The Carpentariat

Merry Christmas to ALL

Merry Christmas!

I was going to leave it at that, until, this morning, I ran across this marvelous quote by one Joe Perry, a professor of modern German and European history and author of Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History, which explores the fascist exploitation of the Christmas season:

"Trump and the Nazis share aspects of race-baiting and perhaps broader aspects of extreme conservatism — many political ideologies do," observed Perry to Newsweek. "Frankly, I’m not sure how far Trump himself is willing to go to use the holiday to promote anti-Muslim or anti-minority visions of America, or if he even really understands what he is doing with his 'Merry Christmas' tirades."

To warm our hearts, Newsweek included this photo in its bluntly headlined reporting, "How Trump And The Nazis Stole Christmas To Promote White Nationalism."

The thrust of Newsweek's piece is self-evident. Critics allege that "Trump is promoting a version of the holidays that excludes members of other religions," writes Christina Maza, whose journalism focuses on religion and extremism, "and that his crusade to bring back Christmas is part of a larger attempt by the president to define America as a country for white Christians alone." Given Trump's brainwashing by Fox News and the Steve Bannons of the world, the critics are doubtless correct, even if Der Trümp fails to understand the full import of "his 'Merry Christmas' tirades."

It seems to me that, for the plucky opposition, the most effective way to dilute Trump's fascist, white-supremacist, Fox Newsy distortion of the Christmas season is to embrace the greeting of "Merry Christmas!" along with the worst of them. Don't let the bastards own it. One can follow up with a "Happy Hanukkah!" or "Festive Festivus!" or "Delightful Druidism!" as well, if one chooses, but let us not consign Christmas to the Trumpeteers, the white supremacists, the native fascists, the colossally unChristian.

So,

Merry Christmas!

— P.M. (Phil) & E.J. (Ellie) Carpenter 

 

It wasn't the elites; Trump merely roused the rabble

The New Yorker's Steve Coll has reiterated an electoral premise that has ricocheted among the punditry for more than a year, and is likely to ricochet into journalistic eternity. "Disillusionment with institutions," he observes, "enabled Donald Trump’s election."

Coll then elaborates, with a nearly unnoticeable variation. "Trump had a sound instinct as he took office that public disgust with élites, including those running the Republican Party, ran so deep that he — even as a New York billionaire — could get away with outrageous attacks on people or agencies previously believed to be off limits for a President." Are American elites the same as American institutions? — Congress, the courts, the Fourth Estate, law enforcement, the intelligence community and the like. No matter, we shall let that pass in obeisance to Coll's permissible implication: that institutionalism, though distinct from elitism, is most commonly guided by elites.

"After his Inauguration, for example, Trump did not hesitate to denigrate the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies for promoting their independent judgment that Russia had sought to aid his campaign," continues Coll. "And the President’s opportunistic assaults on less popular institutions — such as the news media and Congress — have riled his base."

And there we have it: The punditry-driven, popularly accepted thesis that, more than anything else, distasteful elites and displeasing elitism drove the simple masses to unleashed revenge — both got Trump elected, and the rest is all too familiar history.

Is the thesis correct? One could argue, contrarily, that misguided hysteria (Hillary's emails), the Electoral College, Democratic sloth, misogyny and Sanders-Stein imbecility enabled Donald Trump's election. Any one of them is a plausible explanation for Clinton's defeat, rather than Trump's victory.

But even more than any of those individually, I'd argue that elites and elitism themselves were far less of an electoral factor than the historical proclivity of many Americans to blindly and ignorantly rage — to put it in the vernacular — against their betters. That's what enabled Donald Trump's election. The difference between elites' (presumed) smugness and the rabble's resentment is perhaps a small, but nonetheless important, distinction.

