PMC Commentary

The GOP, Donald Trump, and an alternative ending to "Shutter Island"

It's funny, it's sad, it's astonishing, it's banal, it's aggravating, it's amusing, and it's still crazy after all these years. I write, of course, of the blinkered, cocooned, utterly unself-aware mentality of vast swaths of present-day Republicanism — an uncomprehending mass of befuddlement brilliantly exemplified by one Katie Gage, once a Mitt Romney deputy campaign manager. What makes Donald Trump objectionable to her as well as other Republicans? asked Politico. Replied Ms. Gage: "He makes up facts."

Did Willie Sutton disdain his fellow penitentiary inmates because they were criminals? I don't know. But I'm sure there are many madhouse inhabitants who resent their accommodations because they're surrounded by lunatics.

Donald Trump is a scoundrel, say the GOP's world-class self-reality-conjuring necromancers, because he makes up facts. Were I the GOP's attending psychiatrist, I'd recommend forgoing any further intensive counseling and instead I'd reach straight for the emergency buckets of Thorazine. Can you hear yourselves, you pathetic crackpots? Or do you hear only the paranoid chorus of discombobulated voices in your head? Does your singular condemnation of Mr. Trump not ring even one cracked bell in your belfry?

Although I'm not licensed to practice psychiatry anywhere in the cosmos, I'm now of the professional opinion that Donald Trump is the sanest Republican presidential candidate there is. I venture this professionally unorthodox opinion only because even Trump seems to realize he's nuts, which, in the Hellerian sense, means he's not. Furthermore, he's been sane enough to grasp (you've probably noticed this) that if he wishes to go some distance, he must modulate his circus-clown routine.

This, we would all concede, is a critical realization that is nonetheless fraught with peril (peril is always fraught, never loaded). What has made Trump the mentally rocky star he is among the GOP base is his willingness to don the biggest and funniest fright wig he could find, and then match his pronunciamentos with his appearance. This took him from obscure jokedom to within margin-of-error frontrunner status. He now flaps and fumbles as a protest-vote clown on the precipice of Herman Cainness. How does one maintain a lead achieved by being magnificently eccentric while reining in the very eccentricity that made him such a popular protest jester — all to avert the abyss ahead, the doomed überclownishness of Herman's ultimate fate?

This, in the GOP's 20-ring circus, will be a delicate act of uncertain maneuvering. But I know one thing: Being Donald Trump's chief strategist would be the greatest political job on Earth.

I still have this equally magnificent fantasy. At the end of it all, Donald will burst out of a Trump Tower cake and declare his entire act an enormous hoax. "I just wanted the world to see how much garbage you hardcore Republican nincompoops would be willing to swallow. Now we know. I quit."

That, anyway, would be my strategic advice — at, as noted, the end of it all.

 

Republican presidential hopefuls react

Via Bloomberg Politics:

Jeb Bush: "I will work with Congress to repeal and replace this flawed law with conservative reforms that empower consumers …" yada yada yada.

Scott Walker: "Republicans in the House and Senate must redouble their efforts to repeal and replace …" blah blah blah.

Marco Rubio: "Obamacare must go" and I have no more idea of what might come back than I comprehend strategic international relations.

Rand Paul: "This decision turns both the rule of law and common sense on its head," and I should know, because from upside down is how I view the world.

Rick Santorum: "As President, I will be committed to repealing the monstrosity of Obamacare and replacing it with a patient-centered program that" has something to do with dogs.

John Kasich: Let's face it. No one cares what I think.

Mike Huckabee: "Today's King v. Burwell decision … is an out-of-control act of judicial tyranny," and, theocratically speaking, I'm envious as hell.

Carly Fiorina: "Obamacare has not lived up to what we were promised"; in fact it has worked better than we were promised, but as an inept former executive, I'll be damned if I understand how.

Ben Carson: What's "Obamacare"?

 

Fast-track authority

"Meep-meep motherfuckers" is right.

(I miss Sullivan and his socialist conservatism.)

 

The Apocalypse Cometh: Married Gays on Obamacare in Stylish Anti-Confederate Outfits

As pleasurable as it is to see the Court's defense of Obamacare today, that's nothing compared to the incomparable pleasure of watching the right's reaction to it. The poor dears are simply beyond rage, and I have the distinct feeling that ACA-covered cardiovascular stress tests (of recent familiarity) are being ordered by the thousands, if not the millions, as I write.

