PMC Commentary

Insufficient sycophancy

Elliott Abrams may be a neoconservative dolt, but is that what prevented his hiring? No, of course not.

President Trump has rejected the hiring of former Reagan and George W. Bush foreign policy aide Elliott Abrams as the deputy secretary of state after seeing writings in which Abrams had been critical of Trump before his victory last year….

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson … had backed Abrams for the job, arguing that the veteran Republican official’s knowledge of the State Department and Washington’s foreign policy bureaucracy would complement Tillerson’s lack of government experience.

I may not possess the world's thickest of political skin — let's say, that of a Barack Obama — but I am confident that were I president of the United States, burdened with a State Department of virtually no experience, I not only could but would overlook the writings of a once-critical foreign policy adviser. My feelings wouldn't be hurt to the extent that I'd deprive my secretary of state of some Foggy Bottom know-how.

Not so with Donald Trump. He's not a president with the nation's interests at heart; he is, rather, a child — and a pouty one at that. Welcome to Trumpworld, Secretary Tillerson, and good luck with it.

 

Pent-up rage at Trump's mushrooming neofascism

Free from the nuisances of more than two weeks of hospital life, this morning I had cable news on for a mere but uninterrupted 15 minutes before I erupted in vocal, anti-Trump invectives. I was positively sputtering at the television screen as B-rolls of Trump signing ignorant, vicious, hateful, moronically nativist executive orders played on.

"We'll soon be a nation of 10 million Anne Franks," I mentioned to a friend who is caring for me in my convalescence — and my friend, who's not particularly political, quite agreed.

A 2020 presidential primary question — perhaps the first conceived — also occurred, and the question could apply to both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates: "If you could return in time and strangle baby Donald in his cradle, would you?"

(Before some right-wing sourpuss alleges nefarious implications, please note that the above question is purely historical in nature; there is no suggestion whatsoever as to any contemporary act.) 

 

Stumblebumming Democrats?

I have just read the couple dozen comments to yesterday's post — perhaps my shortest ever — and I read them with no little interest. Within them runs the partisan theme (heroically countered in places) that Democrats are proceeding, in the face of Trumpian triumphalism, as the usual bunch of blind, unthoughtful stumblebums they always have been — you know, from the stumblebumming of FDR battling a Great and Global Depression as well as liberating half the world from fascism, to the equal stumblebumming of Barack Obama also battling a great and global near depression as well as suffering, with ineffable grace, this nation's historically most backward gang of political cutthroats.

Do Democrats stumble about nevertheless? Of course they do. All political parties do, given the vagaries of political events. Will Democrats roam in the wilderness for months or perhaps a year? Again, that wouldn't surprise. It takes time to recover from such senseless blows to common human decency and sane public policy, such as Trumpism and Ryanism have delivered.

But I can say this much for national Democrats: I'm goddamn proud of them. With near uniformity they have condemned and promised to fight the GOP brutality that has befallen us. For now, could we reasonably ask for any more? I think not. And I further think their better, if not best, days are ahead of them, as Trumpism exposes itself as the national and international blight that it is.

***

Now, excuse my brief absence. A dear friend is about to wheel me, as though I'm some sort of retired British colonel in plaid lap blanket, into a local park for some fresh air and sunshine, neither of which have I indulged for weeks. I wish you all an equally dreamy day. Life is good — and so much more appreciated when one knows that it, and the family and friendships that go with it, will be around a bit longer. (Sorry, I'm feeling exceptionally emotional today.)

 

I'm being sprung today. Don't know precisely when, but it's, like, going down, man. 

 

Still in a blissfull semi-coma

Yesterday I rejoiced that I had postponed my daily scribblings until my physical and mental health returned. I noted that I had been bordering on the hallucinatory -- hearing voices, espying vanishing figures in the wings, imagining bizarre conversations with myself, that sort of thing.

So it's good that I didn't post. For had I persisted in doing so, I would have related -- either last night or this morning, my most bizarre, hallucinatory event yet: That of Donald Trump blathering before a national audience that, for instance, "I turn on the T.V., open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos. Chaos. Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine."

And that he again boasted of his vast electoral college victory, while again excoriating the media, the intelligence community, and federal judges.

Commenting on any such hallucinations would have been as irresponsible -- as just plain nuts -- as commentating, say, on an extravagantly far-fetched nightmare I most recently had of the U.S. Senate confirming a staunch anti-environmentalist as this nation's next EPA administrator. That just couldn't happen.

Hence what I've been reading in the past 24 hours must only be the passing madness of fevered delusions and drug-induced addleness. As I emerge from my stewing befuddlements, either later today or tomorrow, the world will reveal itself to be a much saner place on which to comment, I'm sure.

 

Trumpmath

Moments ago, Trump repeated that his electoral college victory of 304 to 227 was like nothing seen since Ronald Reagan's.

