PMC Commentary

An old truth

Michael Gerson makes a crucial point:

"Moderation is not indecision or centrism.... It is the mode or mood of a successful democracy. What [political scientist] Aurelian Craiutu calls 'a difficult virtue for courageous minds' puts an emphasis on reasonableness, prudence and balance. It is a principle rooted in epistemological modesty — a recognition that no one possesses the whole truth."

Indeed, moderation is a Montaignean virtue and Shakespearean strength; it's what the GOP lacks in whole and what some on the left are skirting. In politics, epistemological certainty translates into brashness, and in a pluralistic society, brashness ultimately fails. Witness the stockpiling collapse of the Republican Party. As a democratic socialist I'm more eager than most for swift and transformational progress. But my non-ideological mentors, the Bard and the Skeptic, are forever whispering in my ear: Proceed gently.

 

The most ironic photo ever shot

Trump speaking at the Energy Department on Thursday. (AFP/Getty Images)

 

The paradox of Trump's squalidness

This morning Krugman writes that Republicans, their Senate health care bill and their political philosophy in general are "cruel and immoral," which is boldly akin to venturing that Stalin was a nasty guy. It should be noted, however, that compared to their party's leader, most Republicans are charitable and virtuous.

Observes Politico: "Repealing the health law without a replacement would kick about 18 million Americans off of health coverage in the first year — and reach 26 million a few years later…. Repealing the entire law would remove subsidies, cut coverage, take away protections for pre-existing conditions and send premiums skyrocketing."

Krugman further writes that Republicans "live in an intellectual bubble," which, again, is inarguably true. Trump's environment, though, is one of unprecedented anti-intellectualism — a whirlpool of absolute mindlessness. He is doing what congressional Republicans haven't been able to do in 40 years. He's making them look thoughtful.

 

Just say it: Donald Trump is mad.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski answered Trump's vicious tweet. According to Axios, Scarborough and someone named "Brzenzski" blasted Trump. Mediaite is even more creative, reporting that Scarborough and someone named "Brzezenski" wrote a scathing rebuke.

To repeat: Scarborough and Brzezinski simply answered Trump's tweet. I saw nothing blasting or scathing about it. What this confrontation does demonstrate with a certain ferocity, however, is that what this country needs is another president, as well as copy editors.

In Scarborough and Brzezinski/Brzenzski/Brzezenski's reply to toddler Trump, the cable network hosts employed a light touch. "America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president," they wrote. "We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show." They recommended that Trump "keep his 60-inch-plus flat-screen TV tuned to 'Fox & Friends.'"

With credible and easily verifiable recall, the hosts pointedly denied Trump's tweeted claims about their pathetic requests to attend him at Mar-a-Lago. They also denied Mika's face-lift bleeding; indeed they denied that Mika ever had a face lift, which she obviously did not. These are statements of fact, and I see nothing "scathing" about factual statements.

In what some might see as scathing but I see as fair playing, the MSNBC hosts did reveal that, aside from being an ignorant sociopath, the president of the United States is a bungling blackmailer. "This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked." They didn't beg, and Nixon, taking Kennedy's advice, rarely got mad — he generally got even. Trump isn't that functional.

Scarborough and Brzezinski conclude their answer to Trump with the roundly familiar: "We … have noticed a change in his behavior over the past few years…. The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check."

In its familiarity, that passage is rather sedate. Other lay commentators have explicitly noted with ample psychiatric evidence that Trump's inability to keep his worst instincts in check is, manifestly, a thundering sign of madness. This, the network hosts did not write. Yet had they observed what others have symptomatically observed, it would not have been scathing. It would, rather, have been a matter of fact. Which is to say, characterizations of Trump as mad are no longer mere opinion. They are objectivity itself — and to label objectivity as scathing is to throw objectivity into the realm of mere opinion.

And that's a disservice to the nation. Trump's unfitness for office is straightforward and factual: The president of the United States is mad.

 

Trump is getting sicker by the day

His pathological vileness is deepening:

No president of the United States would issue such a hateful remark for public consumption. That's why I can tolerate this sinister clown only by seeing him as the president, not a president. That, I grant you, is a fine distinction, but for me, a bearable distinction nevertheless.

