The Carpentariat

Those clever Dems

Jon Chait:

Democrats appear to have won this latest round [of government-shutdown responsibility avoidance]. Republicans, or at least those speaking on the record, express mystification at just how they pulled off this tricky feat. "I think [Senator] Schumer was very shrewd in his efforts to make certain that whatever blame is to be had for a shutdown doesn’t rest with the Democrats," Republican senator Jerry Moran told Politico. 

[Chait lists five reasons for 'how' Democrats shrewdly did it.]

3. [Of the five, the only one needed]. Trump loudly and repeatedly claimed responsibility for shutting down the government….

Schumer’s main strategic contribution was trying not to laugh. He was largely unsuccessful.

Editorial writer Alan Barth said, in the 1940s, that "News" — later revised to "journalism" — "is the first rough draft of history." Chait's piece is proof.

 

City day

Portland doesn't actually lean, although with a bit more traffic on one or the other side, it just might. I've been surprised by the automobile congestion here; when you're in it, it's as though you're in downtown Chicago. I grew up as a city boy, but I've had enough of urban living. I'll take the country, perhaps a small town a half-hour or so from civilization.

For instance we were in Sandy, Ore. a few days ago, about 45 minutes from Portland. Here is the town's diminutive city hall, which suggests more than enough municipal authority for a misfit like me. I want government, but I want it in Washington, D.C. — nowhere near me.

I return Tuesday. I shall miss Oregon's great outdoors, magnificent scenery, and not least, its smooth roads. I've yet to encounter a pothole, the skillful dodging of which provides about the only entertainment in Champaign, Ill. And I'll be sad to leave lady-friend L. Reeves, who will also miss the Portland area, since she's moving to Michigan. (The employment thing, you know.)

See you in the morning.

 

Two pundits and the politics of wizardry

When I saw the CNN headline, "Beto O'Rourke leapfrogs most of the 2020 Democratic field," I understandably thought it came from some ghastly poll. Turns out, O'Rourke Mania was just an affliction experienced by the story's writers, the data-driven journalist Harry Enten (formerly of FiveThirtyEight) and that tedious master of conventionally dull wisdom, Chris Cillizza.

The Cillizza-Enten piece is rather peculiar, in that they spend all of their opening statements on The Unparalleled Excitement of Beta O'Rourke — only to choose Kamala Harris as the candidate "most likely to wind up as the Democratic nominee." Do they explain why? Sort of. Unfortunately.

In words other than mine, though mine are more "authentic," they write that Ms. Harris is the reigning princess of identity politics: "her profile — an Indian-American and African-American woman with a law-and-order background — looks tailor made for the 2020 Democratic electorate." Notice her law-and-order background (she was once California's attorney general) takes a backseat to her double-bonused, mixed ethnicity. Then, ominously: "Harris' big challenge? She's never been on a stage as big the one she will be on if and when she announces she's running" — which is true of damn near every presidential candidate.

My guess is that, in determining their rankings, Cillizza and Enten were attempting to channel the progressive-activist mind: What the Democratic nominee needs is the right skin color, the right gender, and youth. Crowning experience, which lies heavy on the head of #3, is a throwaway. Yet in the 2018 midterms, progressives largely opted for Democratic candidates who possessed the potential to actually win, rather than robotically choosing progressive darlings.

Here's to hoping their pragmatic mindset holds throughout 2020.

 

Will the GOP bail on Trump?

The fetid incoherence of Trump's politics is suddenly alarming to the craven servility of the Republican Congress. It seems that claiming preemptive credit for a politically disastrous government shutdown is an unsettling puzzler to Trump's GOP allies. Their faith in the president's populist wisdom — his gut is smarter than anyone's brain — is slipping. Or so some believe.

The Times' David Leonhardt, for instance, sees Republicans' openly rattled nerves over Trump's questionable border-wall politics as an introduction to party defection. "I know what you may be thinking: Trump’s allies will stick by him, regardless of what happens. I disagree. Already, there are early signs of waffling from Trump’s usual allies…. Just because they have not abandoned him yet doesn’t mean they never will." I agree.

Leonhardt's last point is, as a matter of logic, undebatable. The future is not always dictated by the past. Debate centers instead on Republican willingness to go down with an increasingly unpopular president. We can't yet know just how unpopular Trump will become, but we do know that GOP defections would be based not on high principles but on Trump's low approval ratings. If his ratings stumble toward Nixon's basement — somewhere in the 20s — Republicans are likely to flee, falsely claiming, of course, the very principles they forever forfeited in 2016.

The Washington Post asserts that the border-wall controversy has caused "a new rift between the president and his party on Capitol Hill." Said John Cornyn, the Senate's #2 Republican: "I don’t understand [Trump's] ­strategy, but maybe he’s figured it out and he’ll tell us in due course." Ouch. The Senate's #3 Republican, John Thune, said a shutdown "would not be good"; "it’s just simple math — that you’ve to got to get 60 votes in the Senate, and that’s going to require Democrats" — and implicitly, the impetuous president failed to think about that. In the GOP House, "some questioned the wisdom of holding a vote that would face certain rejection in the Senate," writes the Post.