The right is spitting mad, as the old imagery has it, they're clutching their chests and huffing and puffing and grasping their shrinking swinging balls, wondering and groaning: What in God's name has happened to this blissfully assbackward country?

An acute case of anti-pseudoconservative sanity?

And if we think the right is emotionally and physically collapsing over today's Supreme decision, just wait till the Court prohibits those assorted state prohibitions of legally married love — you know, between those people.

Rank homophobia will convert to mass Santorumism, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker will attain new heights in dimwitted demagoguery, and Jeb Bush will find his own balls in a vice. Oh dear, oh my, how to placate the spitting-mad, decency-torching villagers without burning up all general election hope? Don't sweat it, Jeb. That was never possible.

And of course need I remind anyone that all this fury will come in the immediate wake of the GOP's bars-and-stars' forced retirement? The liberal bastards just elbowed their way past the Moronic Scions of Confederate Veterans and now they've successfully defended six-million desperately needed healthcare subsidies — damn! — and they're about to throw rice at thousands of newly, happily and legally married queers.

Oh, Jesus, oh Lordy Lord, piss on that proverbial fire, grab the kids, call in the lapdogs and unleash the hounds. All hell is breaking loose.

 

No drumroll, just a rimshot. Bobby Jindal is in!

American politics, being much like Hollywood executives or monkeys peering back at us through the bars, is imitative. If some politician's latest act is deemed popular, the others rush to copy it. In the racket of politics we see only microscopic germs of originality but wholesale plagues of mimicry. The GOP's recent stampede to decry Confederate undulations — on the heels of its decades-long indifference to and even encouragement of racial offensiveness — is one example. Another is the rush to be even weirder than the last guy in the public unfurling of one's presidential campaign.

You want weirder? Then take Bobby Jindal. Please.

 

At one point the governor (mostly hidden, appropriately, behind a natural obstruction) tells his little tykes that because of his presidential run, "things are going to change a little bit." No they won't, not even a little. He'll remain the same extraordinary insignificance that he was before, assuming GOP primary voters don't hacksaw their way through and all the way down the presidential roster, as they did in 2012. He also promises the kids a vacation trip back to Iowa, where, in GOP primary circles, the grazing bovine do truly roam. My favorite part of the Jindal video is when he asks the little ones: "What do you remember about Iowa?" I swear for a moment I thought all three would erupt with, Religious fanatics!

 

Well-duh news

The most immense non-surprise of the year … The Washington Post: "Affordable Care Act survives Supreme Court challenge."

In the case of King v. Burwell, the oral arguments gave it away. Credit is still due, though, to Kennedy and Roberts, for dissenting from the Three Ideological Amigos. If the latter are feeling any real pain today, that's OK, because they're still covered under Obamacare.

 

The bigger bogeymen under our bed, cont'd

The reasonable objection has been made that the New America Foundation's graph (which I reproduced yesterday, here), which shows a prevalence of non-jihadist (vs. jihadist) violence in the U.S., is a post-9/11 depiction, and this skews reality. Had the graph marked its beginning point just one year before, we would see quite the opposite: a prevalence of jihadist violence in the U.S. This is, again, a reasonable objection. It does, however, open itself to a reasonable counter-objection. Quite a few of them, in fact.

Why stop the regression at 2001? Why not encompass the 1990s and therefore the Oklahoma City bombing? Indeed, why not rewind the chronology past the often violent Civil Rights Movement and head back to the era of Jim Crow, whose black lynchings by white supremacists historians can't even accurately count. (Lynchings became so common, local newspapers may have ceased bothering to report them.) Or, for that matter, if one really wants proportionality, why not march back to 1861 to mark the beginning of "non-jihadist" violence in the U.S.? At a graphic glance we could then see how three-quarters-of-a-million deaths stack up against 3,000, or 26. In fact we should, by rights, retreat in time to 1787 to begin counting — or rather estimating — the slaughter.

As for the more general topic of race and American dread, we should also be more mindful of geopolitical balance. This morning the Post's Harold Meyerson has a piece recounting "the grotesque reality that was the antebellum South and the Confederacy’s fight to preserve it" — all of which is true. But too often we overlook the grotesque reality of the antebellum North and Northern politicians' fight to preserve it, as well as preserve the South's grotesqueries. Was the North outraged at slavocracy? Hardly. A fair estimate of Northern abolitionism is about 5 percent of the population. Northern capitalists were more than happy to finance the Old South's "means of production." The North's textile manufacturers were fine with the South's cotton production and the manner in which it was produced. Copperheads and Southern sympathizers ran rampant during the Civil War, prior to which, Northern fears of free black labor overwhelmed whatever Northern pity there was for black bondage.

