P.M. Carpenter

Ukraine's D-Day; its counteroffensive has begun

It seems that President Zelensky has exploited the symbolism of D-Day, 6 June. Just one day prior, American and Russian officials are reporting "a flurry of offensive military activity that by Monday was raging along multiple sectors of the front line." (NYT)

Ukraine's counteroffensive has begun.

American officials are reserved, saying only that the surge is a "possible indication" of a Ukrainian offensive and adding that it might begin with mere "feints or diversions." Russia's defense ministry would disagree. Today it announced that Ukraine had launched a major operation at five locations along the eastern front, the Donetsk region, but had repelled the assaults.

And with that, Russian military bloggers would disagree. They're writing that Ukraine has advanced in some areas, and this morning "an even stronger attack had begun."

And a war-reporting Russian Telegram channel is saying that Ukrainian forces "had breached a first line of Russian defenses near Velyka Novosilka in Donetsk, and reclaimed two villages as Russian forces fell back to reserve positions." There are also reports of Ukrainian forces pushing through Russian defenses in the east-central Zaporizhzhia region. 

Ukraine will also attempt to cleave Russia's "land bridge" that runs from Crimea to southwestern Russia. 

The Times assesses the transcendent importance of Ukraine's offensive:

"Success could help support Kyiv’s push for longer term commitments for additional military aid and security guarantees from the West. It could also strengthen the hand of President Volodymyr Zelensky in any peace talks with Russia.

"Failure, or a lack of dramatic quick progress, could complicate Ukraine’s ability to get further assistance from the west and make Kyiv’s push this summer for additional security guarantees at the NATO summit this summer more difficult."

On Saturday I wrote that "We're only about one-quarter into the 21st century, but it's damn near impossible to imagine a greater future test of free world's will to defeat an authoritarian aggressor." Hence, if Ukraine fails to achieve dramatic progress, that would be all the more reason for NATO nations to double down in their support of Zelensky's government — not abandon it. 

Would the Allies have ceased their efforts to liberate Europe, had D-Day failed?

No morning posts today. Last night, due to "circumstances" (48 hours of involuntary wakefulness), I was forced to take a rather powerful sleeping pill, of which I had weened myself off a few months ago. The damn thing knocked me out for 13 hours. My brain is still in a fog and quite unwilling to cope with notable buffoons and clownish politics. See you tomorrow.    

President Zelensky: The counteroffensive will come any day now (but he worries about weapons, and Trump)

In an hourlong interview with The Wall Street Journal's editor in chief, Emma Tucker, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that his nation will commence its long-anticipated counteroffensive against Russian invaders as soon as the ground is a bit drier. In short, the counteroffensive is imminent.   

"I don’t know how long it will take," he said, and "it can go a variety of ways, completely different. But we are going to do it, and we are ready." Indeed, his forces have already taken preliminary steps in the south, such as increased long-range missile and drone strikes on Russian supply lines along its "land bridge" stretching from Mariupol to Kherson. 

Embedded in his thoughts on how the prolonged counteroffensive "can go a variety of ways," two of them are especially troubling to Zelensky: in the much longer run, the potential of a Donald Trump presidential victory, and immediately, a tragic shortage of Western-made weapons.

Trump has consistently refused to express unqualified support for Ukraine, saying only that he would somehow swiftly clinch a peace deal between the invader and the invaded. That this is simply naked Trumpian bluster is self-evident; there is no realistic chance of such a deal, both sides are dug in. Ukraine, of course, has the vastly superior — and singularly legitimate — claim: it wants its land back. But Russian President Vladimir Putin will never willingly cede one square inch.     

The Journal writes that "Zelensky said he couldn’t understand Trump's claim he could end the war in 24 hours." We do not know the Ukrainian president's exact words, but the Journal's paraphrase is classic understatement. Trump claim is utterly unintelligible because Trump is a bootless windbag; he'll say anything that sounds good to an electoral base as ignorant as he. Demagoguery relies on prodigious gullibility, and among Trumpers, it comes in spades.  