But "rifts" are not ruptures. And the latter won't come until Trump proves himself a poisonous creature of ever-diminishing returns; whenever — if ever — his hardcore base is finally outnumbered by less fanatical Republican voters. Will that numerical inversion come about? I suspect it will. But I'm not sure I'd lay money on it. The GOP is severely diseased, and yet more Trumpian poison might only be superfluous.

 

WH Chief of Staff Piers Morgan

"Dear Mr President, I wish to formally apply to be your new Chief of Staff," wrote Piers Morgan in a Daily Mail, open job application. "You might not immediately recognize what qualities I have for such a massive job in your administration," whereupon Mr. Morgan proceeded to itemize them at brutal length, which USA Today mercifully pared down:

***

1. "You need someone who will look you in the eye and tell you when you’re being an idiot. Seriously."
2. He would "surround the Oval Office with loyal people who like and respect you, not the type of ghastly, untrustworthy reptiles like Omarosa Manigault Newman."
3. He would vet Trump’s tweets.
4. He would get the media to focus more on Trump’s achievements.
5. He would be a chief of staff "who gets on with Ivanka and Jared, and encourages you to listen to them as much as possible."
6. He could bring an end to the war with CNN.
7. Things are about to get heated with special counsel Robert Mueller. "I love a scrap."
8. He would "use Melania more. She’s become a very popular electoral asset."
9. "I’d literally pay to work for you."
10. "You need someone whose reputation won’t be remotely tarnished by working with you and who won’t mind in the slightest if you suddenly fire him."

***

I endorse Morgan's application. He's just what this country needs: A man who now supports Brexit, a national suicide pact equivalent to the imbecility of electing Donald Trump president of the United States. But I'm skeptical that Morgan is serious about his employment-importuning.

He could never hire a staff who "like and respect" Trump, for instance, or make him amenable to being told he's "an idiot," or vet his tweets, or end Trump's cherished war with CNN.

Worse — far worse — is that Morgan clearly doesn't know his movies. In #7 of his open letter to Trump, he wrote, "As Obama’s former CoS, Rahm Emmanuel, said this week, you need a 'true wartime consigliere' like Robert Duvall’s character Tom Hagen in The Godfather."

That's unforgivable. As everyone knows, Tom Hagen's problem was that he wasn't a wartime consigliere. How could anyone honestly aspire to the position of chief of staff for the mobster Trump while misunderstanding the greatest mob movie ever made?

So, while I endorse the clownish Piers Morgan's application, I suspect he's again just clowning around, seeking cheap publicity — much like Trump, who was also unserious about his job application.

 

Ann Coulter explains the Democratic Party

If you're a Democrat, and you probably are, or at least you're a close approximation, I thought you should better understand the party to which you pledge allegiance — mostly because the other party is barking mad. Explained esteemed political philosopher Ann Coulter on Laura Ingraham's harpy show last night:

In the Democratic Party base … they all hate one another. I mean [the party has] the Muslims and the Jews and the various exotic sexual groups and the black church ladies with the college queers…. You must hate white men. It's the one thing they have in common.

Speaking in aggregate terms, Ms. Coulter is, of course, correct. The Dem Party embraces Muslims and Jews, who don't much care for one another. And black church ladies aren't particularly fond of college queers. (Ms. Coulter offered no antipodal group when it came to "various exotic sexual groups" — whatever that means — so on that, I'll pass.)

What Ms. Coulter misapprehends is precisely what makes the Democratic Party more popular than the opposition. It is indeed a "big tent" party, capable of housing disagreement. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is the monochromatic party of "hate[d] white men" — toothless rubes who believe Ann Coulter is an esteemed political philosopher.

And there you have it: Your incontrovertible morning seminar on the American political system.

 

An unstable dolt

"I’m not going to blame you for [a government shutdown]," said Trump yesterday, proudly, thereby donning "the mantle" of recklessness that every thinking politician disowns. "The last time you [Democrats] shut it down, it didn’t work" — which should have told him something — continued Trump. "I will take the mantle of shutting down, and I’m going to shut it down for border security."

That would be the border security, at present funding, that he claimed had already built "tremendous amounts of wall." Go figure.

Mitch McConnell did, and he disliked what he saw adding up. "One thing I think is pretty clear no matter who precipitates the government shutdown: The American people don’t like it and I hope that will be avoided."

Subsequent to the president's mano-a-mano-und-lady Oval Office brawl, Trump, speaking to reporters, declared victory. "If we have to close down the country over border security, I actually like that in terms of an issue…. I think I win that every single time."

