PMC Commentary

I'm experiencing technical issues. My email system has gone on the fritz, and thereby hangs a complicated tale of potential word-processing problems. I must take a break and see if I can't sort out these issues. My apologies. Because of another afternoon commitment, I was going to break early anyway. I'll see you in the morning. Fresh posts below.

 

GOP minds - though neither hearts nor money - would go with Clinton

The Hill:

A story that circulated after [a recent Republican Money] lunch was that the donors engaged in a hypothetical question: "If it was Donald Trump running against Hillary Clinton, who would you vote for?"

One version has it that most of the Republicans at the table put their hands up for Clinton.

[The lunch's sponsor] disputes that account and said in a telephone interview Tuesday that it was just banter among friends and that he is confident that all the Republicans at the table would support the final GOP nominee for president, whomever that turns out to be.

I believe the original account.

(Incidentally, could we please retire "whom" and all its ungodly variations? The Hill got "who" wrong in the opening sentence — it should have been "whom" — and then misused "whomever" in the last. Maybe it's time to just dismiss the distinction altogether. Oh, The Hill also confused "was" with what should have been "were" in its reformulation of the Trump-Clinton question. Sorry for the pedantry — but earlier this morning we discussed professional journalism, which, it seems, should at least start with proper grammar.)

 

So I too will try to explain why the Trump candidacy is in no way confounding

This may seem a peculiar piece to return with, but I stumbled on it this morning — at Bruce Bartlett's Facebook page, which, by the way, is one of the finer roundups of political news — and I found it intriguing, so there you go. The piece is from Jay Rosen, journalism watchdog; its title is, "So I will try to explain why the Trump candidacy has been so confounding to our political press"; and, though you should read it there before proceeding here, its dismayed, yearning thrust is this:

The work of the journalist cannot be done without a commitment to the act of reporting, which means gathering information, talking to people who know, trying to verify and clarify what actually happened and to portray the range of views as they emerge from events. A primary commitment to reporting therefore distinguishes the work of the journalist. Declining to express a view does not. Refusing to vote does not. Pretending to be ideology-free or "objective" on everything does not. Getting attacked from both sides? Nope.

Rosen's nestled tautology — "A primary commitment to reporting therefore distinguishes the work of the journalist" — is amusingly jarring, in its self-evident truth, and yet indispensable. That a reporter should report (gather information, corroborate, clarify) is an axiom in journalism schools, but an on-the-job phantom. Why? Rosen notes the decades-old academic thesis (brace yourself, or close your eyes) of "institutional isomorphism," which simply means professional mimicry: News "organizations," in our case, "tend to model themselves after similar organizations that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful." This journalistic phenomenon is akin to Hollywood's apishness — one studio's superhero blockbuster will compel all other studios to churn out superhero sagas, until the genre is unprofitably exhausted.

And that's what intrigued me. Mr. Rosen, his fellow journalistic watchdogs and academics are of course disapproving when it comes to the aping groupthink of mainstream news media. So am I. But aren't we being unfair? Mass journalism is no more about journalism than entertaining movies are about entertainment. They're about profit. If for-profit CNN discovers higher ratings and thus enhanced profitability by relentlessly covering Michael Jackson's death, MSNBC would be financially irresponsible in not doing the same, next celebrity death. Likewise, if CNN discovers that gathering information on Donald Trump (or Carson, Cruz, Clinton) — then corroborating it, clarifying it — causes a mass yawn, CNN would be financially irresponsible in doing its journalistic duty.

Put more bluntly, for-profit networks and print outlets don't decide what to cover and how to cover it. Viewers and readers decide by viewing and reading. And they have already decided what to watch based on preceding journalistic "decisions," which, QED, were based on what the viewing and reading public demanded.

We can't even blame these circular journalistic mediocrities on capitalism and beastly corporatism. For they are only living up to their nature. There they are, that's what they are, and we should expect no other. Can we instead blame the public? Yes indeed. Yet such blame changes nothing, since those targets of blame are fixated on some other celebrity death or petty scandal or titillating whatever. They are indifferent to thoughtful journalistic analyses of Donnie Trump's brilliant manipulation of both populism and the Fourth Estate. Frivolous entertainment is king, and the emperor knows how to profitably fill the Coliseum.