In the postbellum era, Radical Republicanism's zest for blacks' sociopolitical equality petered out in a mere one decade. Reconstruction was a colossal, shameful and deliberate bust. I have often reflected that the year 1876 — not 1861 — was America's lowest ethical point. The North cut the South loose to return to its antebellum ways. Essentially, the coming of Jim Crow wasn't the South's decision. It was the North's.

From there we can survey the numerous, standing-room-only Northern lectures delivered by South Carolina's "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman — the "Champion of White Men's Rule and Woman's Virtue" — on the evils of integration and black equality. We can survey as well the North's systemic white prejudice, its loathing of cheaper black labor, its prohibition of blacks from some labor unions, its (especially Indianan) embrace of the KKK, its massive white flight, its residential redlining, its furious reaction to busing.

One could go on. One could go backward and then forward and perhaps a bit sideways and then backward in time again and one would find a relentless prevalence of non-jihadist violence — in every pornographic sense of the word — in the United States. This is, one might also argue, merely the human condition. With that I'd agree and thus also note, then: So much for our historical "exceptionalism."

 

I hope I do as well as JP Morgan Chase & Co.

Just as big banks have their stress tests, my little socialist heart is scheduled for one this afternoon. Exactly why I'm having this test is unclear; I just had an EKG performed and it showed my pump and its arteries purring like a well-tuned Rolls Royce. My diagnosed angina? That's probably only the result of some painful brooding infused with a bit of stark terror over my teenage daughter's recent acquisition of a driver's license.

They — and you know who they are — say the stress test may take up to two hours. I've got news for them. Two intended hours of stress on this creaky, desk-bound, out-of-shape shell will, in about 15 minutes, produce only two days in an ICU.

Short of that, I expect to hear the following medical decree after whatever testing is done: "Hmmm, we really don't know what's causing your chest pain." I shall then refer them to the aforementioned cause. I shall add that I fully expect, excruciatingly, that congressional, state and local Republicans will wiggle scot free from their current predicament.

See you — maybe — tomorrow, or at the latest, in three days. I don't believe "they" allow personal laptops in the ICU.

 

The South was right, even though its sole cause was wrong? Go figure.

Again with the NYT. It has some good stuff in it today.

"This is the beginning of communism," said Robert Lampley, who was standing in the blazing sun in front of the South Carolina State House shortly after the legislature voted overwhelmingly to debate the current placement of the Confederate battle flag. "The South is the last bastion of liberty and independence. I know we’re going to lose eventually."

"Our people are dying off," he went on, before encouraging a white reporter to "keep reproducing."

That leaves one rather speechless. But assuming the white reporter has a brain and a heart, I hope he or she does.

Said Sons of Confederate Veterans member Greg Stewart in a magnificent flourish of historical misapprehension: "You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters." Are young Germans asked to believe that their grandparents and great-grandparents were "monsters"? Certainly not; just misguided (and in some cases powerless) victims of a vastly hateful state which imposed a monstrously ideological superstructure over the majority population.

Said Kenneth Thrasher — and I like this — lieutenant commander for the S.C. division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans: "The flag didn’t kill anybody. It was a deranged young man who did." All that's missing here is Mr. Thrasher's NRA membership number, which is probably tattooed on his protruding, Neanderthalic brow.

Harris Dail — a Kansan Son of Confederate Veterans — said Mr. Thrasher is nonetheless a deplorable heretic, since he's willing to "compromise" on the flying flag's relocation to the state museum. "He should be knocking heads together instead of just laying down and rolling over" and "cav[ing] in with the rest of these brainwashed people" — those people, I guess, who are properly lying down, not laying down. Otherwise, him speak English good, as all great philosophical thinkers do.

And finally we come to Freddie Rich, a North Carolinian who owns RebelStore.com and "sells Confederate flags and bumper stickers (including one that reads, 'I Believe the South Was Right, and I Don’t Believe in Slavery — Then or Now.)"