Trump's cheerful demeanor didn't quite square with later reporting. According to the L.A. Times' Eli Stokols: "He stormed out of the Oval, walked into an anteroom just off the Oval Office and had in his hand a folder of briefing papers. And he just scattered them out of frustration — threw them across the room."

About that, I have questions. What had he been doing with briefing papers? Using them to fan himself? I can only assume that the unread briefing papers' Item No. 1 stated: "Do not, under any circumstances, claim the mantle of a government shutdown."

 

Dems must unify early

As was I, Ron Klain was rather bemused by Frank Bruni's "hit job," as I termed it, on prospective Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Klain's former boss.

For one thing, Bruni was fearful of Biden's age, which, to me, means incomparable experience within the Democratic pack. Republicans' nominee will be roughly the same age as Biden when he runs in 2020 — assuming he hasn't resigned (my guess), or been indicted or impeached and removed — thus Biden's age won't be a serious factor.

Yet the former vice president's supremely qualifying experience — again, which comes with age — was also a peculiar negative in the NY Times columnist's opinion. Writes Klain:

"Bruni argued that while Biden is 'impeccably qualified,' such a candidacy did not 'work out' for Hillary Clinton and should not be tried again. Beyond the obvious fact that Biden and Clinton are not the same person, this argument is flawed in three respects." Which are: "Clinton won more votes than Trump"; "there’s no reason to believe that Clinton’s experience cost her votes"; and "experienced leadership could be precisely what voters are looking for after four years of Trumpian chaos."

This should seem bloody obvious to anyone with political, or just common, sense. To devalue a politician for his vast experience is akin to seeking a physician who has rarely practiced medicine. Further, to be wary of age-lending wisdom only because another experienced politician lost (though not really) to an accomplished demagogue is among the shallowest of nerve-rattled opinions.

Last, Klain observes that one poll — Morning Consult, graded "B-" by 538 — "shows that Biden [76] and Sanders [77] are overwhelmingly preferred by millennials, jointly taking a larger share of … younger voters (53 percent) than of the electorate as a whole (45 percent). Other polls have found similar results." Overall, in the cited poll, Biden led the pack; he was first choice among 26 percent of voters, second choice among 20 percent. (Respectively, Sanders was 19 and 16 percent. Other presumed candidates were in single digits.)

For Democrats, salubrious it would be if the front runner remains the front runner throughout the early primaries, thereby squeezing out the less qualified and avoiding a nasty, costly, internecine war. The true enemy of the people is Donald Trump, and only a swiftly unified party can concentrate all its resources on expelling this insidious plague of a man from office.

 

As all is lost, the hilarity of silver linings

The reading of right-wing sites always promises the sublime pleasure of unintended jocularity. Their compulsion to find a silver lining around every dark Trumpian cloud is a guaranteed disorder; where others see nothing but ruination, desolation and doom, right-wing scribblers behold the merriest of serendipity.

The latest in this curious phenomenon of pseudoconservative psychosis comes from Hot Air's Ed Morrissey, who inaugurates his piece by reviewing CNN's coverage of Nick Ayers' rather rude refusal (by Twitter) to assume the wretchedly inherited responsibilities of White House chief of staff.

The president, notes Morrissey, was "humiliated" and "super pissed" at being "blindsid[ed]" by Ayers's rejection, which left Trump "with more chaos in the White House as the year winds down." Plus, with Ayers out, "Now there is no front-runner for the job," Morrissey observes.

Moreover, the White House political director, Bill Stepien, and the office of public liaison's director, Justin Clark, have recently left their employ. And, somewhat amusingly, "multiple White House officials have complained privately that Shahira Knight, the legislative affairs director, is more focused on" legislative affairs than politics. Sin of Trumpian sins.

And just what does Mr. Morrissey have to say about all this — the chaos, the blindsiding, the desperation and grievous absences? I quote: 

That’s actually not a bad position for an incoming chief of staff to have.

Alas, never let it be said that right wingers lack a sense of humor — even if riotously unintended.

 

Playing to the base: The vicissitudes of political chicanery

 

The NY Times' above-the-fold story this morning:

 

 

A few hours later, the NY Times' above-the-fold story:

 

And Trump couldn't care less. He impressed his nativist base, and that's all that mattered to him.

 

In the GOP Senate, a phalanx of denial

We now have strong evidence that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president. In large part he attained the office by defrauding the American electorate, concealing hush payments borne of illicit affairs and Russian business contacts, well into 2016. During the campaign he fiercely denied both activities, and at least 80,000 voters throughout three critical states, it would seem, believed Trump's denials. If they had known then what we know now, Republicans likely would be investigating the many imaginary crimes of President Hillary Clinton, not Democrats the criminal Trump.

Trump's crimes — alleged today, proven tomorrow — were, by any measure of justice, far worse than Bill Clinton's dallying with a White House intern and then lying about it. So naturally, the party of law and order and American values and Christian rectitude and God and flag and family is crestfallen to find that its leader is a crook, and is vowing to set things right. Right?

