PMC Commentary

Take heart: the right and its "continued erosion"

In a lengthy analysis of demographic trends, the Atlantic's Ron Brownstein makes a point related to the concluding point I made earlier this morning:

Despite President Trump’s magnetic appeal for working-class whites, those fiercely contested voters continued their long-term decline as a share of the national electorate in 2016, a new analysis of recent Census Bureau data shows.

That continued erosion underscores the gamble Trump is taking by aligning the GOP ever more closely with the hopes and fears of a volatile constituency that, while still large, has been irreversibly shrinking for decades as a share of the total vote.

A "volatile constituency" is, by definition, subject to change. Thus it is something of a bootless wish for the left to confront the right, for in sheer, practical numbers the white-working-class-centered right is going down.

What I noted earlier is that confrontation with the right is also something of a misguided wish, since the right isn't listening anyway.

Some readers may have misinterpreted that post. Vis-a-vis the right, I was advocating neither a pro-ridicule nor anti-ridicule stance among liberals. If one wants to ridicule the right, have at it. If one prefers to keep one's counsel, then keep it. It makes no difference. Again, the right isn't listening, hence both silence and screeds are equally effective.

There is persuasion to be done, yet it shall be done externally. To repeat: To whatever extent there are thoughtful but nonetheless temporarily insane Trump-voters subject to changing opinion, "they will soon flee the irrational herd — but they must first see for themselves the ruin they have caused. No amount of liberal argumentation will lead them back to thoughtfulness; they cannot be reached — for they reside in unreachable red America. So be it. Liberals' only choice is no choice at all. They must simply wait this out."

In short, benign neglect.

As both the Bible and Shakespeare pointed out (the latter more authoritatively), it is probably wise that one not waste one's time arguing with idiots. However if arguing makes your day, then argue away. The point to grasp here, though, is that benignly neglecting the idiots is at least as effective as confronting them — and far less trouble.

 

Anything to make the imbeciles happy

"Playing to his base" is only a euphemism for succumbing to imbecility.

First there was this:

And now this from the Times, which is scarcely surprising:

Trump is expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, three officials with knowledge of the decision said, making good on a campaign pledge but severely weakening the landmark 2015 climate change accord that committed nearly every nation to take action to curb the warming of the planet….

The exit of the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas polluter would not dissolve the 195-nation pact, [but would make it] "far more likely that we will breach the danger limit of 3.6 degrees," [said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton]. That is the average atmospheric temperature increase above which a future of extreme conditions is considered irrevocable. "We will see more extreme heat, damaging storms, coastal flooding and risks to food security"….

"From a foreign policy perspective, it’s a colossal mistake — an abdication of American leadership," said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat and the under secretary of state during the presidency of George W. Bush. "The success of our foreign policy — in trade, military, any other kind of negotiation — depends on our credibility. I can’t think of anything more destructive to our credibility than this," he added.

Trump is the "colossal mistake" and hunched, Neanderthal-walking destruction of U.S. credibility, and he reconfirms both every day. 

 

Only time will reconcile blue America with (parts of) red America

By now it's a cliché, or at the very least, a commonplace: There are two distinct Americas, red and blue, and in this divided republic "tens of millions of Trump opponents cannot communicate with tens of millions of his supporters. There is no viable vocabulary. There is no shared reality."

That's how the NYT's Roger Cohen frames it, and virtually everyone would agree that Cohen frames it accurately. Political polarization and tribalism and self-reinforcing echo chambers have demarcated red from blue and created a kind of antebellum sectionalism nearly as detached as blue from gray. The only thing that both sides agree on is that there is no common understanding of where we've been, where we are, and where we're going.

From this, Cohen proceeds to frame another cliché — only this time, though just as familiar, it's a peculiar one. "This [absence of a shared reality] is the chasm to which Fox News, Republican debunking of reason and science, herd-reinforcing social media algorithms, liberal arrogance, rightist bigotry, and an economy of growing inequality have ushered us."

