The Carpentariat

"No Fucking Swing Voters"? None at all?

I can't say how many and I hope the number is exceedingly small, but at least some progressives wanting to wish away the electoral necessity of moving to the middle in the general election have traveled to this lunatic extreme:

There Are No Fucking Swing Voters. https://t.co/Ud3b1hxvsr

— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) June 30, 2018

Ms. Spiers is no stabbing-the-keypad-from-mom's-basement, 13-Twitter-followers progressive. Not at all. Indeed her mini-bio in that medium states that she's the ex-editor in chief of The New York Observer, an NYU journalism professor, and of course a mover and shaker within The Insurrection. Spiers forgot to add, "even though I haven't a clue about politics."

In the real world, clues abound. For example FiveThirtyEight's elections analyst, Geoffrey Skelley, writes:

"Estimates … suggest that there were around 10 million voters who shifted from voting for one major party in 2012 to the other in 2016, which accounted for roughly 7 percent of all votes cast. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a lot of people, but these voters probably did play a role in helping President Trump get elected."

As for the near future, Skelley notes that polling "suggest[s] that if turnout increases in 2020, there could be more swing voters than in 2016," that "the importance of swing voters should not be understated," and "how they swing in 2020 could make all the difference."

They sure could — as they go fleeing into Trump's camp for fear of Democrats abolishing now-cherished private health insurance, providing undocumented immigrants with free care, decriminalizing illegal entry into the U.S., and maybe spending $30 trillion over 10 years with revenues of half that; a kind of Trumpian fiscal progressivism.

And it's Rudy to Trump's … defense?

Trump's whistle-blown communication with a foreign leader is coming into focus, in part because of the president's "defense" attorney, Rudy Loose Lips Giuliani, who squared off last night, in his customary dyspeptic squalor, with CNN's Chris Cuomo.

Barrister Rudy's affirmative defense of Trump? That it's just fine for the president of the United States to threaten Ukraine with extortion, in the military aid amount of $250 million [corrected], so as to force the sovereign nation into a fraudulent criminal investigation of the president's probable opponent in 2016, thereby boosting Trump's reelection prospects and, as a bonus, assisting Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine.

Or as Loose Lips, Esq., put it: "The reality is the president of the United States has every right to say to another leader of a foreign country, 'You got to straighten up before we give you a lot of money.' It is perfectly appropriate for him to ask a foreign government to investigate this massive crime that was made by a former vice president."

That would be the crime that would have been massively career-ending for Biden, had it ever happened, which it didn't.

The Cuomo-Giuliani segment to receive The Funniest Exchange of the Week award is less relevant to the White House's absurd accusation of Biden's bribery scheme (to help his son, Hunter). But it's the Essential Rudy, as he tangles his lips in shortest-term memory loss and Trumpian inconsistencies. Cuomo simply asked if he asked Ukraine officials to investigate Biden.

Giuliani: No, actually I didn’t. I asked Ukraine to investigate the allegations that there was interference in the election of 2016 by the Ukrainians for the benefit of Hillary Clinton.

Cuomo: You never asked anything about Hunter Biden? You never asked anything about Joe Biden and the prosecutor?

Giuliani: The only thing I asked about Joe Biden is to get to the bottom of how it was that [Ukraine's current prosecutor general Yuriy] Lutsenko, who was appointed, dismissed the case against …

Cuomo: So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden.

Giuliani: Of course I did!

Cuomo: You just said you didn’t!

Giuliani: No I didn't ask them to look into Joe Biden …

It's a painfully amusing nine minutes.

To finish on a note of refreshing coherence, the chairmen of the House intelligence, foreign affairs and oversight committees have jointly written that "if the President is trying to pressure Ukraine into choosing between defending itself from Russian aggression without U.S. assistance or leveraging its judicial system to serve the ends of the Trump campaign, this would represent a staggering abuse of power, a boon to Moscow, and a betrayal of the public trust."

Where do we stand in the president's betrayal-of-public-trust count? I've no idea. That Trumpian specialty began on Inauguration Day, with preposterous howls about "American carnage" and obscenely petty claims of the media's deflated crowd-size estimates. And with 5-10 lies a day, each day of his 972 days in office, how could anyone keep track?