Well, not quite. It appears the GOP is, instead, a bevy of very patient bleeding-heart liberals concerned mostly with safeguarding the presidential perpetrator's constitutional rights, disbelieving those who've given sworn testimony, and in general dismissing the severity of Trump's crimes.

Says Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee: "As long as Cohen's a liar, I shouldn't give much credibility to what he says." (Although Trump's thousands of documents lies lend credibility to what he says.)

Says Sen. Orrin Hatch, appallingly: "I don't care, all I can say is he's doing a good job as President." (And Al Capone had soup kitchens!)

Says Louisiana's Sen. John Kennedy: "Jesus loves [Cohen], but everybody else thinks he's an idiot. He's obviously a sleaze-oid grifter." (For definition, see: GOP Senate.) 

Says Sen. Ron Johnson: "[Dagnabbit, as Government Affairs chairman I spent hundreds of hours investigating Hillary's emails, but now] "I'm not sure how we would even get … information" on Trump's hush-money charade.

Says South Dakota's Sen. John Thune: "Until we know all the details — it's a sentencing filing…. So, it's hard to read too much into it." (For God's sake just read it; you needn't read anything "into it.")

Says the ever-vacillating, ever-furtive, ever-treacherous Sen. Susan Collins: "We have to get all the facts and I'm going to wait until Mr. Mueller concludes his investigation." (And then she'll conclude it means nothing.)

Says Sen. Roy Blunt: "I don't know that it changes things much. I think you would have to have more than this happen before anything changes much." 

Yesterday, the Post's excellent Paul Waldman nevertheless wrote, "Every Republican who works for Trump, who supports him, who defends him, who justifies him, who excuses him — all of them are responsible. All of them are implicated in his misdeeds.... If, when this is all over, they don’t pay a price for what they did, we should all be ashamed."

No, we should not all be ashamed. They should be ashamed. But they won't be. From South Dakota to Louisiana, they'll simply be reelected — because from Trumpworld, Missouri's Blunt gets it right: "You would have to have more than this happen before anything changes much."

 

The (almost) friendless Theresa May

The Washington Post reports on our British cousins' spectacular, thankfully unprecedented, Frankensteinian clusterfuck:

Faced with a devastating loss in Parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May announced Monday that she would delay a vote on the Brexit deal she negotiated with the European Union and instead return to Brussels to ask for more concessions.

"If we went ahead and held the vote tomorrow, the deal would be rejected by a significant margin," May conceded to a packed chamber in the House of Commons….

May’s humiliation in Parliament does little to bolster her cause in Brussels, as Europeans leaders wonder how long the weakened British prime minister can hang on to power.

As long as she likes, I should think, for who in his or her right mind would want to step into May's pumps?

Others, here, have commented on their growing sympathy, even admiration, for Ms. May. I would like to add mine. She's inescapably caught between soft Brexiteers and hard Brexiteers, between immigrant-friendly humankind and raving xenophobes, between realists and Boris Johnsonian demagogues, between those who comprehend macro- and international economics and those who don't — in short, between the thoughtful and the halfwitted.

She's caught, trapped, up Shit Creek — and mostly friendless. But Ms. May, just know …

 

The tyranny of ordained religious faith

"Letter & Liturgy"'s Samuel James critiques Andrew Sullivan's "America's New Religions," which I deemed "among his strongest" of columns, partly for the reason that James deems it weak.

Sullivan’s prophetic mantle is a bit too see-through…. For years Sullivan was one of the most influential and impassioned advocates of legal same-sex marriage, and his "conservative case" for radically redefining matrimony drew extensively on his progressive Catholic sensibilities…. Sullivan’s lifelong advocacy for same-sex marriage represents a lifelong resistance to the unanimous teaching of the Christian church and the overwhelming judgment of the Scriptures [my emphasis].

Does Sullivan truly want a Christianity that talks down to politics? It’s difficult to know, only because there seems to be a lot of confusion in his own mind over which political issues deserve equivalency with the Atonement, and which don’t.

Sullivan's Christianity is, charitably speaking, nuanced, which is to say, he ironically advocates a universal Christianity grounded in his own religious biases and political opinions. I suspect most every Christian's Christianity follows this corrupted nuance — corrupted, if one also believes that the doctrines of theological authority are final, which, alas, most nuanced Christians puzzlingly profess.

Yet, on second thought, my assessment of Sullivan's Christianity is perhaps less charitable than notably pragmatic. I see Christianity for what it is — in practice — not what is written in the New Testament, which, to comply with, requires an unrealistic, Christlike superhumanity. Hence I can forgive Sullivan and his fellow Christians their apostasies. They're only human.

James, on the other hand, is aggressively critical of Sullivan; he implicitly charges the Catholic writer with odious hypocrisy, while implicitly preening his own theological virtue. Writes James: "For Sullivan’s sake and ours, I wish he would reconsider his own role in the gutting of American Christianity, and turn to a solution more ancient, and more spiritual, than ever before." Shades of George Wallace —fundamentalism now, fundamentalism tomorrow, fundamentalism forever.