His tweets say even more about his base, however, and how they should be countenanced. Trump tweets such bughouse maliciousness only because he knows his base loves it — he knows that his core base is as mean-spirited as he is. Some in the opposition insist that these are voters whom Democrats should pursue — that Dems should cater to the hatefully malcontented who constitute Trump's base. To which I say, leave 'em alone, let 'em stew in their hate, just let 'em die off. Trump can have them, pretty much all of them. Democrats should concentrate instead on motivating fundamentally decent human beings.

p.s.: We should also note the vileness of Republican congressional leaders who regularly dance around the vileness of Trump and his base. To wit — Speaker Paul Ryan, at his morning press conference, just said of the above tweets: "I don't see that as an appropriate comment." And there you have it: the GOP's utterly vacant "moral leadership." Trump's two-part tweet wasn't "inappropriate." It was gapingly abominable.

*** 

At least Sen. Sasse tries — a bit, a little, somewhat.

To which a reader responded:

This is a common misconception. Such behavior is impeachable.

Impeachment is a political act, and within that framework the founders allowed that unfitness for office qualifies for removal. A crude, sleazy, ignorant lowlife of a scuzzbucket in the Oval Office may somehow avoid committing criminal acts, but that doesn't erase the constitution's permission for removing ignorant scuzzbucketry from office.   

 

Just where in hell did these guys study?

Ponder the pitiableness of Republican epiphanies. Bloomberg:

"Several Senate Republicans began to question Wednesday whether their health-care bill should repeal a tax on high-income Americans imposed by Obamacare when the legislation would scale back subsidies for the poor."

Several Senate Republicans just began to question this.

One strains to recall that the United States Senate was once known as the world's greatest deliberative body.

Deliberation, especially great deliberation, entails an intellectual background in Platonic meditation on matters of justice, social fairness, and just plain human decency. If one comes to the negotiating table absent at least some contemplative grounding in such matters, the product is bound to stink (and, one hopes, fail). That some Senate Republicans are just now realizing that robbing the poor to further fatten the rich is a rather dubious proposition of social justice is an astonishing display of even more astonishing ignorance and partisan inhumanity.

 

Of Gallup, Trump, and Herman Melville

Earlier this week, Gallup released its annual findings on Americans' confidence in the nation's 14 major institutions, which include the presidency, Congress, and the Fourth Estate. Although the findings are generally headed in an agreeable direction, they're also mixed — and rather depressing.

For instance, take Congress. Please. In its present iteration, surely here is a confidence-sucking institution for all times. Both chambers are controlled by the same party and possess no partisan conflict with the executive branch. Congress may do as it likes; it has the run of the field. And yet so far, after five months, it has accomplished the sum total of absolute zero major legislation. For a while it looked as though fresh sanctions might be imposed on the president's malevolent keeper — Vladimir Putin — but naturally that has fallen through. Congress has of course botched health care reform as well — a nearly decade-old promise of immeasurable, self-professed virtue, essentially dead.

The encouraging news? Only two institutions rated below 20-percent confidence: internet news (16 percent), and this 115th United States Congress, at 12 percent. Why that's wonderful, you say — perfectly fitting. The discouraging news? Congress's 12-percent confidence rating is actually up 3 points since June of last year.

Moving on to the presidency, one is, at first, somewhat heartened. Americans' confidence in this institution has, in a year, dropped 4 points — from 36 to 32 percent. This rating serves a dual purpose: It not only reveals the general confidence level in the endlessly bumbling Donald J. Trump, it also evinces with fair accuracy the percentage of dreadfully insane Americans.

But, comparative numbers get even worse. Confidence in U.S. newspapers — whose resurrected golden age of journalism Mr. Trump has generously facilitated through his manifest unfitness for office — now lies at 27 percent. Again, the encouraging news? That 27 percent is up 7 points since June 2016. The downside? Twenty-seven percent is 5 points lower than the 32 percent who have confidence in the endlessly bumbling Donald J. Trump.

It must be admitted that aggressive partisanship skews the overall number for confidence in newspapers. While 41 percent of Democrats have confidence in them, only 12 percent of Republicans feel the same. Nonetheless, on the whole there are fewer Americans who have faith in the one institution that consistently exposes Trump's assorted debaucheries than who have faith in the debaucher himself. And that, most anyone should find sharply dismaying.

I recently read Melville's The Confidence-Man, an immensely difficult antebellum work (1857) that deals with a charlatan who boards a Mississippi steamer on April Fool's Day. Its ensuing themes are too complex to encapsulate here, so I'll let Melville's epistolary summation suffice: "The [national] joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it." Melville's was a signpost of Trump's infinitely fleeceable base.

