P.M. Carpenter

It Takes a Vicente

Charming brevity:

I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall.

-- Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico

 

Of meaningful negatives and a meaningless positive

First Read points out that in a Clinton-Trump contest, "both parties would be nominating their most UNPOPULAR candidates":

* Hillary Clinton: 37% positive, 50% negative (-13)

* Donald Trump: 28% positive, 59% negative (-31)

Ted Cruz is at a negative 15; Rubio, -3.

All of these negatives actually mean something in terms of aggregate disapproval. What's interesting is that Clinton's net negative, after a quarter-century of GOP remorselessness, is less than half of Trump's, who's been on the political stage for less than one year.

There is also, among First Read's list, one prominent positive that means nothing whatsoever:

* Bernie Sanders: 42% positive, 35% negative (+7)

Go ahead. Put Brooklyn-socialist Bernie in a general-election contest and just watch his numbers reverse into Trump territory, plus some. A billion or two of Citizens United Koch-brothers cash and Karl Rove boodle would set all but the most progressive voters' hair on fire.

Bernie himself? He's agin super PACs, you know, on principled grounds — hence the genuinely wicked Republican "status quo" would laugh all the way to his slaughter.

I'm still trying to understand the wisdom behind setting oneself up for a powerful kick in the ass. And I'm failing at it.

 

Broadcast high crimes and misdemeanors

Joe Klein:

Trump knows exactly what he’s doing. His policy ignorance is a strategy. Every position he takes is carefully calibrated to elicit a reflexive response from his supporters. His campaign is about fears that have existed since before we became sapiens–fear of the other, fear of going hungry, the joy of martial triumph….

His has also been the perfect campaign for television. He is outrageous, which is more fun than substance or sobriety. Outrage brings ratings, the one true currency in the desperately competitive world of broadcast news. This is another primal truth that Trump has figured out: the qualities that the Great American Audience now values most are the least presidential.

Outrageousness and outrage have always been more stumping fun than substance or sobriety, of course, but not since George W. Bush's 2000 promise of enormous tax cuts but no accompanying deficits have I witnessed such an egregious lapse of broadcast media attention to "strategic" policy ignorance. And that lapse applies to far more than Donald Trump.

In print one can find sober, substantive reporting such as that of the Fiscal Times's, last October: "While Trump, Carson and others routinely complain about unrestrained government spending and mounting debt, there is a striking disconnect between their massive tax cuts despite the adverse effects it will have on the debt." Yet watch virtually any broadcast news and one will hear Republican presidential candidates bellow about their multitrillion-dollar tax cuts with nary pushback from the broadcasters.

This is more than scandalous; it's a journalistic felony of reckless disregard for the profession of proper journalism — and Donald Trump isn't the only beneficiary. The entire bloody lot of Republican wannabes have "figured out" that network broadcasters are, for the most part, professionally AWOL.

 

The Sanders "movement" should shift direction

"Donald Trump has not tapped into something mystical," ventures former Romney adviser Stuart Stevens to The New Yorker's Benjamin Wallace-Wells. "He’s just running against campaigns," added Stevens, "that aren’t running against him."

There's an imperishable truth to that observation, even if those who did run against Trump have perished themselves. From Jeb to Jindal, they're gone; victims, it is said — mostly by Trump himself — of the frontrunner's ferocious attack machine, rolled out on Twitter, at rallies, in debates and network interviews. Yet never has any anti-Trump force matched the firepower, relentlessness or sheer malignity that Trump has unleashed.

Jeb, with his hapless hundred million, would occasionally belch that The Donald is a "jerk" or some such thing, and that would be that. Only a few coins in his war chest were ever spent against Trump. The GOP's craven big-money boys disingenuously "cite the lack of success of the few super PAC attacks that have already targeted Trump as evidence that such attacks have not ― and cannot ― halt his momentum." Those super-PAC attacks, however, were feeble and indeed few.