I don't mean to dwell on this one piece of Sullivan's, and its counter-critiques. The clashes do seem to me, however, an almost divine invitation to ponder the absurd humbuggeries of mass religious devotion, contra the serenity of individual spiritual contemplation — if individuals so choose.

 

Trump and his "Bottomless Pinocchios"

Glenn Kessler, of the Post's Fact Checker, has been forced to innovate. For years he has dispensed one, two, three or four Pinocchios to politicians who lie or, with more innocence, propound a marginally false claim in what is ordinarily called "spin." But Donald Trump has rendered Kessler's format rather useless, since claiming, for instance, 42 times that Democrats — not the Trump campaign — colluded with Russia is an assertion that in no way compares to traditional political lies.

So what's a conscientious fact checker to do? Kessler's answer is the creation of The Bottomless Pinocchio — to be "awarded to politicians" — meaning Trump, exclusively — "who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation." Writes Kessler:

"The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation."

To be awarded this dubious prize entails rigorous conditions, which any human politician could never meet: "The claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker, and they must have been repeated at least 20 times." Adds Kessler: "The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the president immediately qualify for the list."

A sampling of Trump's Bottomless Pinocchios is enough to make us imagine that we're reading a Goebbels Dispatch to the Masses:

*"Robert S. Mueller III is biased because of conflicts of interest." (Repeated 30 times.) Though on the lower numerical end of Trump's repeated lies, this one is extraordinarily offensive, since such a claim is so ludicrously false about the Dudley Do-Right prosecutor.

*"U.S. Steel is building many new plants." (37 times.) Kessler notes this claim "verge[s] on the edge of fantasy"; not one new plant is under construction.

*"The U.S. economy has never been stronger," (99 times.) Eisenhower, LBJ and Bill Clinton had stronger economies.

*"The U.S. has started building the wall." (86 times.) Border-security funding excludes expenditures on a wall.

Trump's most repeated lie? That his "tax cut was the biggest in history," which he has blathered 123 times. In fact it was "the eighth largest tax cut in 100 years," although the lie "continues to be an all-purpose applause line in the president’s rallies."

How does Trump get away with repeating these outlandish falsehoods? In truth they dwell, indeed thrive, not in America, but in Trumpworld — an exotic, utterly separate nation composed of Fox News, Breitbart.com, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing social media. The bumpkins who attend Trump's rallies and, in approval, yell themselves hoarse are familiar only with ordained Trumpian propaganda; they are wholly ignorant of the real world, which laughs at them. Of the latter they're at least aware, which then reinforces their determined ignorance. Laugh at a man's patently false beliefs, and he'll double-down on them.

But laugh is all the real world can do. Its chortling is reflexive, not strategic. The bumpkins are hellbent on living in their imaginary world in which Trump is the bold truth-teller and Bob Mueller is a "conflicted," Democratic witch hunter — and in a perverse way, it's funny as hell. Neither side can help itself.

 

Russian collusion at a glance

The defense:

The reality:

These are the people who, during Donald's campaign, were in contact with Russian nationals — from a Russian ambassador, a Russian deputy prime minister, a Russian pop star, a Russian weightlifter, a Russian lawyer, and a "Soviet army veteran with alleged intelligence ties." 

They say where there's smoke, there's a blazing conflagration — a veritable vanity of the confires, or in this case, the Donfires as well. But Mueller is no Savonarola, and the assorted Trumpeteers are no Trumpian heretics, though I'm sure they now wish they had been.         

 

Bruni's inexcusable hit job on Biden

The Times' impossibly self-righteous Frank Bruni — Is there any sociopolitical quandary about which he, single-handedly, fails to provide the virtuous answer? — has determined that Joe Biden, whose sociopolitical wisdom surpasses Bruni's by several parsecs, would be unfit as Democrats' presidential nominee:

"What would you say if I told you that we should put our chips on a man who failed miserably at two previous campaigns … and that he spent nearly 45 years in Washington ['a dirty word'] … and that his record includes laws and episodes that are reviled — rightly — by … female and black voters. [And that he's four years older than Trump.]

"You’d tell me that I was of unsound mind.

"Well, Joe Biden's boosters are."

According to Bruni, know this: You're unhinged if you support a presidential candidate with a half-century of political and policy experience, which dwarfs that of any other Democratic hopeful and positively blows away the sitting president's lack of knowledge and knowhow — a candidate with, heaven forfend, flaws in his record. Deem it refreshing that other candidates lack Biden's flaws, for they are without sin, but only because they have done so little to criticize in their short, undistinguished political careers.

In short, support for the experienced candidate is akin to downing some really powerful goof juice, whereas support for virtual nonentities, here and there, is like imbibing a sobering elixir.

