The Carpentariat

Wanna guess what Hillary faces in 2017?

And so it begins, or soon will begin, as if that's any surprise. From Politico's "GOP plots early wake-up call for Clinton":

Republicans on the Hill said that much of what Clinton has proposed during her campaign amounts to unfinished agenda items of the Obama administration — and they don’t expect her to have any more luck than he did while facing an obstructionist Republican Congress.

Some Republicans warned that Clinton will have less…. "There is a long history of Republicans opposing pretty much everything Hillary Clinton has done, from trying to reform healthcare in the 1990s to what she was doing as secretary of state — there’s a long memory there," said [Dan Holler of Heritage Action for America]. "Assuming she wins, Republicans could in some world say the message here is that we have to compromise with Hillary Clinton. I’d be very surprised if that was their takeaway."

I'd be just as surprised if Democrats don't make Republican obstructionism the centerpiece of their 2017-18 midterm strategy. Regrettably, though, even the best of strategies often don't get out the Democratic vote in midterms. It's the party's worst failing — and a difficult one to cure, since the absence of motivation underlying it is so damn bewildering. 

 

Of Spicey comments

From Political Wire:

And two choice comments:

I have no idea what the means, but I agree with it. 

And,

I'm just glad that D.J. Trump and the entire Republican wombat machine have provided us this sublime opportunity, at this critical juncture in world history, to focus on the issues.   

***

Speaking of comment sections, I wish to add a note about a "block" I imposed in mine yesterday. It's the only one in existence here, and I resisted imposing it for weeks. I believe in free debate and I'm fond of vigorous disagreement. But when one's debating technique and profound disagreements are centered in seeing Jews (or any other ethnic group) everywhere, behind every wicked policy, then that commenter blocks himself from our sober consideration. I, too, don't much care for our policy toward Israel and I believe Bibi Netanyahu is a shameless demagogue and I positively detest Israel's treatment of the Palestinians (just as many Israelis detest their nation's treatment of the Palestinians). But I would suspect — or I hope I would suspect — some deep corruption of my intellectual soul were I to commence seething against "the Jews" as some sort of monolithic ethnic body, as a certain commenter so recently, and persistently, did here. And with his personal corruption came a contamination of this comment section, which I could no longer abide. So he's gone. For his wasn't debate, discussion, or disagreement; it was merely blind bigotry. And I won't have it.         

 

Good choice, Donald

Donald J. Trump, law-and-order candidate.

Stephen K. Bannon, the new CEO of the Donald Trump campaign, was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence, battery and dissuading a witness following an incident in early January 1996.

Buffy J. Trump, voter-fraud slayer.

Donald Trump’s new presidential campaign chief [Steven K. Bannon] is registered to vote in a key swing state at an empty house where he does not live, in an apparent breach of election laws.

 

In left-right commentary, it's either the ghastly Trump or pitiful Clinton

This morning, while reading Eugene Robinson and David Brooks in tandem, it struck me with uncommon intensity just how flatly two-dimensional this charade of a presidential contest has become, in print anyway.

Liberal commentators are aghast at the "conservative" candidate, and they — we, you and I — cannot help but repeat and repeat again the bloody conspicuousness of his ghastliness. It's all we have. Conservative commentators, on the other hand, tend to affected sorrow. They're even more aghast at the Republican nominee, since they and their party are the ones stuck with him; but about that, the less said the better. And so they dwell in tender pity, sighing that the Democratic nominee isn't a saint. It's all they have.

I give you Mr. Robinson, who attempts a subtle seduction:

I realize that most of Trump’s ardent fans do not take kindly to being lectured by the likes of me. But it is with a certain degree of genuine sympathy that I say what has to be said: Your candidate is a flake. A fraud. A bag of air. A con man. A joke.

One can hit the thesaurus for variations on this theme, but they'll all mean the same: Donald Trump is a ghastly human being, and even ghastlier nominee. Next week, two more Robinson commentaries saying the same thing; 20 or so here. It's all we have.

