The Carpentariat

Harry Potter, progressives, and the sorcerer's stone

One cause of my modest-to-nonexistent readership by progressives is that I haven't the good financial sense to be either a splenetically pom-pomish cheerleader of whatever the left does, or a forever-weeping Jeremiah. And in the bare modesty of this readership lies a paradox.

Lefties, especially those of the incurably progressive ilk, positively love to be lied to by the pollyannaish triumphalists so commonly found throughout the internet — We're winning! We're winning! — while at once they are also quite fond of being told how unavoidably doomed we and the entire world are.

Among humans — as opposed to more rational, lower-order animals — harboring both unfounded euphoria and excessive gloom is less a test of a conflicted yet functional, first-rate intelligence than a diagnostic indication of mental mush.

Like Jehovah's Witnesses, progressives rejoice in feelings of persecution (a sign of virtue in an evil world) and thus embrace all the gloom they can get; or, like airport Moonies, they're just wild about spreading the imminently universal Good Word, of which they're the protagonists.

In politics, neither of these attitudinal assessments is helpful. As any honest, professional strategist would tell you, the most valuable possession in politics is truth, whether encouraging or devastating to party, candidate, or cause. Blowing smoke up another's dress in the intrusive face of impending destruction, for instance, is not the act of a friendly player.

As a relevant aside, I was once asked to join a progressive congressional campaign as a senior adviser, to which I agreed — as long as the campaign first understood that its candidate would at best build some name recognition for the next go-around, but this one, the candidate would most certainly lose. I was swiftly disinvited.

Conversely, acting the worldweary Gloomy Gus in the face of overwhelming good polling is only apt to dispirit the properly enthusiastic.

In short, there is a balance. Ethical political writers must be piteously, testicles-ripping honest when one of our armed forces in our eternal political wars is at a notable disadvantage, while the other force, however wickedly or counterintuitively, is gaining territory.

It is this balance that is altogether AWOL in progressive "reporting" and commentary. And progressives eat it up. They'll read no other — such as Roger Cohen's warning:

"The president’s hand is strong. Trump has an unshakable base of perhaps 35 percent of the country. Pro-guns, anti-abortion voters won’t budge. Trump approval hovers around 40 percent. Then there are all the voters who will look at their 401(k)’s and decide they could use more of this… The message: Who cares? That gets Trump within range of the 46.09 percent of the vote that was enough in 2016."

It was not long ago that I scoffed at the likes of Cohen's assessment. No longer. But progressives don't want to hear it, either. They're in their triumphalist mode.

The GOP's minority counsel: Republican or Democratic?

To me the most striking element of today's hearing is that minority counsel's questions seemed to burnish the reputation of Ambassador Yovanovitch rather than poke holes in it. He ploddingly surveyed her tenure in Ukraine, fact by already known fact, yet at no time did minority counsel even attempt to taint her tenure.

Perhaps he was more concerned about protecting his reputation as a high-priced Washington attorney, rather than contaminating it to the dishonorable point of having to handle, in the future, little more than petty divorce cases.

The panel's Republicans were left to do the dirty work, virtually none of which had anything to do with Ms. Yovanovitch's earnest efforts to diminish Ukrainian corruption, which our Putin-adoring president was doing whatever he could to perpetuate.

Even the drunken, reckless Sen. Joe McCarthy managed to finger one or two communists among the thousands of other lives he destroyed. House Republicans have been unable to accomplish even that much. I suspect minority counsel well understood where this prosecution is heading, and how personally degrading it is to all the Trump defenders — and he wants nothing to do with it.

Yovanovitch

I believe I'm falling in love with former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

What a thoughtful, ingenuous, contemplative, levelheaded, professional, well-spoken, attractive woman. And the composure she is demonstrating before a congressional committee, one half of which is about to demean her in every despicably imaginable way, is simply awesome.

Yes, I'm falling in love.

On book reviews

Irrespective of its context, I wanted to bring to your attention this touching passage in Peggy Noonan's latest:

I don’t like to beat up books, because they’re books; you can’t have enough data and argumentation and art; if you don’t like it, don’t read it.