"Liberal arrogance." With equal disapproval Cohen heaves it into the cesspool of Fox News, anti-intellectualism, and right-wing bigotry. Such equal-parts damnation is also part of seemingly obligatory both-sides-ism. We are two distinct Americas because we choose to be two distinct Americas; the arrogant blue is as culpable as the anti-intellectual (etc. etc.) red. "America needs the conversations it’s not having," muses Cohen. "They start, for both sides, with listening."

Ah but liberals have listened, and Cohen himself delineates what they've heard from the right: gibberish about "welfare queens" and unlimited guns and wicked government and also wicked environmental regulations and "illegals" taking American jobs and the need to drag a parochial God into public schools and "We lost our discipline and our moral code in this country … [and s]o we need honest Trump to shake things up."

Although Cohen throws "liberal arrogance" in with the sins of the right, it's instructive that he offers no similarly asinine liberal arguments to match the above from the right. The reason for this omission is, of course, that contemporary liberalism is fundamentally rational; it is empirically based and thus proceeds on the basis of the verifiable. There is, it should be admitted, a faction on the left that violates the fundamental rationality of contemporary liberalism. But it is mostly young, largely naive, and has, of late, been rejected by liberalism's main body.

But back to liberals' "arrogance." Is it arrogant to be confidant in sound public policy, to note the social harm of unlimited guns or urge the protection of our planet or argue — empirically — that government can be a force for good? And is it arrogant of liberals to unsympathetically remark on a white working class that not only votes for its own sabotage, but has led the rest of us to this hellish nightmare of a Trump presidency?

For decades the left has warned that the right's fundamental irrationality could bring us to grief. Well, we have arrived. The right doesn't see it because the right chooses not to see it, which is to say, the right is as willfully blind as it is broadly destructive. Is it arrogant of blue America to cease attempted communication with — in effect, to give up on — a red America that has folded its arms in ruinous intent?

Cohen says "there are hateful racists among Trump supporters; there are also many decent, thoughtful, anxious, patriotic Americans who felt they were losing some part of their country’s essence." Let us grant that; let us grant that the thoughtful ones, in voting for Trump, merely experienced some sort of temporary insanity. Accordingly, they will soon flee the irrational herd — but they must first see for themselves the ruin they have caused. No amount of liberal argumentation will lead them back to thoughtfulness; they cannot be reached — for they reside in unreachable red America. So be it. Liberals' only choice is no choice at all. They must simply wait this out. That's not arrogance. It's reality.

 

Republicans are warming up their deficit machine

The Wall Street Journal, via Political Wire:

Republicans … are scouring the tax code, searching for ways to offset the deep rate cuts they desire. But their proposals for border adjustment—which would tax imports—and for ending the business interest deduction and making major changes to individual tax breaks for health and retirement have all hit resistance within the party. The only big revenue-raising provision with anything close to Republican consensus is repealing the deduction for state and local taxes, and that idea faces objections from blue-state lawmakers in the party.

Prepare for the return of massive budget deficits because of unneeded tax cuts, which is the one thing this Congress and its president will hasten into law. As long as Trump is in office Republicans will dismiss as innocuous that for which they vilified Obama — the growing national debt. They will, however, resume denouncing deficits and debt as the nation's most contemptible atrocities once a Democrat returns to the White House in 2021.

This is but a public service reminder about that which everyone has known for nearly 50 years, and for just as long has given the GOP a pass. And so the party persists in its familiar hypocrisy. Why not? 

 

A blackmailed administration?

CNN:

Russian government officials discussed having potentially "derogatory" information about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and some of his top aides in conversations intercepted by US intelligence during the 2016 election, according to two former intelligence officials and a congressional source.

One source described the information as financial in nature and said the discussion centered on whether the Russians had leverage over Trump's inner circle [damn don't we all wonder who that could be?]….