And it has been noted extensively, as well as from different theoretical approaches. The eminent historian Richard Hofstadter, for instance, explored the long and sad history of anti-intellectualism in America, which essentially is anti-elitism. The social critic H.L. Mencken sarcastically but seriously proffered that "By 1828 in America [Jacksonianism] and by 1848 in Europe [continental revolutionaryism] the doctrine had arisen that all moral excellence, and with it all pure and unfettered sagacity, resided in the inferior four-fifths of mankind." By this Mencken meant, of course, democracy: "the theory that there is a mystical merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale — that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a sort of superiority."

Mencken would have rejoiced, in 2016, at the beastly sight of seeing his mordant critique so fully validated by all the inferior, bottom-of-the-scale morons who elevated Donald Trump to the White House, which wasn't radically different from their elevation of King Andrew. The ill-schooled, the crude and the crass, the authoritarian personalities and shameless shitkickers both times swamped the electoral process in indignation against all those who were smarter, better educated, refined and deeply invested in addressing America's real problems — not raging against others' unmistakable superiority.

In short, never was it the perceived transgressions of America's elites and institutions that Trump so ably exploited; it was rather, the fixed, the immovable, the eternal peevishness of America's least intellectually capable that Trump cultivated and capitalized on. And they're too stupid to know that now he is screwing them, and screwing them with impunity, because they are in fact too stupid to realize it.

 

Watching fascism unfold in real time

From the Washington Post, in what should be a front-page story everywhere, one akin to a dictator's personal loyalty oath:

For two decades, the commander in chief has doled out distinguished-looking coins as personal mementos. Now, the presidential "challenge coin" has undergone a Trumpian transformation.

The presidential seal has been replaced by an eagle bearing President Trump’s signature. The eagle’s head faces right, not left, as on the seal. The 13 arrows representing the original states have disappeared. And the national motto, "E pluribus unum" … is gone. Instead, both sides of the coin feature Trump’s campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again."

The changes don’t stop there. In addition to his signature, Trump’s name appears three times on the coin.

Heil to the usurpation of country and exaltation of servility to one man, one Leader, one Führer.

Roughly a third of the nation endorses this slop, which isn't far from the minority percentage that endorsed it four score and four years ago in central Europe. Ich schwöre: Ich werde dem Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes Adolf Hitler treu und gehorsam sein, die Gesetze beachten, und meine Amtspflichten gewissenhaft erfüllen, so wahr mir Gott helfe. I pledge to follow the leader and Make Germany Great Again, so help me God. I'll swallow any state propaganda and attack any state-approved scapegoat and I'll cherish the articulated rot of Frau Huckabee Sanders, Minister of Truth, and I'll forever genuflect to the high orange-coifed orangutan of Earth's particular plane of the apes — our obedient nation of rib-scratchers.

I shall always remember the day when, over copious red wine at a local bistro, I expressed my enduring bafflement, to a professor of modern European history and friend, over how it was that an eminently civilized nation such as Germany could have journeyed so far to the dark side. My professor friend's straightforward response — and that's what made it unforgettable — was, "Well, what do you mean? Hitler bamboozled millions, he then was appointed (because of his parliamentary control, via a coalition) to high office, and then he locked down dictatorial control. Simple as that."

This had always failed to satisfy my curiosity and wonder; just how did a highly cultured nation come to embrace a philistine of the lowest order and his entire gang of criminal misfits — how did millions not see what depths of depravity they were in for; how did they manage to watch and accept, day after day, the wretched descent of their fatherland into an infamy so sickeningly profound? I had tried imagining the daily tick-tock of self-annihilation, Germany's metronomic plunge into unprecedented degradation, but I was always unsuccessful. Herr Hitler's rise remained unfathomable, as was his country's precipitous dive.

I was always unsuccessful. Until now. Because as an object lesson the selfsame disgrace is taking place right before our eyes: the loud, vocal, controlling minority, the assorted distortions of democracy, the official propaganda disseminated daily, the quotidian brayings of an unbalanced demagogue, the chipping away at institutional norms, the transmutation of highest office into a den of personal and political iniquity. And we, the collective who know better — workers both blue and white-collared, the uniformed, the scapegoated, the literati, the business-minded, the sane media, the intelligentsia, the people's sober representatives — are tolerating the wannabe dictator's insufferable erosions of human decency and law.