Speaking of philosophers, not even Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel could produce a synthesis out of that dialectical mush.

 

The bigger bogeyman is under our bed, not in Syria

 The NYT, courtesy the New America Foundation:

Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many [Americans] have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week … is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.

Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count…. [S]even lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.

Note —actually, it's impossible to miss — the red spike's timeframe. Writes the Times:

A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, which warned that an ailing economy and the election of the first black president might prompt a violent reaction from white supremacists, was withdrawn in the face of conservative criticism.

Yes, they're delicate creatures with infinite sensibilities that are offended by both facts and factual potentials. We mustn't ruffle the feathers of the pernicious wings with which they fly.    

Lord, I do fervently pray that the American voter is catching all this.

 

Right or wrong, I can't forgive Dylann Roof either

Contributing NYT op-ed writer Roxane Gay voices a Nietzschean, partially Hitchensesque, anti- or unChristianist view which I suspect is what the academy would unfortunately call a central societal paradigm, notwithstanding recent stampedes to gush in support of New Testament values:

I do not forgive Dylann Roof…. My unwillingness to forgive this man does not give him any kind of power. I am not filled with hate for this man because he is beneath my contempt….

Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media narrative vigorously embraced that notion of forgiveness, seeming to believe that if we forgive we have somehow found a way to make sense of the incomprehensible.

I take the victims' families at their word. They say they forgive Dylann Roof, and I have no right — especially at this sensitive, wounded time — to question what may be their superior humanity. But, like Ms. Gay, I do question the conceptual validity of forgiveness when it comes to monstrous crimes against humanity. And my anti-herd instincts instantly kick in whenever I hear a "media narrative" that is aggressively perpendicular to a preceding narrative of some considerable duration.

Did we hear American cries of forgiveness after a handful of ultra-pious ideological lunatics slaughtered 3,000 of us? Have we joined hands to forgive the ISIS cutthroats who rape, plunder, crucify, burn and oppress? Of course not. Nor should we. They deserve a swift assignation with Allah — and most of humanity seems to agree, be it atheist or divine.

This morning the Post's Michael Gerson, evangelical cheerleader, does his best to injure what I've already obliquely classified as the Nietzschean view of Christianity as weak-minded slavery: "Forgiveness … demonstrates spiritual maturity, strength of character, depth, discipline and steadiness. It is the sign of a determined faith, fighting against every natural human inclination." Those would be, if you're a believer, our God-given inclinations, thus it seems somewhat blasphemous to fight them. I am happy to report that we failed miserably in fighting them when 20th-century fascist powers demonstrated their spiritual immaturity and lack of good character.

I have also ventured that Ms. Gay is only partially Hitchensesque, in that she prefers to consign Dylann Roof to a life of wretched imprisonment, rather than a premature death. Were we consistent, we'd demand a drone on the little bastard. At any rate, I tend to agree with Christopher Hitchens: Forgive my enemies? Sorry, but I prefer to kill whoever is trying to kill me. Odd, is it not, that "disciplined" Christians and devout nonChristians alike who oppose the death penalty (as Hitchens did) have no problem with annihilating human monsters who still stalk? Of course there's a chasm in the argument here: Roof is no longer a monstrous threat to humanity. But one wonders — would Ms. Gay, or Mr. Hitchens, or I, or you have pulled a trigger on Mr. Roof a month ago? Would we have smothered baby Adolf or Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in his crib? Would we have imposed the death penalty when each was no threat? I suspect Hitchens would have, although I don't suspect this of Gay.

This post is going on far too long; long posts, in this brave and grievously efficient new age of 140 characters, tend not to get read. I shall close, then, with what I believe is Ms. Gay's mostly God's-honest truth:

Forgiveness does not come easily to me. I am fine with this failing. I am particularly unwilling to forgive those who show no remorse, who don’t demonstrate any interest in reconciliation. I do not believe there has been enough time since this terrorist attack for anyone to forgive.

It may be that a few of us have, and those few have made their voices known. Whether this demonstrates a human superiority, however, is debatable.

 

See previous post

 

… and ABC News' Rick Klein is a handsome idiot

Exhibits A to Z:

In a 2016 field with no clear frontrunner, yet no shortage of candidates, it took a non-candidate to recognize a major national moment and, well, lead. Gov. Nikki Haley did what governors and leaders more broadly seek to do all the time -- to unite, to push forward, and to heal, all in the wake of unspeakable tragedy…. She managed to drain the politics out of a charged debate over the Confederate flag that's been popping up for longer than she's been alive…. She cut through a muddled, half-hearted set of responses from 2016ers and now sees them drafting behind her leadership. Out of a tragic story, this is politics at its best -- not as pejorative but as a force for the positive.