Whats more, Christie concentrated on flattening Rubio, Cruz didn't wish to offend the Trumpeteers Club, Carson was and remains catatonic, Kasich is still playing his warm aw-shucks routine, Graham was always a dismissible joke and Fiorina a conspicuous fraud — and who can even recall the others?

Tonight there's yet another Republican debate, about which, ABC News mirrors Stuart Stevens: "Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have so far shown little willingness to take on the former reality television star when the national spotlight shines brightest." That may change this evening; the odds, though, favor another Rubio-Cruz spat over which is the bigger liar — even as the prince of populist gibberish stands right in the middle, grinning like a Napoleon over self-digging foes.

Back to Mr. Stevens: "The way to beat Donald Trump is to go after the essence of Donald Trump" — that being, indisputably, that "Trump is a ridiculous figure." The anti-Trump forces (if they can be called such) have instead engaged in internecine slaughter. "It’s like some mass hysteria — it’s like the tulip mania of politics," says Stevens, referring to the crazed, 17th-century Dutch bubble of flower-bulb competition. And as these diminishing forces are concerned with cutting each other up? "Trump," notes Steven, "is concerned with winning the election."

Which brings us to the point of this post. While all the non-Trump Republican forces were concentrating their firepower on one another, Trump was slipping through their lines rather generously unscathed. He was swelling up like a bullfrog as his party ate its own, and his partisan opposition — i.e., on the Democratic side — is committing precisely the same error.

As Trump gathers more and more electoral power by dispensing in buckets the magic of populist fantasies, Clinton and Sanders are engaged in a whopping and increasingly hostile debate about absolutely nothing: Which of their presidential fantasies are better suited to a White House that will be gutted by Republican obstructionism as of 21 January 2017? If theirs were a battle about which should take supremacy in the Democratic Party's future — realism or idealism — and if the latter possessed any authentic chance of delegate supremacy and thus the nomination, then perhaps the blood would be worth it. But the latter has no such chance; Bernie's struggle is as futile as Jeb's.

And that, as I noted a few days ago, leaves Democrats with only one objective: to pull together, win the White House, and protect Obama's successes. Their internal struggle is, for now, nothing but internally injurious. The longer they bicker and squabble and direct their attacks inward, the more time the "ridiculous" Donald Trump has to amass electoral power — unscathed.

The odds of a President Trump are about as slim as they come. But do Democrats really want to risk awaking some morning, say, in mid-summer, and finding themselves in those "other" Republicans' shoes? — fighting a heaping onslaught of gullible populist mania? I'll say it again: In the face of delegate futility, Bernie should withdraw.

But he shouldn't quit. He should instead deploy his considerable skills in motivating and mobilizing the dispossessed to vote in November against every "R" on the ballot in every purple state and congressional district.

He won't withdraw, of course, because ideologues never stop dreaming — even though their lofty dreams can turn to unthinkable nightmares. So, so much for "shoulds." Sorry to bother you.

 

What a telling juxtaposition

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking last night before the House Freedom Caucus:

"There's not a snowball's chance in hell that [a dutiful confirmation or even a hearing is] gonna happen."

President Obama, writing today for SCOTUSblog:

"The Constitution vests in the President the power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court. It’s a duty that I take seriously."

***

This will probably do it for me today. There's a blizzard here that is knocking out communications one by one. See you in the morning -- maybe.

 

Republican self-governance in action

Here's what the once-buttoned-down, once-business-like Republican Party has become:

Reporters at [Nevada's] Republican caucuses are spotting irregularities, disorganization and violations of caucus rules.

Much of the controversy has centered around caucus personnel. At some sites, caucus volunteers were accused of failing to require proper voter identification or take other anti-fraud measures — leading to voters casting multiple ballots. Other areas were plagued by long lines and missing ballots. And in one precinct, would-be voters reportedly showed to their caucus location to discover the site hadn’t been set up at all.

The asylum is in charge of itself.

 

The magnificently feckless Marco Rubio

Do they come any more feckless than Marco Rubio? I think not, although he does have a base of supporters who also think — not.