The sources … cautioned the Russian claims to one another "could have been exaggerated or even made up"; they "could be overstating their belief to influence," said one of the sources.

That may be. What is clear, however, is that we've seen no evidence of Russian overstatement, exaggeration, or confection. Indeed the Donald and Jared are behaving just as one would expect two blackmailed morons to behave.

 

Your morning double take, courtesy you-know-who

Holy Batshit-Crazyman! his contradictions are enough to make one gag. Today he (re)tweeted this:

Two days ago he tweeted this:

His stupidity leaves one speechless.

 

Brzezinski was "deeply troubled" by Trump

David Ignatius's thoughtful tribute to Zbigniew Brzezinski doubles, inexorably, as a wholesale condemnation of Trump.

Brzezinski, who died Friday, devoted most of his career to explaining and enhancing this idea of a robust, supple, U.S.-led architecture for global security and prosperity….

Brzezinski was deeply troubled in his final months by the evidence that this order — the work of his generation — had been undermined almost capriciously by the rise of the inexperienced President Trump.

If there is fault in Ignatius's observations, it lies in describing Trump as merely "inexperienced" in the field of foreign policy. He is that, of course, but he is far more than that. He's a deliberate plague, an aggressive arrogance, a ferociously unschooled bully who delights in entertaining the rabble with pretentious stupidities. He's a populist whose foreign policy is to make the United States less popular among the honorable nations of the world.

Ignatius writes that "Brzezinski’s concept of the liberal international order was that it rested on a framework of alliances and global institutions that could adapt as the world evolved." Brzezinski's ordered concept was, for decades, shared by American lawmakers on a bipartisan basis. Trump's substituting concept is that of bromances with vile dictators and, as Ignatius puts it, "recklessly challenging the institutions of the West."

President Carter's national security adviser "would have been appalled, but not surprised," continues Ignatius, "by the results of Trump’s Group of Seven meeting last week." The columnist's use of "appalled" brushes against understatement. For what Trump unfurled in Europe bordered on the treasonous betrayal of virtually everything good and decent that the United States once stood for in the international arena.

Trump is no president in the traditional sense of the title. He is instead a sickness — more a cancer on the presidency than a president.

 

What does the GOP stand for? Truth-teller Ben Sasse evades the truth.

When asked by Politico how he would describe the current president, Republican Senator Ben Sasse tellingly answered: "Current president." And that was that. When further asked to describe his own party — that is, what it stands for — Sasse's answer was more complex: "Question mark," and "I don't know." But again, that was that.

Sen. Sasse should get out more, or at the very least he should more often consult with his boss in the Senate. For Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a Reuters interview, had an answer for both above questions:

What the administration is doing, not only am I comfortable with it, but I think the vast majority of Republicans in Congress feel that this is a right-of-center presidency, which is what we had hoped. If you look at what the president is actually for, it strikes me as indistinguishable from what a President Jeb Bush or a President Marco Rubio would have been advocating.

Although not even low-energy Jeb or little Marco would have degraded U.S. foreign policy as the Donald has done, McConnell was correct that the latter has walked in lockstep with the GOP on domestic policy.

Both have set out to destroy health-insurance guarantees provided under Obamacare, and both are hailing the vast benefits of further fattening the rich through monstrous tax cuts (which dovetails with slashing health-insurance guarantees). And of course both envision the economic Elysium to come from deregulated American capitalism, which only makes sense; after all, it worked so well in the 1920s-Hooverian culmination.

What does the Republican Party stand for? Republican Ben Sasse says "I don't know." And yet his reputation as the party's lone truth-teller is reaching presidentially aspiring heights.

You get the point.

 

Trump just exonerated the "deep state." Will his base notice? (Hint: NO.)

Has it gone unnoticed that Donald Trump has exonerated the nefarious "deep state" from conspiring against his presidency?

