PMC Commentary

See last entry.

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A reminder that tomorrow (Thursday) I'm undergoing another surgery to tame my bowels' 10-month incorrigibility, this time with some permanency, or so is my hope. I may tap out a few items while away from Commentary Central, so do check back now and then. See you again soon.

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Friday. It's 9:30am and I'm still in bed. Haven't pulled anything like that since I was in my teens. My excuse is acute pain, for which — get this — they allow me one norco and morphine, but not two norcos alone, which I take at home and the hospital has, of late, regularly prescribed. Hospital logic. It reminds me of my last hospital visit. A friend wanted to spend the night in my room, and in an unoccupied room down the hall was a full-length couch on which she could sleep. Could we have it for the night? we asked. All the hospital had to do was wheel said couch into my room. We were promptly informed, however, that that was against hospital policy. So what did they do? They moved us and all our stuff to the room with the couch — a mountain going to Moses sort of thing.

Sunday. It seems my stay won't be as brief as anticipated. My kidneys are acting up again (limiting my urine output), and I'm coping with immense nausea. More later.

Monday. A day of successive tests left me exhausted. No word yet on when I'll get out, which is just as exhausting. Perhaps a more hopeful prognosis tomorrow. Cheers.

Tuesday. Now I have pneumonia. That explains the exhaustion.

Wednesday. And diaper rash! (I kid you not.)

***

Friday (again). I beg your forgiveness, for my relative silence about my health has gone on far too long. All I can belatedly offer is reasons for it, however inadequate they are by now. For the past four or five days I've suffered several chronic conditions: namely, pneumonia, diarrhea, fatigue, total loss of appetite. With the pneumonia finally under control, the extreme fatigue is slowly passing, I believe. The chronic diarrhea is unrelated, however, and its decline is dependent on my regaining an appetite, which remains elusive. But this shall pass; of that, there is no doubt. My surgeon informed me this morning that I would be in the hospital (well?) into next week. I have written nothing about politics for the simplest of reasons: I feel like death not even warmed over — instead just served up cold on hospital bed pads, absorbing my vile, uncontrollable leaks — which is a rather major distraction. I don't believe I would yet have any useful contributions to make to the dreadful study of Trumpathology, and so I'm taking a bit more time to recover. I trust you understand, and I appreciate your forbearance. 

***

Monday. Joyous news. I am home. There was only so much remaining to be done more effectively in the hospital than could be done at home, and today we reached that point of diminishing infirmary returns. So here at home I stand, or rather recline, I can do no other. This shall be my last entry in random daily updates; next I'll attempt re-wallowing in the slime, filth and corruption of making America great again. I can't promise that will be tomorrow, but soon it shall be. Take care, and many, many thanks for all the good wishes you've expressed over the past couple weeks. —Phil 

 

The joy of Roy Moore

NeverTrump conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes said of crowning crackpot Roy Moore's Alabama Senate primary victory last night that "Republicans — and that means Trump, too — have unleashed something they can’t control." Added fellow NeverTrumper and GOP strategist Rick Wilson, "More and more Republicans may say I don’t want the hassle from the activists on the left and the Trump Republicans on the right" — and just flee the regnant pseudoconservative maelstrom, as Sen. Bob Corker did yesterday. And Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel, a probable challenger to U.S. senator Roger Wicker, summarized the populist discontent with GOP incumbents: "[People are] are going to vote against those who play the D.C. games."

But control and contain his humiliating repudiation by Alabama extremists is of course precisely what the cowardly Trump is attempting. Yesterday he deleted his recent pro-Luther Strange tweets in an embarrassed frenzy of Stalinist airbrushing, and, reports the Daily Beast, he's "gearing up to lay blame" for his candidate's loss "squarely at the feet of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell." The president's out-of-character candor last week that he "might have made a mistake" in backing the impending washout was as fleeting as any of his inept stabs at using coherent syntax.

The upside to Republicans' Alabama Sturm und Drang is that the inevitable war between the equally unhinged forces of Trump and Steve Bannon is on. And Bannon has won the first major battle. From his expected victory over Trump-Strange, Breitbart's militant bossman is overconfidently forecasting, Sanders-like, that a populist "revolution" will ensue nationwide.

While Bannon's prediction will doubtless play out in Republican primary politics of 2018 and 2020, Bannon is ahistorically overlooking — as extremists are wont to do — that the American electorate at large is neither radical nor revolutionary and it sure as hell is not pathologically fanatical, as are Roy Moore and Steve Bannon. Monday night the latter said of McConnell & Co.'s establishment battalions, "They think [Moore-enthusiasts are] a pack of morons, they think you’re nothing but rubes." Moore's local success proved McConnell correct, but the religious fanatic's victory will never flourish across this diverse republic.

Trump's 2016 hideous triumph was the blackest of swans in American political history, and though it "unleashed something" he and his party can't now control, as Sykes observed, that "something" is only pseudoconservatives' last radical gasp before collapsing in suicidal heedlessness.

Just about all that remains is for Democrats to shrewdly exploit that heedlessness — which is as worrisome as Republicans' self-immolation is joyful.

 

The GOP's repeal-and-replace demagoguery will go on, and on

I have yet to read or hear news coverage of yesterday's repeal-and-replace collapse that omitted similar wording to the NY Times'. Sen. Susan Collins' defection — she called the latest bill "deeply flawed," a euphemism for "stupendously cruel" — "virtually ensur[ed] that Republicans would not have the votes they need for passage," reports the Times. What's "virtual" or uncertain about at least three hard votes against it? 

Shockingly, it was Donald Trump who assessed his party's legislative predicament without spin or equivocation. Calling in on the "Rick & Bubba" radio show, he said "We’re going to lose two or three votes, and that’s the end of that." I'm a bit unclear on why he used the pronoun "we," since, unshockingly, he blamed the entire fiasco on his party. The only certainty in the Trump administration is that when failure lands with a manifest thud, the president of the United States and leader of the Republican Party will assure his base that he had nothing to do with it. Turns out, the demagogue who promised to single-handedly "fix" pretty much all of America's carnage is just a bystander (except to add to it).

But though Trump's gloomy remark that "that's the end of that" lacked equivocation, was it accurate? Not necessarily. In one of the funniest comments I've ever heard come from a Republican pol, Sen. Orrin Hatch mused that "We're supposed to be able to handle complications." Note the conditional verb usage. Still, in modern GOP jargon, "handling complications" only means further manipulating the Senate's rules.

As Politico reports, "Some Republican senators have suggested starting over, with parliamentary language in a new budget blueprint that once again would shield repeal legislation from a filibuster…. Republicans could provide reconciliation instructions for both health care and tax reform" (my emphasis). "That might entail some procedural hurdles, but one GOP aide said Monday that because the Finance Committee has jurisdiction over about 95 percent of health care policy, 'it’s not like we couldn’t slip it in anyway.'"

Yet what are procedural hurdles and extended hypocrisy about what Republicans repeatedly denounced as the legislative scourge of Democrats' health-care reconciliation maneuver? Even those complications are but trivial pursuits when compared to the straightforward simplicity of Republicans' far deeper and far more cynical objective in prolonging the reconciliation option.

Adds Politico, Doing so would put the contentious issue of health care back in the spotlight during the 2018 midterm elections.

Here is a base-pandering bone from which Republican curs just can't let go. The policy of Obamacare is, to the GOP, of much lesser importance than the politics of it. For decades, from the Reagan through the Bush II administrations, they dangled all manner of cultural wedges — such as the abolition of a woman's right to choose — before their socially conservative base. But achieving their cultural reactionaryism would have cooked some their finest, raw electoral meat. And God knows they couldn't have that; the politics of demagogic cynicism demanded that such issues always be kept fresh — and readily available for cheap pandering.

For what genuine, realistic policy ideas do Republicans actually have to sell?

 

Krugman questions the future of GOP tax cuts

This morning he writes:

"The next big item on the G.O.P. agenda is taxes. Now, cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy may be an easier political lift than taking health insurance away from 30 million Americans. But Republicans still have a problem, because they’ve spent years posing as the party of fiscal responsibility, and they have no idea how to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit."

Of course they don't, because exploding government's income without lighting a deficit fuse is empirically, mathematically impossible. But when has the party's masking of radical fiscal recklessness with its traditional claims of conservative fiscal responsibility ever inhibited them? While Trump boasts about a soaring GDP, they'll bellow contradictorily about the need for tax cuts to "get the economy moving again" — and they'll do it with accompanying, stentorian fallaciousness about tax cuts paying for themselves, their tireless, Reaganesque Laffer scam.

Krugman adds that "the bill for cynicism seems to be coming due. For years, flat-out lies about policy served Republicans well, helping them win back control of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But those same lies now leave them unable to govern." While that is demonstrably true, Republican pols have also validated the most egregious menace to a healthy representative democracy. They have learned they can lie with extensive impunity; that democratic accountability, especially on tax policy, has steadily gone the way of the Studebaker.

Nonetheless, a fundamental shift in Republican politics has taken place — it has tied itself to Donald Trump. Now vastly unpopular, deeply distrusted and intellectually vapid, he is the face of the Republican Party, no matter how often he denounces his partisan colleagues. The GOP has been a cynical fraud for decades, yet its fraudulence has been plastered over by superior public relations, from the smiling, furtive visage of Ronald Reagan to the phony, down-home "toughness" of George W. Bush. Trump evinces nothing but incompetence and a transparent willingness to lie about everything — consequently, he is taking the party down.

Undoubtedly it will proceed will all its usual folderol about massive tax cuts and magical deficit-avoidance. But now its lies will be burdened by its chief spokesman. "[T]ax policy, like health care," observes Krugman, "will be hobbled by a legacy of lies." If hobbled it is, this time around the hobbling will be afflicted by Trumpian lies — which, paradoxically, are having the pleasant effect of restoring some level of democratic accountability.

Do I agree with Krugman's rather strong implication and now believe that Republican lies about yet more tax cuts will fatally hobble their passage? No. Blowing up deficits is what modern "conservatives" do, and they do it with remarkable unity. But daily this president further devastates his party's political credibility, and his unpresidential squalor will, in time, ineluctably doom the GOP on all manner of policy.

 

Trump's distractions can't prevent his destruction

To many of Trump's supporters, football is their religion and the NFL is their church. And so I would think his assault on a sport "struggling to make the game safer in light of scores of players who have been found to have severe brain damage" — oh, the irony — might have been his first, racist miscalculation. Defending white supremacists and neo-Nazis is one thing; criticizing the liturgy of football, so many of whose honored deacons are black, is quite another.

But of course my conjecture is probably misplaced. The sports site Deadspin wrote that Trump's attack on the NFL's new safety rules "demonstrated an already-evident dearth of intellect," which is also the chief characteristic of most Trump supporters. Their tolerance of presidential ignorance and its assorted corollaries appears to be infinite — so here, too, they are more likely cheering than grimacing. "[M]any fans on social media were supportive of the president" in his oddly calculated ignorance, reports the NY Times. Still, the question is out there: What percentage is "many"?

Deadspin added this to the irony of a severely brain-damaged president denouncing at least some protections against severe brain damage among the NFL's players: "[Quarterback Colin] Kaepernick is off the field due mainly if not entirely to his silent protests against police brutality" — protests which Trump, in his own infinite ignorance, has chosen to describe as disrespect for flag and country. But, as Kaepernick's mother remarked, "[It's] what most of us have come to expect from him."

What Trump's indignation against decency was really about, though, was something even more expected by now than his decades-old racism. It followed yet another presidential failure — that of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Trump's first year in office is indeed historic, as he often brags, but for a reason he must increasingly try to conceal. He has managed to transmogrify a monumental election upset into the most immense, in-office flop in American presidential history. The self-professed artful dealmaker has accomplished precisely nothing. Thus on the heels of each presidential failure he lets loose some colossally idiotic comment that is bound to swamp the headlines and airwaves.

Can he successfully sustain these transparent distractions until he's impeached, indicted, or resigns from the threat of either? Sustain them he can, no doubt, but I do harbor doubt about their successful deployments having any real effect on their staving off his ultimate destruction. Because Robert Mueller isn't distracted.

 

From health-care failure to tax-cut splendor

We're going to win so much, you're going to get tired of winning, You’re going to say: "Please, Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don't win so much. This is getting terrible." And I'm going to say, "No, we have to make America great again." You're gonna say, "Please." I said: "Nope, nope. We're gonna keep winning."

—Candidate Donald Trump, February 2016, in what would now be a speech that could have been delivered by Joseph Goebbels during the Stalingrad offensive

Trump has never been a true winner. But when it comes to spectacular scamming, he's always been the real article. In fact, none truer. And he continued his latest con last night at a Strange rally. "Maybe we’re going to do it now — it’s a little tougher without McCain’s vote, I’ll be honest," he said, using "little" as an honest substitute for "Himalayan."

According to a NY Times piece, Trump's party executed its latest attempt at repeal and replace largely in a bid to simply appease donors. To Republicans the devastation of a sixth of the economy and the stripping of health care from millions are mere hiccups when compared to the splendid sighs that come from raking in the boodle. Sen. Cory Gardner, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, unveiled the bleak news last week at a closed party session.

"Gardner of Colorado painted a dire picture for his colleagues. Campaign fund-raising was drying up, he said, because of widespread disappointment among donors over the inability of the Republican Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act or do much of anything else…. 'Donors are furious,' one person knowledgeable about the private meeting quoted Mr. Gardner as saying. 'We haven’t kept our promise.'"

Sen. Pat Roberts, in a Grassley-like remark about his party's singular objective of raw power over thoughtful governance, said "If we do nothing, it has a tremendous impact on the 2018 elections, and whether or not Republicans still maintain control and we have the gavel." The massively traumatic consequences to the republic of doing worse than "nothing" would be at most a minor annoyance to a party wholly consumed by winning by any means — Trumpian Sociopathy 101.

I suspect, however, the boodle may yet flow into Republican coffers. Next up on their agenda are tax cuts, and their donors possess a kind of Christian forgiveness as long as they're lavished with more pelf. And Trump? His task will be what he excels at: scamming the base. He'll bamboozle them with more flapdoddle about the mother lode of plutocratic tax cuts actually going to the little guy.

Now that's the sort of thing the party can rally around, and always wins at — no matter how much of a terrible headache it inflicts on the nation's fiscal stability.

 

The truth about political truth?

The theorem stating that truth wields a leftward bias may once have been intended, in part, as an ideological offensive. Its linguistic currency was most commonplace during the Bush II administration, whose most tragic lies were grounded in its defense of the Iraq war — lies vigorously exposed by the left. But even Bushian neoconservatism had its occasional merits (even if used as a cynical cover for witless interventionism), such as advocacy of human rights — a time-honored American value which the present administration has almost just as tragically jettisoned. If absolute truth exists, it's an elusive creature.

By now, though, any leftward ideological premise once possibly underlying the theorem is no more. Contra Merriam-Webster and pink-hued activists, truth can now be properly defined as any articulation opposed to any statement, any position, any policy uttered by the Republican Party. Virtually everyone estranged from its steaming cauldron of rancid fallaciousness can, with sublime legitimacy, be called a divine advocate and noble guardian of truth, in all its reasonable variations.

By way of proving my modified theorem, simply note that even Republican pols accept it. They no longer make any serious effort to gainsay accusations of their conspicuous lies. Baghdad Bob Trump issues outrageous falsehoods by the oil-tanker load — a pathology that happened to render him president of the United States. His party has taken note of his political success via monstrous prevarications, and so — not unreasonably — his party has adopted his method in toto. Success breeds imitators.

Currently the chief practitioners of the Trumpian methodology are Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy. About their repeal-and-replace atrocity, they lie with grinning indifference. The Graham-Cassidy bill would accomplish every health-care detriment they insist it won't, but they just don't care. As Paul Krugman observes of this "stunningly cruel" and "incompetently drafted" legislation, Graham and Cassidy "have produced something that everyone, and I mean everyone, who knows anything about health care warns would cause chaos." OK. In the fetid swamp of Republican so-whatism?, knowledgeable objections, however, are blithely dismissed.

It is said by many that we live in an era of inescapable post-Truth (mere "truthiness" is so old school), courtesy of the right's unremitting propaganda machine and Donald Trump's brave new hellhole of flourishing mendacity. I, however, would counter that we've entered a clarifying world of easily verifiable Truth: Simply put, whatever belches from the malign oracle of modern Republicanism, it's a lie. And over this ruinous Republican turn, Truth increasingly will become the more common currency of American politics — and ultimately triumphant.

 

Chuck Grassley, a literal democrat

Chuck Grassley reveals why the infinitely squalid Graham-Cassidy bill has garnered near-majority support in the Republican Senate.

"I could maybe give you 10 reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered," said the GOP senator to Iowa reporters yesterday. "But Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign. That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill."

I have always thought of Grassley as possessing maybe one or two IQ points more than his almost clinically imbecilic Republican colleague James Inhofe. Perhaps I should reassess. I doubt Inhofe's muddled mass of synaptic disconnects could come up with even one reason "why this bill shouldn't be considered."

That Grassley, however, would assert that Republicans must vote "yes" on even a catastrophic bill only to appease an unenlightened base is a startling admission of Raw Politics über Alles. That Grassley is not embarrassed by this is merely one indication of just how unenlightened the base is.

Because ...

The Unites States is a republic — not a democracy — and in sustainable republics politicians use their own (and presumably better informed) judgment, even if it sometimes conflicts with those who put them in office. Shouldn't a United States senator grasp this?

 

The GOP could save Trump by betraying America

Every time I see a poll showing Trump retaining a roughly 40-percent job approval rating, I pull myself from the resulting acute depression by therapeutically recalling that we always have Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The NY Times reports that he has asked the White House to turn over all documents about "Trump’s most scrutinized actions since taking office," including the firing of national security adviser Michael Flynn, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey — Trump's most flagrant, on-the-public-record act of obstruction of justice — as well as the Apalachin-like meeting between the president and Russian diplomats, in which Trump bragged about having whacked a top, American law-enforcement official.

If the documents don't nail Trump, his mob associates — who would rat out their mothers to save their own hides — will. And what a clever bunch those associates are. I especially liked this passage from the Washington Post, reporting on Paul Manafort's emailed offer to peddle campaign information to a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. "The notes appear to be written in deliberately vague terms, with Manafort … never explicitly mentioning Deripaska by name. But investigators believe that key passages refer to [Oleg] Deripaska, who is referenced in some places by his initials, 'OVD.'" Now there's a cryptological brain-teaser.

Manafort is to Trump what "Sammy the Bull" Gravano was to Gotti.

Still, the question looms. Will the party that impeached Bill Clinton for lying about sex now argue that Trumpian obstruction of justice and virtual treason were but frivolous, run-of-the-mill political acts? For a party altogether void of ethics and a deontological mindset, what should be a rhetorical question is, rather, a clear, present, and dangerous potential of national betrayal.

 

The almost unbelievably mean-spirited Graham-Cassidy bill

I'd be less nauseated if I just stopped reading political news (not to mention writing about it). For years I've predicted that the maliciousness of Republican politics can't possibly become more obscene. I predicted it for eight years under the Bush II administration, for another eight under Obama's — whose every policy of supreme logic or simple decency was relentlessly opposed by the GOP — and now, for months, under the gangsterism of Trump's, an administration whose ignominy is as vast as it is truly indescribable. I have observed, throughout, that the Dantean bottom of modern Republicanism has, perhaps, at long last been attained; thus I've further predicted that its only remaining direction is up. And yet the party keeps proving me wrong, always finding a way to sink farther into its unspeakable sewer. And I keep getting sicker.

Vox's excellent Sarah Kliff encapsulates the latest of the GOP's once-inconceivable foulness — the Graham-Cassidy ACA-"reform" bill:

[It] takes money from states that did a good job getting residents covered under Obamacare and gives it to states that did not. It eliminates an expansion of the Medicaid program that covers millions of Americans in favor of block grants….

Plus,… insurers in the private marketplace would be allowed to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions, for example. And it would eliminate the individual mandate as other bills would have, but this time there is no replacement.

As we know, this wretched party is often more likely than not to follow through on its antiAmerican nihilism. About its passage of the Graham-Cassidy bill, however, my fear is quite low. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul and John McCain appear to be almost certainly opposed. Its failure, then, seems assured (two votes short).

Of course (just to concede my inconsistency), I have also frequently described GOP obscenities as bottomless. Perhaps, in fact, the party has not reached the bottom; indeed, it may not have one. Who the hell knows?

***

Quick update: I just scribbled the above from the hospital, where I'm back for merely a few hours in what's called "expanded care." My next surgery ((that is, my absence here) has been moved up a week because my blood levels are being inexcusably uncooperative. The nerve. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where all this is going. So should I suddenly vanish without notice, I will be back soon.

 

Quick take

Said Trump today to the United Nations General Assembly, "If the righteous many don’t confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph."

Anyone care to guess if he grasped the irony?

 

Thanks to all of you who contributed over the past few days to the continued operation of this site. Your generosity is deeply appreciated.

I thought I'd be back writing today in a somewhat normal fashion, but, unexpectedly, late yesterday I learned I must return to the hospital this morning for another session of fluid pumping. (By now, an old story: dehydration). Fill 'er up! Further, Wednesday I'm booked for a rendezvous with radiology. In short, it shall be Thursday before I'm back in something akin to regular order. (That promise, though, is more genuine than Paul Ryan's.) I will however try to comment here and there, between now and then. 

And once again, thanks to everyone who pitched in of late. Your help is of more value than you can know.

 

The unending disgrace of Donald Trump (& Friends)

You have probably seen this, but if not …

What kind of presidential mind — what kind of adult mind — would cheerfully disseminate such an unspeakable disgrace? There is no bottom to the infantilism of Donald Trump's.

What's more, his "humorous" retweet of a physical assault on a woman — a former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate who whipped his butt by three million votes — came from an anti-Semitic Twitter user, @Fuctupmind. "Please get rid of the Hasidic Jews. They are the worst people on the planet," spewed, last November, the prolific tweeter, who is of course an enthusiastic supporter of this Fuctuppresident.

"I will be so presidential, you will be so bored," said Trump in April 2016. In a way he was right. We are somewhat bored by his endless depravity. We are also, however, horrified that here is a cretinous manchild in possession of the nuclear football.

I recall when Trump's party derided his predecessor as "unpresidential" for, on occasion, not wearing a suit jacket in the Oval Office. Now this. And yet most Republicans are silent.

That in itself is as disgraceful as Trump. Whose silence is honorable instead? "A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton," reports CNN, "declined to comment on the tweet."

 

Trump: quietly prolonging a losing war

Einstein's over-quoted yet still-useful theory of insanity as a commitment to selfsame failures is, once again, being tragically verified. The NY Times:

[The Trump's administration's Green Zone] expansion is part of a huge public works project that over the next two years will reshape [Afghanistan's capital city] to bring nearly all Western embassies, major government ministries, and NATO and American military headquarters within the protected area. After 16 years of American presence in Kabul, it is a stark acknowledgment that even the city’s central districts have become too difficult to defend from Taliban bombings…. Along with an increase in troops to a reported 15,000, from around 11,000 at the moment, the Trump administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan is likely to keep the military in place well into the 2020s, even by the most conservative estimates.

But, continues the Times, "unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump has suggested that American forces would remain in Afghanistan until victory" — which, as our longest war's history of failure has shown, is undefinable and manifestly unachievable. For a president who campaigned on stalwart opposition to nation building and military interventions, Trump is nonetheless doubling down on the familiar insanity of both.

Which leads us to reflect on the second-longest war in America's history, whose 18-hour retelling by filmmaker Ken Burns debuts tonight on PBS. As George Will quotes the film's summation, the Vietnam war was "begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings," and "prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions" throughout multiple presidencies. Next came the Iraq war — a one-presidency misunderstanding begun in ill faith — which foolishly ignored the past. Mr. Will also quotes a bemedaled Marine veteran of our Southeast Asian catastrophe.

If by Vietnam syndrome we mean the belief that the U.S. should never again engage in (a) military interventions in foreign civil wars without clear objectives and a clear exit strategy, (b) 'nation building' in countries about whose history and culture we are ignorant, and (c) sacrificing our children when our lives, way of life, or 'government of, by, and for the people' are not directly threatened, then we should never get over Vietnam syndrome. It’s not an illness; it’s a vaccination.

What separates — and is most worrisome about — Trump's Afghanistan-doubling down from previous presidents' ill-considered military expansions is that this president appears to be utterly untethered from war's decision-making. That, he leaves up to the generals. He does so because he hasn't a clue about the world, about history, about diplomacy, about "clear objectives" — and certainly not about a "clear exit strategy," the absence of which he conceals by saying virtually nothing to the American people about what in God's name he's doing in Afghanistan. Indeed, what are we still doing in Afghanistan? Of its "history and culture" we remain not only "ignorant," but helpless to turn around.

So just how does Trump get away with further obscuring his hypocritical war-making and nation building? That's simple. About something else, he merely tweets something outrageous — and thereby distracts a nation still engaged its longest war.

 

Are Dems playing with a hellish fire?

I find myself in the fog of war.

Having written yesterday that "I now love Mr. Trump," because of his luscious betrayal of his most ardent supporters, this morning I see that a #NeverTrump conservative columnist is suddenly and equally enamored of this horror show of a venomous administration. "Uh-oh. I’m starting to enjoy Donald Trump’s presidency," confesses the NYT's Bret Stephens.

His pleasure derives from watching the "blowhards and bigots" — Laura Ingraham, Steve King, Ann Coulter, among others — "get their comeuppance at the hands of their idol." Observes Stephens: "Who are the 'cuckservatives' now? I use the epithet — 'cuck' is short for cuckold — since it’s the one [they] hurled at mainstream Republicans they accused of caving in to the moral bullying of liberals." It's all quite a "delight," he notes. He further notes, however, that "Nobody should count on it whipping any sense into those [many other] conservatives who fell for him."

Still, the war is on. Trump has, perhaps, irreparably separated himself from leading cogs of the right's malevolence machine, who themselves (again, perhaps?) are now separating themselves from their own, once-toadyish followers. To watch the GOP's fracturing is a delight indeed, and we have Donald Trump — "his addiction to betrayal" — to thank for it. 

My glee is vastly tempered, though, by the prospect of any Democratic dealmaking with the devil, which was what, of course, helped to launch pseudoconservatism's latest, and probably largest, fracture. "The sudden burst of bipartisanship," remarks Politico, "could be perilous for Democrats." Their achievement of a few admirable policy goals would necessarily entail caving to Trumpian scurrility on others. Is any Faustian bargain ever worth it? Would not negotiating with this satanic sociopath not "normalize" his utter, unprecedented degradation of the American politics?

We confront these questions of ethereal ethics while also running up against the practical potential of immense political fallout. "Giving Trump the sheen of bipartisanship risks boosting his standing and potentially undermining Democrats' efforts to win back Congress," continues Politico, "not to mention the White House in 2020." In brief, whatever commendable policy goals Democrats might attain, Trump would get the credit — which would likely and perhaps permanently perpetuate his banana-republic politics. Absolutely anything goes would be proven permissible, and Trumpian imitators would insidiously flood the American political scene.

Hence I find myself in a most wretched fog of war. To now adore Trump for his delightful betrayal of much of his base — and the possible good that come from it — is a condonable sentiment. But to in any way cooperate with his unexampled squalor is also a terrifying prospect whose ramifications could forever destroy America's honored political traditions. In the end, I suppose my vote would go to never dealing with the devil.