Paul Krugman should stick to economics

I've been waiting for Paul Krugman to reconfirm his distinguished standing as an economist by reconfirming his often scattershot clumsiness when it comes to political analysis. Monday, he delivered the second reconfirmation as Andre Agassi might serve a tennis ball:

"All of [the Democratic presidential candidates] are decent human beings; all would, if given the chance, move America in a notably more progressive direction. The real chasm between the candidates is, instead, in the extent to which they get it — that is, the extent to which they understand what they’re facing in the modern G.O.P.

"The big problem with Joe Biden, still the front-runner, is that he obviously doesn’t get it. He’s made it clear on many occasions that he considers Trump an aberration and believes that he could have productive, amicable relations with Republicans once Trump is gone. Which raises the question: Even if Biden can win, is he too oblivious to govern effectively?"

I'll let pass with only little comment the non sequitur of, "all [the candidates-as-presidents] would … move America in a notably more progressive direction," though one of the "all," Joe Biden, is "too oblivious to govern effectively" — a Krugmanian declaration put deceptively in question form. If that analytical stumble is merely secondary in my concern, what, then, is my principal objection to Krugman's argument?

It is this. Every credible presidential candidate or nominee tells the electorate that he or she firmly believes that "productive, amicable relations" with the opposition can be had with the right chief executive. That Republicans are politically, ideologically, philosophically, physiologically, emotionally incapable of having amicable or productive relations with anyone but each other is a reality that simply goes ignored.

Why? Why do candidates dismiss grappling with reality and why does the electorate so willingly accept these dismissals? Because among the electorate's many desiderata is the emphatically deepest of political improbabilities: That "they" can all just get along.

Voters' suspension of disbelief in this would-be presidential nonsense swingss about every four years, even though the last four years of potential amicability and productivity were unpityingly drowned by Republicans in their vast, stinking cesspool of hyperpartisanship and obstruction of anything Democratic.

Nevertheless, and as already stressed here, the promise of comity and compromise is forever held out by candidates as an achievable political ideal. Mr. Biden knows better than that. His 40 years of congressional and White House experience likely had a little something to do with such knowledge.

I should think Krugman knows that Biden knows. Perhaps he does, in which case Krugman is being disingenuous in his rebuke of Biden. If, on the other hand, Krugman does not know what Biden knows, then Krugman should not be commenting on national politics.

Trump's "promise"land vs. the rule of law

It could be that the unknown substance of Trump's "promise" to a foreign leader, which led to the blockbuster scandal of a whistleblower's allegation and inspector general's "urgent concern," was of less actual harm to national security than its even more urgent coverup by the White House and Justice Department.

National security is about more than "negative" protection against domestic or foreign terrorists, cyber-assaults, illegal immigration, the ravages of long-term climate change, or the most acutely severe form of national insecurity — territorial invasion.

There is also the sweeping, "positive" concept of national security: that of maintaining economic vigor, promoting energy independence (to the extent possible), upholding the health of free-world alliances, jealously sustaining the robustness of traditional institutions and, above all, preserving the rule of law — without which we are subject to an authoritarian's erratic behavior, sundry oppressions, and in general ruinous vagaries of mind.

Nearly all of these positive elements of America's national security are more so under threat by Trump, "his" Justice Department and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court than we are under threat by terrorists of whatever ilk or those well-advertised raping, murderous immigrants of swarthy complexion.

Through the president's tenfold obstructions of justice (as of the Mueller Report's release) — as well as his strident self-dealing, connivances with a hostile foreign power, executively ordered racism, abuse of pardon power, official and semi-official harassment of critics and political opponents, thuggery against a free press and refusals to comply with congressional subpoenas — he has mocked and molested the rule of law and assailed once-timeless institutions. This he has done in cahoots with a gutless, constitutional turncoat of an attorney general and the unholy prospect of SCOTUS' everlasting salvation.

And so we return to the "urgent concern" of the intelligence community's inspector general. After he forwarded the whistleblower's complaint to the director of national intelligence, the latter, by law, notes the Washington Post, had seven days to inform Congress of the complaint's substance. Yet the DNI "refrained from doing so after turning for legal guidance to officials at the Justice Department" — that is, an exceptionally pusillanimous chicken asked the fox for guidance.