From that one tweet we cannot know with precision Trump's definition of "many." But the drift of his tweet is, unmistakably, that actual leaks aren't the problem; the real problem is the media who simply make stuff up. That is Trump's opinion in Trump's own words. He did, however, then proceed quite helpfully in defining "many."

Here, many now means all — or again, such is his drift, and in this instance his drift is more precision than driftiness. Those sources don't exist is a direct statement of all-inclusiveness. Therefore fake news is not the co-enemy (along with the deep state); fake news is the singular enemy. In sum, the deep state is entirely off the hook.

Trump is merely being Trump, though, which of course means that Trump is lying. His tweets are only for the benefit of his boob-base, which will eagerly swallow whatever contradiction he throws at it. As you know, Trump has a long history of defaming the U.S. intelligence community (significant parts of which constitute the nefarious "deep state). And his defamation has turned to paranoia — which is the thumping contradiction of his recent, deep-state-exonerating tweets.

"Two White House officials," reports Politico, "said Trump and some aides including Steve Bannon are becoming increasingly convinced that they are victims of a conspiracy against Trump's presidency, as evidenced by the number of leaks flowing out of government — that the crusade by the so-called 'deep state' is a legitimate threat, not just fodder for right wing defenders."

In the coming days Trump & Associates will, no doubt, again frog-walk this conspiracy as the principal if not singular enemy — thus utterly contradicting his tweets of the last 24 hours. But because Trump is Trump, the fake news media will also be fingered by him as the principal if not singular enemy.

One day the leaks will be completely "made up" by the nefarious press, and the next day the leaks will spring only from the nefarious deep state. Trump will tweet both. And yet his base will never notice — nor care — that on 28 May 2017, Trump wholly exonerated the deep-state intelligence community from conspiring against his presidency.

 

Trump's Law: this scandal doubles in intensity every week

"The president's lawyers have urged Trump not to write adversarial Twitter messages or make off-the-cuff comments about the Russia investigations, explaining that those utterances could further hurt him if it seems as though he’s trying to obstruct the inquiries."

That, reports the Washington Post, is one White House line of defense against the righteous onslaught. We might think it a rather astonishing defensive line, since most anyone with an IQ above Louie Gohmert's would scarcely need it "urged" on him. The object of urging, however, believed that firing James Comey — a prima facie instance of obstruction of justice — was a brilliant tactic, hence we shouldn't be surprised that the object's lawyers are urging astonishingly self-evident advice.

Which the object will cluelessly ignore, since, compared to the object, Louie Gohmert is a deep thinker, a keen tactician and even keener strategist, a veritable Cato of letters.

Nestled alongside the president's legal advice is that of grittier and more street-brawling stuff, such as campaign adviser Barry Bennett's. Trump should do "rallies once a week," he tells the Post. "You get to say whatever you want to say, and you don’t have to take questions," he adds.

Imbued in Bennett's advice is of course an implicit admission of both presidential incompetence and guilt. Trump is incapable of fielding questions in a coherent manner, and Bennett knows it. Trump is also culpable as hell, which Bennett also knows, otherwise Bennett would instead advise Trump to simply get the liberating truth out.

Yet a third line of defense is being urged on Trump — and this one, dovetailing with the second, will superfluously smother the first. Here, the defensive line turns not only offensive but pointed: "The deep state and the swamp and many in the media are never going to let up," says Jason Miller, a communications adviser to candidate Trump.

And there you have it: An administration offense that runs home to campaign mama; endless blathering to the boobs about the evil media, the miasmic swamp, and the transcendently vague deep state — all of which will excite the boobs and impress on them that their man in the White House is winning.

Which they'll genuinely believe until the indictments roll out and articles of impeachment are written. For the onslaught is not merely righteous — it is swelling to insurmountable dimensions. Moore's law, which states that computing power doubles every two years, is nothing compared to the unmasking and damning speed of Trump's scandal.

