The Carpentariat

It's Harris

Now let the applause and complaining begin.

More later.

Even voters who dislike Biden prefer him over Trump

Monmouth University Polling finds Joe Biden leading Trump by 10 points among 868 registered voters (51% to 41%, 6-10 Aug.), with the president's 41% matching his averaged approval rating. "Fully half (50%) of registered voters continue to say they are not at all likely to support the incumbent," (italics original), reports Monmouth, which is happily rated "A+" by FiveThirtyEight.

Moving from the happy to hilarious, though, is Monmouth's reporting that "just over 1 in 5 registered voters (22%) … do not have a favorable opinion of either candidate. Biden is the preferred presidential choice among this group by 55% to 17%."

In other words, by a wide, 38-point spread, even those voters who are indifferent to, or just downright unfavorably disposed toward, Biden prefer his election over the bloated, orange reptile's.

And that, gentle reader, is what has Trump weeping with rage. Evidently he miscalculated by "winning" for us too much. If he had just settled for being a great president rather than the Messiah, he himself would be winning as I write.

Misreading Stuart Stevens

The NYT's Ross Douthat has read It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, by former Republican propagandist Stuart Stevens. Mr. Douthat was not amused. He was, however, prodigiously confused:

Stevens presses a critique of Republican voters, activists and operatives — and white religious conservatives above all [which particularly offended conservative Catholic Douthat] — that makes its author seem less like a convert with a tale to tell and more like the world’s most clueless mercenary, a political veteran who noticed only after several decades that he was fighting for what was, by his own account, transparently the wicked side….

"What does [an authentic] center-right party in America stand for?" Stevens asks, in the closest thing to an ideological statement his book contains. "Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution."

In fact, this list [does not distill] the issues that conservative voters cared most about before 2016…. All it distills is a cloistered center-right elite consensus, hawkish and globalist and fatally naïve, whose failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and China and domestic political economy mattered at least as much to the rise of Trump as the crankish or bigoted aspects of conservatism that Stevens spends his book decrying.

Of course Stevens' list fails to itemize what conservative voters cared most about before 2016 — since what they most cared about were the crankish or bigoted aspects of conservatism that Stevens spends his book decrying.

They cared about the partisan racism that Goldwater introduced in the early to mid-1960s; they cared about "shiftless blacks" in Cadillacs and on welfare in the Reagan years; they detested the fiscal sanity that ultimately gripped one-term President George H.W. Bush; they rallied around the militarism and domestic lawlessness of H.W.'s son — and throughout, they gave not a damn about "fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution."

That was Stevens' whole point, Ross. Hence what I least care about is whether Stevens is or is not "the world’s most clueless mercenary." It's just not relevant to what he now describes — to paraphrase — as his party's downward trajectory into the squalid wasteland of modern conservatism, which, as we all know and Stevens now admits, is squarely opposed to actual conservatism.

The payoff went to Donald J. Trump, who simply popularized Douthat's pejorative of a "cloistered center-right elite consensus," which, with all its hideous faults, still can't compare unfavorably to Trump's quotidian destruction of the entire American political tradition.

A Russian covid vaccine as fabled as Trump's hydroxychloroquine

"I would like to repeat that it has passed all the necessary tests," said Russian President Vladimir Putin about his country's newly developed coronavirus vaccine, which, in fact, is far from having passed all necessary tests.

The World Health Organization has warned about short-circuiting Phase 3 trials, "which normally last for months and involve thousands of people," reports the Associated Press (via Politico). In Russia, human studies did not begin until 17 June, testing all of 76 subjects.

Putin compounded his lie about necessary testing having been completed with yet another lie — one worthy of his feathered-bird pal, Donald Trump: "The most important thing is to ensure full safety of using the vaccine and its efficiency."

Russia's Health Ministry added that "the vaccine is expected to provide immunity from the coronavirus for up to two years" — a pleasant thing to know, but only if it is true, which no one can know because Putin short-circuited the Phase 3 trials.

And so all that Russia's president has confirmed is the axiomatic garbage of the Trump-Stalin mindset: Whenever expedient, the truth is helpful; but propaganda is forever priceless.

Joe Biden: Keep those asinine attacks coming, Donald

The Washington Post's splendid Ashley Parker:

Rather than look for campaign ammunition in the former vice president’s long track record of politically vulnerable votes and policy proposals, Trump has instead chosen to describe Biden as a godless Marxist bent on destroying the country with a radical agenda that would make Che Guevara blanch….

