The Carpentariat

Another radicalism too far

I just read, in the Washington Post's "Social Issues" department, a roughly 3,000-word report titled "A Language for All: Teens in Argentina are leading the charge to eliminate gender in language." It's a frightening peek into a self-triumphalist radicalism that envisions a revised language as little more than an oppressive collection of words all dressed in Mao suits. You must conform to our standards, says this minuscule minority to the vast, grammatically correct majority of lexicographers.

Here [in Argentina], teenagers are rewriting the rules of the language to eliminate gender. In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine "o" or the feminine "a" with the gender-neutral "e" in certain words — in order to change what they see as a deeply gendered culture.

Their efforts are at the center of a global debate over gender, amid the growing visibility of non-binary identities and a wave of feminist movements worldwide. A big part of the battle is being waged over language….

The Royal Spanish Academy, the preeminent authority on the centuries-old language, has said that such grammatical changes are "unnecessary and artificial"…. While changes in vocabulary happen fairly often, the grammar of a language rarely changes, said Paz Battaner, a lexicographer and member of the Royal Spanish Academy. It’s not impossible for the gender-neutral form of Spanish to someday become so common that the academy accepts it, she said. "But I doubt it"….

The language form has divided the feminist movement from which it originated. While some within the movement insist on speaking in a way that includes non-binary people, others have resisted, preferring to emphasize the voices of women by using feminine words….

Hernan Semprum, a 77-year-old Venezuelan law professor who has lived in Argentina for 10 years, argued it is essential to preserve the purity of the Spanish language. "It is what truly unites all of the countries" in the Spanish-speaking world…. Psychologist Agustina Taquini, 37, argued that women shouldn’t need to change the language in order to get ahead. "In the end, it makes women seem more weak than strong," Taquini said.

Señora Taquini could have added that such demanded change also merely reinforces the centuries-old, sexist stereotype of women as shrewish, irrational, and endlessly troublesome. 

Unlike Spanish, or French or German, we haven't this gender-neutral issue in English, since our articles — a and the — are already neutral (a man, the men; a woman; the women). Still, a foul, linguistic miasma is seeping into the minds of those who should know better. "Merriam-Webster added a new definition of the word 'they' to its dictionary, declaring the pronoun may be used to refer to a 'single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.'" That is to say, they is. If even the sound of "they is" crawls up your spine as though you've been transported to an illiterate-redneck swamp, then your sanity are intact.

As e polemicist, I selected several above passages favorable to my opinion. I do not dispute the prodigious bias of that opinion, just as I would not dispute my biases in favor of gender equality, racial equality, and equality of opportunity. Yet I urge you to read the Post's entire, argument-neutral article. It is, let's say, interesting. And perhaps you'll violently disagree with me, which is, after all, what genuine debate over "change" is all about.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with this:

"Throughout [a television interview on the subject, 18-year-old Argentinian Natalia Mira] casually used gender-neutral words. As Mira spoke, the journalist, Eduardo Feinmann, kept interrupting to correct her. 'My way is Spanish. I don’t know what yours is,' the journalist fired back."

Say most Republicans, Lincoln's emancipation of slaves meant little compared to, say, Trump's steel tariffs

According to a depressingly believable survey conducted by YouGov for the Economist magazine, most Republicans have — not to put too fine a point on it — hopelessly lost their already hideous little minds:

"The 16th president boasts his own memorial in Washington while the 45th president faces impeachment. But ordinary Republicans, in a 53-percent-to-47-percent majority, favor Trump over [Lincoln]….

"For example, one C-SPAN viewer, identified as Neil, a Republican from Oregon, said that Trump 'supersedes' Lincoln. 

"'Lincoln only freed the slaves,' he said during a call to the network Wednesday. 'Yes, that’s a big thing. But what Trump is doing is far greater.'"

Stupidity speaks for itself.

Adam Schiff: "The President doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for our country"

In an interview with The New Yorker's superb Susan Glasser, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff efficiently summarized the national and international horror of Donald Trump:

"The President doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for our country, what’s good for Ukraine. It’s all about what’s in it for him personally and for his reëlection campaign."