Obama vs. Romney, 2012: 332 to 206

Obama vs. McCain, 2008: 365 to 173

Clinton vs. Dole, 1996: 379 to 159

Clinton vs. H.W.Bush, 1992: 370 to 168

H.W. Bush vs. Dukakis, 1988: 426 to 111

 

Struggling to return

I'm damn glad I didn't post anything yesterday, since throughout the day I was not only bordering on the hallucinatory, I was positively saturated in it.

Strange voices from nowhere shook me from twilight noddings -- voices that were, of course, not there. Nearly as frequent were shadowy figures looming in the periphery, all of whom would vanish upon my struggling to fuller consciousness.

Most frightening -- and hallucinatory -- of all, however, was one episode of fevered delusion I shall never forget, and am damn reluctant to confess. "Maybe the Trump administration won't be so bad after all," I thought to myself in one of my semi-comatose spirals.

It was, at that very moment, when I realized just how dreadful the early stages of dementia would be -- as well as how premature my return would be. For I was some kind of sick in the head. 

 

I'm sorry, but this is another bad day here at PMC's Commentary (remote location). I've little problem with handling post-surgical pain, since modern medications for that are so effective. I wish the same could be said about sleeplessness. I'm now on my ninth day of insomnolence and it's wearing me down to a blithering nothing. Virtually every suggestion I make as to how we might battle this scourge of sleeplessness is met with superior knowledge as to negative drug interactions, and so I go on, from night to night, from day to red-eyed day. It's the incoherence that results from days of sleep deprivation that worries me the most about posting; I wouldn't be aware that I had lost my mind, but you would be. And you don't deserve that. Perhaps I can get a long nap in later today and then get something up. I miss you guys.

***

One consolation: Orange jello to dine by, in the press-conference presence of Sean Spicer.

 

The Donald's presser

My computer came back up (thanks to repeated reboots, I guess?). Thus I was determined to write about something today; I just didn't know what. Trump resolved my indecision by staging a press conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau -- in which I learned, right off the bat, that the U.S. and Canada have been productive allies for some time. Well I'll be damned *** Good God! he's still bragging about his "very large electoral vote" *** I have noticed before how deferential Trump is in bilateral press conferences. I assume his deference comes from his deep insecurities -- his knowing that he knows that he doesn't know what he's talking about? *** Another briefest of brief press conferences from our inveterate ignoramus. What did he take? Three, four questions? That was that. And as MSNBC immediately began reporting, the press conference was brief because Trump went out of his way to choose interrogators who would ask no real questions. And that's the way it's to be, for four years.     

 

This morning I'm experiencing more than somatic internal problems; bogeymen are rampaging across this here computer's system, which is causing a series of indescribable headaches in trying to post (for that matter, in trying to even read the news which might lead to posting). I can't simply switch out computers as I might at home, and I'm a bit tied down here.

I want inquiries made. I want acts of vengeance. I want whatever it takes to see that this war stops only in my victory, not my computer's. So please allow me a few more reboots and investigations into troubleshooting. I do hope to be back later today.      

 

The "promise" of Trump? Seriously?

I still may be some chronological distance from being at all useful. While 48 hours away from surgery might seem adequate for the execution of basic cognition within politics, my staring at this partial Ross Douthat sentence for 10 or maybe even 15 minutes, with no real comprehension, was, it seemed to me, a vivid sign of my mental vacuum: "The former Breitbart impresario has a clearer-than-your-average-Republican grasp of the political promise of Trumpism."

Although the sentence raced and reraced across my mind as lucid enough, something about it was nonetheless incomprehensible; indeed, something about Douthat's entire column, as it built on itself, seemed incomprehensible. Where was Douthat going with all this -- this sculpturing of Steve Bannon as the ideological avatar of Trumpism's promise? That was the key, the promise of it all. Trump, Bannon & Co. just rolled out the most bumbling of presidential administrations ever, one so undeniably clumsy, it has freed the right's Douthats to indulge in criticism of it (and today, Douthat indulges quite heavily).

Still, there's the promise. "There is no necessary reason," writes Douthat, "why [Trump] could not wake up tomorrow and decide to show a broad deference to Rex Tillerson and James Mattis on foreign policy." On domestic policy? "Let Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell figure out how to get an Obamacare replacement through Congress and tell Tom Price to prop the system up if they can’t. From the White House, the message should be simple, boring, popular. We want a big infrastructure bill. A middle-class tax cut. Corporate tax reform [etc]...."

Ah but there is a necessary reason -- an enormous, necessary reason -- why Trump could not just wake up tomorrow and show deference, broad or narrow, to anyone. And that reason, of course, goes by the name of Trump.

At the age of 70, will he begin reading Montesquieu, studying Madison, pondering Lincoln and the Roosevelts? Will he suddenly break with a career habit of cronyism ans corruption? Will he develop a love of briefing books? Or will he be, tomorrow, the same Donald Trump who has always scammed his way through life (I shall add no question mark here, since the question is a rhetorical one).