Amen, Peg. I have read reviews of books — of poetry, of fiction and non-fiction — that were so venomous, so vicious, so pitilessly hide-peeling that had I been the author, I would have donned Groucho Marx glasses in pubic and spent my private hours at home whimpering softly under the bed. Full fetal.

The cruelty unleashed by some book reviewers should rightly fall under Geneva's war crimes. My assumption has always been that the barbarities inflicted on usually well-meaning authors by formaldehyde-blooded reviewers are simply the outcome of said reviewers being incapable of writing anything nearly as good.

***

I now see the hearings have resumed. So enough of this, and on to that.

REQUIEM FOR A REPUBLIC

​​​​​"[There were no] immediate signs that the hearing penetrated the general public," writes the Times' Peter Baker. "There was little sense of a riveted country putting everything aside to watch à la Watergate."

On this day after, the absence of a riveted country is not for want of Baker's trying. He gives it his all, a literary striving for Kleenex-pulling pathos that has me uncertain whether to withdraw in cynicism or simply laugh in the deadly face of a virtuous republicanism long gone.

One of yesterday's two star witnesses before the House impeachment panel, William Taylor, was, in Baker's flourish of journalistic creativity, a "fatherly figure with Kevlar credibility," a man's man with "a deep baritone voice," a voice "reminiscent of Walter Cronkite’s," a face "chiseled," hair a "reassuring gray."

In terms of disinterested devotion to his country, Taylor is indeed among the noblest. No question about that. Giving testimony with a "more-in-sadness-than-anger tone," he methodically imparted that never before had he worked, in his 50-year career of government service, for a chief executive so disgraceful, so blindingly self-absorbed, so downright poisonous to the nation's welfare.

It requires no men of nobility to swear to the obvious. Simply reading the papers should have already had the nation convinced of Taylor's accuracy in describing this unpresidential guttersnipe.

Yet here is how Trump's former lawyer, John Dowd, characterized Ambassador Taylor: "A pitiful, ignorant, insubordinate gossip with no trustworthy information." I give not a rodent's ass about Dowd's opinion; what's vomit-worthy, however, is that roughly half the U.S. population agrees with it.

Republicans' wholly owned political subsidiary of Jesus Christ Inc. could itself descend from God's weeping heaven and atypically denounce Dowd et al. as the viperish tribe of punks, lowbrows and traitors that it is. And yet, America's far larger, Trump-loving, Molièrean tribe of Tartuffian imbeciles would tell Christ to go fuck himself. Divine, cosmic pronunciamentos have their limits.

Baker also writes what to me is boundlessly baffling: "[Democrats'] goal is to transform what might seem like an abstract debate over foreign policy into high crimes and misdemeanors in the public mind. Mr. Trump suspended $391 million in American security aid approved by Congress at the same time he pressed Ukraine to help him with his domestic battles against Democrats like Mr. Biden."

What — again, in God's name — is, in any way, abstract about that? What Trump did was screamingly, impeachably extortionate, plain and simple — no J.D or Ph.D in U.S. Constitutional history required for comprehension. Just a passable grade in democratic literacy, the wholesale absence of which announces itself in this tweeted "insight" from the spawn of the spawn of Satan:

"This clown show is horribly boring," pecked Eric on his LeapFrog keyboard. "There is not a single person outside the beltway who is engaged in this nonsense."

But tragically, he's more correct than any truly American citizen would care to admit.

A non-impeachment eye-opener

Please let it be.

The Republican Party remains just one I.Q. point short of a fungus beetle's, and Rick could average that down.

"Former Long Island Republican Congressman Rick Lazio told The [New York] Post on Wednesday he is seriously considering running for the seat being vacated by fellow Republican Peter King."

See first two minutes, from the 2000 NY Senate race:

Not proof enough for ya that Rick would be the cerebrally disadvantaged, Trumpian calamity he's always been? Check this out, also from the Post:

"He is currently an executive at alliantgroup, a giant consulting group that helps major companies score tax breaks and other government business….

"Lazio insisted that his business background would be viewed as a plus."

With friends like Republicans ...

