The Carpentariat

An ass-backward Republican view of republican government

The word from the White House has, no surprise, now seismically shifted from impeachment being a baseless witch hunt to sure, Trump violated the public trust by attempting to extort a foreign power into interfering in the 2020 election against his likely opponent, Joe Biden; but what hell, abuse of his presidential power is not an impeachable, high crime offense.

It seems the ethically flexible Alan Dershowitz came up with this asinine constitutional humbug, which, Q.E.D., authentic constitutional scholars have swiftly treated as intellectually laughable. The very highest of high crimes that the founders imagined was a president soliciting a foreign power's aid in domestic electoral affairs. Such assistance would undermine the fundamental concept of republican government; indeed, it would drive a vampiric stake in its heart.

The White House had also heretofore insisted that House Democrats were embarrassed by the poverty of their impeachable evidence, which explained the speaker's holding of impeachment articles. But no more. This most corrupt of all presidential administrations has switched gears by essentially conceding Democrats' irrefutable evidence. However, mirabile dictu, Republican senators can now sign on to their abuse of power by deploying the dereliction-of-duty excuse which we all knew was coming, all along: Goddamn right he's guilty as sin, the evidence is overwhelming — but hey, his was but a low crime, quite forgivable.

Hence, once the criminal Trump is acquitted, this shattered republican government of ours, in imperial executive form, will no longer be accountable to Congress; legitimate oversight will become nothing more than a quaint antique of the American political tradition. Oversight committees can issue all the subpoenas they want in attempting to investigate a sitting president's high crimes — and yet executive-privilege precedent will be the royal Up Yours: The White House does not acknowledge any congressional oversight authority.

And so that sitting president can go right on abusing his power and violating the public trust and shutting down any accountability and extorting the electoral aid of whatever foreign power he chooses — as long as he's a Republican, and has a Republican Seante. Such is the New, New, New Right's idea of a constitutional republic, a Trumpian nightmare.

If the body politic fails to throw every last one of these illicit bastards out on their ass in 2020 and beyond, then we can kiss our ass goodbye.

Another notch for Republican hypocrisy

​​​​​With Ken Starr's addition to Trump's defense team, hypocrisy, as always, will be Republicans' watchword:

"In his report to Congress … Mr. Starr argued that Mr. Clinton had committed an impeachable offense by unlawfully invoking executive privilege to try to block witness testimony and documents. One of the articles of impeachment passed by the House last month charged Mr. Trump with obstructing Congress by blocking testimony and refusing to turn over documents."

Says a lawyer who worked with Starr on his Javertian persecution of the 42nd president: "Throughout the Clinton impeachment, Judge Starr consistently opposed the invocation of executive privilege and called for all the witnesses to come forward."

Well, well, these are incompatible legal positions, you say. To which the resounding answer comes: Not for Republicans.

"Demand a Fair Trial"

The Lincoln Project, headed by lifelong Republicans such as George Conway, Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, is an organization that has "many policy differences with national Democrats," as its website notes, but far more important is its national campaign to "[elect] Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not."

That would be just about all of them in the United States Congress. Led in the Senate by the bottomlessly underhanded Mitch McConnell, they "have abandoned their constitutional oaths" by ignoring reams of damning evidence against this eminently removable president, thereby prejudging his wrongful acquittal. It's a national scandal, a political farce, a blight on the Constitution, a permanent stain on the U.S. Senate and, one hopes, merely one of the coming death knells for the truly despicable Republican Party.

The Lincoln Project, however, has not yet given up. Its latest ad is a pressure campaign directed at constitutionally indifferent Republican senators; but barring any success in that effort — which will indeed be barred by the aforementioned, constitutional indifference of "conservatives" — the ad is a furtherance of its campaign to "elect Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not."

Bernie's bouncing ball, and Liz's catch

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave," wrote the 19th-century poet and novelist Walter Scott about 21st-century Bernie Sanders, whose latest deception, though, is as baffling as tangled.

A few day ago, as you'll recall, Bernie denied having ever told Elizabeth Warren in 2018 that a woman could not win the White House. This is but a nasty rumor, he said, concocted by "[Warren's] staff, who weren't in the room and are lying about what happened. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016."

But asked yesterday in an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio "if he thought gender was an obstacle" for a woman, Sanders response was, "The answer is yes."

