The Carpentariat

"We got him" Part II

On 1 May 2011, President Obama announced to the nation in a moment of joyous relief, "We got him" — him being you-know-who. Now it seems we can joyously announce that on 30 July 2021, "we got" the other you-know-who, the terrorist malefactor who attempted to kill America from within.

Evidence of Trump's core involvement in the attempted coup of Jan. 6 is already piling up. And whatever loose ends of doubt about his broader coup attempts might otherwise have remained — legally speaking, that is — appear to have been whisked away by the Justice Department's surrender of notes, to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, taken by then-Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue.

The memorialization of his and Boss Rosen's Dec. 27 phone conversation with Trump is the smoking Nixonian gun.

In fact, the gun is on fire. The most damning bill of particular in criminal charges to come: "Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me" — America's terrorist malefactor and, paraphrasing here, his congressional lackeys, he added, who all along have flagrantly aided and abetted the chief conspirator's crimes.

Notwithstanding the department's repeated refutations of election fraud, Trump's command to the DOJ to just say the election was corrupt is unambiguous evidence of his conspiracy to commit not only said fraud, but to perpetrate one coup attempt before the next.

One final thing. The Times writes that "handing over the notes to Congress is part of a pattern of allowing scrutiny of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election." It's the notes' contents, however, that are part of a much larger, more relevant pattern of Trump's criminal behavior — which, as I understand it, could be admissible in a court of law to impeach his credibility, if he's first convicted on other fraud charges, say, in Georgia and New York.

We got him. At long last, we got him. I think.

Funnier than Borowitz

To think that this moron is a duly elected U.S. representative and the House's third-ranking Republican. Good grief.

Note: To say she's a moron is an act of kindness. The only alternative explanation for this monumental fatuity is that she indeed knows better, and is merely feeding yet more rancid meat to the great unwashed, for which there is no excuse.   

Today’s Anniversary of Medicare & Medicaid reminds us to reflect on the critical role these programs have played to protect the healthcare of millions of families. To safeguard our future, we must reject Socialist healthcare schemes. https://t.co/mOdUuX7THT

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) July 30, 2021

It's not equity over equality, but equity to equality

In "Pursuing 'equity' over equality reveals the nation's moral regression," George Will channels a prevailing neurosis by writing that "the steady pursuit of [equal opportunity] is as noble as today’s progressive abandonment of this aspiration in favor of 'equity' is ignoble. This regression involves ascribing all disparities in social outcomes to racism."

That moderate Biden's equity policies are but foothill paths to the aspirational zenith of equal opportunity are unfailingly misrepresented by the right as ends in themselves is also a diagnostic symptom of — I'll be charitable — an unfortunate misunderstanding.

A plain fact of unopportunistic racial disparities in social outcomes is, well, as one might guess, race. To take remedial considerations of race out of social policies would be akin to taking the U.S. military out of "good" wars. Without intervention, neither equal opportunities nor the ultimate objective of peace could ever be achieved.

Just as unfortunate is Will's correct assertion that "benefits allocated to a specially protected racial cohort might come to be seen as a badge of inferiority." They already are, of course, by many Americans. Yet an end run around that perception by throwing up our hands in exasperated hopelessness is scarcely the better alternative. After four-hundred years of mostly unprotected racial cohorts, this society, led by its only conscientious political party, must keep trying to balance the books.

As Will writes his color-blind preferences, he also writes this shockingly blinkered statement: "Getting used to special dependency, and soon experiencing it as an entitlement, the beneficiaries might come to feel entitled to preferences forever."

Reading that, my mind leapt not to an equal opportunity-deprived African American or Latino or Native American, as Will intended. It leapt instead to that special dependency of hereditary rich, forever-entitled, beneficiary halfwits and social parasites such as Donald Trump who so routinely infiltrate the ranks of America's "elite." About that, Will has nothing to say. He simply averts his blinkered eyes.

The evolution of Republican hyperpartisanship

In the lead paragraph to his self-answered piece — "Is Joe Biden Sinking?" — the WSJ's deputy opinion page editor, Daniel Henninger, writes: "The country’s partisan polarization has intensified every year since George W. Bush won the presidency in the 2000 hanging-chad election."

I'm generally loath to play the tracing-back parlor game. This strong disinclination took root during my two graduate years of minoring in the history of science, in which I read numerous authors giddily noting that Darwin's principal thesis was nothing new. His more insightful predecessors stacked up in these books and essays, with each author going further back in time to reveal the "true" Darwin. Had I kept reading these works, I'm sure the Original Darwin eventually would have turned out to be a French Neanderthal who left a cave painting of humankind's evolutionary timeline.