And yet we are the ones of unsound mind, according to the intellectually boorish columnist.

To substantiate his claim that vast political-policy experience is a killer, Bruni writes, "ask Hillary Clinton how consoling her impeccable credentials are." It's as though, in Bruni's mind, experience is just experience; the candidates' immensely differing personalities are of no significance. There is a blindness here that staggers.

Bruni's squalid discrimination against age I won't dignify with a counterargument, except to observe that some gays, too, possess irrational phobias. His more reasonable objections to Biden are these: "[He] has many [shortcomings and vulnerabilities]. His record is one of them. There’s prodigious accomplishment there but also trouble: his stern treatment of Anita Hill when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he was chairman; his role as an ambassador for the financial services industry in Delaware; his key part in the passage of crime bills that ended up punishing African-Americans disproportionately."

Doubtless these complaints would arise in 2020's presidential melee, even though equally reasonable responses should, by argumentation rights, prevail. As Biden has explained (over and over), as Judiciary chairman he could not simply order other senators to cease and desist in their rude questioning of Hill. "Under the Senate rules," Biden has said, "I can’t gavel you down and say you can’t ask that question." He voted against Clarence Thomas and has repeatedly said he believed Hill.

As for his "role as ambassador for the financial services industry," Biden represented the state of Delaware, for Pete's sake — then the geographical home of financial services. As a U.S. senator, he was doing his job. And as for his "key part" in passing 1990s crime legislation, I would remind Bruni that such was the political zeitgeist of that decade. Since then, Biden "played a 'critical' role in the Obama administration’s continuing efforts to overhaul" the harsh, unwise system he helped to establish.

We make mistakes — the spearhead of 1990s crime legislation, Bill Clinton: "I signed a bill that made the problem worse" — and we atone — "I want to admit it." Biden continues to defend his tough-on-crime past, however, and in politics, there is nothing wrong with that.

Bruni concedes that Biden is "an admirable person…. He pressed on with public service long after he could have cashed in. His devotion to his family is palpable; his strength through its tragedies, extraordinary. He’s informed, he’s affable and he’s real." (Remember when being authentic was Job One in politics? When it's inconvenient in argument, it becomes passé, I gather.) Yet the preposterously baffling, nearly uninterpretable scathing line in Bruni's columns is this: "His party can’t get enough of the word 'progressive,' but he’s regressive, symbolizing a step back to an administration past."

Bruni seems to be using "regressive" in a chronological sense, however the totality, the suggestive pattern, of Bruni's preceding criticisms leads one to think he is using regressive in the political, or ideological, sense. And that would be an insult beyond fairness — and comprehension. Much like Ted Kennedy, Biden is a liberal lion — and even if Bruni is writing chronologically only, what is to criticize in the Obama administration's FDR-like, progressive-conservative approach?    

If, after reading Bruni's tsk-tsk column, you still prefer Biden to any among his comparatively shallow pack of competitors, well, I guess you're unhinged. The virtuous Bruni always knows.     

 

20 years of life, and not a clue

Late last month, the faculty of Williams College, Illinois considered, for adoption, a 2015 University of Chicago statement on the matter of students and free speech. A petition in opposition immediately was issued, and signed by 363 students (of roughly 2,000) — "an amorphous group of students activists who came together to hex all fascists." The petition reads, in part:

A petition has circulated … which claims to defend the right to "free speech and free expression" on college campuses. The authors of the Williams petition assert that "while there is an understandable desire to protect our students from speech they find offensive, doing so risks putting down legitimate dialogue and failing to prepare our students to deal effectively with a diversity of opinions, including views they might vehemently disagree with." We … take grave issue with the premises of this petition and the potential harm it may inflict upon our community….

With increasingly visible violence towards those most marginalized by our society, why is this discussion happening now? "Free Speech," as a term, has been co-opted by right-wing and liberal parties as a discursive cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism. The creation of this petition at Williams cannot be separated from those dehumanizing associations…. Therefore, this petition has grave potential to further silence the voices of people of color, queer people, disabled people, poor people, and others outside the center of power….

While the University of Chicago statement says that students "may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject," the issue is that these are not views we reject; they are views that reject us, and our very right to speak/breathe. The UChicago Statement, in failing to see this, has rejected our right to counter-protest, to "interfere." Thus, our rights protected by the 1st amendment are eradicated by a petition that claims to support "free speech." This document does not promote free speech: it punishes it.

Rare indeed is nearly perfect Orwellian spin. Guaranteeing everyone's right to free speech is offensive to the 1st Amendment, say the students, since the protection of that right denies others' right to shut down free speech. Thus only the negation of free speech guarantees what it negates. Orwell's Ministry of Truth could not have penned a more ideal statement of Doublethink.

Furthermore, say the students, the college's "urgent need to protect 'free speech' over all other issues … is evidence of white fragility, ideological anxiety, and discursive violence." Hence China's repressive censorship, one gathers, is but evidence of Asian strength, ideological security, and discursive tranquility? The student's indifference or outright hostility to freedom of speech and thought is positively staggeringly.