To hear Trump tell it, the former vice president and longtime U.S. senator is "the most extreme left-wing candidate in history." Biden is going to "abolish the police" and "abolish the suburbs." Biden is even "against God….

"He’s following the radical left agenda, take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment, no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God," Trump said Thursday in Ohio. "He’s against God. He’s against guns"…. [He's] a Trojan Horse for the Radical Left Agenda," and "the radical left has taken over Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Don’t let them take over America."

Politics professor Ken Goldstein noted to Ms. Parker that "there is certainly this notion that a bunch of wizards sit around and come up with this caricature and then spend hundreds of millions of dollars to drive the caricature, but it only really works if there is some kernel of truth to it."

I would add that Trump's peculiar, twofold approach to campaign messaging is his incurable compulsion to slander every opponent and every critic at any level; and perhaps equal to that failing is that he's simply incapable of comprehending, let alone conceiving, in any depth, any non-fatuous policy ideas.

Trump is not the ideological guardian of conservatism or even pseudoconservatism; he's just a cheap, frothing junkyard Dobermann — or, as Tommy Lee Jones, Agent K, said: "Imagine a giant cockroach, with unlimited strength, a massive inferiority complex, and a real short temper."

Monumental ghastliness

CNN Politics:

Kristi Noem, governor, S.D.: "[In 2019, in the Oval Office,] he said, 'Kristi, come on over here. Shake my hand,' and so I shook his hand, and I said, 'Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.'" [Not many people know that.]

Trump: 'Do you know it's my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?'"

Noem: "I started laughing. He wasn't laughing, so he was totally serious." [Despite having laughed in his face because of his buffoonishness, the South Dakota governor is "a steadfast ally of Mr. Trump," observes the Times.]

Later, Noem "greeted Trump when he arrived in the state for his July Fourth celebrations at the monument with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included his face."

***

For this country's first 100 years, just actively seeking the presidency was considered a garish act by the electorate: The job came to the man, not the man to the job. As merely one example of how this sitting president has debauched even the job itself, he has actively sought to deface Mount Rushmore by having his added to it.

Trump has the humility of John Gotti — without his better-fitting suits — and the integrity of Mitch McConnell — without his good looks.

A benevolent dictator is one thing, but this is ridiculous

On "Meet the Press" yesterday, Trump's trade adviser, Peter Navarro, revealed his and the president's belief in the divine right of kings — dictators, actually — to rule with no checks or balances whatsoever, which conflicts just a bit with the American political tradition:

"The Lord and the Founding Fathers created executive orders because of partisan bickering and divided government," said Navarro.

In a much different, which is to say, sane United States, the freewheeling rights of a unitary executive wouldn't be so bad. After all, noted Trump, dispensing with congressional authority "works better" for him — I can't believe I'm having to write this — since he needed not to "give up" anything in the usual tussling and tackling among self-interested pols in a representative democracy.

And yet the Lord and the Founding Fathers — assuming they indeed created the no-muss, no-fuss executive order, which they didn't — appeared to have overlooked the very real possibility of the electorate installing an ignorant, incompetent and even satanically empowered king in the Oval Office.

Trump is no Lincoln forcefully grabbing the reins of government so as to sublimely nourish the nation in a time of unprecedented crises. He is instead a manbaby with a machine gun; the proverbial bullshitter in a china shop; a looser cannon than when Debbie did Dallas.

As the Times put it in so many words, leaving the covid and economic crises to Trump alone …

"resulted in confusion and uncertainty ... for tens of millions of unemployed Americans and countless businesses…; the plan appeared unlikely to have immediate, meaningful impact on the sputtering economy…; [and] a number of critical provisions are also left unaddressed without a broader deal, including a lapsed federal program for small businesses, another round of stimulus checks, aid to schools confronting the beginning of the academic year and funds for state and local governments reeling from the toll of the pandemic."

The Times added that "administration officials were on the defensive a day after the president’s legally questionable executive actions" — a defensive stance I don't quite understand. Why not just cite Mr. Navarro's on-the-spot spiritual but uncomprehending wisdom, and leave it at that?

Why does Maureen Dowd need editors? Let them commit their own blunders.