"I think everybody has their own sets of problems," he elaborated. "I’m 78 years of age. That’s a problem…. If you’re looking at Buttigieg, he’s a young guy, people will say, 'Well, he’s too young to be president. You look at this one, she’s a woman.' So everybody, you know, brings some negatives."

Bernie then indulged, or at least skirted by, an ancient political-rhetorical process known as apophasis: "I would just hope very much that the American people look at the totality of a candidate. Not at their gender, not at their sexuality, not at their age, but at everything."

In mentioning age, Bernie included himself, which admittedly complicates the purity of his sneaky little apophasis. But try reconciling Of course! a woman can win with his disparaging judgment that being a woman in a presidential race is a "negative."

I can't. Can you?

Saturday, Warren corrected Bernie's bad history. She noted that Hillary's stolen, 3-million-vote victory in 2016 "was a big, big wake up call for a lot of people. And that’s why I say, the world has changed."

Yet Bernie has not since 1968, when male SDS activists still had "the girls" making coffee runs.

Can you spot your host?

From my daughter's 1-Second-Every-Day video, her junior year at university — I am not the lazy dude on the couch. Since she's the primary cinematographer, my daughter does not appear, except in the fifth frame, while sitting next to some grouch. Frannie the Furry Femme Fatale is the star.

Andrew Sullivan's gobsmacker

​​​​​An astonishing leap of either Kierkegaardian faith or Nietzschean will it is. Andrew Sullivan, the moderate American and British conservative, is now pulling for … clear throat … socialist Berne Sanders.

In what manner was his leap taken? In somewhat the majority Democratic manner: "At this point, I don’t care about their policies," he writes; it's only a question of who can beat Trump.

As just noted, most Dems feel the same, which is why Joe Biden's train continues to carry plurality support. And yet this is precisely where Sullivan derails. He surveys the territory and, through an attritional process, comes up in favor of the astonishing train wreck of Bernie.

Elizabeth Warren he dismisses, because she's Elizabeth Warren. I have no quarrel with that. Amy Klobuchar? She "just doesn't command a room." Again, no quarrel — though I do believe she's a good choice as veep. And of Pete Buttigieg, writes Sullivan rather quizzically: "the combination of his perfect résumé … and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me." That assessment I'll leave to psychosocial political scientists.

So finally comes the quasi-endorsement of Bernie, which reveals why no political commentator can responsibly dispatch the question of policies while penning a piece on who is most likely to beat Trump.

Sullivan likes that Bernie "seems more in command of facts than Biden" and "more commanding in general than Buttigieg or Klobuchar, and far warmer than Elizabeth Warren." (My bathroom tiles at 4 a.m. are warmer than Warren.) And he likes that he has "a consistent perspective on inequality [with which to] take on a president who has only exacerbated it…. He could appeal to the working-class voters the Democrats have lost."

Here's the rub. Sullivan concedes that "the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal," although the potential oppo research he cites is of a tangential nature at most. He groans at Bernie's one-time association with a Marxist-Leninist party favorable to Ayatollah Khomeini in that wretched, hostage year of 1979; plus "he loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union."

It's true that such a past is unlikely to get one nominated for the American Legion's Man of the Year award, if there is such a thing. Yet that past would scarcely be the primary target against which Trump and allies would launch their offensive. Two other targets, of the present, would be.

Though Bernie once "loathed the idea of open borders," he now — so as to better fit with the Democratic Party's newfound sensitivities — opportunistically advocates "essentially an end to any control of illegal immigration," observes Sullivan. There go those (white) working-class voters to whom Bernie might otherwise appeal.

But of Bernie's Medicare-for-all policy — which should have been pondered by Sullivan, since he introduced Bernie's fresh immigration policy in violation of his initial, "I don't care about their policies" announcement — Sullivan writes not one word. As informed readers know, the concept of Medicare for all is superficially popular, while its support drops like flies in winter when specifics are explained. Even Warren had the good political sense to back off.

On Medicare for all, all by itself, Trump and the Trump Party would dismember Sen. Sanders' presidential campaign and leave nothing recognizable left.

Thus how could anyone, let alone an experienced political observer, decide that Bernie Sanders is perhaps the best bet to beat Trump? Sullivan writes that his immigration flipflop "is beyond my understanding." The flipflop I understand perfectly. What's beyond my understanding is Andrew Sullivan's concluding remark: "Between the front-runners, Biden and Bernie? Bernie, maybe, but by a smidgen."

I've been wrong. No Senate trial is needed.

No, witnesses aren't at all needed in Trump's Senate trial.