It scarcely needs noting that what Jay Rosen and I and no doubt you more deeply long for is what the historiography of our founding era has labeled "republicanism": responsible citizenship, civic virtue, political engagement, an informed republic. Its pursuit was perhaps possible with a three-millionfold body politic. Is it possible with 300 million so easily entertained because of the vast accessibility of easy entertainment? How to start? There's the rub; and that, it seems to me, is the question.

 

A Dear Caught in the Spotlight

I am back. But I see there is, after all, little more to add:

[O]ne senior law enforcement official … said that after Mr. Dear was arrested, he had said "no more baby parts" in a rambling interview with the authorities.

The official said that Mr. Dear "said a lot of things" during his interview, making it difficult for the authorities to pinpoint a specific motivation.

Allow me to exercise my speculative muscles a bit more. Mr. Dear's motivation was that of a GOTV precinct captain for the GOP; he learned public policy at the cloven feet of Carly Fiorina; and he worships the rhetorical coherence of Ben Carson and Donald Trump.

And his, my friends, is a classic portrait of your average Republican primary voter and contemporary-conservatism enthusiast. As GOP presidential hysteria pursues the vote of every last mad American, we can expect more of these crackpots with perfectly legal and sophisticated weaponry to emerge from other meccas of Christian insanity or hotbeds of Beckism, whereupon they will exercise their First and, above all, Second Amendment rights.

USA. We're #1.

I shall be back full-time in the morn, cheerful and optimistic as ever.

 

Planned Parenthood, planned hoodlamism

The NY Times:

The Planned Parenthood facility has frequently been a scene of protests since a series of videos secretly recorded by a conservative group showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the use of fetal organs for research.

Both the police and Planned Parenthood officials emphasized, however, that they did not know the gunman’s motive. "Since this is still active," Lieutenant Buckley said, "it would be premature to speculate" about a motive.

It is wise for the police not to speculate. Meanwhile, all reasonable people can hang this crime around the harpy neck of Carly Fiorina, the serpentine throat of Ted Cruz, the vile chords of Mike Huckabee and the entire, immensely irresponsible Republican Party -- which has become an accomplice to domestic terrorism.

The sooner the GOP -- now little more than a gang of violently cynical opportunists -- collapses, the saner this country will be.

I apologize for the brevity; I'll have more to say when I return. For now, I'm simply absorbing just how manifestly diseased is the modern Republican Party. I would ask for a statement of shame from a party spokesman -- but of that, I know the party is incapable. 

 

Early Wednesday my daughter and I are departing for Missouri's 7th congressional district, the very heart of the Ozarks, to give thanks that we're not represented by U.S. Congressman Billy Long. I just applied three bumper stickers to mein Hyundai wagen — "Make America Great Again," "Trump über Alles," and "Why Does Obama Hate America?" — so that we'll blend in. Inconspicuousness is the key to intelligence gathering.

I may post the occasional dispatch from Grandma's bunker in the woods, depending on events — and Internet availability. If not, I shall see you Monday morning. Till then, I say to all my American friends, Have the grandest of Thanksgivings. To all other readers I say, Be thankful you're not an American these days; it's getting ugly here. (And I'm doing my damnedest to make it uglier.) 

Really, everybody … have a great one. 

***

Oh dear, just minutes after signing off, I, Cornelius Drake, received my first missive from the Cruzian prayer group I joined.

You got it: Cough it up. 

 

Still dreaming of Mitt

There is simply is no downside to the GOP presidential field, whether real or imagined. The Boston Globe:

According to a [Suffolk University poll] of likely Granite State primary voters, if Romney was added to crowd of GOP presidential hopefuls, he would lead the field with 31 percent of the vote — more than double that of current frontrunner Donald Trump.

My dreams of a Trump nomination are equaled in quantitative wetness only by the spectre of a Romney nomination. Be still my … heart?

I very much miss Mr. Romney's unique political skill of obliviously alienating ever-larger blocs of American voters. There is that, there is definitely that. But more than that is that the Trump-Cruz-wing primates of the rib-scratching Republican base would go absolutely bananas were another "RINO" to seize, with the aid of opposable thumbs, the nomination. Their furious partisan grooming and animated vowel screeching would present an even greater show on earth than that of Trump's slide to worse-than-Goldwater numbers.