 

Whore - and an insensitive one at that

Politico:

Chaffetz will be a contributor to [Fox News] starting July 1, the day after he will officially resign from Congress….

The position with Fox News likely pays better than the salary for a member of Congress (which is around $170,000)….

Chaffetz [has] suggested members of Congress get a $2,500 stipend per month for housing, complaining that it’s hard for a member of Congress to afford a mortgage at home in Utah, kids in college and a place in Washington [my emphasis].

He should try paying rent, anywhere, on $9 or $10 an hour, while also "affording" kids in college. 

Oh hell I'll just say it. Jason Chaffetz makes me sick.

 

Trump can't say this news is "fake"

Trump wanted on-the-record stories in the mainstream press, and by God he got one, from the Washington Post. ("Who’s afraid of Trump? Not enough Republicans — at least for now.") These public-consumption quotes are truly stunning.

Sen. Susan Collins (R): "This president is the first president in our history who has neither political nor military experience, and thus it has been a challenge to him to learn how to interact with Congress and learn how to push his agenda better."

Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R): "The president remains an entity in and of itself, not a part of the traditional Republican Party. I handle the Trump administration the same way I handled the Obama administration. When I agree, I work with them. When I oppose, I don’t."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R): "Asked if he personally fears Trump, Graham chuckled before saying, 'No.'"

Political consultant John Weaver (R): "When you have a 35 percent approval rating and you’re under FBI investigation, you don’t have a hammer."

Only one R, a "senior [operative] close to both the White House and many senators," spoke anonymously to the Post. He "called Trump and his political operation 'a paper tiger.'"

I have read many times that, assuming Trump survives impeachment or indictment, it is foolhardy to think the president will be primaried in 2020 — that no Republican would be willing to take him on. I rather think that should Trump survive into 2020, probably a dozen GOPers will take him on. Because by then, even much of Trump's base will have come to realize that this president is an impossibly isolated idiot.

 

"America First"

Or second or third:

A consulting firm led by Paul Manafort, who chaired Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for several months last year, retroactively filed forms Tuesday showing that his firm received $17.1 million over two years from a political party that dominated Ukraine before its leader fled to Russia in 2014….

The report makes Manafort the second former senior Trump adviser [Michael Flynn, paladin of Turkey, was the first] to acknowledge the need to disclose work for foreign interests.

 

I believe we can take an excellent guess

I have only one question about David Fahrenthold's lengthy Washington Post story on Trump's characteristic fraudulence and fakery, captured in this photo:

My question? It springs from this peculiar entry: "It is not clear who created this fake Time cover — or why."

Seriously?

 

Just another "bizarre moment"

 

Speaking on MSNBC, Megan Murphy, Bloomberg News's Washington Bureau chief, mostly overlooked Trump's tawdry chauvinism and adolescent condescension and instead addressed the deepening crisis of Trump vs. the media, which is reaching the dimensions of a full-scale war:

He’s the president. He should know how to behave. He owes her [Irish reporter Caitriona Perry] an apology. We deal with this every day, whether it’s press briefings that aren’t broadcast, whether this criticism of the press for so-called "fake news." We saw an eruption again in the briefing yesterday. This is the entire attitude towards the fourth estate that marginalizes us, that makes us feel like we don't have the responsibility that we have to bring the truth, the news, to the people. It's the latest in an incident, we need to draw the line; it's become a war against us and against the press. It's time that this kind of behavior stops. That is offensive on every level. But the overall approach the administration has taken toward the media is incredibly offensive.

Incredibly offensive. Those are perhaps the most felicitous two words ever applied to Trump and his sinister little band of enablers. In fact I can think of nothing inoffensive about them. They are the height of vulgarity and the lowest point of American politics. As for their tenacious supporters, after all the displays of the preceding? They are, indeed, just downright deplorable.

 

Trump's war on the Republican Senate

Mitch McConnell is having a bad week, and an even worse year. Of the majority leader's move to postpone the upper chamber's health care bill, the majority whip, John Cornyn, said "This is more than just about health care, as important as that is. This is about keeping our promises and demonstrating our ability to govern."

Is it ever. McConnell and his fellow Republicans have it all — the Senate, the House, the White House — and yet they're flopping around, they're under siege, they're keeping no promises and, much to the regret of their rank-and-file cheerleaders, they are vividly demonstrating their ability to govern.

