PMC Commentary

An embarrassment of Rich's (superb words)

As a lowbrow public service, I have edited, for clarity and essence, Frank Rich's 4,454-word New York Magazine article, "No Sympathy for the Hillbilly," to a more manageable 25:

If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.

If 25 words, in your estimation, are too many to forward to your uncomprehending brother-in-law of Trumpian persuasion, perhaps he'll appreciate these mere seven, which serve as the subtext of Rich's article:

[L]et the GOP own these intractable voters.

And there you have: Frank Rich's 4,454-word article in only 32, tops.

 

I must cut out a bit early. Dr. appointment — and big day! I'm finally going to have this bothersome gastric tube removed (I hope). I also hope to learn more about the date of my next surgery, which will, however, promptly restore a gastric tube's seven-week presence. Can't win 'em all.

***

I am — oh yeah, fuck yes — now g-tube free, and I have no more incision bandaging. Damn it feels good. On May 2 we'll schedule the third and final surgery, and this will all be done. Great day.  

 

Gerson's "free fall" - and another one

Some of the finest critiques of the Trump administration and its politically dysfunctional party have come from none other than Bush-speechwriter Michael Gerson. Indeed, in general he's probably the finest writer on the Washington Post's op-ed page (E.J. Dionne being the smartest).

This morning, having designated the administration as "empty, easily distracted, vindictive, shallow, impatient, incompetent and morally small," Gerson summarizes the GOP's "free fall" as rather hopeless:

It is now dawning on Republicans what they have done to themselves. They thought they could somehow get away with Trump. That he could be contained. That the adults could provide guidance. That the economy might come to the rescue. That the damage could be limited.

Instead, they are seeing a downward spiral of incompetence and public contempt — a collapse that is yet to reach a floor. A presidency is failing. A party unable to govern is becoming unfit to govern.

And what, in the short term, can be done about it? Nothing. Nothing at all.

I admire Gerson's writing and his many insights, but here, he falls freely himself. For there is, in the short term, something that can be done, at least far as shoring up the Trump administration goes. Congressional Democrats can bail him out.

I shan't (not so soon, anyway) rehash my familiar objection to a Democratic rescue of Trump. (You're welcome.) I shall offer some much-needed clarification of it, however.

My objection has been read by some as a purely (and somewhat tawdry) political one: That should the Dems cooperate with Trump and help him put some intelligent policy points on the board, the latter will grab all the credit and leave Democrats, pathetically, begging for praise (which won't be forthcoming). It's true that this would be politically unwise of Democrats, and so I've opposed it. But there's far more to my opposition than the self-harming, short-term politics of assisting Trump, even if intelligent policies enacted would be of some national benefit. And it has to do with the long game of American politics — and just plain human decency.

Assisting Trump, cooperating with Trump, merely tolerating Trump would be to reward the most ghastly politics ever inflicted on this country. If Democrats wish to see a quadrennial repetition of Trump's monstrously contemptible politics played out — the lies, the distortions, the malignant hate, the fake news dispensed daily — then just give him a boost and save his thin hide. American politics would be permanently corrupted by the scourge of Trumpian politics, for it will have proven itself permissible — and salvageable. This generation would suffer less than the next, and the next, as America slides irretrievably into the prevailing Trumpian slime.

My objection to Democratic cooperation is about more than cheap politics — and it's not personal, Donald. It's strictly business — the long-term and serious business of this nation: passably honorable politics and thus responsible governance. To both, cooperating with Trump would only do limitless harm.

 

The Trump administration's staggering incompetence in its coverup

I'm coming to believe that the guilty-as-hell Trump administration is seeking exoneration-by-pity. Never in the history of American political skulduggery has such absolute incompetence in covering up crimes been demonstrated — or invoked?

Nixon's plumbers, who had helpfully retained the White House's telephone number in their personal belongings (so that the FBI could instantly make the conspiracy connection) were at the head of their cloak-and-dagger class compared to the bumbling boors who have so far constituted the Trump-Russia Affair.

The administration's management of a scandal that is in fact bigger than Watergate has been so inept (one is tempted to say "Bush league") and self-wounding, I'm beginning to feel rather sorry for them; my piling on feels as though I'm making fun of the developmentally disabled.