"In a situation like this," said Zelensky, "when there is support [as there is now, from President Joe Biden], you are afraid of changes." And by "afraid" he meant ghostly pale and a state of terror. "When you mention a change of administration ... you want changes for the better, but it can also be the other way around." As in 180 degrees, with Trump backing his authoritarian friend Putin. A reminder: the former president has called Russia's invasion "genius" and "pretty savvy."

A Trump administration redux would mean Ukrainians' slavery under the iron thumb of a tyrannical despot. Thousands would be rounded up, interrogated, tortured, executed. The NATO alliance supporting Ukraine would fracture, and possibly collapse altogether. A free, democratic nation would vanish from the face of the earth, all because of a Trumpian whim and the returned president's adoration of "strongmen." The U.S.'s global reputation would be irrevocably soiled.

Other than the longer-term distress of a second Trump administration, Zelensky is most vexed by his shortage of advanced, Western-made weapons, particularly in two areas: air coverage and air defense. Zelensky conceded to the Journal that Russia has air superiority, which will play out disastrously on the front lines. "A large number of [Ukrainian] soldiers sill die" in the counteroffensive, he said, because of his forces' inability to take on Russian power in the skies.

The human cost of the West's delay, which is to say, the U.S.'s delay, in providing Ukraine with fighter jets — F-16s — is about to become horribly calculable. The European transfer of these planes is now in the works, but far too late for Ukraine's counteroffensive. Zelensky was philosophical: "We would like to have certain things, but we can’t wait for months," he said. More's the pity. 

He also stressed the need for more Patriot missile batteries, the air defense system that the Journal describes as "consist[ing] of several launchers, a powerful radar, a control station and other support equipment—to protect [Ukraine's] cities and front-line troops" from Russian missiles. Zelensky specified a need of 50 such batteries; presently, Ukraine has two.  

An extraordinarly disconcerting irony — or internal contradiction — hovers perilously over Ukraine's looming counteroffensive. If it fails, if Ukrainian forces are unable to score major successes in the regaining of lands, we will almost certainly hear a cacophony of Western voices demanding a negotiated peace. If such a peace were to materialize, it would signify only a major Russian success. The deal would mean Ukrainian lands lost, and a peace that's impermanent. Putin would be back once his armed forces had remanned and resupplied. He has been clear as to his intention to have all of Ukraine.

Yet a failed counteroffensive would come about only because the West has so consistently starved Ukraine of the modern weaponry it needs to succeed. Zelensky's forces have proven time and again that they can beat the delights out of Russia's. But to triumph wholesale has always required more than the "drip-feeding" (the Journal's words, on Zelensky's behalf) of advanced armaments from the West. Hence the self-contradiction. To have deprived Ukraine of what was military necessary and then say "Well, you failed, so it's time to negotiate," would be dishonorable and incoherent.       

Should Ukraine's counteroffensive miscarry or come up unacceptably short, Zelensky correctly noted that "that animal, that beast will develop a taste" for more of his sovereign land. And from there, one might further note, his neighbors' lands.

We're only about one-quarter into the 21st century, but it's damn near impossible to imagine a greater future test of free world's will to defeat an authoritarian aggressor. Thus Ukraine's counteroffensive may be said to be the Battle of the Century. Godspeed.   

How, why and when Donald Trump could bite the primary dust

This segment by Jonathan Last (The Bulwark) nicely summarizes how I see the Republican primaries playing out. So nicely, I can simply reprint what Last writes. 

Right now the primary is a logjam: Donald Trump has an overwhelming advantage. Ron DeSantis is viable, but only barely. And everyone else—everyone who could even plausibly described as #TeamNormal—is stuck in a scrum under 5 percent.

But a federal indictment is coming for Trump. This won’t be a New York City politics production. And it isn’t about sexual assault. It’s a real-deal crime against the state. Complete with a tape of Trump holding a smoking gun and explaining to listeners what it is and whom he just shot with it.

