The Carpentariat

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.

 

In case you missed it.

I did.

 

Welcome to the new populism

One wouldn't expect to see polling like this (from CNN) under a populist president:

* "Opposition to the [tax-cut] bill has grown 10 points since early November, and 55% now oppose it. Just 33% say they favor [it]."

* "Two-thirds see the bill as doing more to benefit the wealthy than the middle class."

* "More than six in 10 (63%) see the tax bill as leaving the President and his family better off."

* "Disapproval of the President's handling of taxes has risen six points in the last month, to 57%."

And the kicker: "Overall, Americans see health care and averting a government shutdown as higher priorities than passing tax reform." The tax bill is so anti-worker and pro-plutocrat, voters would prefer to see Congress and this administration doing just about anything else. And not, for instance, just health care, but children's health care, the neglect of which is indescribably contemptible.

Consider that the pass-through provision inserted into the tax bill at the eleventh hour (to secure the votes of venal pols such as Bob Corker) will cost the government $414.5 billion over the next decade. That figure, reports the Times, is 29 times higher than the cost of CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, for one year. But in their rush to fatten their own wallets or those of their major donors, Republicans permitted the program to lapse. States are now running out of alternative funds with which to finance CHIP, and by the end of March, three-fourths of them will have to terminate the program.

But there this Republican Congress and the Republican president sit: passing, to the exclusion of all others, extravagant tax cuts for the superaffluent — and in world-record time, as though the excessively wealthy won't always be with us.

Welcome to the new populism, which is very much like the old one. From Reagan to Bush II to Trump, the rubes just can't get enough shafting.

 

Contacts, cooperation, and collusion everywhere

NBC News:

"In the weeks after he became the Republican nominee on July 19, 2016, Donald Trump was warned [by FBI counterintelligence] that foreign adversaries, including Russia, would probably try to spy on and infiltrate his  campaign…. [He was] urged to alert the FBI about any suspicious overtures."

It's no curiosity that the White House immediately responded via deflection: "That the Republican and Democrat nominee for president received a standardized briefing on counterintelligence is hardly a news story," said a White House spokesman. "That NBC News hears about the contents of this classified conversation due to an inappropriate leak is a news story."

What is a curiosity is that a "source close to the White House said their position is that Trump was unaware of the contacts between his campaign and Russians." A curiosity, because Trump still maintains there was no collusion — i.e., cooperation — between his campaign and Russians, even though the White House's "position" is that there were contacts, implying cooperation.

What decidedly is not a curiosity is that Trump and his team were instructed to alert the FBI about such contacts (Hope Hicks, for example, was separately advised) and they failed — no, they refused — to do so, which intensely implies a mindset of guilt. It's also inconceivable that Trump's team would have kept him in the dark about Russian love offerings, which appeared to be so valuable to familial lapdogs and campaign sycophants.

I've lost track of how many pieces of this byzantine puzzle have already fallen into place. What's most bewildering, though, is not that Trump persists in lying about colluding with Russians, but that 30+ percent of voters believe him. Dick Nixon's approval rating plunged to a ghastly 24 percent — and with him there was only one smoking gun.

 

"Making America Great Again" (by nominating the worst)

Jimmy Carter once asked, Why Not the Best? (Disclosure: I worked on his 1976 presidential campaign as a very young field representative, the lowliest paid-minion position there is.) Yet to right wingers he's an object of ridicule while they revel in the Great America-Making of Donald Trump, who offers the worst.

The Honorable Matthew Spencer Petersen has withdrawn his nomination for a district court, making the doofus a thousand times more honorable than Donald J. Trump. I'll say that much for him.

What did the White House have to say for his would-be benefactor? "It is no surprise the President's opponents keep trying to distract from the record-setting success the President has had on judicial nominations."

I'm still waiting for a White House statement whose conclusion is supported by its premise. And it looks as though I'll be waiting for a long time.  

  

Of squishes and primary voters

Two years ago I described Townhall.com's Kurt Schlichter as "the world's worst writer"; he had edged out Stonekettle's Jim Wright, who, like the testosterone-overloaded Schlichter, believes that having served safely in uniform makes him an Audie Murphy among us quivering, gutless, unappreciative civilians. Both gentlemen are also Hunter S. Thompson knockoffs, and really poor ones at that. (Schlichter: Bernie Sanders is a "wretched piece of walking, talking excrement." Not a dram of originality or wit.)

Still, this morning I discovered that Mr. Schlichter — an ever-farther right, #AlwaysTrump kind of guy — at least fathoms the rudiments of electoral politics, which is more than most ever-farther lefties seem to comprehend. For in "Some Real Talk For Conservatives About 2018," Schlichter sets out to enlighten his brethren of ideological purity.