Especially now that the president's little gang of thugs, laughable bumblers and junior g-men have made Nixon's plumbers look like a sterling collection of James Bonds.

Leading the list of D- Gordon Liddys involved in Trump's spectacularly impeachable wrongdoings is one Robert Hyde, otherwise known as "an obscure Republican candidate for Congress." This idiot had sent print-messages to a flunky of Rudy Giuliani, himself a flunky of the president, who was kept intimately informed of the latter flunky's hijinks.

The first flunky, Lev Parnas, has now wisely turned on the whole rotten bunch, and he's dumping whatever evidence he has of POTUS' criminal conspiracies on House Democrats. Hence we know of messages forwarded to him by Mr. Obscure Republican Candidate, "who had suggested to Mr. Parnas that [U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine] Marie L. Yovanovitch had been under surveillance while serving as the United States ambassador in Kyiv at a time when she had come under heavy criticism from Mr. Trump’s allies."

This is creepy stuff. "My contacts are checking. I will give you [the ambassador's] address next week," wrote a Belgium operative to Hyde,” who replied, "Awesome."

It is perhaps too obvious to note that Ambassador Yovanovitch was a trifle disturbed to learn that Trumpian lowlifes had been stalking her. The outcome for the lowlife clowns? Ukrainian officials are now investigating them, and the FBI has "visited" Hyde's residence and business.

Unless these supersecret agents with Groucho glasses offer to stand on a street corner and be shot, as Mr. Liddy did way back, then they too will soon be turning on Trump, Giuliani & Assoc.

So, I'll say it again. Witnesses aren't really needed in Trump's Senate trial. Mitch can just open it up, whereupon every senator who has read and comprehended any major newspaper within the last few months can vote that they find this tackiest of all presidents extraordinarily, breathtakingly guilty.

Mitch McConnell's Senate impeachment trial - Cut!

Carl Hulse, perhaps the most experienced political reporter in Washington, has once again proved his somber chops by writing about the Republican Senate's habitual skulduggery, without once cracking an egg of eye-rolling cynicism. To wit:

"Lawmakers" — that would be Republican senators who've been on lawmaking vacation since the House regained its sanity — "could pull the C-Span plug and go into closed session at critical moments of debate."

Gee, you don't say, although GOP senator John Thune said yesterday that it's "hard to say" if Mitch will indulge his proclivity for Trumpian stonewalling. It is? Hard to say? If John is that authentically dense, I'd love to play poker with him someday.

The real quotable quote issued from the Democratic minority leader when Republicans just could not get enough of trying to bounce a duly elected president who, like any sane man, capitulated to the feminine wiles of "purdy lips." Said Tom Daschle to Mr. Hulse, "We found that the closed sessions were oftentimes more productive. There was more candor, less public positioning, fewer speeches directed to the cameras."

One asks oneself, or others: Why must Senate doors be closed before its occupants can be productive, transparent, unpuffed, and relatively taciturn? In global diplomacy or city-hall negotiations, secrecy is most commonly efficacious because diplomats and negotiators require an absence of meddling external pressures so that reasonable agreement can be reached.

But what is it about the procedural ins and outs of an impeachment trial of the highest executive in the land — in this peculiar democracy, sometimes even a popularly elected executive — that should be kept mum?

Have you ever seen government documents marked "classified" or "top secret"? Ninety-nine percent of them have the for-your-eyes-only profundity or dire national security implications of a keypad code for the men's washroom. In short, government secrecy is most often just bureaucratic overkill and a product of self-importance.

But, Stonewall Mitch is in charge. So we're likely to see little more than a Senate test pattern.

"Fear doesn't win," says Elizabeth Warren

Times reporters Shane Goldmacher and Sydney Ember note that Sen. Elizabeth Warren makes a habit of "talking about … how 'fear doesn’t win.'"

What nonsense. Of course fear wins. All Elizabeth need do is ask George W. Bush or the sitting sociopath of a POTUS if fear is an effective campaign tool.

OK, sure, they'd lie, and insist it was only their brilliance of mind and stirring rhetoric that so tragically won them the White House. But if Liz were to pull a television "24," ticking-time-bomb routine on them, they'd wet their pants and spill the beans.

If it hadn't been for their hawking of fear, and duping ignorant voters with it, they'd soon acknowledge, each would have been, at best, mismanaging a Taco Bell franchise which their daddies bought for them, rather than criminally malmanaging the nation.