Jail time—real, orange jumpsuit stuff—suddenly becomes possible.

And maybe Republican voters panic.

It doesn’t have to be all of them. It just has to be enough to register decline in the polls. Enough to get Trump under 50 percent. Because once he starts bleeding support, that becomes its own story. It could plausibly spook other marginal Trump supporters who are worried about electability. Before you know it, the combination of news about the criminal trial and news about Trump’s backwards momentum becomes a flywheel....

Suddenly what you have is room for an alternative.

Where I differ from Last — which is obvious in my intro — is his final assessment: "I don’t think this scenario is likely. Rather, it’s highly unlikely." I'd say it's reasonably likely. 

My reason for this belief is that many — the always amorphous many — Republican voters are this time around abnormally keyed up about the "electability" thing. And if Trump has up to four criminal indictments hanging over his head during primary season, many Republican voters will ultimately say "We still love you Donald, but there ain't a chance in hell that a man looking at prison can win the United States presidency."

I know. That's sober, logical thinking on my part, and I'm speaking about an immensely besotted, illogical bloc of voters. But the very real potential of a legally besieged, conspicuously criminal nominee just might persuade enough Republicans to think straight for a change.       

A Republican ponders the literal end of the Republican Party - under Trump

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, who suggests in her latest column that the Republican Party is only 53 years old — probably because she was a special assistant and speechwriter to President Ron; in her eyes, she was present at the Creation — writes that if Trump is nominated, if Republicans put him "over the top in the primaries," then ...

they will have ended the Republican Party.

Ms. Noonan underscores that "I don’t mean this rhetorically.... I mean it literally: The GOP will disappear as a party." 

Exactly when this will occur is somewhat hazy, but allowances must be made for the miasmic fog of crystal balls. Mine itself often goes on the fritz, perhaps it needs new batteries. Anyway, Noonan proceeds to predict that some Republicans will drift to a third-party, others to the Democratic Party (hoping to "improve things there"), while "Trump supporters will stay on in a smaller, less competent[?] party."

Even then, however, "as time passes," the Trumpers will "get tired of losing and also drift on somewhere. But there will be no Republican Party after a Trump ’24 race." Here she does mean it figuratively. 

But ultimately, "the vehicle of conservative thought and policy will be gone." Peggy is a bit behind the times, as that passage vividly reveals. Since her president — Reagan — the GOP's principal claim to conservatism — fiscal responsibility — has been self-molested, self-mauled, self-defaced and monolithically murdered time and again. To venture now that its conservatism will be gone is both ahistorical and just downright zany.  

Noonan attempts a guilt trip: "Do you wish the Republican Party to disappear as a force in American political history?... Do you want to abandon America to progressive thinking? If you do, you are no longer a politically involved conservative, but more like a nihilist. It’s all ugly and corrupt, blow it up." If Trumpers were capable of feeling guilt or shame, this would work. If. 

Turns out, the impetus for Ms. Noonan's Column of Anguish is promote ... Chris Christie.   

God knows he needs the promotion. In the latest A-rated Fox News poll, he's at less than one-half percent, right next to a psychotic, Larry Elder.

Putting aside Christie's scandals as New Jersey governor, Noonan notes that his "executive talent" is "wholly undervalued, he had "big policy achievements," he is "politically gifted." He was a "golden boy" — once, she observes. And she's hoping to repolish his image.  

"He is almost Trump’s equal in showbiz and his superior in invective, so he can do some damage. Would it be a suicide mission? I don’t know. But those kamikazes took out a lot of tankers. He has been told that if he takes down a bad guy and loses, he goes down in the history books, and if he takes down a bad guy and wins, even better. Seen this way he can’t lose."

With that I agree. Besides, what else does Christie have cooking for the remainder of 2023 and 2024? He might as well have some fun, kicking Trump around. Perhaps he can even convert his Fox News "*" — his less than one-half percent — into a "-" — which is absolute zero.   