Yesterday, when the "news" broke that House Intel Committee chair and Trump employee Devin Nunes had been "helped" by "a pair of White House officials" to "somewhat vindicate" the bumbler in chief, I could scarcely work up a yawn. Who didn't already suspect this — indeed, "this" as a transcendence of suspicion and a matter of knowledge? Who on God's red earth hadn't already connected the immensely prominent dots?

One of Nunes's helpful WH elves was Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a National Security Council clown and Michael T. Flynn stooge whose job was protected only through the intervention of the utterly mad Steve Bannon. The NYT's passage on "what prompted Mr. Cohen-Watnick to dig into the intelligence" is a screamer. "There were conflicting accounts" of Cohen-Watnick's motivation, writes the Times, but "one official" says it was "to find evidence that would justify Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts about wiretapping." Well blow us away.

The Times then positively drips with straight-reporting sarcasm: "The real issue, Mr. Nunes has said, was that he could figure out the identities of Trump associates from reading reports." Oh that devilish Devin. He's a sharp one. But I've no doubt that his pitiable, real-issue reasoning was handed to him, in crayon, by the White House.

Then within hours broke the news that the already-proven-to-be-guilty-as-hell Mr. Flynn has requested immunity from criminal prosecution in exchange for congressional testimony. That's when my pity really kicked in. One of the bigger rats has abandoned the U.S.S. Trump, and he's now slapping detonators on its hull.

It would have never come to this had the campaign and then the administration been even remotely competent in the covering of its crimes. But Jesus! what a trail: Flynn, Roger Stone, Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort, indeed the candidate and president himself ("Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton's email") — a confederacy of self-evident incompetence so titanic, it makes one wonder how any of the confederates ever made it so far in business, consulting, or politics.

Sad!

 

That path? A bit rocky.

The blowback cometh:

Minutes after Mr. Trump’s post, his Republican critics took to Twitter to respond, in Trump-ese: "It’s a swamp not a hot tub. We both came here to drain it. #SwampCare polls 17%. Sad!" wrote Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who often sides with the [conservative] caucus on votes.

"It didn’t take long for the swamp to drain @realDonaldTrump," said Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, a member of the Freedom Caucus....

Michael Flynn Jr., a conservative activist — and son of Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser — went even further. "Why is @realDonaldTrump siding w/ estab Repubs (which we know r closet Dems) and looney Dems like Pelosi and Schumer? NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR."

And the kicker!

On Wednesday — about 18 hours before Mr. Trump’s Twitter attack — senior officials from the White House invited two dozen leaders from conservative groups for a closed-door session to plot a path ahead.

Don't you just love it?

 

God bless Donald J. Trump's little fingers

You'll have to decipher the political purpose of that tweet, because it baffles the hell out of me.

Lumping flaky Freedom Caucusers in with evil Democrats will likewise baffle, and perhaps dispirit, the hardcore Republican base — possibly to the point of simply staying home in 2018.

Internal divisions are a common feature of the two major parties; what's uncommon — and just plain nuts — is for the leader of one to publicly exacerbate the internal divisions.

 

It's not the ruling party. It's the unruly party.

Well here's a shock, from Axios:

There was an effort yesterday to get House GOP conservatives — the House Freedom Caucus and Republican Study Committee — to meet with GOP moderates — the Tuesday Group — to talk about a path forward after last week's failed health care effort.

It ended up deteriorating into blame-shifting and recriminations.

The Tuesday Group met yesterday, and a Tuesday Group source said there were "fireworks at the meeting," with members resentful at being told to sit down with the Freedom Caucus.

Oh my, there seems to be chronic unpleasantness taking place in the majority party's sandbox. Classic is this quote from a "White House source":

Welcome to my life the last two weeks. This was never about policy. This was about people wanting to oppose each other and it's such a divided conference at the moment it's hard to get things done. We were the ones caught in the crossfire.

