The Carpentariat

The now-forming GOP narrative

"How will the GOP recover from the complicity and corruption of the Trump era?" The Atlantic's McKay Coppins has been asking around, and the answer is all too GOPesque: Pretend it never happened….

"The narrative now forming in some GOP circles presents Trump as a secondary figure who presided over an array of important accomplishments" — tax cuts, deregulation, reactionary judges — "thanks to the wisdom and guidance of the Republicans in his orbit. In these accounts, Trump’s race-baiting, corruption, and cruel immigration policies—not to mention his attempts to overturn an election—are treated as minor subplots, rather than defining features…. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of 'healing' and 'moving forward,' but the strategy will be clear—to escape accountability by taking advantage of America’s notoriously short political memory."

Alongside promoting President Biden's aggressive agenda, Democrats and others of conscience must just as aggressively remind voters time and again of the GOP's bloodguilt, its slavishness to an ignorant chief executive and its cowardice before an imperiously naked insurrectionist.

Biden will take heat for this, but he'll needs distance himself from such recriminations, as he tries to assert common cause with handfuls of these lawmaking creeps.

Hence the party as a whole will also be burdened with a frightful balancing act — one nevertheless unambiguous in its condemnations. As Republicans pretend all the ghastliness of Trumpism never happened, Democrats must make plentiful deposits in the otherwise depleting memory banks of voters. I'm just glad I'm not a White House communications staffer.

Please chip in.

Where do these people come from? And how should they be treated?

"I told my husband today, I said 'I’m going stir crazy,'" says an elderly lady, who accurately self-diagnosed. She believes Antifa — not her fellow crazies — staged the insurrection of 6 Jan., buys into a Facebook warning that the Biden administration might strip parents of their children, and sobs, "I simply cannot fathom what my country is becoming."

Or there's the middle-aged truck driver who quit his job because his employer insisted he wear a mask. "Are you OK with internment camps if you refuse to wear a mask or take a vaccination?" he asks.

Perhaps it's less from where they come and more by whom they're led, those who know better — well, most of them: Aside of course from Trump, Fox News, OAN and Newsmax, there are Sens. Cruz, Hawley, Johnson and Tuberville, among other advancing Decembrists, along with Reps. Jordan, Gaetz, Brooks, Gohmert and Greene, the latter of whom has had her Twitter account suspended, is filing impeachment articles against Joe Biden, and is a notable warrior on behalf of:

The death of irony: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wears a mask that says "censored" as she speaks into a microphone in the House Chamber on national television.

— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) January 13, 2021

Should foolish truck drivers and elderly saps be forgiven for their phantasmagoric delusions, given that certain men in Brooks Brothers attire and women in dress suits have skillfully deluded them? Absolutely not. They're aware of credentialed fact-finders, and yet they freely choose to wallow in malicious skulduggery, hateful filth and preposterous lies. These are America's political demimonde; accordingly, they should be ostracized.

The GOP establishment is nearly as sick as its hoodlums

As I noted several weeks ago, I visit Mr. Hewitt's Washington Post scribblings perhaps once a month so as to read Hugh's barometer of what passes these days for GOP establishmentarianism — which is anything just short of storming the Capitol and violently overthrowing the United States government. Hugh is among the party's kittens of ooze who piss acidic urine and cough up hairballs of pussycat subterfuge. No AR-15s for Hugh; merely a pen and loads of self-satisfied preening.

Today he ventures to tell us of Mitch McConnell's unabated promise of laudable Republican stewardship. "No doubt," writes Hugh, "he is already planning how to wield … power for the GOP and the good of the country." After one is through gagging on that second piece of breathtaking pamphleteering, one discovers that Mitch, says Hugh, will lead using "examples of successful Republican governance" such as Florida's science-denying, covid-enhancing, Trump-toadying Gov. Ron DeSantis — and a House "full of GOP promise" such as the stellar dullwittedness of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

I save the most breathtaking of Hewittisms for last. Subsequent to writing that "rule-of-law conservatives owe an enormous debt to McConnell for protecting the Constitution," Hugh, while providing no justification whatever for this unconscionable act, praises McConnell for having "refused to be railroaded by the chattering class into consenting to President Barack Obama’s filling of [a] Supreme Court vacancy." Indeed he cattily avoids citing McConnell's own justification of 2016 being an election year, since he goes on to purr that we should remain agog with admiration at the majority leader's heroic guidance, in the next presidential election year, of Justice Barrett's Supreme Court nomination.