I also agree that eventually, under a Trump, the Republican Party will disappear, for want of sufficient voters. A party can sustain only so many national losses before it goes the way of the Whigs, the Greenbackers, the Populists and the Progressives. Whether it remains a player in American politics will depend on 2025, and its post-Trump evaluations of how to break free of its most poisonous life-forces.     

The "phony war" of the debt ceiling crisis

Is it too eccentric to suggest that we should never again worry about a congressionally induced default on the national debt? 

How many times has the nation faced the horror of an unraised debt ceiling, millions thrown out of work, America's credit rating detroyed, no operational government, global mayhem — only to find, at the eleventh hour, that all is well.  

With default seemingly imminent, the debt ceiling bill sailed through Congress with only token resistance. It passed the House by a vote of 314 to 117, with large majorities on both sides: 149 Republicans, 165 Democrats. In the Senate it passed 63-36, which, for that body, represented an astounding consensus. 

In short, very few — way too few — Republican members of Congress every seriously toyed with the notion of crashing the American and world economies. All the Sturm und Drang was, once again, mere theatre, a means by which the GOP could show the home folks that it was fighting the good fight.   

But from here on out, perhaps the better way to engage these children of melodrama would be not to engage them at all. Ignore their demands, let them scream and cry, sit back and say nothing but ... No negotiations on the debt ceiling. Which, as you know, was President Biden's initial stance.

A shame it is he failed to maintain it. Because he had them all along. Except for the most dedicated nihilists, the Republicans never intended to commence a global economic catastrophe. This was one ransom note whose price was far too high, and much too calamitous if unpaid.       

In the end, a whimper. Credit to Biden for at least having negotiated a phony agreement to match the phony war. Officially, it cuts federal spending by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. A New York Times analysis, however, found an actual reduction — after accounting for its bookkeeping gimmicks — of about $650 billion, again, over 10 years.

The Congressional Budget Office projects federal outlays for just this year to total $6.2 trillion.   

In a couple years, Republican theatrics will again hit the stage. We'll all feel better if we simply leave our tickets at the counter.    

Josh Hawley's "Manhood," and its seemingly endless woes

My first thought before reading this review of Sen. Josh Hawley's new book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, was that the problems of modern manhood are likely historical, and that perhaps men should whine less and actually do more.

Sure enough, from the historical angle, the reviewer — the Times' Carlos Lozada, formerly WaPo's book critic — notes that "in 1958, Esquire magazine featured an essay by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called 'The Crisis of American Masculinity,' which almost reads like it could have been published today. 'What has happened to the American male?' Schlesinger asked. 'For a long time, he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society.' However, by the mid-20th century, Schlesinger wrote, men had come to see their maleness 'not as a fact but as a problem.'"

The problem, as I see it, is that at some indefinite time in world history, the soldiering of productivity, for want of a better word, changed from brawn to brains. Nevertheless men, by and large, chose to stick with brawn, while women have buried them with their brains. Digging ditches and heaving bales of hay are no longer required in our technological age, but men refused to accept what was always inevitable. This is on them, not society, not pushy women, not uppity minorities. So they should quite bitching about their lot in life. They opted for it.

As for the Missouri senator's silly Solomonlike take on "the problem," Lozada observes the book's central illogicality:         

"In Hawley’s telling, the left regards men as the source of their own problems. 'In the power centers they control, places like the press, the academy and politics, they blame masculinity for America’s woes,' the senator writes.... But he seems not to notice the contradiction at the heart of his book: Hawley spends chapter upon chapter telling young men to stop blaming others for their troubles, urging them to take personal responsibility for their lives and failings … and then he proceeds to give those same young men someone to blame for their fate."

Here's my take. The left, the right, the power centers, the press, the academy and politics should shut the fuck up about gender — both of 'em, or however many there are these days. We've had gender debates and analyses and critical interpretations and feminist theories and masculinity theories shoved down our gullets so often and for so long, Just. Stop.