One also thinks of the inestimable FDR, who, God love him, and I certainly do, nonetheless said the silliest thing at his first inauguration: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Indeed, that endlessly, unthinkingly quoted quote is even sillier than Warren's "fear doesn't win."

In March 1933 the entire world had excellent reason to be bone-chilled afraid; the global economy had collapsed, U.S. unemployment dwarfed that of the "Gay 90s" Great Depression, capitalism seemed to be forever crippled, socialist revolution was in the air, and fascism was in its halcyon days.

Let's put it this way: If you were an unafraid worker in 1933, then you simply were not paying attention.

Returning to the present day, it would be equally absurd for a political leader to tell the tens of millions of victims of Trumpism that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. Trumpism's namesake is an impulsive, emotionally vacant and mentally unbalanced threat to their everyday security, be it national or otherwise.

Any reasonably high-functioning victims would also erupt, in justifiable displays of superior judgment, with an air of chortling if some saccharine goo-goo progressive pol were to inform them that "fear doesn't win." In just this young century, it has won in three out of five presidential elections, and with almost no interruptions, tactically settled in both chambers of Congress.

In short, what are we to say to such rosy-cheeked, oblivious tub-thumping as "fear doesn't win"? We should say that the speaker is either lying or pathologically out of touch with reality. Because Trump, Trumpism, and the entirety of today's Republicanism are extraordinarily fear-inducing.

A waking, overnight nightmare

​​​​​I underwent yet another inexplicable episode of insomnia last night, and throughout early morning. So between an assortment of readings, I flipped on the TV and gave it my all. For there, on my screen, sat one of those perfectly coifed, meticulously goatee-trimmed preachers of God's Word, and he desperately wanted me to hear him.

Thereupon for a good 30 minutes he preached that a successful life is unswervingly a matter of "who [sic] you honor." This puzzled me, momentarily, since the TV preacher, one Mike Murdock, talked every which way about honoring "somebody" close to you, without really nailing down who that someday might be.

Well, surprise. Then it happened. Pastor Murdock revealed that once upon a time, during his miserable impecunious life, he was inspired to give $1,000 from a $5,000 check he had just miraculously received, in honor of God. Next day he gave another thousand, and yet another thousand the following day, until he was broke, in honor of God and the Holy Spirit, he said, which had been talking to him throughout.

I would then mute the blasphemous sound, resume my reading, and after a respectable pause, unmute the sound, whereupon I would find preacher Murdork praising the honor of poor Social Security recipients who had somehow donated a thousand bucks — to him.

Especially amusing was that his audience members — quite obviously Republican, evangelically mind-trained minions, every one of them — would stir and giggle at every Murdock "witticism" regarding the honored, career-launching depletion of his own funds. As an example to others, of course.

The moral of this little tale?

Pop quiz, four possible answers: that Christopher Hitchens was right when he wrote that religion poisons everything; that St. Paul was rather unsaintly in converting ignorant gentiles; that Preacher Mike should really quit fleecing Paul's ignoramuses; and that Republicans' God should bring Murdock and Trump home soon, as He did with Oral Roberts.

In this Age of Trump, Trumpian scams are everywhere

 

This is the sort of laughable scam I contend with virtually every day:

 

***

 

Hello,

I was wondering if you have any sponsored posts options available on your site.

If yes, can you please get back to me with the prices and the details for the same.

Do let me know

 

Alice Thomas

 

 

Online Account Manager

Ingene Inc
www.ingeneinc.co.uk

 

***

FOR CHRIST'S SAKE DON'T GO TO THAT ADDRESS (which, originally, was a link). I didn't.

 

My reply:

 

I'd be glad to, if your company were anywhere to be found on the internet. For now, in its absence, let's just say that a one-inch digital ad costs $100,000 a day, prepaid. Thank you for your business, and I look forward to our long-term financial relationship. Oh, by the way, I'd appreciate your permission to fuck Alice, your online account manager.

 

Till then, I am, your servant or hers,

PM

"A Very Unstable Idiot"

From the Washington Post's coverage of the paper's Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig's new book, A Very Stable Genius:

"'Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?' Trump asks his then-chief of staff John Kelly, as the men prepare to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which commemorates the December 1941 Japanese surprise attack….

"'Trump had heard the phrase 'Pearl Harbor' and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else,' write the authors, later quoting a former senior White House adviser who concludes: 'He was at times dangerously uninformed.'"