Perhaps most astonishing is the students' assertion that free speech "has been co-opted" by both conservatives and liberals "as a discursive cover" for virtually every cultural ill of modern society: "racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism." Unpondered by these students is that only freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas have ameliorated these age-old transgressions against foul isms and phobias; that somehow, forcing only one ideological position on society will improve that society.

The students seem unaware of Justice Brandeis' famous formulation: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." It also seems that the "process of education" is what the students are missing.

 

Trump is right, for once

Boy met girls. Boy slept with girls. Girls threatened exposure. Boy, running for class president, bought girls' silence in violation of school's campaign finance laws.

The moot court of public opinion, cable news and sundry commentators — and moot the court really is — has determined that this belated exposure of wrongdoing has "delivered a potentially devastating one-two punch" against the boy, Donald Trump; that "the likelihood that the [Trump organization] and the Trump campaign face charges is now high"; and that "the danger to Mr. Trump, his business and his campaign has compounded significantly."

This is humbug, of the most wistful kind — not about the boy's business and campaign, which may indeed be in danger of criminal prosecution, but about the boy himself. The little lad of privilege will graduate (barely) and proceed to live out the corrupt but gaudily comfortable life that was handed to him by dad.

Trump, now famously and better known as "Individual 1," directed his rarely legal mouthpiece to pay "the girls" — a porn actress and Playboy model — a combined $280,000, say federal prosecutors, which somewhat surpasses the allowed limit of $2,700 apiece. And say the NY Times commentators quoted above, "[Trump] could be named as an unindicted co-conspirator … or charged if he leaves office before the statute of limitations runs out (most likely in 2022)."

Which is to further say, Trump will be named as an unindicted co-conspirator but won't be charged upon leaving office. (Notice the above commentators wisely omit any mention of impeachment and removal, since a Republican Senate renders that eminently proper course inconceivable.) George W. Bush committed far worse crimes than paying off a couple bimbos; illegal surveillance and internationally banned torture were W.'s presidential pastimes. Yet President Obama swiftly decided that getting on with repairing W.'s wrecked economy was saner than prosecuting the former president. Likewise, President Biden will decide that repairing Trump's immense wreckages, foreign and domestic, will be saner than proving in court what everyone already knows: Trump is a dimwitted crook.

Prosecutors are also onto Trump's Russia dealings, as their filings showed yesterday. But establishing a beyond-reasonable-doubt, direct link betwixt Donald and Vladimir would be infinitely more difficult than photocopying the Trump Organization's bank statements, which prove the bimbo payoffs. Nevertheless, cable news (MSNBC and CNN) rejoiced in the Russia crumbs thrown by prosecutors, as though delicious bread-of-life justice is coming. Again, humbug.

Hence, ironically, Trump was more right than wrong when yesterday he tweeted: "Totally clears the president. Thank you!"

 

Andrew Sullivan and "America's New Religions"

Being Friday afternoon, Andrew Sullivan's latest thoughts are out, and these are among his strongest.

In "America's New Religions," he elegizes our diminishing Christian faith, which Sullivan contends is the very foundation of liberal democracy. Especially through Christianity's social-justice movements, he writes, the marginalized increasingly entered the bloodstream of the body politic, and thus, with regularity, have "renewed" the "liberal project." Such thinking follows Niebuhr, which to my thinking pretty much sanctifies it — as far as sanctification can go, anyway.

Sullivan's core argument is that as Christian faith has waned, political cultism has waxed — since tribal fanaticism, as it were, is a close substitution for genuine religious faith.

We have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided….

The same cultish dynamic can be seen on the right. There, many profess nominal Christianity and yet demonstrate every day that they have left it far behind. Some exist in a world without meaning altogether, and that fate is never pretty….

And because [the major Trumpian subset of evangelical] faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump.

Here, Sullivan's notions encounter a spot of trouble, notwithstanding the overall strength of "America's New Religions." For instance having concluded that the left's Christian social movements once acted as the bulwark of liberal democracy, he criticizes the left's contemporary social movements — shorn of Christianity — merely because they are, well, shorn of Christianity.

To the latter Sullivan attributes singular wisdom, culture and restraint. Why? Do not the secular though divine writings of Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens and Tolstoy impart, though with greater readability, Biblical wisdom? Why must only the Word of God, as imagined by ancient scribes, pass for the very highest of received virtue? The simple answer, of course, is that for two thousand years, that's what we've been told. By Christians.

Sullivan's otherwise strong proposition is that because of evangelicals' errant religious faith, they have by necessity substituted a faith in Trump, which has as much to do with Christianity as national socialism.

Their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ.