If a criminal organization had attempted to extort me until law enforcement somehow learned of the attempt, intervened, then thwarted the attempt …

and then some garlic-breath goombah called me a day later and explained that if I, in any way, ever publicly revealed that said criminal organization had indeed attempted to extort me …

then, he further explained, Goombahs, Pisanos & Co. would burn down my house and murder my family …

well …

I'm pretty damned sure I'd slap on my Volodymyr Zelensky smiley face and deny before the world that the criminal organization had even so much as stricken me from its Christmas card list.

And congressional Republicans? They, no doubt, would declare that my composure was irrefutable proof that the criminal organization had never attempted to extort me.

This impeachment is ultimately about saving ourselves

That the impeachment inquiry's public debut is understood by most Americans to be an investigation into Trump's self-dealing Ukraine policy (and understood by fewer Americans to be just another devious Democratic "witch hunt"), I agree with former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal that within and surrounding the hearings is the stench of "Trump’s effort to hinder the House investigation," which "is at least as great a threat to the rule of law."

Still, I'd go further. Trump's myriad obstructions of this constitutionally authorized process are not as great a threat to the rule of law; the threat is even greater.

We have come to accept Trump and Trump's party as preadolescent pranksters willing and even eager to disrupt inquiries into the president's Ukraine misdeeds, to distract from important testimonies, and, if at all possible, to derail the entire investigation. However despicable, none of these tactics is illegal or unconstitutional. Any two- or multi-party democratic system is, by its laws and traditions and philosophical foundations, perfectly free to make an ass of itself. (Just as Republican Rep. Devin Nunes made a permissible ass of himself just moments ago.)

Yet for Trump to stymie the turning over of critical documents to relevant House panels, or to block essential testimony of high-ranking administration officials, or to denounce a constitutionally legitimate procedure as monstrously illegitimate, is the very definition of a lawless chief executive operating in a republic reputedly governed by the rule of law.

Mr. Katyal concludes that "Trump’s stonewalling is a grave problem because it means there is no way to police executive branch wrongdoing." Yet there is a way: impeach him, remove him.

If Congress fails in this, its constitutional duty — and almost certainly it will — then executive branch wrongdoing may proceed unchecked in perpetuity. We will no longer be a nation of laws; merely another shithole country under rule by authoritarianism. And that, indisputably, is a far greater danger than the foreign policy implications of Trump's Ukraine corruption.

The axiom of the ages: Democrats can always find a way

​​​​​That the Democratic presidential contest's greatest peril is none other than Democratic voters is frightfully evidenced by the now-swelling number of quite possible late entries.

Only about a fortnight ago, rumors of a Mike Bloomberg, Deval Patrick or Hillary Clinton joining the already too-populated crowd of White House aspirants were greeted by either yawns or amused yelps. No longer.

This ill-advised metamorphosis has sprung from the unrelenting torrent of Democratic doomsaying being heaved by much of the rank and file on the unmistakable frontrunner — nearly all of which has been, as is puerile spite and intellectual laziness and strategic ineptitude's wont, poached from self-interested elites.

A former Massachusetts governor and current network-news commentator can say (again, for self-interested reasons) to millions of viewers that, for example, Biden is "struggling," which of course can be said of all the candidates. But in Joe Biden's case, any such remark instantly compels the fanged, cable-newsy hyena pack of Biden-hating progressives to thereupon deny that the former vice president is leading even his pack.

They'll say that Biden isn't struggling, he's spectacularly straggling; that he is hell's summoner of unprecedented party ruination; and that Warren (or whoever, evidence need not apply) is the real frontrunner — all that, despite this, most of which comes from NYT/Siena's A+ polling:

Biden +4 over Warren — New Hampshire

Biden +14 over Warren — North Carolina

Biden +9 over Warren — Michigan

Biden +8 over (2nd-place) Sanders — Arizona

Biden +8 over Warren — Florida

Biden +12 over Warren — Pennsylvania

Even more striking is Biden's more-than-respectable showing in Iowa. Quinnipiac (B+), 6 Nov.: "The Democratic race for president in Iowa is wide open, as the top 4 candidates are in a close contest.... Senator Elizabeth Warren receives 20 percent support among Iowa likely Democratic caucus-goers, with South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg getting 19 percent, Sen. Bernie Sanders at 17 percent, and former Vice President Joe Biden at 15 percent."