There's just no downside here. Mitt Romney is the best the GOP has to offer — and he was the worst presidential candidate in modern political history. The Republican field is that bleak.

 

The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs with no Wilson?

The Post's Richard Cohen pens an exquisitely phrased paragraph, with which, perhaps to some readers' dismay, I agree. In replying to Princeton University students' demand that President "Wilson’s name be expunged from the Princeton campus" because of his racism, Cohen writes:

What’s lacking in the Princeton debate over Wilson, and similar debates elsewhere, is an appreciation for the word "and." Instead, "but" is too often substituted, so that a person becomes one thing or another — not two things at once. Sometimes those things are in conflict, as with Thomas Jefferson. He drafted the Declaration of Independence, founded the University of Virginia and championed religious freedom. And he was a slaveholder. Still, I would keep his monument on the Tidal Basin.

Cohen goes on to note that "George Washington, like Jefferson, owned slaves," and that "Andrew Jackson extended American democracy, yet he was brutal to Indians." Both men remain revered — though Jackson far less so in my book, less because of his brutality (which land-grabbing white Americans generally cheered) than his ignorant, stubborn retardation of Whiggish economic progress. Cohen also notes that LBJ "supported racial segregation early in his career — and embraced civil rights as president." Should all three U.S. presidents, alongside Wilson, be Stalinistically sandblasted from every monument because of their darker sides? Should FDR's resplendent achievements in depression and war be airbrushed from collective memory because of his internment of Japanese Americans?

In this, our wretched age of intense polarization and Manichean simplicites, we are losing, observes Cohen, our "ability and willingness to keep two opposing views in mind at the same time," which "are hallmarks of adulthood. We grow up to respect the gray. Black or white, one or the other, is childish."

Cohen's last line is true. As for his preceding line, our "grow[ing] up" seems to have been arrested.

 

Dear Nate Silver, I'd give Donald Trump 21

Yesterday, Nate Silver urged the commentariat to "Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls." He observed, in particularly admirable prose, that "pundits and punters seem bullish on Donald Trump, whose chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination recently inched above 20 percent for the first time at the betting market Betfair." He then counter-noted that "I can see where the case for Trump is coming from, although I’d still say a 20 percent chance is substantially too high."

If by "freaking out" Silver means palsied fear, just who is he reading? I, for one, keep exhausting my supply of confetti. And as I understand it, America's Fleet Streets are running low on champagne. That's no freaking fearful sucking sound you're hearing, or blood-red dread you are reading; it is, rather, unmitigated media ecstasy. But perhaps I'm misreading Silver; perhaps by "freaking out" he means only the spotless ecstasy we feel.

As for his "substantially too high" estimation? Here we're in unmistakable disagreement. Trump's "20 percent chance" seems, to me, about right — if not a bit too low. Silver objects that Trump's 25-to-30 percent support isn't enough to capture the nomination; that his "favorability ratings are middling among Republicans"; that Trumpeteer turnout is in question; and that "the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their minds yet." These are reasonable protests against Trumpian bullishness.

I would ask, however — What of winner-take-all primary states? What of the fragmentation of the Republican vote — assuming it holds — in which 30 percent in a winner-take-all state is as good as 95? What of the promise of chronic fragmentation, given that so many ultimate losers possess life-sustaining super PACs? And what of the GOP establishment's justified fear that the sine-qua-non brutalization of Trump might well result only in a ruinous third-party bid?

This last predicament explains — maybe more so than the establishment's fear of "get[ting] mowed down by [a Trump] counterassault," as Dana Milbank muses this morning — why, "with few and intermittent exceptions, rival candidates, party leaders and GOP lawmakers decline to call him out."

They decline for the same painful reason I might now decline, were I so unfortunate as to be a Republican presidential candidate: Mr. Trump has them by the balls, because the GOP's scrotal sack — known medically as "the base" — is just wild about Donaldian cretinism. And the wildness factor translates to (or should I say, following Silver, "inches" toward) at least a 20 percent chance of a rather magnificent Trumpian boner.

 

Syrian dominos

The disputed downing of a Russian warplane over Turkey — or was it Syria? — may not resemble the manifest shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but today we can expect to hear more than a few references, I should think, to Balkans-like powder kegs of rolling calamities. Indeed, President Putin has already deployed a term that was destined to become ominously emblematic of archducal fallout: Russia, he said, has been "stab[bed] in the back" by Turkey.