Poor Maureen Dowd, what a clusterfuck of a column yesterday. It has by now been washed, rinsed and remedied by half-conscious opinion editors at the NY Times; the NY Daily News has the most concise backdrop:

"Dowd originally claimed that the Biden ticket would be the first Democratic ticket including a man and a woman since Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro for their losing 1984 White House bid…. That account inexplicably left out Hillary Clinton’s more historic bid with Kaine at her side in 2016….

"Dowd later tweaked her column to clarify that the 2020 race would be the first time a man has chosen a woman as his vice presidential candidate since Mondale did so. But in 2008, John McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate on the GOP ticket."

The Times ran a correction, of course, which incorrectly neglected Dowd's negligence of the McCain-Palin ticket. It took the Twitterverse to note the editors' second error.

"It has been that long since a [Democratic] man chose a woman to run as his vice president."

*Democratic.*

The 2008 Republican nominee for president chose a woman as his VP. pic.twitter.com/gGABLiOz0z

— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) August 8, 2020

The Time's corrected correction now reads: "An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the history of the Democratic ticket. It has been 36 years since a man chose a woman to run as his vice-president on the Democratic ticket, not 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket."

Maureen Dowd's scattered permutations of thought are one thing. (In her partial defense, as a commentator I know how mindlessly some passages can be written, which may be a trifle embarrassing — yet scarcely earthshaking.) But good grief, what is going on among the opinion editors at the Old Gray Lady? Are they nipping at the bottle along with their morning cup of coffee? Has the paper's conspicuously forced diversity of opinion of late simply scrambled their brains? Did the personnel department eliminate any formal education as an editorial requirement?

A presidential campaign based on farfetched foolishness

Politico reports on "an ever-growing sense of doom and gloom about the president’s political future" among administration officials, congressional allies and big-money contributors. That triad of gloom, the precursor of doom, is on the road of realism.

Team Trump, however, is littering the airwaves and newspapers with useless wishful thinking in addition to the president's preferred method of shambolic planning: fill head and mouth with ludicrous mendacity about the chief executive's prowess in overcoming adversity and proclaim, sort of, that he's actually "winning."

"A top Trump campaign official said the campaign was focused on its own internal polls," writes Politico, "which the official said shows Trump either matched with or ahead of Biden in the 17 key states the campaign is monitoring. The official declined to offer more specifics."

That's because the campaign official's claim is utter horseshit — that, plus focusing on internal polls allows Team Trump to manipulate and lie hysterically about their gloomy results.

"A campaign official disputed the notion that anyone inside its headquarters feels a sense of pessimism about the president’s prospects" — which could be true only if everyone inside campaign HQ is sniffing immense quantities of cocaine throughout each internally miserable day.

At least one "prominent Trump donor," Dan Eberhart, is keeping the bunker's faith, ca. 1945: "Trump is better at running behind than ahead because it makes him more aggressive…. The lesson in 2016 supposedly was that the media and polling was wrong, but I throw away that line of thinking."

Which, as noted, is merely wishful, since 2016's major polls were not wrong; and no more than any sane American, the media simply could not conceive that the electorate could put a demonstrable madman in the Oval Office.

But, let Dan and Don go on believing whatever they wish to believe. That's what doomed Democrats four years ago.

Word of the Week

Vaticination.

Hint: There is going to be a whole lot of this — much of it here — between now and 3 November. (Oh, and it's not the process of settling down in the Vatican.)

Must racists also be subliterate?

Taken from two local news reports, this story, from Political Wire, is so ghastly as to be nearly unbelievable — but, it seems, it is authentically, atavistically true.

A Republican official in Leelanau County, Michigan rejected calls for his resignation after he used the n-word at a public meeting....

Said road commissioner Tom Eckerle: "Well, this whole thing is because of them n—–s in Detroit."

When rebuked for using the language, he continued: "I can say anything I want. Black Lives Matter has everything to do with taking the country away from us."

Eckerle doubled-down to Interlochen Public Radio: "I don’t regret calling it a n—-r. A n—-r is a n—-r is a n—-r. That’s not a person whatsoever."

I was unaware this country was once rightly owned by Eckerle and Eckerle-like morons only, now known as Trump's hardest-core base. Indeed, Mr. Tom Eckerle himself is so moronic, he could not even manage to sputter those n——s in Detroit.