That, of course, is unmitigated malarkey. The WH and its antecedent campaign have been in the front lines of blasting away at responsible, coherent governance. In a Politico op-ed, none other than the National Review's Rich Lowry grasps this fundamental point. "Trumpism is in crisis," he writes. "No officeholder in Washington seems to understand President Donald Trump’s populism or have a cogent theory of how to effect it in practice, including the president himself."

As is his wont, Lowry, from there, gets most everything else wrong, such as this beaut of miscomprehension: "Just because Trump and the conservative caucus are both 'anti-establishment' doesn’t mean they have anything else in common. Trump is more naturally an ally of the moderate Tuesday Group, except with a flame-throwing Twitter feed."

Trump is a natural ally of no one but himself. In my preceding post I quoted Princeton historian David Bell, who really rang the truth of the president's political solipsism: "Trump himself is … nearly always guided by a single principle: his own self-interest." That makes him a friend of nobody and the enemy of all.

And with that kind of executive "leadership," his party will persist in its unpleasant unruliness.

 

Would you cooperate with a snake?

This morning's NYT op-ed page is a contrast study, one of intellectual clarity versus a cognitive miasma.

On the right side of the page, in Thomas Edsall's "When the President is Ignorant of His Own Ignorance," lies a mountainous collection of perspicuity. "Trump seems to have no awareness whatsoever of what he does and does not know" is the nifty, quoted epistemological summation of philosophy professor Steven Nadler. "He is ignorant of his own ignorance." (Similar quotes abound in Edsall's column. There is international relations scholar Andrew Bacevich's description of Trump as "utterly unqualified, both intellectually and by temperament, for the office he holds"; and there's Princeton historian David Bell's observation that "Trump himself is abysmally ignorant about both international and domestic affairs, and he is nearly always guided by a single principle: his own self-interest.")

Mixing Nadler's philosophy and others' human psychology, one could say that Trump is the Platonic Ideal of the Dunning–Kruger effect: The man is so inept, so incompetent and so dimwitted, he is utterly incapable of recognizing just how inept, incompetent and dimwitted he is. Yet, paradoxically, he is also just serpentine enough to have known how to enchant mass ineptitude, electoral incompetence and populist dimwittedness. In a reverse metaphor, he was the guru-ish charmer and they were the cobra.

And now he's imploding. Scarcely two months into office, Trump's enormous deficiencies are Galluping along — downward. Each week brings another notch of public disapprobation; the shabby veneer of authoritarian knowhow is being systematically stripped via legislative blowups and amateurish coverups. Trumpism — the antiChrist of the not-sainted but still rather noble American political tradition — is on the ropes. And there it should stay, until bloodied and bruised beyond any recovery. The above-quoted scholars, I think, would agree.

And so we turn to the left side of the NYT op-ed page, where Will Marshall, of the Progressive Policy Institute, recommends a Democratic intervention of sorts. Here, the rough flipside of the Dunning-Kruger effect reveals itself: Those of actual ability often overestimate the ease — and, as a theoretical refinement, I would add the wisdom — of the task before them. In Marshall's clinical case, he conceives that Trump, cornered as he is, may be "willing to make real concessions to [Democrats'] core values and priorities," so that he can "start racking up 'wins.'" Hence "pragmatic Democrats should hear him out."

That Democrats' most fundamental "priority" should be the wholesale destruction of Trump and Trumpism tragically escapes what I would call Marshall's preening, do-gooder ken. There is no judicious pragmatism to be found in cooperating with a venomous snake that has reduced American politics to an abominable domestic spectacle and international embarrassment. Cooperation implies acceptance — what's come to be known as the "normalization" of Trumpism. And indulging in that — the normalization of America's most egregious political atrocity — would only lower Democrats into Trump's snake pit.

 

Hillary is back at it — is she not?

It appears that Hillary is running again.

Hillary Clinton took the stage at a diversity conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, making her most political comments since losing the 2016 presidential election.

Such as: "There is no place I'd rather be than here with you, other than the White House."

In humor there is truth, of course, and the presidential bug is a lifetime condition.

Her age as a factor? She's one year younger than Trump, and in January 2021, at the age of 73, she'll still be one year younger than Trump — whose approval rating by then, should he survive impeachment or his own party's tarring and feathering, should be in the single digits. At any rate, no, age would be an improbable adversity, given that her likely opponent would be even older.