This morning I watched, on CNN, a "Today Show" post-Nevada clip of Rubio, in which he said "the vast majority of Republicans don't want Donald Trump to be our nominee." That's true, however an even vaster majority of nationwide Republicans don't want Marco Rubio as their nominee:

Rubio went on to somehow observe that "we feel great about almost every state that's on the map." One assumes this would include his, uh, home state of Florida? Alas:

I might also note (rather needlessly) that everything Rubio said this morning on the "Today Show" he said prestissimo. That of course is the key to dazzling bullshit — although every day, and state by state, Rubio's bullshit is less and less dazzling.

 

Trump's Nevada victory was a Goldwater-Reagan victory

I recall my paternal grandmother saying that once while visiting a retired friend in Arizona, her friend arose one morning, opened the blinds and exclaimed, "Yep, another goddamn beautiful day." The friend had about had it; she had tired of everlasting atmospheric beauty and longed to return to the experiential diversity of changing seasons and differentiated days. Simply put, my grandmother's friend had consigned herself to an all-too comfortable hell of beautiful sameness, and she regretted it immensely.

It was with nearly the same reaction that I awoke this morning to the monotonous news of Trump's trouncing of the hapless Rubio and Cruz, in neighboring Nevada. Said trouncing had been predicted for days, given similar trouncings in preceding contests — and, of course, given the GOP's chronic condition of crazy. Simply put, Trump's victory was the same old shit. I was especially deflated upon seeing that Cruz came in a most disappointing third. I would much prefer to see the two top lizards battle it out from now till glorious summer. It now seems that Ted might not make it past March.

Still, my lingering ennui is one of ambivalence. Though victorious Trumpism is already tiresome, what's more joyful than witnessing the lightning collapse of the Republican Party at the hands of a duck-lipped, orangutan-colored, lizard-eyed fascist?

We're all in pursuit of knowledge; we all wish to know: How in hell did this happen? How did a bagful of vacuous boasts ever grab the hearts, minds and balls of those once-Grand Old Partiers? It was, then, in such a pursuit that a tease to Jacob Weinberg's NYT op-ed tore me from caucus news and grabbed me in toto: "How did the party of Ronald Reagan turn into the party of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz?" At long last, The Answer.

Which consisted of this. With the aid of super PACs and a relentless right-wing noise machine and working-class rage, "Republican presidential candidates [have] … turned [the] party into a swamp of nativism, ideological extremism and pessimism about the country’s future, in direct opposition to Reagan’s example," writes Weisberg. "And they’ve transformed primary season into a reality show of insults, betrayals and open feuds…. The tactical obstinacy of the 1990s has curdled into the belief that any compromise constitutes betrayal, a dynamic now playing out in the primaries."

Yet all that, mostly, is an outcome, not the cause — which is rather singular, and which Weinberg notes: "populist demagogy." Yet just who launched populist demagogy to the very top of Republican politics? — which Weisberg does not note? Ronald Reagan, disciple of demagogic Goldwaterism of the early and mid-1960s. He simplistically blamed all working-class ills on the federal government and promised the rubes — while coddling the plutocrats — that they could have it all, pain free.

This Weisbergian omission, though, is not what shocks. No, what shocks is Weinberg's wrap-up: "Unless [the Republican Party] repudiates the inflammatory rhetoric of the primary, it will lose Reagan’s claim to the center and become more like one of Europe’s chauvinistic right-wing parties."

The party will lose — that is, it's in danger of losing — a claim to the center? That passage rendered me awestruck. The GOP hasn't had a claim to the center since Barry Goldwater, with growing appeal, protested in 1964 that "The big trouble with the so-called liberal today is that he doesn't understand simplicity" -- that being the absolute essence of populist demagogy, right or left.

 

GOP Gitmo outrage begins

Fox News isn't the least embarrassed to report Republican reaction to President Obama's Gitmo-closing plan. Some choice selections:

House Speaker Paul Ryan:

"We will not jeopardize our national security over a campaign promise."