He'll be checked, in time. The elections of 2018 and 2020 will halt and reverse the Far-Right Demagogue & Party's slide into otherwise irreversible national disgrace. But, just as generations have asked how civilized Germany could have countenanced barbaric fascism for so long, so too will generations henceforth ask: Why did decent Americans permit Trumpism to flourish for at least two nation-debasing years?

This will puzzle them, but it doesn't puzzle us. For we're watching it unfold in real time.

 

 

Carter Page, B.A.A. (Busted Again & Again), Ph.D.

From an amusing little story in The Guardian on Carter Page's "three attempts to gain his doctorate from the University of London, finally succeeding in 2011." Mr. Page, you'll recall, was one of Trump's top foreign policy advisers during the presidential campaign.

Page first submitted his thesis on central Asia’s transition from communism to capitalism in 2008. [One examiner] said he had expected it would be "easy" to pass Page.... He said it actually took "days and days" to wade through Page’s work. Page "knew next to nothing" about social science and seemed "unfamiliar with basic concepts like Marxism or state capitalism," the professor said.

The [exam], held at University College, London, went badly. "Page seemed to think that if he talked enough, people would think he was well-informed. In fact it was the reverse," [said the examiner]. [The] subsequent report was withering. It said Page’s thesis was "characterised by considerable repetition, verbosity and vagueness of expression."

[The examiner] said he was mystified as to why Page tried to pursue an academic career…. [He] said during his three decades as a lecturer he failed just one PhD student twice: Page.

Is Trump so incredibly ignorant about foreign policy because he hires clowns such as Carter Page? No. Not at all. Trump is incredibly ignorant about foreign policy because he's stupid.

 

The United States: rogue nation

What next? Will Donald Trump, through Foreign Minister Nikki von Ribbentrop, demand the Sudetenland? Or roll tanks into Hungary and Liverpool to enforce ideological uniformity?

One thing is for sure. Former CIA director John Brennan has had it with Trump, and he endorses others' rejection of any kind of Munichlike appeasement of the bullying, muscle-flexing U.S.

At the U.N. yesterday, others' rejection was mammoth; by a vote of 128-9, the world — including most of our traditional allies — told Nikki and Donald where to get off after the former insufferably declared: "We will remember it when we are called upon once again to make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations. And we will remember when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit."

The lopsided vote — condemning Trump's idiotic decision to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem — was, in classic Trumpian fashion, immediately deemed a victory by Nikki because it could have been even more lopsided. Thus blathers the ghost of Joseph Goebbels.

The Council on Foreign Relations' Stewart Patrick summarized well the Trump regime's "really unnecessary, clumsy diplomacy": "I think it symbolizes the self-defeating notion that for the United States, 'it’s my way or the highway.'"

In all this clumsiness and self-defeating stupidity, one thing is blisteringly clear. To Trump, the slogan "Make America Great Again" carries only the narrowest of meanings: Our returning greatness and sense of well being shall be restricted to domestic fat cats and high-rolling foreign investors.

 

Al Franken's noble parting address - and our shame

The satiric title of Al Franken's most recent book, Giant of the Senate, may yet prove the year's most ironic cruelty.

The former comedian "cultivat[ed] a reputation as a serious legislator … [and] emerged as a powerful voice against corporate interests in politics and one of the Democrats’ most pointed and effective critics of Trump," notes the Washington Post. And soon (Jan. 2) that voice will be gone from the Senate floor, from committee hearings, from cloakroom discussions, from cable news interviews with sitting lawmakers — a voice cut down by Pissants of the Senate, meretricious scolds who smelled political advantage in knifing their colleague and cravenly feared retribution by outside scolds vacant of intellectual discrimination.