Well blow us all down and shiver our timbers: "[DOJ] lawyers determined there was no notification requirement," continues the Post, "because the whistleblower complaint did not constitute an urgent concern that was 'within the responsibility and authority' of [the DNI's] office."

Repeat after DJT and WPB: From the intelligence community, any whistleblower's complaint of urgent concern about Trump, a foreign leader and national security falls outside the director of national security's "responsibility and authority." Who was the whistleblower supposed to complain to? Ben Carson of HUD? Melania Trump? Louie Gohmert?

I shall instead repeat that whatever the substance of Trump's "promise" to a foreign leader — my guess: "My Dear Leader Kim, I swear we won't spy on you anymore" — his words might well have been of less actual harm to national security than their even more urgent coverup by the White House and Justice Department. Each day, Trump, with the support of A.G. Barr and in time the Supreme Court, tears off another inch of the original U.S. Constitution.

America's national security and de-facto rule of law are no longer what the founding document envisioned and the statute books say, but what the erratic, oppressive, ruinous Donald J. Trump says they are. Hence that — our precious freedoms via the preeminent rule of law, which separate us from Putin's Russia or Xi's China — is what's at stake in 14 months. So be there, to vote — which, if you don't, could be your last free act.

"A Weekday at Bernie's"

In a way I feel some pity for Bernie. There's nothing quite so anguishing than running, or trying to run, a presidential campaign while 200 self-admiring whiz kids on staff are running their mouths at you, telling you this is wrong and that is wrong and you really should be listening to that particular whiz kid alone.

The self-importance of any given twenty-something political staffer is insufferable — he, she is aggressively looking to be the next David Axelrod — and the candidate's insufferable misfortune is that one of the whiz kids just may be right. Problem is, which one? The game has to be played to completion before one can know which plays worked, which failed.

In Bernie's case, the authentically clever ones are faxing, emailing, instagramming and tweeting bits and pieces of their résumés to Elizabeth Warren. For the scrawled handwriting is plastered all over the public face of "Bernie 2020."

Even some of his "fiercest supporters are sounding the alarm," reports Politico, "that the campaign is bogged down by disorganization, personality clashes, and poor communication between state operations and national headquarters." (Somewhere, I suspect, is the heavy hand of Jeff Weaver, whose personality can do nothing but clash.)

The biggest hit taken by the Sanders campaign this week was the loss of the Working Families Party's endorsement, which went to Warren. A rather sensible fellow who once worked for the WFP and volunteered for 2016 Bernie was one Rafael Shimunov, who observed, "Seeing the campaign not be able to outshine Warren with WFP progressives doesn’t have me questioning WFP’s process. It has me questioning where the Bernie campaign could have done better."

That, as noted, would be the rational response. However, in big bold progressive style of closing one's eyes and ears to reality, "Many Sanders’ supporters," writes Politico, "blame WFP’s leaders for making the wrong choice."

The fools! They voted for the wrong guy. Will such troublesome strains of grassroots democracy never cease? What an outrage.

If you'd really like to get a sense of where the activist left meets the authoritarian right, though, contemplate this: "Politico spoke with nearly a dozen current and former Sanders advisers and allies, some of whom declined to discuss internal dynamics on the record because of fear of retribution" [italics mine].

In short, don't fuck with Bernie. Otherwise the long arm of compassionate progressivism might drive a figurative pickaxe into your skull. And with that, there goes what little pity I had for Bernie.

Kim Jong-un, just a fat little funnyman to Trump

Ever wonder what high-level intelligence matters and insights into the global economy the president of the United States takes with him to august international gatherings such as the G7?

I should say this president of the U.S., not the or a president. And according to BuzzFeed News, this president possesses a kind of greatest hits played over and over in his mind, especially songs of praise for that "great guy," Kim Jong-un, as Trump informed members of the G-7 this year. As well as last year in the exact same account.

"[He] went off on a tangent, spending some 10 minutes rambling about his great relationship with Kim," reports BuzzFeed, "leaving the other G7 leaders mostly speechless."

In Trump’s retelling, during a back-and-forth exchange about the name-calling the two men had engaged in over many months before the meeting in Singapore — "You called me fat… and then you called me this" — Kim asks Trump why he’d called him that.