If I'm wrong, we might as well kiss America goodbye — for Trump's treason will have prevailed, and will therefore repeat in increasingly sinister fashion.

 

Trump's bottomless greed is at the root of this unprecedented scandal

Yesterday a Washington Post story sketched the muddled background: In a post-election meeting of Trump-son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump-emotional-doppelgänger Michael Flynn and Putin-mouthpiece Sergey Kislyak, the creation of a Trump-Putin backchannel housed in the Russian embassy and designed to evade U.S. intelligence services was discussed.

Reuters' subsequent story then reported — 18 paragraphs in — what seems to be a clarifying forefront: "FBI investigators are examining whether Russians suggested to Kushner or other Trump aides that relaxing economic sanctions would allow Russian banks to offer financing to people with ties to Trump.... The head of Russian state-owned Vnesheconombank [which is under U.S. sanctions], Sergei Nikolaevich Gorkov, a trained intelligence officer whom Putin appointed, met Kushner at Trump Tower in December."

Simple greed and byzantine financing — the two hallmarks of a Trump empire too sleazy for Wall Street. It is said that Trump sees every relationship as transactional, and what typically Trumpian and thus sleazier transaction than selling out American democracy in exchange for convertible Russian rubles?

This president never expected to win the White House, and neither, I'm sure, did Russia's president ever expect the unfolding of such an epic tragicomedy. But there would be rewards for a Trump campaign cooperating with Russian intelligence in the pursuit of corrupting our electoral process and undermining confidence in the incoming Clinton administration. The fix, as they say, was in. Trump going on to shockingly win the White House was but icing on the kekc. There would be no Clinton administration, American democracy had indeed been sabotaged, and Trump's empire and Russia's money would come to its understanding — on an even cozier level. Kushner could not wait to verbally draft the sinister contract.

Was Trump personally involved in all the details of this assorted perfidy? I doubt it. As the New Yorker's Adam Davison wrote two weeks ago: "I spoke recently to a longtime business associate of Donald Trump, and asked his thoughts about the various investigations into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. He laughed and said that there is no way Trump could have been part of such a conspiracy. 'He couldn’t sit through the meeting,' the associate said." A Trumpian order for a loose "understanding," however, is an altogether different matter. Because Trump is so seedily greedy and necessarily fond of byzantine financing, one can easily imagine such an amorphous Trumpian diktat.

It makes sense. Indeed the mysterious backchannel and FBI investigation into the Kushner-Gorkov meeting about possible tits for tats only make sense if one thinks on Trump's endlessly unscrupulous level and bores into his limitless, transactional greed. Whether it was through the presidency or merely his campaign for it, Trump would secure a monied payoff. It's who he is. It is all he is.

 

Kushner's cone of silence

There is no end to Team Trump's nitwitted skulduggery:

Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports … [italics natural].

Kislyak reportedly was taken aback by the suggestion of allowing an American to use Russian communications gear at its embassy or consulate — a proposal that would have carried security risks for Moscow as well as the Trump team.

I wish Stanley Kubrick were still around to put all this on film.

 

Short and appropriately sour

 

An appalling week from an appalling president

Again, we're only about four months in to this appalling administration, so Trump has plenty of time to appall us even more. But I must say that the past week has been the most appalling yet. Atop a mountain of domestic abominations such as his exceedingly abominable budget, Trump has peered across the globe, seeking friends to abuse and foes to admire. At that, he's done a magnificent job.

"What possesses him to treat America’s allies so badly?" asks the NY Times's editorial board. Trump offers an "enthusiastic embrace of countless autocrats, among them Vladimir Putin of Russia and King Salman of Saudi Arabia," while slandering our European friends of 70 years.

And slander it is, since he was intentionally misleading in his assault on those friends. As BBC News remarks: "He spoke again of countries who fall short of the Nato defence spending target as 'owing' money from past years - which is not how things work at all…. Nato states' contributions are voluntary and a target of spending 2% of GDP on defence is only a guideline."