Aside from confirming a Supreme Court justice only through hook and appalling crook, the Republican Senate has accomplished precisely nothing, while the Republican House has merely demonstrated that it's the most craven political assemblage since antebellum Democrats. At the apex of this barren grotesquery (or full-fledged delight, depending on one's politics) sits Donald Trump — who is, perhaps, Mitch McConnell's worst enemy.

So says a wholly enjoyable Politico piece, which opens with: "Top GOP officials and senators say White House chaos and impulsiveness are crippling efforts to expand the Republican Senate majority in 2018, unraveling long-laid plans and needlessly jeopardizing incumbents."

Senate Republicans could have been rallying the base by spending their time investigating the many imaginary crimes of President Hillary Clinton; instead, they got their man last year, who now has got them by only one of the three body parts of balls, hearts, and minds. There is, reports Politico, "a widespread sense of exasperation with the president, interviews with nearly two dozen senior Republicans reveal, and deep frustration with an administration they believe doesn’t fully grasp what it will take to preserve the narrow majority or add to it." What it is that Trump even partially grasps — except his total greatness — is up for debate.

An early bit of McConnell's tactical brilliance came in urging Trump to appoint Senate Democrats Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp to his cabinet — "a gambit that would have improved the GOP’s odds of seizing their [West Virginia and North Dakota] seats. Yet Trump ignored the advice." Also (obviously) against McConnell's advice is that Trump appears poised to attack Arizona's Republican senator, Jeff Flake, who hurt Donald's feelings during the campaign, and then had the decency to criticize Trump's firing of James Comey. For McConnell, not to mention Flake, "Trump-fueled primary worries are intensifying." And just yesterday the president, through his outside group of America First Policies, launched a million-dollar ad campaign against Republican Sen. Dean Heller "over his opposition to the now stalled Obamacare repeal bill." Trump's group ultimately decided to pull the ads, but only after a "massive backlash from senior Republicans."

Alas, this year is only middled-aged; there remains plenty of time for Trump to do even more damage to McConnell's senatorial cohort before the serious fun starts next year. This should gladden the balls, hearts and minds of "the resistance." The Republican House is already teetering — pretty much on its own — and Trump is doing all he can to jeopardize McConnell's majority.

 

A dead health care bill is precisely what Trump and McConnell wanted

Politico:

Mitch McConnell is delivering an urgent warning to staffers, Republican senators and even the president himself: If Obamacare repeal fails this week, the GOP will lose all leverage and be forced to work with Chuck Schumer…. [In addition v]oters expect Republicans to deliver on their long-held promise to repeal the law, McConnell said….

Trump has … privately told activists and administration officials that Democrats would own the failure of Obamacare and that it could be a political boon for Republicans. But some of his senior officials believe the White House would take at least some of the blame if markets imploded.

How deep into the abyss of absolutism the GOP has gone. A mere 20 years ago one would have strained to imagine a Senate majority leader bemoaning being "forced to work with" the Senate minority leader. Today we worry about the authoritarian tendencies of Trump, but in fact the GOP at large has become an all-or-nothing party utterly uninterested in pluralism and governing, where compromise reigns.

As for the sheer politics of it all, I tend to differ with McConnell and agree with Trump, although my differences with McConnell are likely a phantom. That is, I simply don't believe the majority leader when he mourns the Senate's failed health care bill. I believe, rather, that he was praying for its merciful death. What Republican senator up for reelection in 2018 would have wanted to defend that monstrosity?

The ease with which Republican pols can continue assailing Obamacare is far preferable, politically, to the labors of championing the worst piece of legislation in decades. The Republican base loves to hear about Obamacare's "collapse" (which Republican pols will persist in pursuing), and this, I believe, is where Trump (probably McConnell, too) is correct. Just keep feeding the base poisoned raw meat. Such is the stupendously successful Republican platform, so why would the party stop now? Virtually all it has to thrive on is nihilism and hate.

Oh, and tax cuts, which are up next. On that, Republicans will hang together, since moderates love irresponsible tax cuts as much as conservatives. And therein will lie their "legislative success."

 

I'm experiencing some technical problems, including connecting (or rather not connecting) to social media, which means little of today's "work product" is being distributed. I can only trust that these problems will be resolved soon, since I haven't the vaguest idea of how to resolve them myself. Nonetheless, a few fresh posts are below.