Turning to Brooks and his Bill Bennettlike columns of virtues, we find much sadness — sadness that Hillary Clinton is insufficiently "gracious." But Brooks,
fighting despair, is there to help, to exhort, to guide.

The gracious people one sees in life and reads about in history books — I’m thinking of the all-time greats like Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela and Dorothy Day as well as closer figures ranging from Francis to Havel — turn awareness of their own frailty into sympathy for others' frailty.

I should like to remind Brooks that Abraham Lincoln, attorney for powerful corporate interests and relentlessly ambitious politician, didn't trust his fellow citizens. He postponed and then mitigated emancipation in the certain knowledge that most white voting Northerners were racist boobs who gave not a fig about the enslaved. Losing more sons and brothers to "prematurely" ending the plight of the racially disdained could be, well, rather impolitic.

As for Brooks' similarly embraced "saint" of Mahatma Gandhi, I'll let Orwell speak:

I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main…. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained…. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi's basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

And there we have it. Even most reputed saints are less than saintly (excluding Mandela, Day, Francis of Assisi and Buddy Rich), and, above all, among their ranks one will never find a politician. The fulfillment of political objectives too consistently requires at least a touch of the tawdry. For Brooks, this entails Mrs. Clinton's inadequate graciousness. Maybe so, maybe not. And yet Hillary's objective is the peaceful ending of de facto Republican rule — not sainthood. One may have an aesthetic distaste for her, but anyone of conscience cannot argue with her fundamental aim. And compared with that other leading political figure of our time, how clean a smell she has!

Conceding that, though, would, for Brooks, violate the protocol of partisanship. The poor thing must dwell in pity. As for the rest of us — it's back to ghastliness.

 

Doctor's appointment. You know the routine. The appointment will entail a 30-minute lecture on everything I'm supposed to be doing, followed by several months of my not doing any of it, since my vices are already down to a near-intolerable minimum.  

 

Words fail

Reuters:

If the U.S. presidential election were held today, Democrat Hillary Clinton would win the key swing states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia and have a 95 percent chance of beating Republican Donald Trump to become America’s first female president, according to the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project.

Facilitating Clinton's coast to victory, perhaps, is that the Trump campaign is too incompetent to even place itself on every state ballot, which suggests the "unbelievable" management skills that Mr. Trump would bring to the Oval Office.

 

Ted Cruz knew it

This is just too precious:

As Donald Trump soft-pedals his once-hard-line immigration rhetoric, supporters of his vanquished primary foe Ted Cruz [with whom Kellyanne Conway was super-PAC aligned, accusing Trump of being "cozy with the establishment"] have one message for Republican voters: We told you so.

Cruz spent the final months of his unsuccessful presidential primary run arguing that Trump was a not-so-closeted liberal whose conservative language on immigration was not to be trusted….

"Everything Trump promises comes with an expiration date," said Cruz’s former Senate communications director, Amanda Carpenter. "We knew it during the primary, and now it is apparent he has duped his most loyal supporters on the issue they care about most, immigration. Don't say we didn't warn them."

Even more precious is what Politico then reports:

The Texas senator has been dealing with plenty of political fallout of his own after refusing to endorse Trump in his speech at the Republican National Convention…. But Trump’s rhetorical contortions on immigration this week are giving Cruz supporters in and around his orbit more hope that anger over the RNC speech, and over his broader opposition to Trump, will fade.

Was there ever a political development more easily predictable — and nonetheless widely, also predictably, botched by the nation's punditry? This development is coming earlier than I anticipated, but, as I observed the day after Cruz's supposedly career-ending RNC speech, it is coming:

As Sen. Cruz revealed last night, Republicans' 2020 gauntlet is lining up a wee bit early. Ted knows, just as every able Republican strategist knows, that The Donald, in November, will go down to historic humiliation and defeat. And Ted's a fast learner. What has he learned? That a Republican presidential candidate can say the most "unbelievable" and outrageously offensive things to the Republican base, he can earn their acute disapproval and censure, he can incite a deafening round of "Boos," and in rather short order the base will let it all pass; Republican voters will embrace a man who actively seeks the rolling destruction of the Republican Party.