Future historians — far removed from the partisan, moralistic frenzy of our age — will look back on Franken's ouster and ask, What were they thinking? And the answer — also removed from the hypermoralistic zeitgeist of yesteryear — will be, They weren't. Those Senate Democrats of purported social justice were as profoundly susceptible to the sinister mechanics of McCarthyism as they were in its original iteration. The tawdry seductress of bandwagon righteousness struck again.

Franken's parting address to the Senate and nation touched not, however, on the cruel irony of his departure. Yesterday, the Minnesota senator of conscience instead addressed a much higher plane of the gallopingly problematic. "As I leave the Senate, I have to admit that it feels like we’re losing the war for truth," said Franken in conspicuous reference to Donald Trump's unremitting assault on facts, reason, honesty, sincerity. "Maybe it’s already lost," he added in uncharacteristic (and unbelievable) despair."If that’s what happens, then we have lost the ability to have the kinds of arguments that help build consensus," he concluded.

Still, as Franken well knows, Trump and Trumpism's assault on truth villainously transcends its impairment of mere consensus-building. Rather, it wrecks every historical foundation of the American political tradition; not that every American pol has always sought virtue — far from it — but that in the main, American pols have championed the democratic norms and institutional customs that have walled off the United States from banana republicanism and authoritarian decline. Except to malign alt-righters and demented leftists, the politically artistic swill of Papa Doc Duvalier and Stalin has never been welcome in America. Never, that is, before now.

For another gross irony is that the swill wasn't imposed on us. American "exceptionalists" asked for it, they welcomed it with their votes. They (somewhat) elected a world-class fabricator, a slanderer, a slithering miscreant and malcontent of authoritarian tendencies so vast, one must remind oneself daily that this is, in fact, the United States — not Haiti. Because our only daily certainty is that our commander in chief will again say something magnificently stupid and maliciously untrue.

That's not the American way; it's the Trumpian way. But only if we divest ourselves of outrage shall the two enduringly blend. In another way, Al Franken's "feeling" that "we're losing the war for truth" and that perhaps we've "already lost" is a valid one, for in most any respectable democracy, Donald Trump would have already had to buy a ticket back to Manhattan (or on to Leavenworth). His high crimes and miserable misdemeanors are things of pounding visibility, and yet there he sits, in the White House, a remorseless affront to human decency and civilized self-governance.

Yet, it's the decent Al Franken who is ironically headed out the door — one of those rare Democratic senators who is bold enough to unconditionally call out Trumpism for what it is: a national disgrace and betrayal. And we should be ashamed.

 

What is to become of us?

The three dumbest media rocks on this bigger rock of ours are Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian  Kilmeade, of "Fox $ Friends." Nevertheless, the dumbest man ever to sit in the White House watches these doofuses — "He promotes their show, tags them by name, and sings their praises" — and "that alone," the website Mediaite has announced, "makes [them] the most influential media people not just in the United States, but in the entire world." (Runners-up, some of whom are nearly as laughable, are Rachel Maddow, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, and CNN's president, Jeff Zucker.)

What's to be become of us? Though I wasn't around throughout all their careers, I grew up, in my family home and as a student of history, following the professionalism of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Frank Reynolds, Ben Bradlee, I.F. Stone, Russell Baker, Tom Wicker, Jimmy Breslin, Theodore White, Frances Fitzgerald, David Halberstam, William Shirer, Mary McCarthy, H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko, and others of superb style, substance, and insight.

And now we're handed Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade?

What is to become of us?

 

"The [certainty] that there was a quid pro quo between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin"

If there is anyone left who's wondering why several Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee surreptitiously have been plotting a major assault on the Department of Justice and FBI's reputation, why damn near everyone at Fox News is committed to defaming a prosecutor and long-time public official they once lauded as a great American, and why the president himself keeps shrieking about "witch hunts" and "fake news" regarding a scandal that were he innocent of it, he would simply let the investigation take its cumbersome but harmless course, well, #NeverTrumper and neoconservative Max Boot has the answer.