"Don’t you know Elton John? It’s a great song," [said] the president.

To which Kim responds, "But you called me 'little.'"

Then comes Trump's punchline: "That’s what he didn’t like!"

One might think that any U.S. president would raise the issue of blood-soaked Kim at a G7 summit only in relation to nuclear weapons, missile tests, and his unspeakable history of human rights violations. As the United Nations reported in 2014, North Korea's great, fat little leader has been busy with ...

"extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation."

That's the monster with whom Trump jokes around, and expects leaders of the free world to be amused by it all.

Lou Dobbs, the uninhibited madman of Fox Business Network

Please pardon my gutter English so characteristic of the demimonde's lower orders, but this has to be the funniest fucking squib I have run across in some time.

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs signed off his Friday show wishing viewers a "great weekend" and followed up that salutation with a rapturous encomium for … Trump, whom he duly credited with "making such a thing possible for us all." 

The Fox Business host has become one of Trump [sic] most devoted worshippers, warning that "traitors" to the president were "committing absolute suicide," condemning Democrats — "to hell with them" — who have refused with him [sic], and cursing as "damned idiots" any of the president’s disciples who don’t demonstrate sufficient faith in his agenda.

I recall the Lou Dobbs of CNN's "Moneyline," which was before he went bughouse bats, ranting in free-verse praise about our glorious Trump-bestowed weekends and brooding about those damned idiots of inadequate servitude to the aforementioned Orange One.

Poor Lou. He's done gone 'round yonder bend. Nevertheless he serves as an ideal example of how personality cultism coupled with hyperpartisanhip can, yea, veritably, utterly waste one's mind. Beware of the symptoms but please be kind to Lou. The pathetic loon hasn't any idea of how fucking ludicrous he's become.

FDR and the enduring humbug of the GOP

 

There will never be another like him — his ridiculing patrician lilt admixed with the rough voices of the working class, who rightly saw FDR as a kind of savior.

He gave people hope while having to tolerate sour Republicans, ultraleftists, segregationist Democrats, Father Caughlin, Huey Long, and untold fringe lunatics who preferred to address him as "that cripple" or the sinister "Rothschild Jew."

Yet FDR took all the abuse in stride, plodding away at this, that, or whatever might work for the benefit of all.

There is a near consensus among political historians that Roosevelt's administration delivered less in battling the Great Depression than is generally, popularly believed. I dwell in this consensus. FDR was not only constrained politically in what his legendary brain trust could realistically do, he himself was a fiscal conservative who played with pump priming as infrequently as possible.

One must recall, however, that Keynesian economics was in its infancy; massive federal spending in down times was almost universally regarded as more than just a peculiar idea. Such spending would rain ruin on America, since spending money one does not yet possess was further regarded as economic blasphemy. (Republicans still adhere to this nonsense, unless, of course, they're in power and need to boost the economy.)

Nonetheless, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a powerhouse of national fervor. As already noted, he provided hope where there was none before, established the federal government as a positive force in people's lives, and laid a broad foundation of future, progressive enactments.

All the while, Republicans swore they could do better with no burdens whatsoever on the commoners, cross their hearts.

Some things never change. And you have been warned.

Incidentally, a few days ago I read Thom Hartmann's latest book, The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, graciously provided to me by the publisher for for a plug. So here it goes, with extreme brevity, and however ungracious in return.

Most of Hartmann's revealed history is no revelation at all — otherwise how did he get hands on it and we never have — but I would sincerely add that if you're ill familiar with the history of Supreme Court decisions, Hartmann's volume of only 158 pages is a good place to start. 

On the other hand brace yourself for the phrase "We the people" peppered throughout Hartmann's work, which is both tedious and progressively exhausting.  

Dear Democrats, some Democrats: Aren't you forgetting about the largest group in politics?

At House Republicans' three-day black mass in Baltimore last week, the White House's prince of darkness exclaimed, "With the grim specter of socialism descending on the Democrat [sic] party, it’s up to all of us to ensure the survival of American liberty."

This the dark prince promptly did by bemocking Pete Buttigieg’s height. He also battled the grim specter of socialism by alerting the good people of the United States that an energy-efficient lightbulb, if broken, is "considered a hazardous waste site." (Lethal gases, you know). And he struck a blow for American liberty by growling that televisions shut down whenever wind turbines do the same. (Which is also asinine.)