Ted has learned this from a superb teacher. So what did he care last night if the Republican mob wanted to hang him? By November 9th, they'll be hugging him.

Hell, they're already flexing and puckering up.

 

Say what, Howard?

Earlier this morning, on MSNBC, I heard Howard Dean muse that young people are pragmatic, unlike their ideological elders.

Have I missed some sort of generational shift away from centuries of youthful idealism?

Bernie's appeal was largely rooted in the naiveté of the inexperienced: those who have yet to learn that, at worst, cynicism is generally appropriate, and, at best, pragmatism and the grinding incrementalism that comes with it are progress's only hope.

Is Howard onto some fresh, promising, youthful phenomenon that somehow has escaped me?

 

Of Coulter, Bannon, Conway, and scorpions

The press corps's Trump-watchers may be interrogating the wrong people. They're asking those attending his rallies what they think of his mild descent from Mount Jackbooted Deportation, when, somehow, they should be asking those who are now absenting themselves from his rallies.

"In a cavernous event space on the grounds of the Florida State Fairgrounds" yesterday afternoon (not the one shown), reports the Washington Post, "the venue was barely half full." The rally was preceded by 24 hours notice — abundant time to inspire a mob — and yet throughout those 24 hours, that other notice was also out: The Donald is going soft.

Those attending the Tampa rally were, as might be expected, publicly forgiving of Trump's seeming apostasy. "He’s still going to build the wall," said one. "It's not a pivot," insisted another. And yet such comments reek of self-reassurance riddled with self-doubt. Here was their fascist bonehead bowing to democratic pressures, much as little Adolf, fearing alienation of the middle class's less-bigoted swaths, reined in his anti-Semitic screeds prior to Germany's parliamentary elections.

Trump has fearlessly promised to always "tell the truth" to his equally boneheaded disciples — but now, which truth is the truth? Will he do as President Obama has done? Or will he order up a fleet of busses for the Einsatzgruppen?

I can't prove it, because I can't prove a negative, but I suspect those empty fairground seats were filled by disembodied disgust. Just as Trump was swearing that he'd never "pivot," the neofascist baboon was swinging from limb to limb, and performing triple axels in between. He would deport but he wouldn't deport, and, turns out, among all those rapists and other criminals are some pretty good people. What are old sieg-heilers to do, other than back away, or rather stay away?

Trump's only consistency is that he remains notoriously incoherent. For most of us, 15 months of this are enough, more than enough; what was once a marvel of gibberish has become a monotony. For others, a few others, 15 concluded months of unintelligibility appear to be the starting point of melancholy. For them, it seems that seeping into Trump's gibberish is an element of discomforting moderation. Does this in fact account for the empty seats? Again, I can't say for sure, but I suspect it does.

My one bit of empirical evidence (other than the empty seats themselves) is the shockingly coherent gibberish of Ann Coulter. "Why are we talking about softening the lives of lawbreakers?" she asked of Chris Matthews earlier this week. "I think this is a mistake. This sounds like it’s coming from consultants" — and if it persists, added the author of In Trump We [Somewhat] Trust, hers will be "the shortest book tour ever."

Coulter speaks for the Steve Bannon faction of Trump's base, which is just about all Trump has. The groaning, straining, semi-rational Kellyanne Conway faction (which understands that one needs votes to win an election) is making its move — and this, at least, portends some internal fireworks down the road. Bannon and Conway are as incompatible as Trump and Everett Dirksen. The two are scorpions in a bottle loaded with matches and dynamite.