By now, any sentient being who is capable of rational thought about the U.S. president … must grasp the likelihood that there was a quid pro quo between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin: Russian President Vladimir Putin would help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election, and in return Trump would lift sanctions on Russia….

No other hypothesis can account for the copious links that have emerged between the Trump campaign and the Russians…. If there was an innocent explanation for all of these contacts, why is it that everyone in the Trump campaign, from the president on down, has lied and lied and lied about them?…

Given that Flynn is now a cooperating witness, who must have given up a lot of valuable information to get such a lenient plea deal, the special counsel is most likely assembling a strong case.

Indeed, since "no other hypothesis can account" for the many known links between the Trump campaign and wily Russians, "likelihood" is, in fact, a virtual certainty.

 

And we thought Mike Pence's groveling was bad

Sen. Orrin Hatch must be expecting to live to 113. Because it makes no sense whatsoever that Hatch, 83, would choose to go out with no dignity whatsoever, lavishly praising a vulgar criminal with mob ties, a sexual predator, a proud ignoramus, an infinite embarrassment to American politics.

Among all the servile, unctuous things Sen. Hatch said in praise to Donald Trump — you're "one heck of a leader" and "we're going to make this the greatest presidency that we've seen not only in a generation, but maybe ever" — he spoke for nearly all of us in precisely one: "You're living up to everything I thought you would."

 

Are we being excessively indignant about the tax bill?

Every now and then — usually after laying indignantly into the many abominations of Donald J. Trump — George F. Will writes one of those self-satisfied, self-superior, eminently pompous columns that ridicules the politically indignant. This week we are treated to another. "The many Americans who are happiest when unhappy seem as addicted to indignation as the fewer Americans are to cocaine," writes Will, who has been described by "former conservative" Damon Linker as a "serial spewer of bile against the all-purpose bogeyman of 'progressivism" and a purveyor, often, of "condescending." "callously dismissive," "outrageously stupid" and "transparently absurd" drivel. (Will's indignant belittling of climate science alone qualifies.)

The outcome of all our childlike indignation via the easy technological means by which we can express it, continues Will, "is an ever-more-clamorous politics, and the survival of the shrillest." To some extent, of course, Mr. Will is correct. In the blogosphere and on Twitter, size matters — that is, the size of one's outrage, and its corresponding loudness. The shriller the better. Still, there's plenty of refined indignation out there (for which Will makes no exception).

Such as that of his Wapo colleague, E.J. Dionne, who, regarding the Republican tax bill, is as indignant as they come. (Will, on the other hand, serenely posits that "On a scale of importance from one (negligible) to 10 (stupendous), the legislation might be a three. Never mind. Cue the Cassandras.") The new "law loots the federal treasury on behalf of major corporations and the richest people in America. It sharply shifts the nation’s tax burden onto wage and salary earners" and it "creates an utterly unstable tax code," rages Dionne. "So many new opportunities for evasion were stuffed into this monstrosity that not a single person who voted for it can fully know what its effects will be."

And that, perhaps — the writing of a tax bill by clueless imbeciles — is what has launched so much proper indignation, including that which is rather understated. For example, the Huffington Post's Matt Fuller this week asked more than a dozen GOP congressfolk — 18, in fact — who supported the seismic legislation to name "just one basic detail of the bill ― the tax bracket percentages for individual income." As Fuller emphasizes, the question is a fair one, since Republicans are selling the bill as a boon to the middle class, to whom several of the brackets will apply.

How many of the 18 lawmakers got it right? One. (Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah.) Reports Fuller: "Among [the others] who were shaky on those specifics were members of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, the chairwoman of the House Budget Committee (Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee) and the lead author of the bill in the House (Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady of Texas) [italics mine]…. A number of House Republicans eventually admitted they didn’t know the brackets…. Other Republicans tried their best to squirm away from the question…. Still other Republican representatives tried their best to guess the brackets … [but] left out one or two." Most brazen in ignorance was "Roger Williams (R-Texas) ― who has an estimated worth between $20 million and $70 million." When asked about the different brackets he simply responded, "I know what mine’s going to be."