We conservatives need to get our heads right about the mid-terms or liberals will end up guzzling patriot tears and their gloating will be flat-out intolerable. We’re not doomed in 2018 – I mean, it’s not like tax reform or pulling out of the Paris Climate Scam, which have already killed millions of people, including me and you. But, if we fail to get on course for victory then we’re going to see Nancy Pelosi and the Gropeocrats back in charge and trying to make America into California….

Yeah, I know the Democrats are awful … [and] the liberal media is composed of lying creeps who to serve as Chuck Schumer’s steno pool when they aren’t awkwardly harassing the interns since they aren’t capable of winning themselves women like real men…. But we’re not talking about them now….

We’re talking about us now…. Let’s talk about what we need to change, because if we don’t change The Swamp is going to swamp us. Our opponents are motivated. They are organizing….

We need to figure out who is the most conservative candidate who can win, and back him/her – that’s the old Buckley rule. The purge of the squishes must come later…. We worry too much about purging our ranks and not enough about making sure we still have ranks to purge. Oh, the accounting shall come – we will have our revenge. But today we need to keep control of Capitol Hill so Donald Trump can keep packing the courts, gutting the bureaucracy, and winning the war against jihadi dirtbags. We can wait to get even.

Here, Schlichter employs certain polemical elements necessary for whipping the base into emotions-guided fury: Their team harbors the true "patriots" while the other's is merely susceptible to "intolerable" "gloating," the "Paris Climate Scam" … (OK, that one lost me, but, I'm sure, not the base), "Nancy Pelosi and the Gropeocrats" — nonetheless the patriots are "doomed in 2018" unless they follow the sainted Bill Buckley's and courageous Kurt Schlichter's advice and get behind a few "squishes."

This, of course, is far from high-level political strategizing. It is, rather, the most elementary of winning gambits, outside of GOTV. Alabama's 5th congressional district (Mo Brooks) is not Pennsylvania's 15th (Charlie Dent). To approach both as politically synonymous is a sure method of winning only one.

Even Schlichter understands this. And if he can grasp it — indeed if Bernie Sanders can come around to grasp it, which he has — why can't the activist left? I suspect the latter does, secretly. But to advocate backsliding from purity is to convert oneself into an anti-progressive squish in the eyes of one's bold, ideological compatriots, who prefer losing pristinely to beating the barbarians. And I doubt this ever changes.

In purple districts, the one real hope Democrats have is that Republican primary voters will altogether ignore Buckley and Schlichter and nominate the ultimate lunatics of anti-squishism.

 

Susan Collins takes a dive

Shameful.

What's more, the Senate leadership didn't even wait till after the vote to shaft her on those health-care promises:

 

If Trump fails to fire Mueller, then he really is an idiot extraordinaire

The Washington Post:

"Returning to the White House from Camp David, Trump was asked Sunday whether he intended to fire  Mueller. 'No, I’m not,' he told journalists."

Since his word means nothing, only a fool would take Trump at his word. And were I one of Trump's many lawyers or political advisers — meaning if I had the conscience of an iguana — I would advise him to deny, for now, what he's planning. Further, I would be one of those who are currently, and undoubtedly, advising such planning.

What's the downside? Mueller is closing in on Trump like a wolverine on a rodent. The incriminating evidence that Mueller is amassing will leave no one in doubt that Donald Trump conspired to collude with Russia, to make pre-election deals with Russia, and then attempted to cover up his crimes; in fact, much of this evidence is already in the daily papers, or on video tape. Permitting Mueller to go forward will only substantiate other suspicions. The end result for Trump is a massive Mueller report to Congress and history specifying that the president of the United States is a crook.

Why would Trump countenance this inevitability of investigative certitude? Better to cut it off at the knees and leave some doubt.

The second and superior reason I'd advise Trump to sequentially obstruct justice by firing Mueller is that he would be doing so with impunity. The president's termination of the special counsel's legitimate investigation would indeed inaugurate a constitutional crisis, although the crisis would be that there would emerge no perceptible crisis. Life in America would go on as before; Trump would proceed as president in his reckless and clueless ways, the Republican Congress would do likewise — no impeachment committee would be impaneled, the Olympics would be broadcast and the Super Bowl played and books would go unread and terrible television shows would continue to be consumed — and within a few days, some other presidential outrage or Republican stupidity would dominate the headlines.

Congressional Democrats are powerless, and though "The Resistance" might organize mass street protests, as encouraged by former attorney general Eric Holder, the powers that be would snicker, in their Washington offices and over their bourbon and branch water, at such an impotent display of fury. Sure, Trump would lose in 2020, but he will anyway. Retribution would at least be vastly postponed.

In short, Trump would be even dumber than he's believed to be if he doesn't fire Bob Mueller.