Stop it. Stop all of it. The more we have analyzed the problems(s) the more muddleheaded we have become. Let us take an earned break from all the talk-show theorizing and journal articles and Sunday features.   

And above all, men and their loony senators should stop kvetching about the sorry state of masculinity. If they really wanted to advance themselves, they would, as just one example, cease showing up at football games with bare, painted chests, guzzling beer and hooting fanatical exhortations. It's demeaning. It's embarrassing. It's stupid.

Which is also the #1 sorry state of so many men, which they proved in 2016 and again in 2020 and are planning on repeating in 2024.

First, fix the stupidity. Inform yourself, guys, with something other than right-wing manifestos. If anyone if "keeping you down," it's the very people who claim they're propping you up. These are the Ivy League folks who denigrate higher education, into which women have plunged. And so women are walking off with the world. Because they deserve to, because today, it's brains over brawn.        

Trump, caught on tape, admitted he had documents that were still classified. Indictment to follow.

And so another of Trump's lies is exposed. And this one reveals a felony.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who's investigating Trump's post-presidential retention of classified documents, has obtained an audio recording in which he acknowledged "he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran," reports CNN.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that prior to leaving the White House he declassified all the materials later in his possession. The audio recording shows otherwise. In it, Trump says he would share some of the documents were not for his inability to then declassify records, since he was no longer president.  

The recording is from a July 2021 meeting at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. Attending were two people ghostwriting former chief of staff Mark Meadows' autobiography and aides to the former president. They lacked the necessary security clearances for access to the information discussed.

At the meeting, Trump falsely claimed that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had urged him to launch a large-scale attack on Iran before departing office.

Meadows’ autobiography attempts to support this fabrication. It includes the passage, "[Trump] recalls a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency." 

Trump's 2021 claim was in angry response to a New Yorker piece by Susan Glasser, in which she reported that "Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran" (emphasis added). The Joint Chiefs chairman, wrote Glasser, "was worried that Trump might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified."

Yet at the Bedminster meeting, Trump asserted that in his possession was a document from Milley that he would show everyone in the room, if only it had been declassified. The document, he contended, "would undermine what Milley was saying," according to CNN's sources. "One source says Trump refers to the document as if it is in front of him ... [and] the recording captures the sound of paper rustling, as if Trump was waving the document around."  

That such a document exists is not in doubt. The Pentagon has contingency plans for every conceivable situation on the planet. Trump's fabrication lay in claiming that Milley had urged the attack. 

In fact, the Pentagon chief had worried about two "nightmare scenarios," one of which involved Iran. In her New Yorker piece, Glasser observed that the first entailed Trump attempting "to use the military on the streets of America to prevent the legitimate, peaceful transfer of power." The second was a Trumped-up war with Iran, which he would exploit as a military emergency to remain in office.

Continued Glasser: "Milley believed that the nation had come close—'very close'—to conflict with the Islamic Republic. This dangerous post-election period, Milley said, was all because of Trump’s 'Hitler'-like embrace of the 'Big Lie' that the election had been stolen from him; Milley feared it was Trump’s 'Reichstag moment,' in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it." 

Whatever Trump's lies were about Gen. Milley, they are non-prosecutable. But Special Counsel Smith now has Trump on tape admitting he had non-declassified documents in his possession, which destroys his previous assertions. And that is prosecutable.  

As David Frum noted early last month in The Atlantic: "It’s not inconceivable that Trump could be wearing an ankle bracelet when and if he delivers his acceptance address at the Republican National Convention." Something in dark blue, please. 

Trump on default: "I would have done that."

Now that the debt-limit deal is sailing through Congress, being readied for President Biden's signature, the former president — and dear God we pray he remains one — is offering some thoughts on the agreement. 

"Well, it is what it is, it was going to pass," he told a Des Moines talk radio host yesterday. But, he added, "we’ll get it fixed and will get it fixed properly in two years."

What would have been "proper" this year? "Asked about his recent CNN town hall comments about letting a default happen, he said, 'I would have done that.'" 