And that, gentle reader, is in itself an efficient definition of "the diagnostic [behavior of] a sociopath," as referenced in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition.

"Don't mess with me"; or, the ambiguity of Pelosi's prayers

I'm sure you've already seen this. I had seen it thrice. But I watched it yet again this morning because I love it when Speaker Pelosi delivers a withering smackdown of some vulturous, right-wing reporter.

Yesterday was barrel day for James Rosen, of the Obama-hating Sinclair Broadcast Group, when he hypocritically asked Pelosi, "Do you hate the president?"

I can appreciate Pelosi's theologically based reply, which, like all theology, can be located somewhere in the abstraction spectrum. But, since I dwell in the secular world, I must say, I hate Donald Trump. What about him, for Christ's sake, is not to hate?

On the other hand, Ms. Pelosi did not reveal what she prays for.

On Trump's impeachment: the war between the states of idealism and pragmatism

​​​​​If history is a guide, and it is, then the imminent debate among House Democrats about the breadth of impeachment articles will be a rip-roarer.

Some Dems wish to corral the charges into the narrow lane of Trump's powerful abuse of Ukraine, including his unconstitutional responses (such as contempt of Congress) to that one charge, while others wish to elaborate on Special Counsel Bob Mueller's findings on the president's tenfold obstructions of justice.

Hofstra University's U.S. history professor Carolyn Eisenberg takes up the latter's defense, using, as her guide, the bitter division among House Democrats prior to writing impeachment articles against Richard Nixon.

Ask anyone under the age of 50 about Nixon’s presidency and the first word is likely to be "Watergate." The second is "impeachment." Ask what this is about and the probable answer is "something about a break-in and a cover-up." Shameful as Watergate was, it was not nearly so serious a violation of law as the covert bombing of Cambodia. One of America’s foremost historians, Henry Steele Commager, observed that Nixon had won a strategic victory 'in the realm of public and perhaps even congressional opinion' by successfully 'concentrating attention on Watergate and its associated chicaneries.'

After three years in which the Trump administration has run roughshod over constitutional procedures and individual rights, the need for a broader response [than the Ukraine issue] seems clear. This is essential, even if the Senate Republicans behave as expected and vote against the removal of the president. For now, the challenge for Representative Jerrold Nadler and his committee is to use the mechanism, providing by the founding fathers, to reassert abiding principles of democratic governance.

Again I'm torn, just as I was torn — and remain so — between Democrats' decision to impeach or to play it safer, for swing-district Dems' sake, by not impeaching: There is constitutional idealism and there is political pragmatism — and the two are forever butting heads.

As a lifelong student of politics I tend to favor — doubtless to my disrepute among constitutional scholars — William James' pragmatism over James Madison's idealism. This in no way implies I condone presidential lawlessness; and yet, I'm capable, pragmatically, of overlooking whatever constitutional sins may have been committed by my political idols, FDR and Abe Lincoln.

It's not that I don't "get" or appreciate the profundity of constitutional idealism; it's that I acknowledge the inestimable value of Roosevelt's legally questionable poundings of his New Deal enemies, and, as to what law professor Daniel Farber wrote of Lincoln's wartime excesses, "when he did infringe the Constitution, his trespasses were, at least, not egregious."

Since Trump's constitutional infringements are egregious, I would revel at having both our founding document and the entire body of U.S. criminal codes thrown at him. Politically, though, "the need for a [lesser] response seems clear."

Biden lands direct hit, mocking the world's laughingstock

In case you haven't seen Joe Biden's latest ad:

A sound foreign policy of at least eight years — not the impossible achievement of universal social justice by the end of 2021 — should be Democrats' central message next year. It won't be — the old quip, wrongfully attributed to Mark Twain, that only "war is God's way of teaching Americans geography" suggests our chronic indifference to global affairs — but it should be.

After all, the ineffable mess made of America by the sitting, impeachable president is almost entirely a matter of his ignorant malfeasance within the realm of international relations, in which I would include trade policy. He has alienated our allies, embraced our enemies, and cost American consumers and businesses millions of dollars in unnecessary taxation (tariffs).