President Kennedy once told a group of Nobel Prize winners, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

From there we've plunged to this corrupt clown and odious, lowlife dolt, who had "heard" of Pearl Harbor, when he wasn't hawking (laundering) Florida condos to Russian mobsters.

An important, non-political moment

I know a sweet lady who suffers from glaucoma, which most often occurs in one's later years, as it did in hers. To state the obvious, you don't want it to creep up on you, unawares. Maybe following up on this less-than-two-minute video will help prevent such suffering for yourself, or a Medicare-covered loved one.

The why's of Bernie's - and Liz's - extremism

The Washington Post's David Von Drehle advances a theory on why Bernie Sanders has abruptly accused Elizabeth Warren of "lying" about what he said in 2018, about a woman as president, rather than offering context or some pragmatic analysis. Von Drehle builds his case:

His Green New Deal proposals make vast promises on tight timelines that far exceed available technology. His supporters approve precisely because it is excessive. The excess shows how deeply he cares….

[He] pledges an immediate transition from the current medical economy to a new one.... Whether such enormous change is achievable with a snap of the fingers is beside the point; what matters to Team Sanders is the determination signaled by occupying the most extreme available position.

Given this mind-set, the danger to Sanders of admitting to a pragmatic discussion of sexism in politics becomes clear. It’s off-brand…. A supporter of women should declare that a woman can win the White House — whether he believes it as a practical matter or not. Conversely, to say it can’t happen due to residual sexism is a sign of not wanting it enough.

On extreme positions as signs of deep caring and delusional wishful thinking, I concur with Von Drehle. Yet, other than willing neglect or ignorance of the American political tradition and its processes, there is indeed a pragmatic reason for Sanders & Assoc.'s extremism.

Just ask any dead revolutionary, buried by his former compatriots who discovered new frontiers of extremism, which rendered the revolutionary a disposable voice of the evil status quo. Hence the survivalist's guide to any competitive extremism, whether left or right, is to always maximize one's position.

There are also the matters of factional image and self-image. How can one call him- or herself a proud progressive, while accepting, however insanely, anything less than the most perfectly extreme progressivism?

Trump managed to deliver the coup de grâce to Republicanism inch by inch and mile by mile, shoving the preexisting condition of pseudoconservatism over the precipice, whose bottom is extremist lunacy. As Trump went, so goes Bernie.

But not Bernie alone, notes Von Drehle: "The same loose linkage to reality" — known in psychiatric circles as psychosis — "that characterizes his agenda is shot through her plans, too. Warren can’t criticize Sanders's pie-in-the-sky while busily building castles in the air."

On cloud nine.

Fresh evidence of Trump's guilt, and hallelujah, McConnell betrays him

The Democratic House has released a pile of new evidence, which, in essence, shows Trump holding up a bank, stashing the money in a shoulder bag marked "reelection," and then fleeing the bank. Trump accessories Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas, who is already under federal indictment, are also shown in the evidentiary material, which was provided by Parnas.

The Republican Senate might now ponder this indisputable, conclusive evidence of Trump's guilt, before acquitting him of all charges.

What, specifically, does the evidence show? A March, 2019 document reveals an exchange between Parnas and Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, in which the latter told the former: "If you don’t make a decision about Madam [U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch] — you are bringing into question all my allegations. Including about B [Joe Biden]. You can’t even get rid of one [female] fool."

Replied Parnas: "She’s not a simple fool[,] trust me. But she’s not getting away." And she didn't. Trump, at Giuliani's urging, relieved Yovanovitch from her diplomatic post a month later.

Another document has Giuliani, in a letter, informing Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that he is acting as "personal counsel" to Trump, who has "knowledge and consent" of Giuliani's illegal shenanigans. The NY Times reports that this "is the first document to be made public to say as much."

Meanwhile, back at GOP Corruption Central-Senate Annex, Mitch McConnell is said to be considering a Ted Cruz "reciprocity" proposal, in which each Democratic witness in the president's acquittal trial would be met by a Republican witness who is altogether irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Also of some interest is that, at a Republican strategy luncheon yesterday, McConnell reportedly "played down Mr. Trump’s apparent enthusiasm for a motion to dismiss, insisting that such a move was not viable."

And with that I will say, Democratic strategists should flood the state of Kentucky with flyers and phone calls announcing to all Trumpeteers that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is, after all, refusing to cooperate with their God-sent president; but worry not, former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath (D) is available in November to take his seat.