And there you have it — a sickening sample of what passes for upright GOP establishmentarianism. I almost prefer the goons and imbeciles who march around with zip ties and Berettas and speak for millions of honestly delusional Republicans. At least they are straightforward in their sickness.

Things are looking up, especially given the GOP's emergent downsizing

After a merciless 2020, excepting 3 Nov., things are looking up. President-elect Joe Biden is proposing strong measures to competently distribute the covid vaccine, reverse an economic slide​​​​​ and relieve widespread suffering; the Grim Reaper has been scythed to appropriate size; in three days the Toddler King will be relegated to Floridian swamp of Mar-a-Lago, awaiting — again — bankruptcy, as well as depositions and courtrooms; the United States is ending its love affair with savage dictators and rejoining the civilized world.

These are merely a few of our national benefactions in the wake of a bad, bad year. And coequal among them is the looming, further disintegration of the Republican Party. Its future electoral prospects have taken on a McConnellesque hue; i.e., the party's prognosis is looking grimmer every day. Odes to joy.

In South Dakota, at the pointed behest of their heartthrob, Sen. John Thune is a 2022 primary target for frothing Trumpeteers; his unforgivable sin, suggesting that Trump bears some responsibility for the insurrection he irresponsibly incited.

In Wyoming, same for Rep. Liz Cheney. The state's Trump-adoring natives are furious with her and fanatical House Republicans are gunning for her. Should they strip Cheney of the Republican conference chair "it could encourage primary challenges against other Republicans who supported impeachment or censure," such as Michigan Reps. Peter Meijer and Fred Upton, and New York's John Katko, muses the Times.

Arizona Republicans are wanting to censure their governor, Doug Ducey, who was their best but now vulnerable shot at a Senate seat next year. In Georgia, the frothers are rolling out the artillery against Gov. Brian Kemp, thus creating an even more favorable position for Stacey Abrams.

In Colorado, Arizona and Georgia, possible primary sights are being set, respectively, by the rabid conspiracy-theorizing U.S. representatives Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who announced last week her intention to file impeachment articles against President Biden.

And every other crackpot wanting to primary a GOP establishmentarian will receive a hearty endorsement from the Toddler King himself, possibly from a jail cell.

How effective, in the promise of primary debacles, could those endorsements of gadflying losers be? A Washington Post-ABC news poll finds that among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 66 percent believe there is "solid evidence of widespread fraud" in Nov.'s election. The base is unyieldingly Trumpian, Trump is the party — and, except in the very reddest of regions, both are insanely indicative of a self-annihilating GOP.

Yes, things are looking up.

Election night's doom: Trump had long anticipated it, and long prepared for it

This is stunning. https://t.co/9AFobGpwhX

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) January 16, 2021

Fahrenthold's "stunned" tweeting came amid a score of likeminded shock I ran across this morning, the buzz of Axios' "Off the Rails: A premeditated lie lit the fire" having alighted across the land as would a dazzling meteor shower. Finally, a publication had the skinny on Trump's wicked rollout of lies atop lies about a fraudulent election, robbing him of his entitled sinecure.

By this, I am bewildered.

Election Day: "His preparations were deliberate, strategic and deeply cynical," writes Axios' Jonathan Swan. "Trump wanted Americans to believe a falsehood that there were two elections — a legitimate election composed of in-person voting, and a separate, fraudulent election involving bogus mail-in ballots for Democrats. In the initial hours after returns closed, it looked like his plan could work."

It did work, as far as it could work. Trump has consumed this two-and-a-half-month post-election period with absurdly twisted tales of "illegal" immigrants, 15-year-olds and dead people voting, electronic machines devouring or changing votes, states manipulating election laws to benefit Biden, mysterious ballots appearing on 4 Nov. and beyond, and every other imaginable fraud. Millions among the moronic class believe it.

Yet, contra Axios' "stunning" reportage, there was nothing new — or now, newsy — about Trump's deliberate, strategic, deeply cynical preparations to bamboozle the rabble. He had been broadcasting his plans for even more months before 3 Nov. As though on tape, he blathered with invariable monotony that his victory was in the bag — only dark doings could possibly dethrone him.

Indeed, Swan observes much the same: "For weeks, Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory on election night — even if he lost. But the real-time results, punctuated by Fox’s shocking call, upended his plans and began his unraveling."