Even worse, of course, is that he's attempting to normalize foreign interference into American politics and elections.

This, none of this, can stand. The United States now teeters on the edge of a bottomless precipice — one on which this president, with virtual total authority in matters of world affairs and limitless power to destroy traditional Americanism, can push us over.

What, then, is Democrats' responsible alternative to a foreign policy campaign?         

Trump's consiglieri have chosen a wise(r) path

Trump is running home to Mommy McConnell.

Says the White House's legislative affairs director: "We believe very strongly … that if [the House] were to elect against our better advice [and] send over impeachment to the Senate, that we need witnesses as part of our trial and a full defense of the president on the facts."

The quote is quotable largely because the Trump mob family could have sent witnesses, in "a full defense of the president," to testify before the Intelligence Committee's impeachment panel. In flagrant defiance of the House's constitutional legitimacy, it chose not to.

More than that, however, is that the deceptions and misdirections of the Trump family's legal strategy are closely aligned to its three-year political strategy: Lie about everything. To say, "Let Trump be Trump" is to say, in its larger context, "Let gangsters be gangsters."

And boy are these sons of bitches good at it, since not one of them was born with so much as a singular brain cell of conscience.

Underboss Mike Pence, for instance, yesterday visited the family's made men in the House, inspiring them, perjuriously, as it were, to "'turn up the heat' on House Democrats and accuse them of focusing on impeachment instead of solving the nation’s problems."

Said Republican congressman Steve Womack: "[He] wanted to remind us that in our discussions back home, we need to talk about things that are not happening because House Democrats are consumed with impeaching the president."

Noted Vox.com's Ella Nilsen late last month:

"Democrats in the House have been passing bills at a rapid clip; as of November 15, the House has passed nearly 400 bills, not including resolutions. But the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee estimates 80 percent of those bill have hit a snag in the Senate….

"Many of the bills that never see the Senate floor are bipartisan issues, like a universal background check bill, net neutrality, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act."

Such is the family loyalty of Mommy "Caporegime" McConnell. When he's not whacking bipartisan bills so as to deny the opposition any power, he's protecting the boss under the ruthless, expansive code of omertà.

Some weeks ago I erred in predicting how McConnell, according to that code, would proceed. I believed he would open the Senate trial, immediately call for a vote, announce Trump's inevitable acquittal, and thereupon close the trial.

Instead, assorted consiglieri decided on a wiser path: Stage a reasonably lengthy show trial of Democratic recklessness and lawlessness, then acquit, thus allowing Trump to run around this freshly lawless land, pronouncing his complete exoneration by that upper chamber of sage deliberation.

And that's precisely what Mommy McConnell will pull off.

Three constitutional law professors on behalf of impeachment vs. one law professor on behalf of fussiness

Here are key passages, all in agreement and consistent in their dominant theme, delivered this morning before the House Judiciary Committee.

Prof. Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School:

"The solicitation constituted an abuse of the office of the presidency because Pres. Trump was using his office to seek a personal political and electoral advantage over his political rival, former vice president Joe Biden, and over the Democratic Party. The solicitation was made in the course of the president’s official duties … [and] sought to gain an advantage that was personal to the president. This constitutes a corrupt abuse of the power of the presidency."

Prof. Pamala Karlan, Stanford Law School:

"The evidence reveals a President who used the powers of his office to demand that a foreign government participate in undermining a competing candidate for the presidency…. That demand constituted an abuse of power."

Prof. Michael Gerhardt, North Carolina School of Law:

"The record compiled thus far shows that the president has committed several impeachable offenses, including bribery, abuse of power in soliciting a personal favor from a foreign leader to benefit his political campaign, obstructing Congress, and obstructing justice."

Speaking on behalf of the anti-impeachment Republican minority, Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley was just as singular in message, but somewhat comical in substance; his testimony had none, in terms of addressing the president's many unmistakable abuses of power. (You can read it, or rather not read it, here.) Yet Turley was fussily upset about the speed with which the Democratic majority has been pursuing impeachment. My goodness, he moaned, this is all proceeding just too quickly — as though if Trump had shot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight, at least a year, maybe two years, of investigation would be required.