No doubt Defense Secretary Mattis has patiently explained this many times to his petulant boss. But what does Trump care? The Europeans are effete losers in the president's book, which was scribbled by a pseudointellectual punk of Breitbartian sewage. No, when on the road Trump reserves his admiration for tough guys, such as the Saudi monarch, who has rolled Trump but good. Writes Fareed Zakaria:

This week’s bombing in Manchester, England, was another gruesome reminder that the threat from radical Islamist terrorism is ongoing. And President Trump’s journey to the Middle East illustrated yet again how the country central to the spread of this terrorism, Saudi Arabia, has managed to evade and deflect any responsibility for it. In fact, Trump has given Saudi Arabia a free pass and a free hand in the region….

[What's more,] almost every terrorist attack in the West has had some connection to Saudi Arabia.

"Virtually none," continues Zakaria, "has been linked to Iran," on which Trump focused his uninformed ire. And in so doing he poured more American fuel on the flaming Sunni-Shia conflict.

Iran is at least struggling toward a democratic future, and of course Europe is already there. So naturally Trump aligns with autocratic Saudi Arabia and Europe's 70-year-old menace, Russia.

Trump is a vast embarrassment to the United States and some would add perplexing. Not I. He's an embarrassment because he's an imbecile. That's the short but sufficient explanation of this wretched horror of an ignorant little man.

 

The deplorable Montana election

They're deplorable, all right.

Greg Gianforte could stand in the middle of Billings, Montana's Grand Avenue and body-slam somebody and he wouldn’t lose any more than nine percent of his Republican voters, as one poll found. He could refuse to publicly align himself with the GOP's hideous health-care plan but be heard lauding it to lobbyists, and he'd survive — with a majority of Montana's voters. He could identify with a probably criminal and definitely unstable president and receive "the biggest applause" from the cretins when citing the criminally insane president.

You just can't keep a good deplorable down. They of course have a democratic right to vote for a duplicitous and violent scoundrel, but their ethos is that of eager, undemocratic brownshirts. Reports Politico:

[Gianforte's] altercation Wednesday night was widely laughed off by attendees at his Election Day party, as they stared — some angrily — at the gathered press. When Gianforte apologized to the reporter he assaulted in his speech at the end of the night, an attendee yelled that he was forgiven, as others shook their head, expressing the opinion that he shouldn't have to apologize. Earlier in the evening, the media-hatred was even a punchline of supporters' jokes. Eyeing a reporter's press badge skeptically just after polls closed, one attendee explained, "We’re looking for the right press to flip off." Then she laughed and walked away.

The deplorables won't be denied. A Republican operative "closely involved" in Gianforte's race told Politico on Election Day eve: "When we run shitty candidates it’s going to be hard to win." But win they do. For there is no Republican candidate too scurrilous or mentally unbalanced to alienate the deplorables. In the course of merely a few decades they've taken the 163-year-old party of Lincoln and T.R. and reduced it to the party of Trump and Gianforte, both of whom would have sent Dwight Eisenhower retching.

Said a Republican strategist: "[Gianforte] won't be the only hot-headed lunatic in the House" — for the deplorables are everywhere. The strategist added that that "doesn't mean it's an easy situation for Republicans to deal with," meaning — what? The strategist seems to be in denial. Deplorable congressional Republicans giddily elected by hordes of deplorables are now the norm, not an exception to be "dealt with" by a responsible Republican majority.

Come on, Mr. Strategist, wake up and smell the stench. Your party has been conquered by mass personalities of a decidedly authoritarian bent, by gangs of deplorables who either adore or — even worse — tolerate the most deplorable among us, as evidenced by the triumphant likes of Gianforte and Trump. And the deplorability of it all won't stop until strategists and operatives and genuinely conservative activists such as yourself declare that enough is enough — and leave this deplorable party.