His is just one of the many madcap voices on the debt deal — all of them Republican, and many of them running for the White House. The Washington Post reports that candidates Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and, of course, Ron DeSantis have also condemned the agreement.

As president, not one of them would ever actually face such a global economic calamity, since congressional Democrats would never do what the Republicans nearly pulled off.    

Incidentally, and as a reminder of just how carefree, swashbuckling and downright lunatic Donald Trump can be, at that recent CNN town hall meeting he said a default might lead to "a bad week or a bad day." Something, I suppose, akin to Hiroshima or Nagasaki's.  

The Kremlin's sick joke: It wants the West to condemn drone strikes on Russia

Every so often you run across a news story that drops your jaw and robs your breath. This is one of those stories. 

"A day after a drone strike on Moscow," reports The NY Times, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said Russia "would have preferred to hear at least some words of condemnation" from the West.

Juxtaposed to the Times story, "Russia Denounces West Over Drone Strike on Moscow," is a piece titled "Russian Missile Strike on Kyiv Kills 3." A child was among them. 

Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow are exceedingly rare, sporadic events. Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukraine are daily events. No Russians have been killed in Ukrainian strikes. U.N. officials report that "thousands of Ukrainian civilians, including children, have been killed in Russian airstrikes and artillery bombardments."

Peskov added that "We will calmly and deliberately think how to deal with this."

Former president Dmitri Medvedev, now deputy head of Russia’s national security council, was, however, less than calm and thoughtful. He wrote on Twitter that "The goofy officials of the UK, our eternal enemy," are acting "as Ukraine’s ally ... leading an undeclared war against Russia. That being the case, any of its public officials (either military, or civil, who facilitate the war) can be considered as a legitimate military target."

The Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, said America's refusal to condemn the attack was "an encouragement for Ukrainian terrorists." 

Immediately after the Moscow drone strike, Vladimir Putin said it was "clearly a sign of terrorist activity." More ominously, he accused unnamed forces of wanting to use "a type of a dirty bomb related to the nuclear industry."

This sort of falderal is usually RussianSpeak about its own intentions. And with that, I'll close. 

Canine engineering

When you leave your dog alone for a minute.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/o5H3SCRZZH

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) May 31, 2023

DeSantis's recklessness, and Trump is sure to follow

Attempting to outflank Trump's right, now-official presidential candidate Ron DeSantis declared Monday on "Fox and Friends" that "Our country was careening toward bankruptcy, and after this [debt] deal, our country will still be careening toward bankruptcy." So he's agin' it.

In his first major test of presidential thinking, DeSantis showed himself to be utterly without principle, responsibility or reason. By 5 June, says the Treasury, the country will be in default, its economy will careen into chaos and rippling destruction, and the world will suffer equally.

No prudent, conscientious candidate for the U.S. presidency would conceivably entertain such a global calamity. So you can toss DeSantis into the Trumpian well of Ayn Randian nihilism.  

He pulled this remarkably clownish stunt because Trump, so far, "has stayed quiet" (NYT) on the debt-limit deal. His Truth Social entries are all about his sublime polling leads and what a hopeless stumblebum Gov. DeSantis has been. Not a word about the most pressing issue facing the nation today.

Of course Trump hasn't any room to lecture anyone on debt and deficits. (Not that that will stop him tomorrow, Q.E.D.) He was bequeathed a deficit of $590 billion. The first year of his presidency, it rose to $670 billion. Then $780 billion in 2018, then $980 billion, with his administration winding with an eye-popping deficit of $3.13 trillion.

Much of that was covid relief, but his idiotic 2017 tax cut accounted for much of it as well. "In all," writes the Times, "Mr. Trump added $7.8 trillion in deficit spending over 10 years through legislation and executive orders during his four years in office." 

Hence DeSantis plans to attack his main rival on his affinity for debt — but he's doing so in the most reckless way: opposing a deal, whatever its merits or demerits, that will at least foreclose on default and disaster. 