But back to Henninger's premise, which touches on, more precisely, Republicans' Neanderthalic evolution. The country's barbarous polarization most decidedly did not begin with Bush's appointment, my dear Daniel, to the presidency.

Now, just as the above authors have done, I could easily flip on my historical retro burners and zoom past Newt Gingrich as the more distinguishable culprit of partisan-polarization launching. Effortless would it be to soar back to the New Right, and before that, Barry Goldwater, then on to Joe McCarthy, malicious anti-New Dealers and, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson-haters. But let us be more temporally precise: It was Newt Gingrich and his 1990s semantics-centered memo to House Republican colleagues that really juiced political hostility and consequent partisan polarization.

As you may recall, in the memo the then-Republican whip urged his comrades to unrelentingly curse and attack the Democratic opposition through the usage of nouns, verbs and adjectives such as "anti-flag," "anti-child," "disgrace," "betray," "sick," "cheat," "pathetic," "radical," "crisis" and "traitors." As Gingrich wrote in 1990, "These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast" to "your vision of public service." By 1996, well, you know.

The words were indeed easily understood — and emotionally absorbed — by the Republican base. Politics hasn't been the same since. Neighbors have turned on neighbors, families have fractured, certain "news" outlets have long adopted the Gingrichean style, we've gone from Newt to the Donald and Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan; the nation's polarization is now not only nasty and brutal, it's locked in.

There's the delineating history of it, Mr. Henninger. Your history.

Pop quiz, multiple choice …

… just for the hell of it.

Which would you mark as correct? ("A" is from the NY Times this morning.)

a) President Biden’s hoped-for message that happy days are here again is on hold as the administration’s initially blitzkrieg-like vaccine rollout has slowed to a relative crawl.

b) President Biden’s hoped-for message that happy days are here again is on hold as the administration’s initial blitzkrieg-like vaccine rollout has slowed to a relative crawl.

c) President Biden’s hoped-for message that happy days are here again is on hold as the administration’s initial, blitzkrieg-like vaccine rollout has slowed to a relative crawl.

Might Trump be losing his sledgehammering influence? I'm skeptical.

The Bloated Blight had commanded Senate Republicans to spit on an infrastructure deal. Otherwise they'll "look weak, foolish, and dumb," the Blight frothed with his usual eloquence.

Then came the weak, foolish, dumb pro-vote — on opening debate only — by 17 of them. So Trump's froth turned to a venomous, fulminating explosion. "Fight for America, not for special interests and Radical Democrats," he howled yesterday. RINOs are ruining America, right alongside Communist Democrats. (I really like the rhetorical escalation from "radical socialists." It has such a nice McCarthyite ring to it.) 

The Hill observes that "the vote is … likely to raise questions about Trump’s influence over the policymaking process in his post-presidency." Much more than likely. The suggestion itself raises questions about his influence. But I'd be wary about raising the questions too high. 

A few of the GOP senators who voted aye are retiring, hence they needn't give a damn about Trump and his deranged base any longer. Others, though, are undecided about sticking around, and assuredly, they and still others who certainly do wish to stick around are pondering that looming, inescapable horror of being primaried. Merely voting to open debate is in no way tantamount to voting for a final package. Thus we might very well watch 17 shrink to 15, 12, and ultimately 9.

Give the base a while to, ahem, express their displeasure at these Communist-Democrat Republican senators. Then, as the political axiom goes, once the base has an excruciating grip on their balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

Or at least that's my guess.

Now some House Dems are threatening noncooperation

Right on cue, progressive House Dems are now threatening an extended deadlock in the same extremist manner as Senate Trumpers, but from a different angle, naturally.

Axios reports this morning that despite Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders and his fellow Democrats' objection to reopening the battle over not only the infrastructure bill's cost but the reconciliation package's cost as well — together, capped at $4.1 trillion — several House progressives are demanding fiscal upgrades, especially on climate-change spending, and especially if Senate Republicans double-cross their Democratic counterparts on proceeding with infrastructure legislation.

Any such progressive thunderbolt would, of course, blow up Joe Manchin & Co.'s participation in escorting either bill to the finish line; both, as the 19th-century's John Randolph of Virginia would put it, would become rotten mackerels in the moonlight, shining and stinking. This, shall we say, little snag in progressives' strategery has been noted to them many times before, yet they always manage to dodge, in answering, a conceivable resolution. Because there isn't one.

But, we should worry not. The powerfully competent halt to House progressives' impossible stargazing will be Speaker Pelosi's promise that they'll be boiled in oil if they persist. And she would. And House progressives know it.