Sorry to dwell, but the media's cheering, pom-poming and hand-springing over this forced and inexcusably belated gubernatorial concession is as inexcusable as the concession's belatedness itself. There was nothing noble in Nikki Haley's preening before network cameras yesterday; indeed, hers was one of the more ignoble acts I have seen in some time. And, in view of the general ignominiousness of GOP antics, that's saying a lot. No doubt what amplified my disgust was watching none other than Reince Priebus file in the room and behind the governor's podium before the governor's Great Goodness commenced. Here's a man who has maliciously orchestrated, from the Deep South to Wisconsin, America's return to the Jim Crow era of literacy tests and poll taxes gussied up as voter ID — in the absolute absence of voter fraud. If Nikki Haley possessed any true nobility, she would have either banned Mr. Priebus from the room or required him to hang a sign around his neck, announcing "I'm sorry, but I'm Reince Priebus, and for that, I'm really am sorry." But she didn't. So now Mr. Priebus can go before other network cameras and proclaim the GOP's visionary egalitarianism and rejection of hateful states' rights. It's bunk. It's all bunk. And the media are falling for it.

 

And it's the Donald just inches behind the Bush!

How daft is the GOP base? This daft:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (14 percent) leads businessman Donald Trump (11 percent) in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary contest, according to a poll from the Suffolk University Political Research Center.

Trump's second-place 11 percent is well within the 4 percent margin of error. For all we know, Bush is trailing the Donald. Meanwhile, Trump leads every other GOP candidate, and "Among self-identified conservatives, Trump (13 percent) topped the field by besting Walker (11 percent) and Bush (10 percent)."

The manifest truth of the matter nearly screams at us: Much of Trump's support is the support of protest. But what, exactly, are these likely GOP primary voters protesting? They have every conceivable breed of contemporary Republicanism — from pretend gravitas to profound screwballism — to choose from. They have the relatively "smart" brother of America's dumbest, most incompetent president ever; they have a sleepy-eyed, Koch-headed nitwit of a union-buster; they have a subcontinental Indian Cajun who is the perfect replacement for Mr. Rogers; they have a Great White Whale who simply will not relent from his Ahabian Quest, come hellish indictments or not; they have a marvelously intellectual-looking Texan of absolutely no learning as well as short-, medium-, and long-term memory loss; they have two Cuban-American Gen. Pattons who have as much familiarity with Clausewitz as does a horsetail fern; and they have at least three Billy Sundays.

It's a splendid, even ideal conservative buffet to move one's tray along. Whether one yearns for the paradisiacal days of the Bush II administration, or the theocratic ramblings of an Elmer Gantry, or simply the cold demagoguery of a Wisconsin imbecile, the GOP presidential self-eatery is open for business — and it has exactly what every right-thinking primary voter could ever want. So I ask again. What's with their hunger strike?

 

Memo to the NYT (cc to self): Why bother?

I'm just curious (mostly because I needed a break from our thoughtful, gracious, good-hearted Nikki Haleys). For whom does the NY Times write its editorials? For what purpose? To whom, for example, is this example addressed?

The economy is not yet healthy. In fact, serial markdowns of anticipated growth suggest it is chronically ill…. [F]iscal neutrality is foolish at a time when needed investments are ignored and growth and productivity are endangered. The government is a sector of the economy — the sector that is supposed to spend and invest more when consumption and private investment are inadequate. The best outcome would be for Congress to get on the same page as the Fed in working to revive the economy.

Well … yeah?

On this, the NYT would get no argument from any sane reader, since it's nothing but rudimentary knowledge of Political Economy 101. Yet the insane among us are all attending Huckabee or Rubio rallies after reading the latest breaking news from Breitbart.com and watching Fox News' hottest hysterias — or, they're serving in the very majority of the NYT-referenced Congress that is hellbent on wrecking the economy and every last American in it. (This is called the honorable profession of politics.) For this group editorial sanity might, in a bathroom pinch, serve as well as a Sears-Roebuck catalogue, but that's about it.

What, then, is the real use of it all?