That's just about all the anti-impeachment Republicans have, folks — that, and the pathetic "defense" that Trump's many crimes weren't all that serious.

And they'll prevail.

***

Update: To be fair, under subsequent questioning Turley elaborated on his prepared remarks, saying he simply did not believe that Trump's extraordinarily impeachable offenses are, under the Constitution, impeachable. Thus his legal opinion goes deeper than his original testimony at first revealed. But, to be just as fair, he should have stopped at fussiness. 

 

Kamala Harris and the ghost of Ted Kennedy

Forty years ago, Sen. Ted Kennedy taught a seemingly unnecessary yet still invaluable lesson to future presidential candidates: When asked why you want to be president of the United States, you should probably have at hand a comprehensible answer.

On 12 October 1979, when CBS correspondent Roger Mudd asked him that very question on national television, Kennedy's answer was a Dantean journey through an utterly uncontemplated, stream-of-consciousness hell:

"Well, I'm — were I to make the announcement and to run, the reasons I would run is because I have a great belief in this country. That it is — there's more natural resources than any nation in the world; the greatest education population in the world; the greatest technology of any country in the world; the greatest capacity for innovation in the world; and the greatest political system in the world."

Remarked Boston Globe columnist Sam Allis: "The answer went on for 336 words. If this were a painting, it would be a bad Jackson Pollock, at once incoherent and repetitive. It lacked a core commitment and a sense of passion."

In probable truth, Ted Kennedy did lack the passion to be president. His only real motivator was that of his surname, which was more of a destiny.

Flash forward to, as of yesterday, former presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She was Kennedy's opposite in a passionate desire to be president, yet Kennedy's doppelgänger in being rather clueless as to why.

Observes NYT contributing opinion writer Miriam Pawel:

"Her candidacy appeared to have no real rationale and no clear constituency. The penchant for zigzagging that marked her policy positions carried over to strategy, as she veered from positioning herself as the fallback candidate for the left, when conventional wisdom suggested the front-runners might falter, to fashioning herself as the option for moderates when that appeared a more likely lane. Her carefully crafted image crumbled under the scrutiny of a national campaign."

Pawel's quoted assessment begins strong, only to puzzle the reader, however, upon the columnist's noting of Ms. Harris' "carefully crafted image."

As Pawel herself makes clear in preceding passages, Harris' "image" — which had always been weak even among voters in her home state; by 2016, after six years of holding a statewide office, "she remained largely unknown" in California — was merely one of moderation and, of course, intense anti-Trumpism.

With several other moderates in the presidency chase, Harris' moderation — whenever she chose to be moderate, that is — distinguished her none whatsoever. And who, for heaven's sake, in the Democratic presidential lineup wasn't already an intense anti-Trumper?

Hence the first of Pawel's overall assessments correctly explains Harris' withdrawal: Her candidacy possessed "no real rationale."

Did no one on Harris' staff ever show her the Ted Kennedy interview?

"How dare you"

The good news: Partly because of President Obama's climate activism, America's coal-burning greenhouse emissions are expected to drop in 2019 by 11 percent over last year, as natural gas and renewable energies replace coal. The European Union expects a similar reduction, for the same reasons.

The bad news: "Instead of beginning a long-awaited decline, global greenhouse gas emissions are projected to grow slightly during 2019, reaching another record high, according to a new analysis [from the Global Carbon Project]…. [The] report … makes clear that the transformation necessary to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions is nowhere in sight….

"[Emissions] are projected to have grown in China (by 2.6 percent), India (1.8 percent) and the rest of the world (by 0.5 percent)."

Rob Jackson, a Stanford University Earth Science professor and Global Carbon Project's chairman, said "It’s another lost year, another lost decade. I don’t want to belittle the important things that have happened and are happening, but they are not enough. People will look back at us and wonder, 'What were you doing?'"