I gather that Swan would argue his unique revelation lies in what transpired on election night and that night only. But in the traditional way of revelation, its uniqueness escapes me. Trump declared victory before the election, after the election, and he's still declaring it. Whether he genuinely refused then and genuinely refuses now "to believe the election results," I can't say. But one thing has been on the public record for some time: His refusal, as Swan himself writes, "was premeditated."

Had some of us missed that?

"The damage" - of right-wing media - "is profound"

None of that just-when-I-thought-I-was-out, they-pull-me-back-in stuff for James Murdoch. Last summer he departed for good from the family business of profiteering on the greedy ignorance of others; he became a Biden contributor and uses some of his inherited $2 billion for battling fake news, whose ground zero lies squarely among the platforms that brand others as dispensing it.

James is careful to not pointedly finger progenitor Rupert's most infamous outlet of primetime "toxicity" — his assessment — as a falsehoods and fakeness player. But he needn't do so. In a Financial Times interview, his indictment of election-fraud-spewing media is clear and encompassing enough: All its profiteers are as guilty, says James the Youngest, as Trump-supporting politicians who "know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies."

I would add that non-propagating yet silent pols are equally guilty. If there has ever been a time to speak up and forcefully condemn the rhetorical rot and uncivil warring of Team Trump, this is it. The exhortation should be too copiously self-evident to flog. Yet here we are, surrounded by the booming echoes of Washington D.C.'s Fort Sumter, while the Army of the Mum does nothing.

But back to James Murdoch, who adds: "The damage is profound. Those outlets that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years. I hope that those people who didn’t think it was that dangerous now understand, and that they stop."

The media moguls won't stop, of course. And they won't stop simply because they're as sociopathically acquisitive as the bloated hotelier who started it all. In their tireless pursuit of material gain, they "are only too happy to make a mess and burn things down," as James himself notes. Why would they ever consider putting a stop to something that makes them so happy?

"It will go away"

"We have it under control," "It's fading away," "It will go away," and "We have prevailed."

A front-page, New York Times bullet point:

In the United States there have been, as of yesterday, nearly 400,000 covid deaths, and more than 400,000 suspicious, perhaps covid-related deaths.

"We have it under control," "It's fading away," "It will go away," and "We have prevailed."

Bizarre, sick, and a bit laughable

For some, the "Funeral Blues"

W.H. Auden:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Pew Research:

"Trump is leaving the White House with the lowest job approval of his presidency (29%)…. Much of the decline has come among Republicans and GOP leaners: Currently, 60% approve of his job performance; 77% approved in August....The share of voters who rate Trump’s conduct since the election as only fair or poor has risen from 68% in November to 76%, with virtually all of the increase coming in his 'poor' ratings…. Three-quarters of the public say the president bears at least some responsibility for the violence and destruction committed by some of his supporters, with 52% saying he bears a lot of responsibility for their actions."

Someone will need to explain to me how a political party attached to these numbers, which are likely to get worse, can stage a national comeback in 2024, or even 2022; most Republican congressional candidates in plausible swing districts will be stun-gunned and tasered by well-advertised Democratic remembrances of their Trump-toadying.

One possible cause of a GOP resurrection would be a profound return to Democratic voter apathy, but the possibility doesn't strike me as probable. These voters proved themselves powerful in 2020, and power usually refuses to lie back and be trampled. There's also a remote chance that the Biden administration careens off the rails, but that is exceptionally remote. Also, I suppose, the GOP could suddenly and miraculously come to its senses and reject its present recklessness and insurrectionist-condoning pathologies, though that is remoter still.

An organizational death knell. That, it seems to me, is what w're hearing.

Biden's "American Rescue Plan" is, in a word, …

… fantastic. Other words include smart, scrupulous — and characteristic; he has managed to win applause from both progressives and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as the NY Times reports.

Now is the time — actually, long past, but … — to prime the Keynesian pump through deficit spending, and President-elect Joe Biden intends to do it to the tune of nearly $2 trillion. His plan is designed to accelerate covid vaccinations and hire more healthcare workers, provide emergency paid leave to more than 100 Americans and expand tax credits for child care, increase federal unemployment benefits, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and offer financial aid to renters and small businesses.

In February, Biden will also introduce an even larger package of spending — that one paid for by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest among us — focused on infrastructure and therefore more job creation.