It's the apex of political counterintuition that Mr. Biden should be among the top four in Iowa. He should not be anywhere close.

The Hawkeye State is starkly unrepresentative of the Democratic coalition — which is to say, that which will be required en masse to beat Trump — since Iowa is as white as Scottsdale, Arizona. That Biden is statistically tied (Quinnipiac's margin of error is 4.5 percent) with the other candidates whose snow-white bases are consonant with an Iowa triumph, though not even dwarfishly recommended for a national election, suggests that his support is even stronger than heretofore assumed by unbigoted Biden observers.

To remake an essential point — one purposely ignored by the clinically disturbed anti-Biden crowd — I and many other political commentators who urge a Biden nomination do so not because of some paramount, personal adoration of the man (although I do admire him). We do so for the most pragmatic of reasons. He can beat Trump. If some other candidate were in Biden's favored position, we would urge his or her nomination instead.

As E.J. Dionne wrote two days ago: "A broad coalition now exists to throw President Trump out of office…. [Yet] Democratic presidential candidates are doing a bang-up job of suggesting that their [ideological] differences matter more than defeating Trump."

Dionne is both correct and wildly off base. The candidates, for sure, are squandering party unity in favor of self-preening. But it's that sizable slice of rank-and-file pettiness — devoted almost exclusively to frontrunner Biden — that is inflicting wounds which will leave scars, encouraging the senseless entry of yet more contenders, and damaging the prospects of the one man who unquestionably can vanquish Trump.

There are so many Democrats who just don't know how to play this game; or worse, play it so that it's rigged for failure; because they, poor things, just don't like the probable nominee. What a childish, contemptible lot they are.

I'm still a bit under the weather on this Veterans Day. Perhaps a full day of rest will put me back in the pink. See you, I hope, tomorrow. 

Make that, tomorrow tomorrow, Wednesday. Thanks for your patience.

There's nothing like honest brokers

​​​​​Republican congressional caucuses are populated by that rare breed of politicians who manage to speak momentous truths only by uttering the very dumbest of lies. They "have complained that the Democratic-run inquiry is unfairly partisan," observes the Washington Post. Now there's a supernal truth for all seasons, although Sir Thomas More would also observe that the impeachment inquiry's rank partisanship is fundamentally "unfair" only because Republicans have themselves abandoned fairness in good government, and consigned it to Democrats' lone custody.

One might call their reasoning a sort of syllogism in search of logos. Try as they might, Republicans just can't square their righteous conclusions with premises meant to deceive. Upon outside examination, their arguments melt like Margaret Hamilton in her wicked castle. By way of compensation, what Republicans then do is just monkey around with necessary premises and inescapable conclusions.

To wit: "House Republicans on Saturday pressed ahead with their efforts to move the impeachment inquiry away from President Trump," continues the Post, "calling on Democrats to add witnesses to the probe including former vice president Joe Biden’s son and the whistleblower whose initial complaint kicked off the investigation."

Yes, why not stage a presidential impeachment inquiry whose focus is on anyone, everyone but the president? After all, adds the Times, the party of Trump has been "buoyed by their growing belief that Democrats have failed to find direct evidence of presidential misconduct"; at most, say Republicans, the Dems have "nothing more damning than secondhand accounts of wrongdoing that fall far short of impeachable offenses."

Let us review straightaway, for served-up hogwash is a dish best eaten while hot. In their damnable refusal to pursue the truth — the partisan danger of which was demonstrated in Richard Nixon's impeachment inquiry and subsequent GOP implosion — Republicans insist that there's no damning truth to be found, even though "direct evidence" of such has indeed been found in the president's telephone calls and witnesses' firsthand accounts.

It's logic like that that has earned the GOP the respect it deserves.

It gets better. The Post notes that the inimitable Rep. Devin Nunes, of the intelligence-minus-at-least-one committee, has accused Democrats of keeping Republicans "out of the loop on witness schedules, copies of subpoenas or opening statements." About which, Nunes has said: "I would just state that if we’re going to continue this circus, I, at least, would like to know what time the circus begins."

Whenever you show up, Mr. Nunes. Just whenever you show up. And yet your own party has now pretty much shut you up by sending in the far less funny It clown of sexual-abuse coverups, Rep. Jim Jordan. The dark force is strong in this one.

