaged political tradition by denying the president of the United States his choice of a Supreme Court nominee — even a hearing for his nominee.

McConnell's was an act of unprecedented partisan brutality; he would wait out President Obama's last year and, against all odds, simply hope for a Republican chief executive in 2017. And then the Court could be further contaminated by another ultraconservative mossback.

With breathtaking partisan ruthlessness and an utter indifference to constitutional mandates, McConnell, in terms of highest court appointments, effectively reduced every future president's term to three years rather than four. In brief, he essentially, single-handedly rewrote the Constitution.

Not that I'd believe or forgive him, but McConnell has yet to "confess and repent" his heretical secularism. Nonetheless, Ms. Parker and other memory-impaired fawners are swooning that "rare is the politician" — that would be McConnell — "who is also a statesman."

"Rather than try to ensure that Republicans keep the seat, he opted to do the right thing," gushes Parker, which is both a splendid truth and despicable lie. McConnell indeed did "the right thing," but for the wrong reason: He feared 2018's backlash should a groping, fumbling rapist like the Republican Moore be seated in the United States Senate. McConnell is pure pragmatism without principle — which translates into nothing but cheap opportunism.

What's moore, where was McConnell's belief in the women who exposed presidential candidate Donald Trump as a sexual assaulter? Where was his statesmanship then? The uncomplicated reality is simply that, to McConnell, Roy Moore is expendable, whereas Trump — whose accumulated transgressions, from the personal to business to politics, were far greater than Moore's — was anything but expendable. He was McConnell's only hope of devastating health care for millions, widening wealth inequality, and insuring that the high court would be populated by the lowest of ideological jurists.

If nothing else, for consistency's sake McConnell should be defending Moore. And Cory Gardner, he being the high muck-a-muck of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, should be flooding Alabama's zone with supportive cash and field operators rather than withdrawing both. Because if the Trumpian Moore "does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of [this Republican] United States Senate," who in hell does?

 

I'm still having some post-operative issues, one of which has forced me to cancel the rest of the writing day. See you tomorrow morning. 

***

Update, Tuesday: After a hard day's night I had to cancel today (formerly "tomorrow") as well. I should be back Wednesday. 

— Wednesday a.m., I'm better, much better. You may have to bear with me from time to time, but all in all I'm on the upswing, I think. (It's amazing what over-the-counter antihistamines and liquid opium can do.)