"People" are already looking back — and fuming:

Perfection at Fox News

When you're to the right of Republican Rep. Jim "Rabid Dog" Jordan (listen to Tucker, at 0:45), and then must be corrected by Jordan (at 1:00) on what the party line is, and then agree with Jordan (at 1:04) that your original comment was not only fundamentally illogical but actually helpful to Democrats and NeverTrumpers, then your abnormal brain scans — first confirmed to reassure Fox News in the interview process — make you perfect for the position of primetime network host.

Donald Trump, Guy Fawkes, and Looney Tunes' Tasmanian Devils

Today should be historic. I use the conditional should only because today will not be historic. Instead, historians will record that it was just another Trumpian round of the absurd.

The House Intelligence Committee is set to release its findings today on the obscenely obvious: that Trump abused his presidential power in an extortion-bribery scheme, against Ukraine, designed to politically soil his most likely opponent in the 2020 election, and thus benefit personally by corrupting the proper execution of U.S. foreign policy and endangering our national security.

This has been outed, corroborated, testified to, verified, substantiated and affirmed by numerous U.S. diplomats and White House staffers. No reasonable juror would conclude otherwise. Trump is the Guy Fawkes of American foreign policy, the American political tradition and American decency.

But, enter President Fawkes' allies, those blowjob-prosecuting Republicans who regard a mobster-enforced sale of U.S. foreign policy — so as to politically benefit only the mobster himself — as unworthy of even a bench warrant.

In their written rebuttal to the Intelligence Committee's report, House Republicans conclude that "Trump was acting on 'genuine and reasonable' skepticism of Ukraine and 'valid' concerns about possible corruption involving Americans, not political self-interest."

One notes that this is an affirmative defense of the president, since the more common defense measure of simply making the prosecution prove its case has already been foreclosed. The facts of this case and the acts of this president are embarrassingly conspicuous.

To alleviate their embarrassment and coddle Trump's base, the Republicans reached for their old playbook and flipped no further than "Chapter B" before stumbling on the magic word that so enrages the right:

"The Democrats are trying to impeach a duly elected president based on the accusations and assumptions of unelected bureaucrats who disagreed with President Trump’s policy initiatives and processes." Flip merely two more chapters, now updated, and see: "Deep State."

As if all this weren't absurd and clownish enough, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES himself felt compelled, naturally, to add this ignorant bit of anticonstitutional preposterousness on his way to blowing up more alliances:

Just landed in the United Kingdom, heading to London for NATO meetings tomorrow. Prior to landing I read the Republicans Report on the Impeachment Hoax. Great job! Radical Left has NO CASE. Read the Transcripts. Shouldn’t even be allowed. Can we go to Supreme Court to stop?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2019

Good grief.

I didn't alter the tweet THAT much

Ukraine's President Zelensky, after being bound, gagged, cracked on the head with a NYC phonebook and mock-executed, renews denial of a quid pro quo with Trump over military aid

9:36 AM · Dec 2, 2019

KeepAmericaGreat.com

As (unneeded) further evidence of the Trump organization's incompetence, it overlooked the purchasing of the domain name of its campaign slogan, "Keep America Great." This, Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer did not overlook. So he bought it. Hence, Googling "keep america great" now renders a top link to this page:

"No Malarkey" meets "Epic Ignorance"

Politico:

"NO MALARKEY!" screams the campaign slogan on Joe Biden’s bus chugging through 18 Iowa counties this week….

"Malarkey?" [high-schooler] Cece West asked. "I’ve never heard of it before."

A potential problem with [the term is that] some of the complaints about it are an extension of how Biden skeptics feel about the candidate himself.

They don’t love or hate the slogan. Some of them said it’s kind of funny; others, kind of corny. While some voters welcomed the slogan as a throwback to a calmer era, others said it will only alienate younger voters.

But many said, bottom line, they don’t quite get it.

Evidently no one under the first-time-voting-age of 18 is familiar with this 100-year-old word, which, though I'm not over the age of 100, I've heard (and used, now and again) all my life.