I resist the argument that Trump is responsible for evangelicals' ill-fated apostasy, for in my own book of empirical wisdom, they jettisoned Christ soon after the first Easter. When have evangelicals not embraced tribalism, exceptionalism, materialism and nationalism? There have been individual holdouts, naturally, but as a movement, evangelicals have always been closer to Molière's characterization of Christian faith than Jesus'. But Sullivan is correct, I think, in seeing Trumpism as evangelicals' most grievous downfall to date.

Then again, what do I know? I'm a Montaignean skeptic, and here, I write specially as an agnostic. We of both persuasions freely confess that matters of the unknowable — the existence of a Cosmic Lawgiver whose supreme wisdom is filtered down to us bipedal primates — are matters best reflected on a few seconds after death. Sullivan, an earnest Catholic, sees Christianity as elemental to every aspect of life. Is social justice somehow truly less just if stripped of religious faith? Is evangelicalism truly "without meaning altogether," mostly because of its (as I see it) execrable faith in Donald Trump? In the second case, I'd say yes; in the first instance, I'd say no. But I sure as hell can't say I know both to be true.

And I'm glad I don't know. For if I knew — if I were tuned in to, possibly, God's absolutes — I'd be left with nothing to speculate, wonder or argue about.

 

Meet America's newest representative to the world

Donald Trump has done it again. In his quest to convert his presidential administration into an Augean stable of Fox News talking poopheads — K.T. McFarland, Scott Brown, Tony Sayegh, Mercedes Schlapp, Richard Grenell, Georgette Mosbacher, Anthony Scaramucci and John Bolton were all contributors to the scatological network — he has gone and hired Heather Nauert, the absolute epitome of photogenic mental vacancy, to be this nation's second-most essential diplomat — ambassador to the United Nations.

Ms. Nauert's knowledge of international affairs and world history is impressive, to be sure. One is thunderously impressed by her summer reflection, for instance, on the 74th anniversary of D-Day. "When you talk about Germany, we have a very strong relationship with the government of Germany," said Heather, as the State Department's spokeswoman. "Tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. We obviously have a very long history with the government of Germany, and we have a strong relationship with the government."

One normally would not cite the U.S.-led allied invasion of Europe, so that we might reduce Hitler's Germany to rubble, as a high point of "strong" U.S.-German relations. Indeed, in contemplation of Ms. Nauert's historical analysis, the Washington Post was brought to hilarious understatement: "The D-Day comment raised eyebrows over the summer, when some suggested it demonstrated a lack of historical understanding."

As historians are wont to say, however, Nauert's unoccupied brain, in this case, is nothing new. I am reminded of George W. Bush's spokeswoman, Dana Perino, another blonde vacancy, who was once required to meditate on another high point of U.S. foreign relations. "I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about … the Cuban Missile Crisis. It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure. I came home and I asked my husband, I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?'"

Ms. Nauert's diplomatic experience lies in her years of work as a Fox News contributor, a health insurance lobbyist, and as a minion for "her family’s financial services company," notes the Post. In her labors as an opinion vendor, "She has broadcast just about every right-wing talking-point under the sun," adds the Post. (Example: "In 2013, she said that a swimming group for Muslim girls at a YMCA in St. Paul, Minn., was evidence that 'sharia law is now changing everything.'")

Fox News, that fountain of Trumpian integrity, repeatedly labeled Ms. Nauert as a "GOP Consultant" and a "GOP Strategist." Such labels "[invest] Nauert with just the right wonkiness and insider cachet," observed the Post's Paul Farhi in 2000. "Except that she says she’s never worked for the Republican Party.

Asked Farhi, rather reasonably: "Why, other than looking like the younger sister of another Heather (Locklear), is she on TV at all? From what well of life-shaping experiences do our anointed dispensers of video wisdom draw their opinions?"

We now must ask, Why, other than being an impressive reincarnation of Perino's ignorance under W.'s aegis, will she be at the United Nations? From what well of life-shaping experiences do Trump's anointed dispensers of video wisdom draw their foreign policy opinions? We reflect for only a second or two. Why of course, Ms. Nauert is merely another manifestation of the Trump's squalid quest to convert his presidential administration into an Augean stable of Fox News talking poopheads.

 

In honor of cable-news hurricane guys and dolls

My posting has been a trifle precarious today. High winds in Portland knocked out cable internet around midnight, and it has remained knocked out, cold. (We finally were able to connect via hotspot.)

This has reminded me that my estimate yesterday of area mountaintop winds of 70 mph was pretty much accurate. Last night the news reported that winds atop the Portland area's "Gorge" reached a body-blown 71 mph. That was the virtual cyclonic whirlwind in which I snapped a photo of the Columbia River snaking through some of the most Gorgeous terrain I have ever seen.

Doing so was in no way frightful, but it did require steadfast determination. Time and again I struggled to steady myself and raise my camera against ferociously strong winds, only to be blown away, literally.

Thus my hat goes off to those resolute, hour-after-hour hurricane updaters: cable-news beachside reporters.