Yet Trump said not a word about the nation's grossly indecent disparity of revenue and expenditures, nor did special sessions held at the GOP retreat include tutorials on the national debt. Meanwhile, reports the Washington Post, on the day Trump was speaking to his partisan minions, "the Treasury Department reported that the government’s budget deficit had surpassed $1 trillion, with a month left in the fiscal year."

The thrust of the Post story, however, is so successfully encapsulated in its headline — "'More united' vs. 'A house divided': GOP goes all in on Trump while Democrats clash over ideology and tactics" — one scarcely need bother reading it. But I did, and as for the GOP side of the equation, "the ones who have criticized the president have either lost or left…. Distancing yourself from the top of the ticket is almost impossible now," said Amy Walter, of the Cook Political Report, with unassailable rationality.

Facing Trump's reelection effort is virtually no Republican opposition, no matter that he has rendered the country a fiscal wreck, harmed American consumers with nitwitted tariffs, and made us both an international pariah and a world laughingstock — in asserting, among a thousand others, the absolute idiocy of the "U.K." and "England" being interchangeable.

So much for the double-barreled blunderbuss of Our Man in the White House, where once sat Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. Indeed it's a hard thing to even write a sentence like that.

On the other side of the presidential equation are of course the threesome or tensome or now elevensome (Tom Steyer, next debate) Democrats vying for the top slot. Collectively they're neither center-left nor left; rather, fundamentally they are a threefold conflict in philosophical approach.

That conflict is both prodigiously symmetric and asymmetric — if, that is, one includes independents, who might well decide the presidential contest. As of January 2019 Gallup found, in its Democrats' political ideology survey, that 51 percent were self-described liberals (who, in Gallup's methodology, incorporate progressives), while moderate and conservative Dems represent a statistical push of 48 percent. Among those inescapable-like-em-or-not independents — who have for some time held a substantial plurality of self-identification — the preceding stats undergo a savagely imbalanced reformulation: 83 percent see themselves as moderate or conservative; 22 percent, liberal.

Hence the candidates' dilemma transcends the Post's conception of it: "Democrats are desperate to unseat an unpopular president but divided about how to do it without alienating chunks of their base" — for Biden, perhaps much of the left; for Warren/Sanders, perhaps much of the white suburban vote and minorities, whose faces one seldom sees in Warren/Sanders' crowds. Factor in independents, however, and the monstrous dilemma begins to fade into a harmless little kitten.

All that's required of the great majority of Democratic primary voters, then, is to keep their eyes on the general election — not these infernal squabbles that percolate from the hellish depths of primary madness.

A.O.C., E. Heng, and the GOP's rancid misdirection

 

 

That "garbage," as Rep. Ilhan Omar described the ad, which ABC irresponsibly chose to air during the Democratic debate this week, may be "horrifying to watch," despite, I would add, its propagandistic hilarity.

Omar's subsequent observation was more poignant: "When will the Republicans learn how to offer ideas and solutions without stroking fear and inciting violence?" I'd wager no sooner than when every last one of the fear-mongering scarecrows gets his lily-white, racism- fomenting, Trump-hugging butt kicked out of office.

Speaking for the new, ad-sponsoring PAC — New Faces GOP — is one telegenic Elizabeth Heng, a recently failed congressional candidate. "This is the face of socialism and ignorance," says Heng in the ad. "Does Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez know the horror of socialism?" — a further assertion erroneously reported by the Washington Post as Heng's comparison of "the freshman Democrat’s support of democratic socialism to the communist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia that killed nearly 2 million people in the 1970s."

I say erroneous owing to undebatable fact that for Heng and New Faces GOP, Cortez is nothing but a cardboard cutout figure. It's not Cortez but the entire Democratic Party that Heng & Co. compares to the mass-murderous, communist Khmer Rouge. That is in Heng's own, tweeted words, which followed the freshman Democrat's tweet, "What you just watched was a love letter to the GOP’s white supremacist case":

.@aoc response is the Democratic party in a nutshell. They are more offended by truthful words than the acts of their political ideology that has killed millions of innocent victims. I don't care about @AOC feelings - I care about stopping her lies about the lies of socialism.