One looks for comic relief wherever one can find it in such grim circumstances. With my thanks to the NY Times, it comes early in the form of ample understatement: "The incident comes just a day before Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, is scheduled to travel to Turkey for what now promises to be tense discussions."

And that, it seems, is just about the only undisputed element of this entire affair.

A Russian warplane, a Sukhoi SU-24, "entered Turkish airspace over the town of Yaylidag, in the southeastern Hatay province," says Turkey's military. Yet even that province remains a matter of territorial dispute, since Syria still insists that Hatay is Syrian, and not Turkish, ground.

Nonetheless, Russia's military says its plane "stayed exclusively above the territory of Syria," which, one assumes, means the province of Latakia. All that is known is that the warplane went down in Latakia.

Russia says its "two pilots … ejected," which implies twofold survival. Al Jazeera reports "that one of the two pilots was captured and killed."

Russia says its aircraft was downed "presumably as a result of shelling from the ground." Turkey says two of its (our) F-16s "intervened … according to the rules of engagement."

Most nerve-racking is one four-letter acronym cited by the NY Times: "Russia’s entry into the heavily trafficked skies around Syria raised immediate concerns about mishaps, inadvertent or otherwise, that could lead to confrontations involving Turkey, a NATO member, and the United States."

Will American neocons still hail Vladimir's czarist "leadership" if he retaliates against Turkey? For then would come the latter's invocation of NATO's Article 5, and then Austria declares war on Serbia, Germany backs Austria, Russia mobilizes against Germany, and, and …

 

The invulnerability of the right's "knowing" what it knows

Chait has some fun with Krauthammer, who somberly observed last week that "If [one] goal of the Paris massacre was to frighten France out of the air campaign in Syria … they picked the wrong country," for "France is a serious post-colonial power." So where's the fun in this? When the craven frogs refused to abet W.'s Iraq fantasy 12 years ago, Krauthammer just as somberly noted that France only "pretends to great-power status." We were better off, averred Krauthammer, without them: "Why in God's name would we want to re-empower the French in deciding the post-war settlement?"

Lucky for Charles Krauthammer, amused assaults such as Jonathan Chait's will never touch him. They will do him no harm whatsoever, nor will they injure those who hang breathlessly on Krauthammer's every word. Because the Washington Post's geopolitical strategist and Fox News commentator lives — as do his followers — completely walled off from scrutiny. He is invulnerable to attack and thus insufferably ineducable — again, as are his auditors.

This point — that of the right's total "epistemic closure" — was driven home to me yesterday in several dissociative moments of utmost folly. I almost always know better. But for reasons unknown, Sunday I twice tweeted Breibart's John Nolte to let him know that his latest policing of "Big Journalism" (how the latter, said Nolte, had maliciously distorted Trump's views on Muslim databases) was in laughable error. I provided an informative link. Twice, I heard nothing back.

In desperation, I then did something I had never done before. In Breitbart's comment section, I commented. I remarked (complete with said, informative link) that Nolte's piece was "false."

Almost instantly a Breitbart reader responded: "Ahh, How is this false. I have listened to and read the whole interview many times and sorry but I am not seeing what your talking about." I had already provided the evidence, which the reader didn't bother reading. So in my response I spelled it out. In return, I got this: "Well, the problem I see and many out there is ... Trump was busy and not paying good attention to what this reporter was asking him. Now that is bad on Trump..if your a candidate you need to be sharp and on the ball [ellipses original]" — "This reporter capitalized on the situation and you can hear him get more and more excited while he is proposing these ideas to Trump and Trump seems to be taking his bait."

It never occurred to this Breitbart reader/commenter that the point of my post wasn't really about Donald Trump and Muslim databases at all. It was about John Nolte, Breitbart's resident vigilante of wicked "Big Journalism," having distorted a story about Donald Trump and Muslim databases — and duping his readers, which is what these readers claim to detest most about the lamestream mainstream liberal media.

I'd like to believe that were I a conservative, I'd resent such treatment from the "conservative" press. The Breitbart reader? He neither noticed nor cared, and his first and second responses to my first and second comments caused to me realize the utter futility of a third. So I let the matter drop.