So is it Douthat, driven by his yearning to see Republican Trump succeed, who makes little to no sense in his column? Or is it me, rabidly compelled by the opposite yearning and perhaps by the cognitive aftershocks of major surgery as well, who is making little to no sense? I can't quite tell, but that's only because I feel so confused.

 

How to increase your circulation? Get Trump to hate you.

Dowd:

Every time our daft new president tweets about the "failing" New York Times, our digital subscriptions and stock price jump, driven by readers eager for help negotiating the disorienting Trumpeana Oceana Upside Down dimension rife with gaslighting, trolling, leaking, lying and conflicts.

Thank you, Maureen. I had been wondering how compelling Trump's pathological invective tweeted at the NYT had been.

Quite effective, I'd say.

Keep it up, Donald. 

 

Faith and secular liberalism

Andrew Sullivan praises Martin Scorsese's latest, Silence, which in "its very complexity and subtlety gave me hope in this vulgar, extremist time" of Trump. Sullivan goes on to take a gratuitous (or obligatory?) shot at secularists:

For some secular liberals, faith is some kind of easy, simple abdication of reason — a liberation from reality. For Scorsese, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery, and often inseparable from crippling, perpetual doubt.... Faith is a result, in the end, of living, of seeing your previous certainties crumble and be rebuilt, shakily, on new grounds.... Those without faith have no patience for a long meditation on it; those with faith in our time are filled too often with a passionate certainty to appreciate it.

It seems to me that for most secular liberals religious faith, while indeed an abdication of reason, is even more so an easy, simple inheritance of sectarianism. There is a reason Boston is populated by Catholics and Riyadh by Muslims, and it's not dumb chance. For one to behold as a personal discovery the universal truths of one's ancestors, dutifully passed on from generation to generation through childhood indoctrination (which has always struck me as unusually cruel), is for some a proud tradition; to others, it's an unexamined life.

Sullivan also seems to repeat the conceit that faith is privileged as the sole sufferer of "crippling, perpetual doubt." This conceit has become so socially accepted that even secular liberals fall for it. Why, I don't know. Personal as well as movement histories of artistic, philosophical, political and literary agonies are legion; in these disciplines there have been crises of belief every bit as profound as faith's agonies.

Finally, Sullivan's observation that "those without faith have no patience for a long meditation on it" I find puzzling. Has Sullivan, absent a faith in it, not long meditated -- and often quite well -- on secular liberalism? Are secular liberals not deserving of the same acknowledgement?

 

A joyous day. Trump gets shot down by a federal appeals court and I learn that surgery, to be performed Friday a.m., will finally rid me of this bowel-obstructed plague. I won't even have to check into the hospital, since the hospital is where I've been for a week. Obviously there will be no posting Friday, since throughout much of the day I'll be in the same state as our president: non compos mentis.

 

A rule to gag on

Have we not all wondered how invested was Mitch McConnell in chastising Elizabeth Warren, rather than simply intimidating Senate Democrats?

As Jon Chait notes, the Senate's Rule 19 -- a prohibition against senators attributing "to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator" -- is a "selectively enforced" rule, which further means it's capriciously applied, thus in the hands of Republicans, more likely to be abused. Such potential abuse hit a high point in McConnell's application of Rule 19 to Sen. Warren and her reading of a 1986, anti-Jeff Sessions letter by Coretta Scott King.

That reading, declared the majority leader, "impugned the motives and conduct" of Mr. Sessions, which, of course, any anti-anybody letter would have done. ("The rule," adds Chait, is not only a "slightly absurd imposition of etiquette designed to protect the swollen senatorial ego," but more importantly, it's an offense against logic. How else to argue Session's unworthiness than to argue his unworthiness?)

Nonetheless, McConnell made his point, which to me seemed less a verbal blast against Warren's "etiquette" than a pronounced warning delivered to all Senate Democrats. From now on the Dems are to keep a civil tongue, Republicans will be defining civility, and the latter, naturally, can say whatever they like. In the hands of the GOP, Rule 19 is much like the Donald Trump rule of "debate." (I'd point you to it, but there isn't one.)

Chait goes on to note the similarity between McConnell's invocation of Rule 19 and the House's "gag rule" of the 19th century, which "backfired," as censorship generally does. The older gag rule accomplished little more than exposing slavocracy's argumentational weaknesses; if the South could win a debate against the North only by shutting down debate, well, there you go. "Mitch McConnell’s gag rule on Elizabeth Warren," concludes Chait, "will likely have the same effect." What's more, McConnell's censorship "has given the opposition a platform, and a cause."

Did the crafty majority leader anticipate this? Of course he did. Did he, does he, care? That I doubt. For now, McConnell's only interest lies in intimidating Democrats on the Senate floor -- in effect, shutting them down, and out. On the House side, and in similar performance, there are the virtual dictatorships of Paul Ryan and Jason Chaffetz. And then there's the king of intimidation, the so-called president of the United States.

Ultimately? Undisputed one-party rule. That's the goal. But that will go the way of the 19th century's gag rule, assuming the American public has retained its hostility toward censorship.