I submit to Mr. Will that no level of indignation or even shrillness could possibly do justice to the casual, indifferent manner in which Republican lawmakers just upended the U.S. tax code in favor of their Roger Williamses. The Post columnist, comfortable as he is in life, can deride others' indignation with his own cool indifference and dismissiveness, but that only cranks up the perfectly justifiable indignation that's out there.

 

The fawning, bootlicking, brown-nosing vice president, Mike Pence

The Washington Post took a stopwatch and an abacus to the vice president's groveling today, and found that "over nearly three minutes, Pence offered plaudit after plaudit after plaudit, praising Trump's vision, his words, his strategy and his results in light of the passage of tax cuts. By the end, Pence offered 14 separate commendations for Trump in less than three minutes."

Jim Mattis, sitting directly on Trump's left, at one point looks at Pence as though to ask, Is there something fucking wrong with you? Rex Tillerson, on Trump's right, quite apparently wants out of the room and seems on the verge of actually objecting, while for a few seconds the jaw of Commerce Secretary Wilber Ross nearly hangs open, in Mattisesque wonder.

Kids, pull up a chair and watch, listen, study, remember. If you wish to be a success in life — even if at the cost of jettisoning all your self-respect — absorb this lesson by Vice President Mike Pence, the biggest baboon in the monkey house.

 

The End of Trump: the 2020 polling begins

From the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll:

"Just 18 percent of those surveyed believe that they will 'definitely' support Trump if he runs in the next presidential election, with another 18 percent saying that they’ll 'probably' choose him. But a significant chunk — 38 percent — say they’re dead set on voting against the GOP commander-in-chief, with an additional 14 percent saying that they’ll probably vote for the Democrat on the ballot."

(The crosstabs are even worse for Trump — e.g., "61 percent of rural voters supported Trump in 2016, while just 43 percent say they’re confident they’ll be in his corner in three years" — in that they reflect a trend.) 

Loosely, for now, that's a 16-point spread (52-36) in favor of the Democratic nominee — any Democratic nominee. And Trump has just gotten started in ending his political career. He's facing the possibility of impeachment proceedings in 2019 — which, while removal is politically out of the question, would drag his provable crimes into the open and besmirch his already besmirched "reputation"; or, quite possibly, he's facing multiple indictments with the same effect; plus voters' resentment over his upward-redistributionist tax cuts will deepen; and, I'd modestly wager, sometime within the next year he'll suck us into a foreign policy adventure as calamitous as W.'s Iraq.

2016 was a staggering fluke, a black swan, an electoral divergence from democratic sanity never before seen in the American political tradition. And its ensuing catastrophes will ensure that we won't see it again for another 229 years. And remember, even in 2016 Trump lost — falling 3 million votes behind his Democratic opponent. Only the antiquated insanity of the Electoral College saved him. But it can't save him again — not with numbers such as those in the NBC/WSJ poll.

 

Hannity is so, so … so MAD!

Over at Rasputin's site — Hannity.com — the Trump whisperer is positively ballistic: "MUELLER MADNESS: Sources Say Russia-Trump Probe May Last 'Another Year.'"

Inside sources close to special counsel Robert Mueller’s months-long investigation into Russian "collusion" in the 2016 presidential election say the probe may last "another year," taking the never-ending witch hunt well beyond the 2018 mid-terms.

According to the Washington Post, people with close "knowledge" of Mueller’s investigation are openly defying President Trump’s hopes that the probe would be "winding down" after former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to "misleading" the FBI.

"People with knowledge of the investigation said it could last at least another year"….

"Members of Mueller’s team have told others they expect to be working through much of 2018, at a minimum.”