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz:

"With this plan, President Obama is prioritizing politics over security."

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus:

"Hillary Clinton, a leading advocate of [Obama's] approach, needs to explain to residents in South Carolina and residents near other potential sites how placing hardened Jihadists in their communities will make them safer."

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott:

How reckless?

Pelican Bay State Prison, "a supermax … in Crescent City, California," is a "275-acre facility … designed to keep California's known 'worst of the worst' prisoners in long-term solitary confinement."

What's right up the road?

 

Pray for Ted - or Rick?

Ted Cruz's emailed "prayer requests" are becoming a bit too on the nose. This morning's:

During a five-week cycle, we rotate prayer needs—our nation, Ted Cruz and family, campaign staff, faith leaders, and campaign events. This week we focus our prayers on the campaign staff.

Bold original.

Campaign staff and Cruz's "Christian" tactics, thy name is Rick Tyler.

 

Gitmo: This is big

From NBC News (Obama is speaking as I write):

President Barack Obama on Tuesday presented a long-awaited plan to Congress to shut down the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

This is indeed big, but only politically, because the only thing Congress will shut down is Obama's plan.

Like everything else he proposes to the majority goons in Congress ... what a waste of administration intelligence and executive prudence.

***

Within minutes of President Obama's announced plan, the panicky Marco Rubio was on the stump hysterically suggesting that Obama intended to give our military base back to communist Cuba. I haven't yet decided whether to find Rubio's "propensity to panic" charming, or merely to throw up. I incline to the former, since the boy Wunderklutz is mostly a study in neurotic collapse.     

 

The bipartisan "political revolution" that isn't

Make that "tripartisan" — one on the left, and two on the right. Furthermore, revolutionary objects are much smaller than they appear on your television or computer screen, on your iPad or iPhone.

As Shakespeare would have it (and Shakespeare, I submit, was never wrong), "political revolution" by any other word — clear throat, "populism" — would smell as sweaty. Passion is running high and it is seemingly everywhere. "Political correctness," in its most literal connotation, is calculated less by the depth of message than the size of one's member(ship). Last night, on C-Span's we've-nothing-else-to-do but rally coverage, I watched The Donald brag in Las Vegas that his is bigger than Bernie's — so take that, Sen. Sanders; the people have gathered and they have spoken. For Christ's sake, they're right there on everyone's television screen.

Yet they, us, otherwise known as "We the People" of which every populist shrieks are in reality microcosms of differentiated rage and disgruntlement. Bernie describes his people as a "movement," which one is happy to grant. Yet look at the numbers, as the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell has done. "Raw turnout numbers — that is, the number of people who voted — in all three Democratic contests thus far have fallen well below their record 2008 levels."

Ah, but many are motivated converts to the democratic process, some would say. True enough, many are. On the other hand, "many" is a matter of comparison. "Entrance and exit poll data so far indicate that first-time primary and caucus-goers have represented a smaller share of Democratic voters this primary season than in the past." What's more, if history is a guide, and it usually is, then overall turnout declines "after early contests," which "bodes ill for Sanders’s promised revolution."

Which, as noted, is but one of three. The other two are on the Republican side — and The Donald is correct; his is bigger than Bernie's, however the third revolution (or movement) is the biggest of all. Continues Rampell: "While turnout has disappointed in Democratic races, in each of the Republicans' three contests thus far, it reached record highs." Because of Trump, right? Again, true enough, although motivation is actually rooted in anti-Trumpism. According to admittedly dubious exit polling but incontestable returns as well, "the majority of first-time Republican primary voters (as well as the majority of experienced participants, for that matter) voted for someone other than Trump."

Thus we have tripartisan revolutions in play (at the very least, 2.5 revolutions), each of which is nearly imperceptible among 323,048,500-some-odd Americans. Still, politics is more a game of margins than "mass" movements, given that no mass movement within America's more traditional political framework and rather staid electorate is all that massive.