Proper American-English should have a defender and savior such as our British cousin, Prof. Henry Higgins.

Modern Republicanism at its purest

Paul Krugman: "When Larry Kudlow, the administration’s chief economist, declared just last week that a 'V-shaped recovery' was still on track, it was predictable that the economy would stall…. At this rate we won’t be back to precoronavirus employment until … 2027."

Economist Michelle Meyer, Bank of America: "In the very early stages of the recovery it’s easier to bring back workers quickly just to have a functioning operation. It’s not a snap back to pre-Covid levels by any means."

The Trump-bungled pandemic economy could have been much worse, notes Krugman. Only a hefty amount of stimulus money pumped into the economy — especially enhanced unemployment benefits — kept demand reasonably stable and prevented an unbridled economic free fall.

Which we confront anew, since stimulus cash is gone and Senate Republicans are making a career of Nero-fiddling and squabbling amongst themselves — as though no deeper crisis is pending. "Even if an agreement is hammered out [soon]," says Krugman, "it will be weeks before the money is flowing again….

"Nobody in the White House or on the G.O.P. side of Capitol Hill seems to have learned anything from [the 2008 economic crisis]. In fact, not having learned anything from the last crisis almost seems to be a requirement for Republican economic advisers…. MAGA!"

And of course one can go back much further than 2008. Since the Great Depression and John Maynard Keynes' remodeling of textbook macroeconomic theory — in fact, by now more proven scripture than theory — Republicans remained on The Road to Serfdom: Friedrich Hayek's general opposition to government intervention into the economy, which, in Friedrich's fevered mind, would lead to socialist tyranny and national servitude.

But at least Republican devotion to Hayekianism was, once, grounded in some level of genuine principle. Now, entry into professional Republicanism requires only thoughtless indecency and indifference to human suffering.

Falwell Jr. on the SS Hypocrite

Showing your soft underbelly, unzipping your pants and hugging a young woman, also with pants unzipped, is a costume?

The Washington Post: "Students at Liberty University, the Virginia school [Jerry Falwell Jr.] leads with a tight grip, are told to dress 'modestly' and banned from consuming media that feature nudity or sexual content. The university president said in an apology this week that he was merely taking part in a costume party on a yacht," and added that the photo was "just in good fun."

And, not too long ago, "Falwell was allegedly showing off racy photos of his wife to colleagues and having crude discussions about his sex life at work."

Glory to God.

And the debate still rages

A few horrifying takes from George Will's latest:

Truman used the bombs to avoid invading Japan. His decision, following the bitter-end Japanese fanaticism on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, was a moral and successful wager on economizing violence.

In the decision’s immediate aftermath, however, little was known of the scale and nature of the violence, and for a while the U.S. government wanted to prevent knowledge. When reports said the Hiroshima bomb was equivalent to more than 20,000 tons of TNT, a young reporter stationed in Europe, named Walter Cronkite, assumed this was a typo, which he changed to 20 tons….

[The bomb] melted eyes in their sockets. Radiation sickness — the bomb’s lethality long after detonation: uncontrollable vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding gums, wounds that would not heal, disappearing white blood cells, fevers reaching 106 degrees — had been denied, then minimized. Army Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, first dismissed Japanese reports of lethal radioactive effects as "pure propaganda," then told a Senate committee that radiation poisoning "is a very pleasant way to die"….

Fred Kaplan’s jaw-dropping 2020 book The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War reports that a Navy commander once minimized the military effectiveness of nuclear weapons — the Air Force had custody of them — by testifying "that you could stand at one end of Washington National Airport, set off an atom bomb on the other end, and walk away ‘without serious injury.'"

Truman's decision to drop "The Bomb" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is likely the most heatedly debated subject among American historians. Some argue that their lethality was well known to the president — making a liar of him — and that geopolitics — showing Stalin who was the undisputed world leader — dominated his decision to unleash those particular hells.

I disagree with Truman's detractors. I've read extensively into both sides of the argument, and I reman convinced that Truman's decision was genuinely military-oriented: Legitimate predictions of hundreds of thousands of American GIs dying on the main island of Japan's "bitter-end … fanaticism" was his principal concern. That, and if the American public ever learned that the U.S. had held a war-ending weapon in storage, as its fathers and sons were being slaughtered, President Truman would have gone down in history as the most cold-blooded president ever.

Trump's most workable idea yet