That, anyway, is the way I prefer at present to interpret this oddly monotonous horror of a "campaign." For that would give me something more to write about, for how many times can one note, with any lingering interest, Trump's incoherence?

 

The 2016 presidential* race

I doubt Hillary would have a problem with Roger Simon's proposal, either:

Trump thundered on Monday that we need an immediate investigation into the Clinton Foundation by a special prosecutor. I don’t have any problem with that. But let’s have a special prosecutor investigate Trump’s tax returns at the same time.

The title of Simon's piece is "Tired of our current universe? Try joining Trump," which Simon borrowed from Hillary: "I do feel at times this campaign has entered into an alternative universe," said Clinton, also on Monday. "I think we all know how she feels," adds Simon. I know I do.

In commentary mode I haven't covered that many presidential contests. This one was supposed to be my fifth, and I was looking forward to it. Yet, as of 9 November, I still will have covered only four, since Trump's alternative universe, by definition, excludes his "candidacy" from the realm of the earthly, the known, the experiential.

I had, at a minimum, counted on Trump ramping up the very ugliest in presidential-campaign history. He has failed me. His campaign is less ugly than just a joke — and an increasingly boring joke at that. The man is "shocking" only in that he's the Republican nominee. His ignorance, his hypocrisies, his deceits and racist appeals lost their shock value long ago.

*And a Trump without shock value in this presidential race is as good as no Trump at all.

Well, there's always 2020. And Ted Cruz. Wait … perhaps 2024.

 

I do so wish Google would stop following me

Google is really good at this shit. Really good.

Yesterday, as I recall,

a commenter wrote 

something about Russian women,

and today on my Google ads,

there, presumably,

is one of them,

on the right,

grinning with that

come-hither countenance.

Ordinarily I might be tempted.

But dat don't look like no Russian woman I've ever seen.

 

The truth about facts - and the right

In "The Age of Post-Truth Politics," William Davies, a University of London political economy professor, writes:

As politics becomes more adversarial and dominated by television performances, the status of facts in public debate rises too high. We place expectations on statistics and expert testimony that strains them to breaking point. Rather than sit coolly outside the fray of political argument, facts are now one of the main rhetorical weapons within it.

One nearly ubiquitous criticism of the American right is that it's resistant to facts. This is an unfair criticism, for as Davies notes, Whose facts? "[E]xperts and agencies involved in producing facts have multiplied," observes Davies, "and many are now for hire. If you really want to find an expert willing to endorse a fact, and have sufficient money or political clout behind you, you probably can." You bet your self-serving butt you can. Just dial up or hire Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation or Steve Bannon's Government Accountability Institute or any of the leporinelike-propagating, right-wing "think tanks." Give them a predetermined fact and they'll substantiate it. Not a problem.

In fact, the American far right's propensity to embrace "facts" has a rather long history. I love op-eds such as Prof. Davies', for they provide me the opportunity to extensively quote that seminal diagnostician of right-wing lunacy, Richard Hofstadter:

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions….

The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry….

[T]he paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence"….

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s [the John Birch Society's] incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies.

And so it remains: experts, footnotes, and bibliographies on the folly of global warming, on the splendors of trickle-down economics, on the mysterious past of Barack Obama, on the sordid history and scandalous present of Crooked Hillary … ad infinitum. The far, chronically paranoid right positively adores facts; it possesses them by the oodles, and it's plenty willing to share them.

 

With Sanders and Stein, nowhere to go

The center is where the two ends collide, from left and right, which is what makes the center the most interesting place to be.