One simply cannot penetrate the right's exoskeletal obliviousness — from top to bottom, and bottom to top. It's invulnerable.

 

Mafia logic

This is priceless.

"The mafia has a bad reputation, but much of that's undeserved," says Giovanni "John" Gambino, a Palermo-to-Brooklyn transplant and relation of Carlo Gambino, to NBC News. "As with everything in life, there are good, bad and ugly parts – the rise of global terrorism gives the mafia a chance to show its good side."

Some of Gambino's good side has involved heroin trafficking, extortion, loansharking and murder. Then again, in favorably comparing his, ahem, business enterprises with ISIS, Signor Gambino does have a point, which was rather humorously made long ago by Bugsy Siegel: "We only kill each other" — well, mostly, anyway — whereas ISIS prefers indiscriminate slaughter.

The downside to Mr. Gambino's argument is that when one needs ISIS to make oneself look "good" …

 

My low regard is for those who hold the government in "such low regard"

First Read marvels …

We've been around the political block long enough to know that almost all presidential candidates exaggerate, dissemble, take statements out of context and, yes, lie. But from the start of Donald Trump's presidential campaign (remember Mexican rapists?), he has taken this [with no little success] to a level we haven't seen before in American politics.

… and Pew Research explains:

Currently, just 19% [of Americans] say they can trust the government always or most of the time, among the lowest levels in the past half-century. Only 20% would describe government programs as being well-run. And elected officials are held in such low regard that 55% of the public says "ordinary Americans" would do a better job of solving national problems.

It's remarkable, the power of propaganda.

You no doubt recall the conservative Elysium in which we lived just seven years ago: a savaged GDP, double-digit unemployment, a trillion-dollar deficit, a plague of the uninsured, and an unprovoked war costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars more.

Then came the dark times, under draconian Tyrant Obama: unfrozen credit, a rebounding GDP, job growth, a halving of the deficit, vastly expanded healthcare, and an end to America's blundering foreign adventurism.

Those, broadly, are the facts, whose reality is smothered in the ignorance of watercolor wisdom, which itself is propelled by the only thing modern conservatism knows how to do well: turn reality upside down.

Fortunately — and generally — the appeal of irreality diminishes as presidential elections approach. 

 

Joyous news. Trump is ahead - way ahead

Fearlessness is valued over content.

That's the fundamental takeaway from the latest CBS News poll of the Republican primary base in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina (and beyond, one assumes). The conservative zeitgeist is elegant in its simplicity: thoughtfulness inhibits popularity, imbecility is a crowd-pleaser, and outrageous imbecility confers frontrunner status. What J.M. Keynes saw in the mid-1930s as a positive force in economics, "animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction," others, such as Orwell, saw as a malevolent force in politics: the animalistic id of "drums, flags and loyalty-parades."

In brief, the more vicious the lead hund, the more vicious the pack. See previous post. And viciousness, says my elementary psychology as well as experience, is typically an admixture of fearlessness and stupidity. Re-enter the rhetorically fearless and strategically stupid Donald Trump, then, as the undisputed frontrunner.

"[W]hen Trump backers are asked their favorite thing about him, the top answer is that he says what others are afraid to say." They don't much care what he says — he can be a de-facto isolationist one day and a pillaging militarist the next — as long as he says it with fearless conviction and in the most simplistic, dimwitted manner possible, so that the pack may comprehend.

This is still paying off for Trump, indeed it is paying off more than ever. He "has returned to the lead in Iowa [30 percent]," reports CBS, "while Ted Cruz [21 percent] has now surged past Ben Carson [19 percent]." (Marco Rubio is at 11 percent; Bush, a steadily pathetic 5.) In N.H., Trump is at 32 percent (Rubio is closest, at 13). In S.C., Trump is at 35.

At all this, I revel. The angry little guy with the funny little mustache never presidentially polled better than what Trump is polling in South Carolina. Yet the United States has no parliamentary system in which unlike, moronic minority factions can unite into a majority, and it has no appointed chancellorship. And that means only one thing for the long haul: Trump is taking the vicious GOP down — one fearless imbecility at a time. 

Stay well, Donald. Stay well. 

 

Right-wing populism in 2 minutes, 24 seconds