Her likely opponents in the Democratic primaries? There's the real fun of imagination: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Deval Patrick, Chris Murphy perhaps — the latter two, I am particularly intrigued by. The "perhaps" applies to them all, since Hillary would almost certainly retain the party's establishment support (fortunate for Mrs. Clinton is that Tom Perez is DNC chair). And that, as Sen. Sanders learned, is a hard thing to buck.

Though intrigued by Patrick and Murphy, I'd be just (nearly?) as content with Hillary as the nominee. For if listless Democrats in only a handful of states had bothered to vote in 2016, she would, in 2020, be more than the nominee; she'd be the incumbent running for reelection — and America wouldn't be under its present threat, and Trump, still in private business, would merely be swindling someone, somewhere, somehow.

We'll know that Hillary is running again when she starts taking the stage at diversity conferences in Des Moines. 

 

His Mar-a-Lago. Your Mar-a-Largess.

Well isn't this precious ...

President Trump isn't concerned about the rising costs associated with his regular trips to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., the White House press secretary said Wednesday. 

That, from The Hill.

On the other hand, and in the interest of fairness and balance:

 

Brexit: It's happening (so duck!)

Speaking of international trade and the ability of some to thoroughly botch their global position, WaPo's Sebastian Mallaby has an insightful piece on Britain's upcoming calamity: the execution of Brexit.

The sure-to-unfold calamity, he writes, has been postponed by a "surprise recovery in the world economy" and British industry's yet-unpaid "price" of losing Europe as a single market. Trump’s election has also been a geopolitical distraction for Brits, and, in an exceptionally well-written passage, Mallaby notes Prime Minister Theresa May's "extraordinary position of not facing a coherent domestic opponent. The Labour Party is under the sway of hang-dog neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn."

But, continues Mallaby, time and distractions from Britain's inevitable calamity are running out:

With this week’s initiation of the Brexit talks, May will face a harder time. Trade-offs that could be pushed aside, on the argument that they were matters for future negotiation, will come more clearly into focus. The foolish bravado of the Brexiteers, who assured voters that negotiating with 27 other countries would be a simple challenge, will be relentlessly exposed. British businesses, which for the past nine months have been implementing earlier investment commitments, will freeze plans for new expansion. The moment of truth for British populism has come a bit nearer.

Britain is still our mother country, and one wonders how far the acorn will fall from the tree.

 

Trump's greater blunder: climate-change denial or trade?

In the long, really long term, long after Trump has been impeached or removed from office through the 25th Amendment, Tom Friedman may be proven correct that the president's singular triumph came in his "Make China Great campaign."

Friedman's principal theme, in "Trump Is a Chinese Agent," is that our cretin of a POTUS is handing China the future of clean-energy technology — "the next great global industry" — while attempting, in his executive-ordered destruction of President Obama's climate-change advances, to return the U.S. to a soot-filled, carbon-monoxide-clogged atmosphere (courtesy Trump's insane, coal-mining politics and "Big Coal and Big Oil" connivance).

As others have noted, however, Trump may come up short in his anti-environmental designs, given that so many U.S. states will refuse them, and private energy enterprises will no longer invest in ultimately doomed, outdated energy technology. They will invest instead in what China is heavily investing in: "electric cars, batteries, nuclear, wind, solar and energy efficiency."

It may be, then, that Trump's greatest triumph, in Making China Greater, will be singular only in the sense of having squandered Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement — a topic that Friedman leads with:

Trump took office promising to fix our trade imbalance with China, and what’s the first thing he did? He threw away a U.S.-designed free-trade deal with 11 other Pacific nations — a pact whose members make up 40 percent of global G.D.P.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership was based largely on U.S. economic interests, benefiting our fastest-growing technologies and agribusinesses, and had more labor, environmental and human rights standards than any trade agreement ever. And it excluded China. It was our baby, shaping the future of trade in Asia….

Trump just threw it away … because he promised to in the campaign — without, I’d bet, ever reading TPP. What a chump! I can still hear the clinking of champagne glasses in Beijing.