It is most interesting, though, that whenever I point this out, whenever I point out the inexorability of certain electoral trends, revolutionary passion attempts to both deny and smother the vividly conspicuous. In yesterday's lead commentary I simply and clearly observed that Bernie Sanders's existing "delegate hole" is destined to grow deeper and wider. One could fairly say that this is not only conspicuous, it is head-stunningly irrefutable. I recall making the same point against Hillary in 2008: math is your greatest enemy, Senator, and therefore reason and party unity compel you to get the hell out.

That argument didn't work then, and of course it's not working now, since revolutionary passion — i.e., denial — reigns. But here's what is more interesting. Typical of revolutionary pushback against sound reason, empirical evidence and towering reality reads repeatedly like this, which attached itself to my post of yesterday: "This commentary wreaks of intellectual dishonesty and capitulation to a status quo." Of the more interesting, the most interesting is that my condemned "intellectual dishonesty" is never disclosed and my "capitulation to a status quo" evidently means that I and many others are capable of recognizing said reality — while, needless to say, revolutionary commenters are not.

All of this leaves us with only irony, and this time, it's a big one. The most clear-eyed of all the political revolutionaries out there, it would seem, are those of the third revolutionary movement, who are in fact counterrevolutionaries — the anti-Trump Cruzers and Wunderklutz-lovers and Kasich-chumps — virtually all of whom haven't a clue as to how the real world works, but are at any rate just smart enough to vote against Donald Trump. It's also the one, less-than genuinely mass movement that I dearly hope fails.

 

A Gentleman's Bedtime Story

I nearly forgot.

Earlier today, while reading the New York Post on Donald Trump's coming blowout, I noticed that just below one of the Post's critically important sidebar "news" pieces, "Hitler had a really tiny penis," there was another Post story on Netflix's release of Love (a 2015 sizzler by director Gaspar Noé). That was the premise of the Post's "news" story — that the film has been released on Netflix.

At any rate, gentlemen, if you have Netflix, do cue it up and watch just the first two or three minutes, as I did.

Then, gentlemen, just try to get to sleep tonight without some considerable begging first. I dare you.

 

For Trump, no friggin' way

From HuffPost's Ryan Grim and Zach Carter, some spooky but sloppy analysis:

Trump has a perfectly plausible path to the presidency as a Republican….

To secure the presidency, Democrats only have to win the Northeast, the West Coast, and the Upper Midwest, including Iowa. Obama did far better [in 2012], carrying every swing state in the country, including Florida and Virginia in the South, and Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada in the West.

But even with that massive margin, Obama could have been undone by victories for Republican rival Mitt Romney in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

So let's give Trump those four states. What Grim and Carter neglect to tell us is that even with those four in Trump's column (which is exceedingly unlikely), if Hillary were to win just North Carolina — which Obama did in 2008 — and its sizable African-American bloc, she would still win the Electoral College vote, 283 to 255. Or if Hillary were to win over Arizona's massive anti-Trump Latino population, she'd beat Trump 279 to 259.

There is indeed a "how" to Ryan and Carter's headline: "Here's How Donald Trump Could Become President." It's called a "miracle."

 

The coming Trump blowout?

Yes, this is from the New York Post, so there's that. But it's a damned enlightening read anyway, because, contrary to Post custom, the reporting is based on objective facts. (The story does adhere, however, to the Post's policy of no more than one sentence per paragraph, so as not to tax the Post's word … by … word … readers):

Donald Trump is leading in 10 of the 14 states set to vote in Republican primaries or caucuses over the next two weeks.

Recent polls show that Trump is ahead in Nevada, Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Louisiana.

According to Real Clear Politics, his biggest lead is in Massachusetts, where he is 35 points ahead of Marco Rubio.

Trump’s lowest margin of victory is predicted to come in Minnesota, where he leads Rubio by 6 points.

In Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s home state, Trump trails him by 6.7 percent, meaning he could still grab a chunk of the state’s 172 delegates.

It is with joy that I say again: You go, Donald; you go, boy.