Trump, coward that he is, appears likely to wait until the deal is done. Then he'll rag on it. DeSantis has simply chosen to demonstrate his unpresidential thinking beforehand.

If his fiscal approach were to be characterized in its truest form, it would have a big red nose, a fright wig, big floppy shoes, and be carrying dynamite.     

Some thoughts on the roots of Trumpism. (The roots are old, and European.)

Joey Mannarino, with 168,000 followers — just one crackpot out of a million on Twitter. "In 2015, when this man" — Trump — "walked down the golden escalator," he once tweeted, "he changed my life." Not for the better. A college-educated Obama voter — a sign of some rationality — Mannarino became entranced by Trump. And down the rabbit hole he went; so far down, he now tweets vacuous items like this: 

We have a problem.

Chick-Fil-A just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

This is bad. Very bad.

I don’t want to have to boycott.

Are we going to have to boycott?

— Joey Mannarino (@JoeyMannarinoUS) May 30, 2023

Elsewhere, Mannarino displays his proclivity toward rather confused thinking. In one post: "My problem with DEI is not the 'diversity' and 'inclusion.'" In another: "I have no problem with diversity." Yet after all that, he then writes: "We have a problem with [diversity, equity and inclusion]." Some might object, "No no, that's not 'confused thinking,' that's stupidity."

I mention this because a Montreal correspondent of mine has been asking about a seemingly intelligent friend, a writer and poet, who also went down the many rabbit holes of Trump — and has stayed there. Why? asks my Canadian friend. What would possess a literate person to sign on to such fatuously transparent demagoguery?

As a blanket answer, stupidity is out — consider my friend's intelligent friend — although stupidity surely accounts for a good deal of Trumpism. Thus I suggested to my Canadian friend that political ignorance and naïveté are the major contributors. And to that I shall add something else.

Of late I have been reading a fair amount of Isaiah Berlin's works on the Romantic Era, roughly 1770-1830. Its essence, as the Oxford philosopher emphasizes again and again, was "the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything." This came in reaction to the Enlightenment Era, in which discoverable answers to humanity's travails were held as the ultimate objective. We could have lasting peace and social harmony, if only we put our minds, our Reason, to it. The truth is out there, to quote "The X-Files."

The Romantics — painters, poets, politicos — rebelled at this, rebelled at what they saw as a stultifying ideation. The true nature of "man," they contended, was to release his inner self, his thundering thoughts, his supreme individualness, his (coming) Nietzschean energy — even if he is altogether barmy in his formulations. Because there is no truth, no eternal, universal values — only the heroic deeds of man. (One can see how modern fascism took root in Romanticism's ethics.)

I submit that my friend's friend, a poet, has been captured intellectually by the aged frissons of Romanticism. There is no truth; there can be no "stable structure of anything"; the Enlightenment's ethics are those of enslavement to faulty Reason.

Real life lies in blowing things up. Hence the endless appeal of Trump. 

The near-death experience of the 14th Amendment option

The question of using the 14th Amendment's wording — "The validity of the public debt ... shall not be questioned" — to shut down all future Republican attempts to extort legislative concessions when the lethal debt limit is reached appears to be on indefinite hold.   

On its face, the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. It is also vastly contradictory. Its statutory wording attempts to override the clear phrasing of the 14th Amendment, and though Congress is free to authorize spending, it then runs up against an arbitrary ceiling. Both cannot live in peaceful coexistence.

Not with Republicans in Congress, who are always eager to replace sober governance with spectacular, bloody theatrics. Let us be absolute on this point. When it comes to the debt ceiling, it is always Republicans who threaten Armageddon, despite The NY Times' silly reporting this morning: "[The Biden-McCarthy agreement] has reopened the door to the debt limit being a perpetual point of leverage that allows the party in the minority — in this case, the Republicans — to use the borrowing cap to extract legislative concessions." 

In this case? When have the Democrats ever brought the nation to the brink of default and economic ruin?