— Elizabeth Heng (@ElizabethHeng) September 13, 2019

At least she got "Democratic" party right, though I'm sure she'll be hearing about that.

New Faces GOP's reason for being is to remove the large rocks presently covering the worm-eaten habitats of "new faces from the Republican Party," who will "stand up to lead. We need candidates from all races, ethnicities, genders, and geographies." For these candidates must hie to hustle the party's "ideas and solutions to fight back extremism." No irony is acknowledged by the PAC.

I'm sorry for Ms. Heng's youthful plight, which assuredly was harrowing. But in pronouncing "Mine is a face of freedom. My skin is not white. I’m not outrageous, racist or socialist. I’m a Republican," she has merely moved by degrees from one harrowing plight to another.

The modern GOP is vastly white, manifestly outrageous, deeply racist via white-nationalism, and increasingly, oppressively authoritarian under the likely enduring influence of Donald Trump (and predecessors). These nasty pseudoconservative attributes are publicly subsumed only by the GOP's assorted misdirections of wicked Democratic socialism.

Actual refreshing new GOP faces would be those who do not go gentle into the appalling darkness of today's conservatism, which, as adduced above, is no genuine conservatism at all. It is instead virtually all white, outrageously radical and racist, and serviceably socialist for the well off.

That's your party, Ms. Heng. Run while you're still young enough to do so.

Sully triggers my Huh? syndrome

In Andrew Sullivan's latest piece, on the NY Times, I was afflicted by the dreaded Huh? syndrome. I could not get past his first four paragraphs. I'll explain why, briefly, just after them:

"Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written."

I’ve been struggling with that sentence — the opening statement of the introductory essay to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project on the legacy of slavery in America — for a few weeks now.

It’s a very strange formulation. How can an enduring "ideal" — like, say, freedom or equality — be "false" at one point in history and true in another? You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different than saying that the ideals themselves were false. (They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition. But that would be conventional wisdom — or simply the central theme of President Barack Obama’s vision of the arc of justice in the unfolding of the United States.

No, in its ambitious and often excellent 1619 Project, the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go.

I doubt that. And I doubt it because the Times, or rather the article's author, almost certainly meant false in the sense of unfaithful, insincere. Odd indeed would be that the accomplished Nikole Hannah-Jones — a 2017 MacArthur fellow and winner of a National Magazine Award, a Peabody Award, and a George Polk Award — would pen such a conspicuous intellectual blunder: that an "enduring 'ideal'" can be "false," in its other sense of untrue, in one historical era, and yet true in another.

Just plug in one of my cited synonyms and Hannah-Jones' opening sentence makes sense: "Our democracy’s ideals were insincere when they were written." True then, and too often true now.

Hence I couldn't comfortably proceed reading a kind of review article that inaugurated itself with a linguistic misunderstanding. What other misreadings might follow?

Biden's vastly misunderstood remarks on the legacy of American slavery

I gather The Atlantic's David Graham has never heard a politician answer a question by saying what he damn well planned on saying, no matter how peripheral to the actual question.

A reporter asked Biden, "What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?" Mr. Graham later commented on "the dizzying nature of the reply [that] can only be grasped by reading it in full." I did, since last night I happened to miss hearing this Biden segment:

Look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Red lining, banks, making sure we are in a position where—look, you talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal raise of getting out of the $60,000 level. Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are—I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have to make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school—school, not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes with parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television— excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone—make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school—a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Remarks Graham: "That’s a word salad even Sarah Palin would have hesitated to serve." The salad's embarrassingly on you, Mr. Graham.

It doesn't require a genius translator to discern from Biden's answer that he was in fact answering in even more than a peripheral, or "random" (as Graham put it), way. He began by targeting red lining, which might be the expected and much easier answer, but then quickly shifted to deeper structural problems which have descended from African-American slavery: the deplorable education system in poor school districts and the indispensable need to hike teachers' pay (which would also attract better, more qualified teachers). He then proceeded even deeper, advocating a greater presence of school psychologists and social workers to help troubled black children. And God forbid he added, in a truncated way — though we knew what he meant — that the TV at home must stay off at night, that music plays, and that poor children of any color, for that matter, should be spoken to with educational frequency, that "kids hear words."