Other than Hannity's plying his Maddowian penchant for making the same friggin' point four concentrated times, amusement comes in reading that Mueller's investigation is defying Trump's hope for an imminent wrap-up. Defying. As though Trump's hope should virtuously guide Mueller's duration. How uncooperative and just downright malicious of the prosecutor to defy the suspect's wishes.

Surprising, rather than amusing, is that Hannity mentions only once — and then, only at the end — what I thought was the principal, propagandistic talking point of all who are virtuous: "Mueller’s probe is under increasing scrutiny from GOP lawmakers following recent revelations of rampant anti-Trump bias throughout the special counsel’s office."

 

The inevitability of Republicans' tax-cut "Armageddon," and Democrats' assist

When it comes to Republicans slashing the safety net next year, some are still predicting what just about everyone mistakenly predicted, just a few months ago, on the tax bill: It's (probably) not going to happen. (See, for example, today's Washington Post: "The Republican tax bill was the easy part. The next debate could be much uglier.")

Reordering the mammoth, dizzyingly complex tax code was seen by pundits as such a gargantuan task, incompetent Republicans led by the world's most incompetent man would never pull it off. But all along, this observer's thinking tracked that of Sen. Pat Toomey. "There was never a moment where I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, we’re going to fail at this,'" he said to the Times. "There were many moments I thought, 'This is still an open question.'

That's the most precarious the tax bill ever was; odds were, Republicans would succeed. And the reason for anticipating their rare success was remarkably obvious. Tax cuts are what Republicans do, it's what they're almost singularly capable of doing.

They're also capable of rousing the rabble, of course, and their love of power over smart policy is awesome. But since 1981, gutting government revenue and enhancing fat-cat portfolios have been Republicanism's sharpest focal point. Their once-buttoned-down worries over deficits (Republicans scolded Jack Kennedy for his stimulative tax cut because of budget-shortfall concerns) became a dismissive thing of the past. Nearly 40 years ago Republicans metamorphosed into Keynesians on LSD. (Even the monetarist Milton Friedman conceded that "We're all Keynesians now.") The, ahem, pitfall in their Keynesianism has always been that they hallucinate when misusing it.

Tax cuts are indeed stimulative — in the short run. But the manner in which Republicans enact them is counterproductive, because the debt they produce is there to stay — and grow. J.M. Keynes championed tax cuts only during times of economic doldrums; during upswings — such as Obama's enduring rebound — their debt would be retired through tax increases. Yet for Republicans, stimulative tax cuts are invariably the key to macroeconomic wisdom, whether good times or bad. Thus the debt piles up. To rhetorically get around this fiscal inevitability, Republicans have incoherently but inventively argued, as you know, that tax cuts would pay for themselves: hence no debt. John Maynard Keynes would have either chortled or thrown up.

At any rate, this explains why Republican success in passing tax cuts was, though at times a bit dicey, as inexorable as the ensuing debt. Reforming health care was an insurmountable challenge, but gutting government revenue and handing out goodies to fat cats would be a relative cinch. As the Times puts it, "Republicans walled themselves off from criticism, convincing one another that unfavorable economic analyses of their bill were wrong," which was rather easy, for they possessed that "animating ideology of their party since the Reagan era: that tax cuts will drive faster growth and national prosperity" — at no cost.

Assisting Republicans in their mad rush to Keynesianism on dope were, naturally, the Democrats. Continues the Times: "A significant moment [in tax-cut mania's success] came in September, when Mr. Trump cut a deal with … Pelosi and Schumer … to prevent a government shutdown and raise the federal debt limit. Republicans say the move averted a protracted fight in both chambers, and left Republican leaders optimistic that they could move quickly on a tax bill by fall." Some of us warned the Dems: Cooperate with these gangsters in any way and you'll regret it, as will the country, so offer nothing, never engage them. The Dems failed to heed this advice.

How [we] suffered for [our] sanity / How [we] tried to set them free. / They would not listen / They did not know how / Perhaps they'll listen now.

Would that they do. Because next up is slashing the safety net.