I know exactly how to usher the infrastructure bill to completion

Count me sobered over the Senate's opening of debate on the infrastructure bill — and not only with a needed 10 Republican votes, which were in doubt, but with 17.

Two GOP-negotiating mainstays accomplished the 67-32 vote: slashing the bill's backlogged cost and strangling its most appropriate funding mechanisms (tax increases on corporations and the wealthy.) Though a spectacular victory for President Biden and Democrats nevertheless, the vote is but the first step on a red-brick road of Republican mines:

The legislation is yet to be written, unease with even its whittled-down cost remains, there's anger over the accompanying reconciliation bill. And among Republicans, anger always turns to pouting, crib-rattling and breath-holding.

All this, reports the Washington Post, "could presage a series of efforts to tweak the bill." And I know just how to tweak it so as to avert a concomitant series of last-minute Republican tirades and renunciations.

Add spending to the infrastructure bill — for a Trump Autobahn, officially named as such. Ah, the cherished memories it would bring to our modern-day congressional goose-steppers, full of reveries over a time when a psychotic autocracy really knew how to get shit done.

Yet Democrats should not stop there in their tactical persuasion of 21st-century megalomania. One more tweak is advised, which is this: Give every congressional Republican a 1939 Volkswagen. Like Trumpism, you just can't kill it — and again, oh, the memories.

I'm still deciding who's worse: the Claremont Institute's Christopher Caldwell or the Times' opinion-page editor

In a jaw-dropping, literally incredible op-ed in the NY Times, Christopher Caldwell, of the Claremont Institute — which explains the op-ed's absolute preposterousness — argues that "Jan. 6 was something familiar: a political protest that got out of control. Contesting the fairness of an election, rightly or wrongly, is not absurd grounds for a public assembly."

A public assembly! That's how this sick-minded opinionist at Claremont, once a respected think tank of the center-right, characterizes a bloody coup attempt.

It was all so "familiar," says Caldwell; just another day of spunky, red-white-and-blue activism. Let us overlook that this "assembly" was no First Amendment gathering "to petition the government for change," but an exercise in barbarically changing the democratically elected government itself.

That day's unconstitutional antithesis is Caldwell's story, and he sticks to it.

"Republicans had — and still have — legitimate grievances about how the last election was run," he continues. His reasoning behind this vast inanity? "Pandemic conditions produced an electoral system more favorable to Democrats" — "an advantage that, in certain places, Democrats manipulated the system to obtain."

Democrats manipulated nothing. Caldwell points to Pennsylvania's Supreme Court ruling that extended ballot-counting by three days, omitting that the previously efficient postal system had been thoroughly fucked up by Trump's assault on it.

He also denounces 2020's explosion of "mail-in voting" by Democrats, which of course was available to Republicans too. But their oracle demonized it; Republican voters, by and large, obeyed his commandment to forego mail-in voting, and so they fucked themselves.

Throughout the fatuous course of Caldwell's 984 words, he pens only four correct ones: Jan. 6 "was not a coup."

Bingo, Mr. Caldwell. It was a coup attempt, an unprecedented, monstrous nightmare that most Americans watched in everlasting abhorrence. You, however, must have been busy collecting your monthly propaganda pay from the Claremont Institute, whose despicable Trumpian apologetics have no goddamn business alighting on any opinion page other than OAN's.

Nancy, you might hurt Kevin's feelings, if he had any

On the urgent advice of the Capitol physician, Democratic Speaker Pelosi has restored the House mandate for member- and staff-wearing masks, since the other guys decided some time ago to reboot 2020's covid surges. The king of toddlers told them to, which has led us to a perpetual pandemic state.

Enter the Toddler King's man servant, Kevin McCarthy.

Make no mistake—The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) July 28, 2021

Pelosi then entered into the annals of House history her considered, infinitely correct, compendious opinion of the self-cheapening footman purported to be the minority leader: "He's such a moron."

But cute as a button, don't you know, to his keeper.

But boobs sell

I just saw the strangest online ad. This one:

Well that sure as hell ain't it.

Battling phantoms is far more enervating than tackling the real things

Having completed its rowdy transmogrification into Oscar Wilde's Dorian 'Donald' Gray, the former GOP is now known as nothing but a rabble of ugly opposition to all manner of human decency. It hates, it scowls, scorns and stands against all things salubrious. Sheer ugliness and uniform against-ism run through its venomous veins. The rabble are, however, planning one "pro" plank for their 2022 and 2024 campaigns, although, true to the party's nature, it's also a negative: "America is not a racist country."