I needn't point out that the incoming president will soon suffer multiple migraines because of the political gangsterism and hypocritical frugality of a Capitol Hill pack that goes by three little initials — denoting a loosely organized syndicate that is no longer grand, old beyond any usefulness, and not much of a party. Its moniker has achieved the level of Voltairean sarcasm: "The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."

Still, Joe Biden is demonstrating that he means business. And that marginalized "organization," or whatever it is, would be well to comply with that aged catchphrase: help lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

The Now Short Life and Adventures of the Republican Party

Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser in the Obama White House — who opens his thoughts on the GOP's future with, "One of my ways for seeming 'smart' over my many years in politics is to always predict that Republicans will do the wrong thing" — takes stock of the Republican base's present-day persuasions, since the base is a "leading indicator" of its leaders and congressional backbenchers' down-the-road train wrecks.

In sum, notes Pfeiffer, "early polling does not bode well for ending Trumpism," that being the worst imaginable boneheaded debacle within the Republican Party. But again, one cannot go wrong in always predicting that Republicans will do the wrong thing, given that they're always dead set on proving us right. The aforementioned polling includes these tweeted findings from Frank Luntz:

* 57% of Trump voters say they would vote against any House or Senate Republican who support[ed] another impeachment of President Trump.

* Slightly more Trump voters currently consider themselves to be supporters of Donald Trump (50%) than supporters of the GOP (44%).

* 41% of Trump voters say they have a more favorable view of him now than on Election Day 2020 [and] 35% say their view of him hasn’t changed.

Another poll found that "70% of Trump voters believe the false conspiracy theory that Antifa played a role in the violence at the Capitol and 74% believe Trump won the election."

This is, of course, nothing more than a collectivity of fringe, destined to follow the Anti-Masons and Wobblies into obscurity. Paraphrasing Pfeiffer, one of the ways for being "smart" is to always predict that the unsustainable is, in fact, unsustainable. It ain't hard.

Nearly as easy is recommending to Republican luminaries that they stop. Just. Stop. Instead, they should "de-radicalize their base"; pressure Fox News and all other ministries of demented propaganda to knock it the fuck off; "acknowledge that Joe Biden is the President"; and circle the wagons around the handfuls of GOP pols who have belatedly but rightly denounced Trump — Pfeiffer's recommendations.

One could just as easily add to the list, such as denouncing the vicious, violent, God-loving "Christian" jihadists who have flooded the ranks of the Republican Party, as well as executing the expulsions of its Josh Hawleys and Ted Cruzes.

But these would be rational acts. And we're not talking about a rational party — not, that is, one in the sense of elevating the greater national good over the much lesser needs of a few selfish careers. A year from now, we'll all be even smarter in also adding, "Q.E.D."

Learning can do wonders

Linda Greenhouse, the NY Times' Supreme Court columnist, observes that "some justices have drifted quite far from their ideological starting points. Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and David Souter come to mind. All were Republican-appointed justices … who ended their careers as among the most liberal members of the court they served on."

She asks if Chief Justice John Roberts — the Court's other conservatives she sees, evidently, as hopeless — might someday join Blackmun et al.s' ranks. (He has, but only on occasion.) The law itself as well as life's teachings opened their eyes to more civilized vistas of our human community.

While reading Greenhouse's column, I recalled, duh, that such intellectual expansions are not limited to the federal judiciary. The same sort of expansiveness effects much of the liberalism in institutions of higher education — some scholarship of organized religion, too.

Right wingers are forever decrying universities' pontificators of liberalism, although students' tyrannical monitoring, in ridiculous end-of-sessions' "evaluations" of professors, has withered what professors were once expected to do. The point, however, is that university liberalism tends to germinate and flower upon higher examinations of what's what — not, necessarily, that universities are hellbent on poisoning the minds of youth with truths and inconvenient facts.

As to this occurrence in the academic fields of religion, I cite the case of Prof. Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A fundamentalist Christian when young, his graduate religious studies at Princeton led to a true epiphany. This transfiguration he recounts in his authoritative Misquoting Jesus: "It finally occurred to me that if I really thought that God had inspired this text [and] if he went to the trouble of inspiring the text, why didn’t he go to the trouble of preserving the text? Why did he allow scribes to change it?" Thus did Ehrman's Christian fundamentalism — or any Christianity, for that matter — go the way of Blackmun's conservative jurisprudence.

For John Roberts, we can hope. Intellectual growth is not always thwarted; sometimes, the intellect looks at history and yells Go.