That aside, the Biden administration has seemingly bypassed an opportunity to have the 14th Amendment question answered in federal court. I say seemingly, since legal confusion surrounds the issue, as is true with virtually all legal issues.   

Earlier this month, as default was nearing, the National Association of Government Employees union filed suit in a Boston district court challenging the constitutionality of the statutory debt limit. The case was humming along, but when Biden-McCarthy reached an agreement, the administration had Justice Department lawyers request the postponement of a hearing scheduled for today, and the judge agreed to one, "indefinitely."  

So where does the question of the debt limit's constitutionality stand? Harvard Law's Laurence Tribe tells the Times: "I don’t think there is a judicial solution that lies ahead because the only time that courts can get involved is when it’s a live issue." The good professor recommended that lawmakers "act to iron out the contradictions between the fact that they authorize spending and then set a limit on how much the government can borrow to pay for those expenses" — a recommendation that has as much chance of succeeding as that of Marjorie Taylor Greene curing her psychosis. 

Notwithstanding Tribe's opinion, the NAGE union's president, David Holway, says "This weekend’s announcement of a deal on the debt ceiling does not resolve ... our federal lawsuit." By that I assume he means to press it somewhere, somehow. Yet Tribe's take on the matter would seem dispositive. Without a "live issue," a federal lawsuit appears doomed.

Nevetheless, it's unfortunate that the Biden administration asked that the matter be dropped. The Times reports that the administration "preferred to keep its legal thinking on the matter private," but the matter's legal thinking has already been publicly splashed hither and yon. Perhaps the Boston district court could have revealed its thinking, had the Justice Department asked instead that that the lawsuit be pursued.  

Trump is still Republicans' choice. (Duh.) But they're missing the fun of a DeSantis nomination.

In a dazzling flurry of barely differentiated connotations, a Monmouth University poll (A) released today finds that "Nearly half (45%) of Republican [and Republican-leaning] voters say Trump is definitely the strongest candidate to beat President Joe Biden in 2024, and another 18% think he is probably the strongest candidate.

"Among voters who name Trump as their top-of-mind preference for the GOP presidential nomination, 74% say he is definitely the strongest candidate the party can put up against Biden and 21% say he probably is."

Roughly one in five Republicans say the strongest contender would "definitely" be a non-Trump, and 33% say the strongest contender would "probably" be someone else. "Just one-third of GOP voters say another Republican would definitely (13%) or probably (19%) be a stronger candidate than Trump."

After hopelessly wading through the "strongest candidate" vs. the "strongest candidate against Biden" and all the definitelys and probablys, one is left with the essential finding: Republicans still want Trump.   

This is not to say they dislike Ron DeSantis. Although his electoral support has declined, he remains "about as well liked as Trump among GOP voters," observes Monmouth. One suspects they don't wish to throw him away just yet, since things could get, ahem, a trifle dicey for their still-preferred candidate — reams of state and federal indictments against him, don't you know.

Indeed, even the present gap between Trump and DeSantis is far from insurmountable for the challenger: in a head-to-head matchup, it's the former president 56%, the governor 35%. Sadly for Ron, those stats are a flip from February, when it was DeSantis 53% and Trump 40%. By March it was a tie in the mid-40s. If DeSantis is permitted to keep talking sans a script, the challenger's challenge may yet become insurmountable. 

Initially I was a hardcore Trump man; the Republican Party could not possibly do worse, I reckoned, than with this criminal sociopath at its ticket's top. Further reflection, however, softened my pro-Trump stance. If DeSantis were the party's presidential nominee, Trump would splenetically unravel in apoplectic fits of resentful entitlement and quotidian vindictiveness. It would be a splendid campaign, Republicans gutting Republicans rather than battling Biden.     

So you folks In Magaland should keep those indictments in mind, while keeping the governor in your back pocket. Since chaos, sheer anarchy and flying ad hominens are your favorite pastime, what could be better than a DeSantis nomination?