That, as discussed in several Trump Party strategy sessions of late, is the campaign slogan to come in intensely targeted, jackhammering style. "America is not a racist country" indeed packs a punch, and the party has the battleground polling to prove it. Although most Americans agree that systemic racism exists, the premise of white Americans as racists is, as one might guess, sharply repugnant to them.

Never mind that President Biden, Vice President Harris and other "prominent Democrats" have consistently countered the slogan's inverse, as Politico's David Siders reminds us. Reality, as we know, is no hindrance to the Trump Party's bumper-sticker S.O.P. That "it’s a winning issue with independents and it’s good for the base," says one Republican strategist, is winningly good enough. And especially easy enough will be ginning up white hysteria over critical race theory as "Defund the Police 2.0," says another strategist.

My God these people are exhausting. They have stuck us, body and soul, in an age of phantom issues — and battling phantoms is far more enervating than tackling the real things. Noxious fantasies possess the formidable illusion of substance, while truth and reality get hollowed out by what too many interpret as nothing more than anemic defensiveness. No one understood this concept better than one little corporal, one little bone-spurred cadet, and their ghoulish, undead Beezlebubs.

Fox News, July 27th, and the perpetuation of Trump's war on America

Fox News' immediate chyrons after the select committee concluded for the day: "Pelosi-led committee …" and "Dem-led committee …"

The anchor then repeated Kevin McCarthy's tweeted bullshit this morning — "What you won’t hear from Pelosi’s sham committee: Why was the Capitol left so vulnerable that day?" and so forth — which is, of course, also a lie.  

Then the network rushed to escort the committee-defrocked Jim Banks onto the stage, who asked why Democrats aren't talking instead about critical race theory. I bullshit you not.

I couldn't handle any more of Fox News' pro-insurrectionism, and I'm sure as hell not going to inflict Newsmax and OAN on myself, or you. 

"Will we preserve the peaceful transition of power?"

A morning post is below, but as for the remainder of this workday, I'll be intensely watching the select committee's hearings, as "every American" should, advised Ms. Cheney.

In relation to my preceding post, Cheney asked, "Will we preserve the peaceful transition of power?" The answer is we have to, simple as that — at all costs, as Cheney added, though some may not be all that peaceful.

As for the entire, coup-attempting Trump Party and its vast, persistent unAmericanism, Officer Michael Fanone spoke pointedly on behalf of the nation's conscience.

American Revolution, Part II

I'm not sure what to make of Jamelle Bouie's latest column, in which he reflects on a recently released history, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders, by political scientist Dennis Rasmussen. (I am sure, however, of this unresolved virtue: If you political scientists will stay out of history, we historians will stay out of statistics. Deal?)

Anyway, it seems Rasmussen has surveyed the founders' post-officeholding gloom; he "walks readers through the later-in-life correspondence of Jefferson, Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, each of whom feared for the fate of the American republic," writes Bouie. Jefferson worried about the uneasy balance of slavery vs. nonslavery states; Washington worried about "factions"; Hamilton, as always, worried about a too-weak central government; and Adams, who made gloom a performance art, worried that the "distemper in our Nation is so general," it is "certainly incurable."

Such is the selective history of frenzy. Anyone — political scientist, historian or ditch digger — could just as easily pursue the writings of the nation's founders and, voila, come up with a work titled The Optimism of a Rising Sun. But selective frenzy is of particular appeal to historical thesis writers — it sells — just as assistant professors of history, praying for tenure, are "injustice collectors," as historiographer Peter Novick so amusingly, and accurately, put it.

Enough background. On to what puzzles. Bouie begins his conclusion with this: "What, then, is there to take from the founders, knowing what we know now about their fear and disillusionment?" The puzzlement comes the adverb, "what we know now." The fear and disillusionment were not unique to the founders and they weren't locked away in some sort of Nicholas Cagean national treasure; they were widely shared by the body politic then, as they have been for 233 uninterrupted years. They run in tandem with American optimism, as they should.

Bouie's concluding conclusion, however, is more exasperating than puzzling: "Perhaps we can take some of that despair and channel it toward critique rather than defeat. And perhaps … we can take the faith that American democracy still holds the resources to revitalize itself — and us along with it."

Perhaps, perhaps. Contemporary "critiques rather than defeat" already fill libraries. There's no "perhaps" about it. Worse, writing that perhaps we can revitalize American democracy has the scent of the very thing Bouie warns against: defeat.

Seldom do men and women go to war suspecting they'll lose it. What we're facing today is a war, a civil war as momentous as the American Revolution itself. Roosevelt never sloganeered "Perhaps Victory over Fascism." Our stated objective, against the same enemy, should be just as unswerving today.