Rudy Giuliani: The last man to die on the hill of Trump

"He is said to be doing little these days besides watching television and fulminating with this coterie of loyalists about Republicans not defending him enough…. Though Trump has been exceptionally furious with Vice President Pence, his relationship with lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of his most steadfast defenders, is also fracturing."

Perhaps more out of unsporting habit than authentic disgruntlement, Trump is — and this, granted, is rather understandable — refusing to pay Rudy's $20,000-a-day legal fees. But he's also personally reviewing his fellow bunko artist's expenses related to travel and his slavish, election-fraud obscurantism.

A high-ranking administration official (yes, there's one left) says Trump's ultimate mistreatment of Mr. Giuliani, among other pitiable stooges, "is the logical conclusion of someone who will only accept people in his inner orbit if they are willing to completely set themselves on fire on his behalf."

Yet that misses the feckless target that is Rudy W. L. Giuliani. He has completely set himself on fire countless times, and he is still "expected to play a role in Trump's impeachment defense," reports CNN.

None that now counts. The net of Trump's finger-pointing and blame-laying spreads wide and never snares the most culpable and yet "most steadfast defender" of his loathsome behavior.

Dear Rudy, dear, dear Rudy, did you never notice?

The case for Trump's disqualification from office, and the case against

Pace J. Michael Luttig, a former U.S. Court of Appeals judge, whose opinion is that Trump's ex-post removal from office and disqualification from future office are constitutionally prohibited, professor of law Stephen Vladeck argues that the 1876 Secretary of War William Belknap impeachment case "cemented two precedents: Congress can impeach and remove former officers, but the fact that the defendant is no longer in office is one factor that senators may take into account in deciding whether to vote to convict," after which they can also vote to disqualify.

For now, who knows? Our highest, ruling tribunal is as much a panel of prejudices as learned scholars of law. All the same, should they decide to go with precedent, in the 1993 case of (U.S. District Judge Walter) Nixon v. United States, "the Supreme Court," notes Vladeck, "held that it’s not for the courts to review the propriety of impeachments."

While Trump's conviction and subsequent disqualification are of righteous appeal, I do find myself questioning if I sincerely desire the latter. Assuming the unstable toddler isn't assigned to the parental care of the Federal Bureau of Prisons or some state facility for the criminally insane, the imagination soars: Trump, foreclosing on other, possibly electable Republican presidential candidates' dreams; Trump, preserving the Republican Party's degradation and decadence; Trump, fracturing congressional candidates into warring tribes and thus numerically unelectable factions; Trump, ensuring that Big Money avoids further largess; Trump, summoning the nation's subterranean morons to surface and expose themselves to arrest and incarceration.

Incontrovertible is that the seething, brooding, tantrum-throwing lump of a public Trump would bequeath us all these gifts through enduring eligibility for office. Conversely, and just as incontrovertible, is that he doesn't serve the option. Hence I'm divided in thought and emotion. So I'll hang my hopes instead on a definitive resolution from the dubious wisdom of the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court.

Arguing with idiots

​​​​​Says a Trump-supporting, retired fire captain, "I'm so mad, I see red about the [expletive] steal. I believe with all my heart that the Democratic Party stole the election, and I will never believe otherwise as long as I draw breath. Liberals, you're driving us to civil war…. I’m not advocating we pick up arms — right now."

The one point of actual fact the captain of inanity gets right is that he'll never change his mind, no matter the educational weight of other actual facts pressing against him.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic. For years I have struggled against another actual fact: You can't argue, productively, with idiots. You can argue with them and waste a helluva lot of time, but what good does that do for either oneself or, for that matter, the idiots? I write not of correcting an interlocutor on perhaps some minor error of, say, chronology, but of some penetrating stupidity that staggers. The best one can do is walk away.

Which reminds me of the modern right's booming deprecations of "cancel culture," which further reminds me of its own, much earlier and rather healthy contributions to this alleged atrocity of contemporary society. As a teen I witnessed philosophical conservatism's highest priest, William F. Buckley, vow on "Firing Line" that the wisest course when encountering ostentatious idiots is, simply, ostracism. Ignore them, disregard them, treat them as though they don't exist, he sermonized. And he was profoundly correct.

I can't swear that over ensuing years I adopted Buckley's advice with expeditiousness or equivalent wisdom. Lord, the hours I've squandered arguing not with credibly philosophical antagonists, but with demonstrably jackassed idiots. It became a horrible addiction. I'm trying to quit.