As well as the scurrying of Pacific Rim economies to China's Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which, observes Friedman, "has no serious environmental, intellectual property, human trafficking or labor standards like TPP."

Trump's anti-environmental executive order was — characteristically — stupid. There are, however, public and private structures in place to fight it. But there is no way to fight the immeasurable stupidity of what Trump did to Obama's forward-thinking Trans-Pacific Partnership.

 

The GOP's peculiar, cruel ability to make us laugh

OK, this one will be a breeze, for a change.

Yesterday, Republican congressman and Freedom Caucuser David Brat said "there is a [legislative] package in there that is a win-win." Fellow Freedom Caucus member Raúl Labrador predicted that "we will have a [splendid] product that will unify the conference." House Republican Whip Steve Scalise reflected that "we’re closer today [to passing this splendid legislation] … than we’ve ever been before." And last night, at a White House reception for Republican and Democratic senators, the president prophesied that "We are all going to make a deal" on this legislation, because this is "such an easy one."

And just what legislation were these Republican pols contemplating; what were they envisioning as so easy and forecasting great success for? Brace.

The repeal and replacement of Obamacare.

I kid you not, though they do. The con continues.

"Under extreme pressure from conservative activists, House Republican leaders and the White House have restarted negotiations on legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act," reports the NYT in — somehow — giggleless wording. Paul Ryan, of course, got in on the con at his daily press conference, although shockingly he "declined to say what might be in the next version of the Republicans’ repeal bill, nor would he sketch any schedule for action."

Nevertheless, the GOP base is not to worry. The next repeal-replacement bill will be a win-win, it'll be splendid, it'll be unifying, and it'll be easy.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi "asked members of her caucus to suggest ways of improving the Affordable Care Act." And that is rather easy. All they need to do is distribute copies of journalist and healthcare maven Steven Brill's Washington Post op-ed, "How Trump can make Obamacare work without changing the law."

The trick, notes Brill, is that "improving" the law lies in simply enforcing the law, such as Section 1402, which "lays out a set of formulas that, in essence, requires insurance companies to waive some of the deductibles and other co-payments for lower-income families." This provision is legally jammed up, though, because of a House Republican lawsuit, which House Republicans could drop.

Or, there's the ACA's Section 1342, which "promised to reimburse insurers that experienced extraordinary losses in the early years of the exchanges." But that, too, is going unenforced: It was "derailed by a provision that Sen. Marco Rubio slipped into a broader spending bill in 2015."

So there is a splendid, easy win-win after all; its problem is that it lacks something in the GOP-unifying department. But again, not to worry. The splendor of an alternative, conservative repeal-and-replacement bill is just around the corner — and for now, we can all enjoy the magnificent con of it all.

 

Garrison Keillor's latest: a must-read for men

Garrison Keillor has written his finest column yet for the Washington Post, "The secret delight of poetry." In it he briefly muses, for nostalgic effect, on the secondary-school terrors of a T.S. Eliot, "that small dark cloud of a poet," and he notes that the poetry of "Rage is simple; loneliness, despair — a child could do it.... But love is a challenge, especially for men." From there, Keillor moves to the practical side, for the modern Neanderthalic man, of self-composed poetry:

Men are wired for combat, to bash the enemy into submission, and it’s hard to wipe the blood and gore off your hands and sit down and write, “O wondrous thou, the wonderment of these my happiest days, I lift my pen to praise thy shining beauty” and so forth.

But you can do it….

Write the poem in black ink on a sheet of white paper — poems should never be sent by email, and never, never, never text a poem — hand it to her and as she reads it, put one hand on her shoulder so that you’re right there when she turns with tears in her eyes to embrace you and forgive you for every way you’ve messed up her life. This is the power of poetry. Poets get the girl.

I would suggest, my fellow male, that you accustom yourself to composing such ditties on a monthly basis, at a minimum. For you know as well as I that you're messing up her life in every way, and probably every bloody day. It's what we do. How they put up with us, I'll never understand. But they do. And if a poorly written poem can ease their torment, it's the least we can offer.

 

Meep-meep

From Roll Call's cartoonist, R.J. Matson: