PMC Commentary

John McCain will always break your heart

The Arizona senator voted against Bush's tax cuts because they favored the rich and would increase the deficit. And he voted against his party's cruel health-care "reform" not because it was cruel, but because it was exclusively partisan. Now, even though Trump's tax plan disproportionately favors the rich and will blow up deficits and is exclusively partisan, Sen. McCain is voting for it.

"I believe this legislation, though far from perfect, would enhance American competitiveness, boost the economy, and provide long overdue tax relief for middle class families," said McCain in a statement. "This is not a perfect bill, but it is one that would deliver much-needed reform to our tax code, grow the economy, and help Americans keep more of their hard-earned money."

Other GOP senators are said still to be fence-sitting, but no more, I suspect, than John McCain was. They'll vote for the tax bill because that's what Republicans do: cut taxes on the rich and inflate deficits. And they do it with either an ignorant or feigned sincerity that's frightening (see: McCain's statement above).

 

No, this isn't true pragmatism

Having read and written about one deranged contributor to The Federalist, Sykes' tweet caught my eye and broke my resistance to reading another.

The author of the above charade is one Tully Borland, a philosophy professor at Arkadelphia, Arkansas' Ouachita Baptist University, which claims to harbor a "strong spiritual foundation." Here, I assume, is an example of Baptists' spiritual "philosophy":

Let’s suppose the accusations [against Roy Moore] are mostly true. Then from a conservative moral perspective, Moore is guilty of lying, trying to have pre-marital sexual relations with girls half his age, and pressuring them to do so without first determining that they reciprocate.

It might be baffling that Borland, from a deontological stance, characterizes mendacity and preying on adolescents and sexual assault as acts condemned "from a conservative moral perspective," as though only conservatives would so condemn. But I reckon they've merely bought into their own mythology of conservatism as the last moral bastion of America.

The point of Borland's piece, though, is that "That being said, I don’t think it’s wrong to vote for Moore," whom Borland laughably compares to Gen. George S. Patton. "In a war — be it military or political — sometimes the profane is all you have left," muses the author, who deems Democrat Doug Jones even more profane, since he's pro-choice.

That gets to the core of evangelicals' support of Roy Moore. They pass off their hypocrisy as political pragmatism, but forget that without principles behind it, pragmatism can be as destructive (morally or otherwise) as any other ism. Thus does a Baptist philosophy professor justify voting for an ethically bankrupt reptile, whom, along with the money-changers, Jesus would have condemned.

 

Trump is mad, Part 2

For a moment this morning I thought I was reading myself, as I read this NY Daily News editorial:

[O]nly those completely under his spell can deny what growing numbers of Americans have long suspected: The President of the United States is profoundly unstable. He is mad.

The Daily News prefaced that passage with, "After his latest spasm of deranged tweets." But growing numbers of Americans suspected before the president's disturbing tweets yesterday that Donald Trump is mad.

 

The GOP's utterly uninformed, hasty tax bills

Nothing motivates and unifies Republican pols like tax cuts that further enrich their big donors, impoverish the ignorant base, and provide a war whoop for the next election, which is why I suspected from the beginning that Republicans would be successful in their supply-side monstrosity of 2017. There's still time to avert this rolling calamity by persuading Republicans such as Susan Collins that the Senate tax bill is even worse than it originally looked. But time is an increasingly scarce commodity. The Senate is, as you know, likely to vote on the bill by tomorrow — "a 515-page mammoth [that] was introduced just last week," notes the NY Times editorial board, with my emphasis.

The Senate bill (not to mention the House's) is a fundamental and precipitous overhaul of fiscal decency, which, in the U.S. tax code, is already as scarce as persuasion time. "This is not how lawmakers are supposed to pass enormous pieces of legislation," observes the Times. At the very least, Congress should hold numerous, protracted hearings in which relevant experts can offer critical analysis. Not so with this bill. It more resembles Nicholas II's packing time to try to get the hell out of Dodge.

In an accompanying piece, the NYT concisely offers the expert testimony that would have been heard by this Republican Congress, if only it possessed a dram of intellectual integrity. Other than conservative Douglas Holtz-Eakin's lament that "We’ve been bleeding corporate headquarters … for a long time" — that would be those corporate HQs that are seeing their highest profits in history — those in the know range from academics to business executives. To wit:

*Edward D. Kleinbard, a former chief of staff at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation who teaches law at the University of Southern California, [said the GOP tax plan is] "not aimed at growth. It is not aimed at the middle class. It is at every turn carefully engineered to deliver a kiss to the donor class."

*"Either it’s a religious belief, a belief where no amount of evidence would change that, or they are using the argument cynically and they just want more money for themselves," [said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Republicans' supply side theory.]

*"What they have here is a big tax cut for the rich paid for with random increases in taxes for various constituencies," [said Bruce Bartlett of both the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations]. "It’s ridiculous. And it’s telling that they are ramming this through without any debate. All of the empirical evidence goes against the tax cut."

*"In our boardroom, the number-one thing we’re talking about is not taxes," said Jeremy Stoppelman, chief executive of Yelp, the online review platform. "Having a strong middle class out there spending money is what’s most important for our business."

*"This is a repudiation of the social contract that Franklin Roosevelt announced at the New Deal," Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian, said of trimming benefits for lower- and middle-income families to finance bigger rewards for the wealthy.

*"This tax bill is a grand deception," said Arnold Hiatt, the former chief executive of Stride Rite, which makes children’s shoes. "It hurts the most vulnerable, and hurts health care and education, which are essential for a healthy economy."

Finally, said Princeton history professor Julian Zelizer, "When the time of reckoning comes to fix huge deficits, social safety-net programs will be first on the chopping block. [The tax bills are] very far-reaching, but there hasn’t been much of a debate."

In terms of Capitol Hill hearings, there has been none. Democrats devoted hundreds of hours to hearings on the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans charged was peremptorily "rushed through."

If hypocrisy were a virtue, Republicans would be saints. And yet if Republicans had held hearings, testominy would have come only from the nation's handful of Douglas Holtz-Eakins. For if their party isn't to be "toast," as Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, they'll pass this bill, come hell or high hypocrisy.

 

Can you recall even one sane, peaceful day since Trump took office?

I can't.

This year has instead been one insane, fanatical, and disorienting day after another.

From Politico's Playbook:

Thus insanity, fanaticism, and disorientation are what have to look forward to, as well — from a party that controls all levers of day-to-day government, and from a president who said that would be unnecessary, since he "alone" would fix everything via his slick negotiating skills.

Our uninterrupted chaos leaves me sympathetic to banana republics, to which we're now compared, although that is unfair to banana republics. They're at least able to fund themselves.

 

The president SHOULD be … but never will be

Trump has been a busy little bigot this morning, retweeting "three anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the far-right group Britain First," as the Guardian reports. (Each is short and you can watch them on Trump's Twitter feed, if you've got the stomach for it).

The Guardian adds that the videos "were not sequentially posted [by Fransen], meaning that Trump would have had to scroll through her timeline before picking out which videos to retweet." Trump is a Twitter follower of the neo-fascist harpy Ann Coulter, and she retweeted one of the videos — all "unverified," notes the Guardian — on Tuesday.

"Thomas Mair, the extreme rightwing terrorist, shouted 'Britain first' before killing the MP Jo Cox during the EU referendum campaign last year." Cox's widower, Brendan, tweeted this in response to Trump's provocations this morning:

Clearly, Cox doesn't understand Trump.

 

Donald Trump is mad

Had Sinclair Lewis written about the sitting POTUS rather than a pulpit-pounding preacher, he would have laconically opened his novel with "Donald Trump is mad" rather than "Elmer Gantry was drunk." And Lewis would not have continued, "He is eloquently mad, lovingly and pugnaciously mad." He would have instead proceeded, "Trump is inarticulately mad, hatefully and irascibly mad."

That would be any reasonable layman's interpretation of recent presidential reporting by the NY Times and Washington Post, notwithstanding how mental health professionals would frame it. The latter would unquestionably and at the least go on about Trump's narcissistic personality disorder and sociopathy, while laymen would say, simply, that Trump is mad, bonkers, disturbingly nuts.

Because he is. He operates less in clever Big Lies than unembellished insanity. There is no other way to read the reporting, which is based on anonymous interviews with the president's advisers and friends and Republican lawmakers.

Trump began casting doubt on the authenticity of the unmistakable "Access Hollywood" tape when he was president-elect, reports the Times — and loony as that was, "he has continued to seed doubt about [the] tape, stunning his advisers." Recently, "they say," the president "has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate," which is even crazier than doubting the tape's authenticity. "He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud," and that he received "52 percent of the women’s vote, even though exit polls show that 42 percent of women supported him." To reporters, Republican pols laugh at his claims — anonymously, of course.

The Post picks up where the Times leaves off. Trump is convinced — authentically, it seems — that "the special-counsel probe into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia will be finished by the end of the year, complete with an exoneration from Robert S. Mueller III." Around friends, Trump "has dismissed his historically low approval ratings as 'fake' and boasted about what he calls the unprecedented achievements of his presidency."

The clincher, from the Post, is this passage: "The first year of Trump’s presidency has brought tumult and chaos, including the expanding Russia probe, an absence of major legislative achievements and instances of self-sabotage by the president himself. But in recent days, Trump has been in an unusually upbeat mood, according to friends who visited with him."

If that's not madness, what is?

One close synonym of madness is psychosis, and psychosis is broadly defined as a grave condition in which one is out of touch with reality. Thus, given Trump's shambolically unsuccessful year in office, complete with criminal investigations and an impending censure (if not indictment) from a special counsel (to be forwarded for the purpose of impeachment), the Post would have been justified in reporting that "in recent days, Trump has been in a psychotically upbeat mood."

Again, the cleverness of Big Lies is thrown into doubt when screaming displays of insanity appear. As doom is about to befall him, Trump transcends mere personality disorders and authoritarian tendencies when he giddily envisions his presidential tenure as a successful one. But it's only natural that he would — because he, it would seem, is mad.

 

A "Federalist" contributor wants you to know that God supports Roy Moore

In one of the more poorly written, logically deficient essays I've ever read — "Why It’s Justified To Vote For A Morally Questionable Politician" — Federalist contributor Denise McAllister argues indirectly in defense of Roy Moore that "God uses, in this secular sphere, all kinds of 'immoral' men and women to bring about his purposes for his church.... He is actually rather utilitarian and pragmatic regarding the secular world."

This pronunciamento is meant to be provocative and profound; it is meant to bolster McAllister's thesis that "to vote for … a person [that would be Mr. Moore] working in the secular arena who will bring about the 'greater good' despite being personally immoral … is justified."

Of course it is, in fact it has to be, since in Christian theology we are all immoral in some ways — humankind's perfection lay only in Christ. George Washington was prideful, Abraham Lincoln pondered the mortal sin of suicide, FDR slept around on Eleanor, yet therein sits the radiant trinity of American politics. That it never occurs to McAllister that the "sins" of these pols or others similar to them were and remain far less sinister than preying on teenage girls is merely one of her logical lapses.

Her greatest lapse is in declaring God — who, "utilitarian" that he is, is obviously in Moore's corner — to be a crackerjack political strategist. For it also never occurs to McAllister that the long-term harm to the GOP stemming from Moore's election is incalculable. In the short term, yes, Moore would be a vote for Donald Trump's cruel, unChristian tax bill, and he would prevent a Democrat from taking a Republican Senate seat. But the Democratic electoral profits to be made from having Moore as a 2018 avatar of GOP "principles" are incalculable as well. McAllister and her God can't see this, though, since they're both so anguished at the thought of a Democrat from Alabama.

Another peculiarity mushrooming from McCallister's mind is her assertion that "Unfortunately, many social conservatives, and Christians in particular, treat secular leaders … as if any stain on their character, fault from their distant past, or even theological apostasy disqualifies them from political leadership." What she staggeringly omits is twofold: It is many social conservatives, and Christians in particular, who comprise Moore's base, and their scolding judgment as formulated by the author applies only to Democratic pols.

Yet another chuckle-worthy peculiarity begins with McAllister's shocking confession that "I [voted for Trump] in the general," to be followed, several disjointed paragraphs later, by: "Will a serial liar deceive those who put him in office? Most likely."

I don't ordinarily read The Federalist. Today I rediscovered why.

 

Entitlement cuts are driving Republicans' tax plan

Yesterday I heard Republican Sen. James Lankford casually explaining on cable news the philosophical impetus behind his party's tax bill — a kind of simplicity incarnate. Cut taxes on businesses, said Lankford, and they'll plow the extra money into their concerns and hire more workers. Those workers will then pay taxes to the federal government, and thus the cost of the cuts will be wiped away.

Republicans have been saying for 40 years that economic growth via high-end tax cuts will compensate for government's revenue losses, and it has never worked out. Ronald Reagan insisted on its truth and George W. Bush insisted on its truth and both oversaw massive increases in annual deficits. This is why, as Paul Krugman notes this morning, "Of the 42 ideologically diverse economists surveyed by the University of Chicago on the impact of Republican tax plans, only one agreed that they would lead to substantial economic growth, while none disagreed with the proposition that they would substantially increase U.S. debt."

The Republican "philosophy" of tax cuts = economic growth = stable government revenue is of course known as supply side economics, which is the biggest scam in fiscal history. There is no credible empirical evidence that supply side economics works; indeed quite the opposite. Bill Clinton raised taxes and oversaw both a budget surplus and greater economic growth than Reagan's and certainly Bush's. Krugman's column is titled "The Biggest Tax Scam in History," which is just another way of saying a vast fiscal scam — just another fiscal scam.

Yet the Republican tax bill under Senate consideration this week comes with a nude twist, which Krugman vividly summarizes: "If you point out that the bill hugely favors the wealthy at the expense of ordinary families, Republicans will point to the next few years, when the class-war nature of the plan is obscured by those temporary [individual] tax breaks — and claim that whatever the language of the law says, those tax breaks will actually be made permanent by later Congresses. [Hence no gargantuan deficits down the road.] But if you point out that the bill is fiscally irresponsible, they’ll say that it 'only' raises the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade and doesn’t raise deficits at all after that — because, you see, those tax breaks will expire by 2027, so the tax hikes will raise a lot of revenue."

Above I mentioned Sen. Lankford's cable-news interview in particular because of its equally nude twist: Even the good Republican senator from Oklahoma doesn't really believe in the supply side flimflammery that he and his party are selling. For his casual lectures on tax cuts = economic growth = stable government revenue comes with this, which the Times notes and he repeated on cable news: "[He] said on Monday that he was in talks over a proposal meant to ensure the tax plan did not balloon the deficit. Mr. Lankford said the Senate was discussing inserting a provision that would lead to tax increases — as yet unspecified — after a period of years if federal revenues fell short of lawmakers’ projections."

Naturally, any such tax-raising plan would never materialize under Republicans' rule. They would instead insist that federal deficits are all the result of too much entitlement spending, which they would go after with an ax. "In fact," continues Krugman, "they’re already talking about those cuts — they’ve started the switch even before getting the suckers to take the bait" — "Republicans [will] suddenly revert to the pretense that they’re deficit hawks, and demand 'entitlement reform' — that is, cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, programs that ordinary families depend on."

And that, gentle reader, is the actual philosophical impetus behind the Republican tax plan.

 

The official presidential portrait

From an Australian cartoonist:

"Gaming out" Sanders in 2020

Oh, Christ. Not unexpected but Politico reports that

Bernie Sanders is taking steps to address longstanding political shortcomings [such as his virtually absent foreign policy experience] that were exposed in 2016, ahead of another possible presidential bid in 2020…. While Sanders himself bristles at questions about 2020, multiple operatives in his political orbits have been gaming out how such a campaign might look.

My dear orbiting operatives, permit me to field that one for you. It will look precisely like the 2016 campaign, with Sanders' policy perfectness acting as the enemy of everyone else's good, and suckering millions of Democratic primary voters into splitting the party over sheer fantasies.

 

Follow the bouncing blockheads

The NY Times:

Trump’s decision to reject every long-shot plan to save [Alabama's] Senate seat reflects the imperative that an unpopular president faces to retain his political base, a determination that he should follow his own instincts after having felt steered into a disastrous earlier endorsement in the Alabama race, and even his insistence that he himself has been the victim of false accusations of sexual misconduct [my emphasis].

I suppose this was inevitable. Trump is now doubting the authenticity of the "Access Hollywood" tape, for which he apologized — "I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize" — just a bit more than a year ago:

As Vanity Fair puts it: "Trump has said on at least two occasions, to two people within his administration, that he doesn’t think the tape is real — or, at least, that he doesn’t think the voice on he tape actually belongs to Trump."

And anyone who "thinks" his doubts are authentic really deserves this clown.

Perhaps the more amusing part of the Times' reporting on all things Roy Moorean, though, is this quote from Republican strategist Scott Jennings:

Either we’re saddled with a Democrat in a seat that ought to be Republican, or we’re saddled with a brand anvil that’s going to drag down the president, drag down the Senate, drag down the party and plunge the Senate into immediate turmoil [as opposed to the Senate's present calm?] when he gets there.

There is however one contender for Most Amusing Line in the Times report: Mitch McConnell has "reiterated his intention to move against Mr. Moore if he is elected."

Right. Sure he will. He will willingly piss off every last hypocritical Christian-fundamentalist voter — which is to say, all of them — right before 2018's primaries and elections. 

 

Geez, one almost feels sorry for Mitch McConnell

Being president of the United States means that you never have to care enough to help. That, I imagine, is Trump and at least Mitch McConnell's conception of the job, seeing how the former, after some unwinding-from-nothing time on the links with Tiger Woods, moseyed home to tweet that it's a "big week for Tax Cuts.... Senate Republicans will hopefully come through for all of us. The Tax Cut Bill is getting better and better. The end result will be great for ALL!"

The tax cut bill is indeed getting better and better, if by "better and better" one means more and more byzantine in the pursuit of tax "simplification," as congressional Republicans promised. What a mess.

The once-businesslike, well-disciplined, near-monolithic party is now running in circles and embarrassingly chasing its tail as it attempts to throw bones to "wavering members," as the Washington Post describes Sens. Ron Johnson, Steve Daines, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and John McCain. The NY Times adds Sen. James Lankford to the disaffected list of seven, which is five more than McConnell can afford to lose, if the vote is to be great for ALL!

Johnson and Daines are playing small-business populists in the undisguised face of really big corporate giveaways. Corker and Flake are regretting their consistent laments about deficits and the national debt, the latter of which their party is struggling to hypocritically amplify by another $1.5 trillion. Some bones are larger than others, and some might seem impossibly large; there is nothing McConnell can do about that troublesome debt, since it's a structural foundation of the Senate bill. Collins appears to want only a $10,000 deduction of property taxes. McCain's bone is perhaps the impossibly largest; he essentially vowed over the summer, during the Obamacare debate, to vote against any strictly partisan bill. Yet these days, the Republican Party is nothing if not strictly partisan.

That leaves Oklahoma's Sen. Lankford, who is comparatively easy to buy off. He too has wailed with considerable and almost believable emotion about the tragedy of budget deficits. But give him a repeal of Congress's 1954 ban on fundamentalist pulpit-thumpers engaging in political activity, and he'll be a happy little hypocrite.

It would seem that Johnson and Daines can be bought as well, as can Corker, Flake, and Collins. The tax system can always be gamed, future deficits always explained away, and property-tax deductions are as good as done. (How Collins reacts to the CBO's damning projection about the income effects of eliminating Obamacare's individual mandate is another, remains-to-be-seen matter.) That would leave John McCain as the sole holdout, while allowing for another defection.

So Trump's godawful tax plan is indeed doable — without, as usual, Trump's help. In fact it will be more doable as long as the bumbling, uniformed president stays uninvolved. The legislation's chief momentum is, of course, politics. In the absence of some tax cuts the Republicans know they're electoral toast.

But who knows? In a rather sad effort to regain his renegade status for the history books, McCain is likely to stay put in the opposition. A mere two other objecting senators would put a nail in Trump's singularly hopeful "plan" to have McConnell work it all out. Either way, it's going to be a fascinating week.

 

From dissing Time magazine to peddling white nationalism

Speaking of deranged tweeting, Donald Trump was at it again last night, promoting the white nationalist/far-right website Magapill.com. "A metaphor based on a plot line from The Matrix ['red pill']," the name Magapill "refers to the process of normalizing extreme views," explains Think Progress.

Think Progress adds that "while Trump presents MagaPill as the antidote to 'fake news,' the site regularly traffics in unhinged conspiracy theories" — urgent news and information such as the crimes of Pizzagate, "child/human sacrifice" and "weaponize forced vaccination," as well as, most recently, a video from one Liz Cronkin, who declares that there exists "a sex tape of Hillary Clinton with an underage girl on Anthony Weiner’s laptop." Such are the "real" press and real news from our commander in chief.

Just prior to Trump's promotion of the white-nationalist bughouse of Magapill, he also tweeted:

I cite this Trumpian tweet only as prelude to that of Norm Eisen's, he being President Obama's chief ethics lawyer: "Dear Dodo-in-Chief: u realize that this tweet is going 2be an exhibit against u in the DOJ-TimeWarner antitrust case right?" (since TimeWarner owns CNN, and the DOJ is Trump's extraconstitutional instrument of vengeance).

And I cite that tweet only as an excuse to cite Eisen's follow-up: "If I had known my tweet was going to make news, I would not have referred to the president as 'dodo in chief.' I would have instead used the more formal 'imbecile.'"

The much larger point is that the Republican Party is hanging its 2018 electoral hopes on both the imbecile and his imbecilic tax proposal, although "just 33 percent of adults support Trump’s tax plan while 50 percent oppose it," reports the Washington Post. And now the party's tax-plan advocacy is coinciding with the imbecile's promotion, once again, of a white-nationalist website.

The irony is that, win or lose on taxes, the party won't need Trump (or so it believes) once the legislative mayhem is all over. Should Republicans pass a tax bill, Trump will sign it and he, as president, will become superfluous. Should Republicans fail, Trump will become just more dead weight — to which he adds by publicly promoting white-nationalist groups.

G. Gordon Liddy could not have designed a more effective means by which a president of the United States can get himself thrown out of office.

 

Time magazine and our 'Liar of the Decade'

Ruth Marcus opened her column yesterday with a line by Jonathan Swift: “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."

By now, Swift would have been exhausted by wonder and wallowing in revulsion. For history reserves its wonder for wickedly competent authoritarians, whereas we, Swift's cousins abroad, are stuck with a bumbling authoritarian wannabe whose shameless narcissism is just about all he has. And it's revolting beyond words.

Its latest exhibition came yesterday afternoon, when Trump tweeted that "Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named 'Man (Person) of the Year,' like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!"

His vain obsession with Time's cover is legend — and typically Trumpian. In 2012, he tweeted that the magazine had "lost all credibility when they didn't include me in their Top 100…"; four years later, upon being named by the discredited magazine as Person of the Year, he told NBC News that it "means a lot … it's a very important magazine … I consider this a very, very great honor."

Indeed it's such an honor in Trump's pathological narcissism that, in the honor's absence, he simply invents it. There was no call from Time, there was no "probability" of Trump's being named Person of the Year, there was no requested accompanying interview and photo shoot, there was no presidential "pass."

The magazine made all this clear in a pair of stupefied tweets. "The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year. TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6"; and 45 minutes later, from Time Inc.'s chief content officer, came this: "Amazing. Not a speck of truth here — Trump tweets he 'took a pass' at being named TIME's person of the year."

Not a speck of truth. Neither a speck of shame. "Media-savvy" Trump had to know that Time would correct the record, but what did he care? He needed to reinvent a world in which he, as always, is #1 — and that he did, without the faintest care as to media fallout.

I never wonder to see him not ashamed. In fact nearly all of us no longer wonder to see him not ashamed. The presidency has become a reliable geyser of shameless lies, at which, by now, we mostly yawn. Yes, Trump's naked falsehoods are still revolting, but they've also become so commonplace they have worn down our wonder. For the first time in our history, we expect the president of the United States to be a Goebbelsesque jackass of narcissistic, authoritarian-wannabe lies. More's the pity.

***

(Note on above image: It isn't a real Time cover, but it should be.)