"There you go again"

​​​​​Holman Jenkins Jr., of the WSJ editorial board, has scribbled a parodic defense of Donald Trump's foreign policy, which he finishes with a head-scratching assault on Hillary Clinton. Yes, Hillary. In 2019. The closest thing there is to editorial atavism.

I'll skip over Jenkins' multitiered ridicule of Democrats' "bad assumptions" about the president's Ukraine policy, such as a quid pro quo out of purely personal interest — not national interest — being anything to get worked up about.

After all, as one must reflect, though Jenkins doesn't, that bit of gaucherie wasn't nearly as objectionable as President Clinton having fibbed about an extramarital affair — which was positively unheard of among married men throughout the ages, and thus, for a president, legitimately impeachable. At least Clinton — & Co. — didn't do any dirty deeds in a White House closet, as Republican President Warren Harding did, also fathering the young lady's "illegitimate" child. (I've never fathomed that term; it's the parents who are illegitimate.)

The Dems, on the other hand, are being "lazy" in their impeachment charges (bribery, anyone?), says Jenkins.

As if this wasn't lazy in itself, he goes on to write that "the question of presidential competence, of course, is a sticky one — Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, WMD, I could go on." But, "by the results, Trumpism has not been half bad."

It was at this precise point, in reading that line, that I suspected either an editorial spoof or sophistic legalism. Trump's foreign policy as not "half bad"? In a way, that's true; it's been altogether bad.

Tell us, Mr. Jenkins, of Trump's even partial success in playing out the Taliban peace agreement, which responsible diplomats labored over for two years. And Trump then blew up. Or his success in trade policy with China, which has cost American consumers, businesses and farmers a good deal of unnecessary, financial pain.

Or his success in negotiating an Israel-Palestine agreement, a task he placed in the hands of an incompetent son-in-law and Israel-biased real estate attorney. Or his success with the lovable Kim Jong-un, who is still building his nuclear arsenal and testing ballistic missiles. Or his success in intimidating Iran back to the negotiating table; or in supporting Ukraine against its hegemonic neighbor, thus supporting as well our national-security interests; or in maintaining the best-that-could-be-hoped-for, for now, stabilization of Syria, or in living up to the U.S.' word there.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Trump's universally failed foreign policy has been his complete disregard for our allies' — no, not North Korea and Russia; rather, our traditional allies — interests, which in general have dovetailed with ours. The post-Trump, diplomatic mending to be done will be an immense task.

As promised, I shall now observe Jenkins' really weird remarks on Hillary Clinton, which he first sets up with a rousing defense — indeed, a rousing vindication — of Trump's criminalities, impeachable offenses, and reprehensibly unpresidential behavior:

"[Democrats] were not satisfied with opposing him. They sought to destroy him. Mr. Trump, it’s easy to see, believes he must stick around and continue to wrap himself in the immunities and powers of the presidency simply to defend himself and the legitimacy of his 2016 victory.

"When history assesses blame, Hillary Clinton, and not Mr. Trump, will be the biggest sinner of our time. Mrs. Clinton continues to flog the claim … that Russia controls our politics…. In a few years, Mr. Trump’s passage through our national life will not seem so hysterically important as it does now, though an opportunity has been lost. Mrs. Clinton … deserves to be remembered finally as the coward who put the country second because she couldn’t accept the legitimacy of her defeat."

What can one say about such tripe, other than to say (only faintly modified) what Ronald Reagan said: "There they go again."

Is Bloomberg really a threat to Biden?

Are we beginning to see a reliable trend here? One that has been reliable for months, even though much of the political media went on an Elizabeth Warren binge that declared her, practically speaking, the new Democratic frontrunner? From the original graphic below — findings are from Siena College polling, rated "A+" by 538 — I am not including battleground percentages for the six other polled candidates. To do so would be cruel. (Briefly put, their support ranges from hopeless to nonexistent.)