It's easy but rather dull to be on, and stay on, the left; it's just as easy as staying on the right. Ideologically, I happen to be on the farther end of the left — not the extreme left, but probably farther than your modern, garden-variety progressivism — and my opinions would be far less tangled and, on occasion, less arduously expressed were I to pitch my tent on sentimental ideological ground and stay put. Pragmatically, however, I would bore myself to stupors. Political progress takes place on the pluralistic battlefield, not back in the ideological camps. Heroic action figures intent on effective engagement have always appreciated this and have, in turn, adopted some of the enemy's ideological characteristics: FDR, Nixon, Obama, Reagan, to name just a few — all, at times, were as conservative as they were progressive; as progressive as they were conservative. Otherwise, the thrill of engagement would have been lost to self-satisfaction, and nothing would have gotten done. And so I resist 100 percentism.

Another reason I pragmatically subscribe to centrism (again, pragmatic, not ideological centrism) is that pious ideological camps tend to be populated by — let's just say it — crackpots. This phenomenon is self-evident on the right (or at least it's self-evident to those of us on the left). The Palins, the Cruzes, the Bannons are a fascinating but offputting, ghoulish bunch who dwell in what is commonly designated the fever swamp. On the left we have, most prominently, Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, the former of whom recently degraded my beloved and fundamentally pragmatic democratic socialism by converting it into a wholly unrealizable fantasy. In brief, he took democratic socialism into crackpot territory, promising overnight fixes to sempiternal problems.

Sen. Sanders now has an even bigger problem than having lost the primary race. Only a self-satisfied crackpot would so blindly proceed in the way he's proceeded, which, as the NY Times reports, has ignited a revolt within his political revolution:

While the establishment of [his] new group, Our Revolution, has been eagerly awaited by many of his most ardent supporters, it has been met with criticism and controversy over its financing and management.

A principal concern among backers of Mr. Sanders, whose condemnation of the campaign finance system was a pillar of his presidential bid, is that the group can draw from the same pool of "dark money" that Mr. Sanders condemned for lacking transparency.

The announcement of the group, which will be livestreamed Wednesday night, also comes as the majority of its staff resigned after the appointment last Monday of Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s former campaign manager, to lead the organization.

Who would have thought it? you might sarcastically ask. A rebellion against Weaver, a man of no identifiable charm whatsoever? And a revolt against Our Revolution as a 501(c)(4), perhaps the most targeted anathema of Sanders's entire campaign? Only crackpots can't see outside their self-fashioned bubbles.

And then there is Dr. Stein, who is similarly bubbling with self-unaware, crackpotted derailments. Yesterday, relates Dana Milbank, "she accused the famed leftist" and Stein-supporter Noam Chomsky "of being cowardly," since the good professor has possessed the good sense to urge a nation-saving vote for Hillary Clinton in swing states. The Green Party nominee, groans Milbank, is pushing "a phony equivalence between Clinton, a flawed and unloved but conventional candidate, and Trump, who is running a campaign of bigotry, xenophobia and intimations of violence." And that, as they say, is just nuts.

Thus even if your leftist host were inclined to decamp from pragmatic centrism, where in the name of political sanity would I go? To His Revolution headed up by both a smug martinet and an unreconstructed fabulist? To a demagogic physician (Stein also sensationally claims that Clinton exposed "top secret" intel in her emails) unable to recognize the difference between traditional coalition politics and goofy cryptofascism?

Thank you, no. Pragmatically I am left with centrism — that most interesting of places, where the two ends collide.

 

I think I'll wrap things up for the day. I'm too distracted waiting for word from my daughter about the final leg of her journey. Next I'll start worrying about her return flights — 10 months away. 

P.S.: She made it just fine. She was in her host bedroom by 10:30 pm, French time. 

 

A towering fraud

Donald Trump, the trustworthy alternative to Hillary Clinton:

After bragging for a year about how cheaply he was running his campaign, Donald Trump is spending more freely now that other people are contributing ― particularly when the beneficiary is himself.

Trump nearly quintupled the monthly rent his presidential campaign pays for its headquarters at Trump Tower to $169,758 in July, when he was raising funds from donors, compared with March, when he was self-funding his campaign [and paying rent of $35,458].

With Defalcating Donald, everything is a con.