My social-work advice to Graham is that he read a transcript of any one of President Eisenhower's less-than perfectly articulated replies to reporters. If the columnist seeks to get truly, dizzyingly high, that should do it.

Incidentally, Eisenhower is now one of our more highly ranked presidents.

Pete's momentary lapse

Did Mayor Pete, whom I like, by the way, ever stop to think that by chastising his fellow Democrats for poking each other, he was poking his fellow Democrats?

Trump: the other "Oddfather"

(A brief timeout from all things debated, though there's more below!)

Doubtless you were unaware that Tuesday evinced a global phenomenon, and that the GOP is strong as ever.

The two big Congressional wins in North Carolina on Tuesday, Dan Bishop and Greg Murphy, have reverberated all over the World. They showed a lot of people how strong the Republican Party is, and how well it is doing. 2020 is a big, and very important, Election. We will WIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2019

And when he's not violating the foreign emoluments clause, he's busy flagrantly exercising domestic self-dealing.

Proud to announce that @TrumpNewYork has just been named the #1 “Best Hotel in the World!" Congratulations to our remarkable team @TrumpHotels https://t.co/1W2QOvqHNR

— The Trump Organization (@Trump) September 12, 2019

That, retweeted by Trump.

I'm beginning to think he is merely emulating Vincent "the Oddfather" Gigante— the mobster who, while babbling incoherently, once roamed the streets of New York City in bathrobe and slippers, thereby laying, or so he believed, an effective legal defense of criminal insanity.

Gigante expired in a medical center for federal prisoners.

And so in good time will Trump, evangelicals' God willing.  

Democrats' third debate. But stay tuned, nothing has changed.

He was going nowhere anyway, so Julián Castro's stagey ploy of self-disembowelment last night was of little national importance. Had he been right in assailing Joe Biden for being wrong — "Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?" — then his undignified aggression might have held some merit. But it was Castro who had forgotten what Biden said two minutes ago, thereby partially confirming the Chinese adage, "When seeking revenge, first dig two graves." R.I.P., Julián. And now there are nine.

As for other hangers-on, WaPo's Dan Balz, an observer of politics for 40 years, ably assesses their performances. "Beto O’Rourke spoke with passion and eloquence" about mass shootings and the government's forcible re-acquisition of assault weapons. That he did. Balz the straight journalist — in demonstrating that straight journalism can be a journalistic straitjacket — labels Beto's confiscatory proposal as merely "controversial," rather than what it is: crackers. The violence and bloodshed resulting from such government overreach, however desirable, are incalculable.

Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar also "used their moments to show their passions," writes Balz. But both are likely to remain in Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg's limbo: neither one of them "did much to advance their candidacies," though they "were credible when they had the stage." (And Andrew Game-Show Yang should get the hell off of it.)

Elizabeth Warren was something of a puzzle last night. Much of the time she was remarkably off, or just downright absent. One of Politico's staff writers notes that she "skated and then kind of faded into the background"; another writes that she "was surprised that Warren was such a small factor in the debate." The Great Biden-Warren Debate reminded me of the 1965 Ali-Liston, uh, fight?

Joe Biden simply did what he needed to do: depart the debate with no scars. Other than that I would note — not entirely off topic — the pettiness and ignorance of the majority Twittersphere. I wasn't following that social medium nor that particular moment, but Balz was: "There was one moment that caused Twitter to go into overdrive, which was when [Biden] referred to listening to 'a record player' in their homes, something that has echoes of households of decades ago." Hey, Twittertwits, you evidently don't know that less than 10 years ago record players were all the rage among whatever that young generation is now called — Gen-something or Mil-that, who cares.

Last — which by intellectual rights should be Bernie Sanders' position in polls — Politico has awarded the senator that coveted superlative, "Most in Need of a Throat Lozenge," adding, "the Vermonter only has one volume: loud." When it comes to pure style, though, what's more annoying is Bernie's thrusting of right arm and its hand's index finger the very second another interlocutor begins speaking.

We have now survived another mostly non-debate of a debate, and yet things stand as they did weeks ago: Biden, Warren, and NeverSanders in the top three. So it shall remain, unless a real battle ensues betwixt the two ultraprogressives. Who expects that? No one.