Is there anything, anything at all, that Biden can say or do without being ridiculed by every ignorant jackass from Sean Hannity's 4.4 million Twitter followers to far-too-idle tweeters to Biden's left?

"Biden was mocked all weekend on social media over the slogan," reports Politico, "with detractors saying it highlights his disconnect with voters."

But whose laugh will be last?

"Biden’s campaign has long worn Twitterverse naysayers as a badge of honor, saying his voters — and the majority of Democratic voters — aren’t hanging out on social media."

Fuck this fucking fucksterizing

The wording of this post's title refers to only half of the post's argument, as does this lede, since the argument itself, profanely put, is more than just fucking easy to make; it's unfuckingbelievably easy to make.

That is to say, on the internet, especially, it's fucking sad to see so much poor fucking writing — which somehow gets itself cited by good writers, thus more popularized and even more financially ginned up.

Let us begin with the literate, rational writing of the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, who, in a tertiary way, notes the danger of any Democratic presidential candidate running on a Medicare-for-All platform. Case in point: Elizabeth Warren.

In Quinnipiac's late-October national poll, she led Joe Biden 28 percent to 21 percent. (Sanders, 15; Buttigieg, 10.) Last week's Quinnipiac poll, however, "showed Biden back on top with 24 percent, Buttigieg at 16 percent, Warren at 14 percent." (Sanders, 13.)

What happened to plunge Warren from win to merely show, placing Buttigieg in the middle and putting Biden back in the lead? Medicare for All happened — Warren's at-first tepid, then-clenched embrace of it, followed by journalists' questions about it, followed by her impossible answers about it, finishing with a "pull[ing] back" from it.

"The saga," understates Dionne, "was a lesson in how complicated defending single-payer would be in a general-election campaign." Another, less complicated way to express the "lesson" is that unrestricted Medicare for All would be a Democratic nominee's political death. (It occurs that I should mention, once again, that I favor single-payer; politically, though, it's just too soon.)

How absurd, say many progressive writers, one of whom — indeed the only one of whom — is cited by the NY Times' excellent Mark Leibovich. In a piece titled "The Hater's Guide to Mayor Pete," the "progressive journalist Drew Magary," observes Leibovich, assaults pragmatic Democrats such as Buttigieg for failing to fight for Medicare for All, which, claims Magary, is a "widely approved progressive idea."

His claim is, of course, widely as well as wildly inaccurate. Of course there is strong support for Medicare for All, left at that. Yet once polling respondents are provided its details, its support plummets into Warren's losing proposition.

This counterpoint is essential to any Medicare-for-All debate; nonetheless it is altogether ignored by "progressive journalist" Drew Magary, who once wrote for GQ and now writes for Medium. Still, more bothersome to me is how he so tediously ignores it — i.e., by his almost infinite use of ...

"Fighters … have the fucking courage to disagree with the bad guys"; Buttigieg supporters are "fucking sap[s]"; Buttigieg is a "fucking fraud"; his vanilla personality is "fucking pathetic"; we have "fucking Trump voters"; and Buttigieg is too complacent, so "Fuck that idea. And fuck him."

These somewhat less than elegant descriptions are, on occasion, interspersed with recuperative variety: "bullshit pandering"; "very attractive bullshit pandering"; "bullshit that … garner[s Buttigieg] more attention," although he's a "craven asshole"; "establishment Democrats [are] standing in the goddamn way"; but there's a "shitload" of fighting Democrats, too.

Now let us conclude by grasping the pertinent points here: Magary is fucking right because he's so fucking passionate; those who agree with him are fucking brilliant; those who disagree are fucking idiots; Magary possesses, it seems, a minimal, middle-school vocabulary; Magary's bad writing reminds one of John Gotti's best utterances — and yet, Magary gets prominently cited by the NY Times' John Leibovich, thus yielding the progressive "journalist" an astronomical number of page views.

It's true; I myself sink now and then to Magary's squalid level. But never have I outpaced or even matched it. Not even close. The most pertinent point, however, is that, I guess, I should have. Then I would be cited by the Times, rack up astronomical page views, and hie often to the bank.