Conducted in roughly the same period (late Oct.), Fox New's "A-" polling showed Joe Biden leading Trump nationwide by 12 points. Warren's lead had shrunk to only 5 points, which was just 3 points greater than Hillary Clinton's. Egads — for Warren's supporters. But she did this to herself, what with all her gab about a $30 trillion+ healthcare system costing nothing to nearly everyone. Only Republican pols can get away with outlandish garbage like that, since the electorate has come to expect absolutely nothing else from them.

On to the amusing part of Fox's polling, complete with commentary: "Few, 6 percent, would definitely back former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; around and about which, said the temporarily pixilated David Axelrod, "the fact that he’s getting in is a clear indication that he’s not convinced Biden has the wherewithal to carry [the Democratic] torch. I don’t think this is a positive development for Joe Biden."

We can, I think, all agree that additional competition in a political race is usually less than a "positive development" for any of those in the race already. (Only "usually," since sometimes the addition splits a candidate's competition). I'm sure we don't all agree, however, that Bloomberg presents a grievous threat to Biden's candidacy — or even a particularly worrisome one.

The mayor's possible? probable? certain? entry into the presidential contest may be a nuisance to Biden, as I see it, and he may shave a point or two from Biden's primary totals. But for Democrats, another megawealthy, party-switching businessman as the partisan answer to America's troubles? A Democrat who advocated and still supports stop-and-frisk law enforcement? Who has doubted the purity of the #MeToo movement?

Now a Bloomberg aide, former Hillary adviser Howard Wolfson said yesterday that we must "ensure that Trump is defeated — but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that." Less well positioned is a Democratic candidate who, though liberal on most social issues, also holds to the abovementioned positions. Even if Bloomberg can make it to a Democratic debate, which is doubtful, his stage opponents would in turn make sure that the audience knows he's the odd man out, philosophically.

My guess as to Mayor Bloomberg's joining the race is that he knows he'd be the impossible odd man out. But he wishes not to check out, so to speak, before his name is historically attached to a presidential campaign — probably the only impractical decision that Bloomberg has ever made.

Another "friend," soon kicked, abused and abandoned

"Twitter has become the Trump war room"

A far-right "journalist" by the name of Jack Posobiec, a crackpot who reports for Trump's other favorite network. One America News, has managed to worm his way into the internet's pseudoconservative psyche by simply deploying one basic weapon: the tweet.

Knowing nothing about this 15-minute-of-fame clown except that his name is on the NY Times' front page this morning, I had to resort to Wikipedia for information on his professional credentials. The site quotes a Hill editor: Posobiec "make[s] stuff up, relentlessly … there's no one [else] at that level."

Naturally, then, Posobiec is a man whom Donald Trump's Friends & Family mob would enjoy retweeting, if, that is, Posobiec's tweet — rather, a retweet itself — was sufficiently demented. It was.

The Times reports that he "had retweeted a lengthy thread by a Florida man — a fan of QAnon, a fringe conspiracy about the 'deep state' — claiming to have witnessed Colonel [Alexander] Vindman 'bash America' in conversation with Russian officers during a joint military exercise in Germany in 2013."

You know Col. Vindman. To your regret, I'm sure, you also know Donald Trump Jr., who retweeted Posobiec's mental refuse: "Anyone who’s been watching for the past three years is not at all surprised that this would be [the impeachment inquiry panel's] 'star witness.'"

Oh, Donnie, you poor thing, you poor, witless thing. In your Trumpy-scion message, there's a touch of enormously unintended humor. It was impressive, though unsurprising, as you rightly note, that Chairman Adam Schiff's keenly professional inquiry would call a war-bemedaled colonel as just one star witness.

It was equally impressive, as it were, that Trump Inc., in refutation, would cite a (literally) brain-damaged, QAnon-following, deep-state believing, retired Army officer who was unaware that fluent-in-Russian Col. Vindman would have spoken to Russians in Russian — thus he would not have understood a word of what Vindman was saying.

So what's the point — other than the pedestrian, that Donnie and Dad are idiots? Well, speaking of Russians, they "get" the point: "They say Trump is making Russia great. That’s basically accurate," said Russian television celebrity Karen Shakhnazarov to the Daily Beast. "The chaos brought by Trump into the American system of government is weakening the United States. America is getting weaker and now Russia is taking its place…. And that’s why we love him…. The more problems they have, the better it is for us."