 

Some Dems are regretting their rush to judgment of Al Franken

Regrets are already setting in.

Two Democratic senators have reconsidered their hasty, unimpressively pious calls for Al Franken's resignation. Politico reports that Pat Leahy has privately informed Franken "that he regrets doing so," and a second told the publication, "I think we acted prematurely, before we had all the facts. In retrospect, I think we acted too fast."

Rather amusingly, Politico adds that the second senator "asked not to be named because of the political sensitivity of the issue among Democrats." Translation: He or she asked not to be named so as to avoid Democrats' Hawthornean branding iron of the scarlet A for unrighteous Apostate.

Perhaps both were shamed into reconsideration because of Sen. Joe Manchin's relentless decency. "What they did to Al was atrocious," he groaned to Politico. "The most hypocritical thing I’ve ever seen done to a human being — and then have enough guts to sit on the floor, watch him give his speech and go over and hug him? That’s hypocrisy at the highest level I’ve ever seen in my life." It "made me sick," he said, adding that "Here’s a man, that all he said [was], 'Take me through the Ethics Committee. I will live by whatever decision and I will walk away thinking about this opportunity I’ve had while I was here.... I hope they have enough guts … and enough conscience and enough heart to say, 'Al, we made a mistake asking prematurely for you to leave.'"

From the outside — Manchin and a handful of other Democratic senators are not alone in their sense of injustice. Wrote retired NY state Supreme Court Judge Emily Jane Goodman on Facebook, "I and many other people — and specifically feminists — feel that it’s not too late, that he should not resign, and that the rush to sweep him out was ill-conceived…. Although we do deplore any kind of gender-based misconduct, we think at the same time he is entitled to a fair hearing."

Which most Democratic senators deemed too much to ask, which imitated Republican authoritarianism, which, at least for once, suggested that the "both sides" narrative isn't always mistaken.

Complicating Franken's possible retention in this Democratic clusterfuck was another ensuing rush to decision. "Tina Smith, Minnesota's Democratic lieutenant governor," Politico reminds us, "was named last week as his appointed successor."

 

Sens. Warren and Sanders: Please stop wasting our time with asinine questions

What irks me to near comic relief about our Elizabeth Warrens and Bernie Sanderses are their rhetorical questions posing as serious inquiries. There is a certain faux innocence about their inquests into the corpse of our political reality that rankles; their interrogations are time- and space-wasting probes into that which has already passed by exceedingly obvious causes. And yet we're expected to entertain their questions with equal seriousness.

To wit, this morning in a NY Times op-ed Sens. Warren and Sanders ask the nation, "With a government funding deadline looming on Friday, congressional Republicans face a choice. Will they spend this week just trying to deliver partisan tax breaks for the rich? Or will they work with Democrats to pass a budget that supports working people?"

Yes, that's a puzzler, an inquiry worthy of deep reflection before answering, no?

Adding insult to our lagging indignation, Warren and Sanders proceed to suggest a series of humane legislative acts that everyone knows will go nowhere in the ghoulish hands of the ruling Republican Party. Why just this week, say the digressive senators, Republican pols could work with Democrats to "show that our country still respects hard work" by, for instance, doubling "federal support for child care in this year’s spending bill," by correcting "failures in student loan servicing" — because "Congress can easily fix this" — by "shor[ing] up … retirement plans and mak[ing] sure nearly 1.5 million American workers aren’t left holding the bag for Wall Street’s mistakes," and by "doubl[ing government] funding for key mental health priorities."

You bet. And in an outburst of their own mental-health improvement, Republicans could also concede that they've been running a populist scam for almost a century, and beg for our forgiveness.

For sure, there is nothing wrong with advocating measures such as those proposed by Warren and Sanders. But to ask if Republicans might discover humanity and therefore cease, for a few moments, "trying to deliver partisan tax breaks for the rich" is to insultingly obscure the political reality they have labored to impose — again, for a century — on the nation: an oligarchic, plutocratic cesspool of a politico-economic system. At this, they have been quite successful — as much now as before the Great Depression.

Just take a look at the 2018 World Inequality Report (among others), written by economists Thomas Piketty et al. They note that U.S. income inequality is "largely due to massive educational inequalities, combined with a tax system that grew less progressive despite a surge in top labor compensation since the 1980s, and in top capital incomes in the 2000s." By keeping the poor ignorant and lavishing regressive taxation on the wealthy, Republicans have perpetuated a system of capital concentration and class immobility. The top 1 percent possesses almost 40 percent of the nation's wealth while the "bottom" 90 percent possesses only 27 percent. The top 0.001 percent has seen an increase in income of more than 600 percent. With these augmented riches, courtesy Republicans, our modern-day aristocratic class has managed to buy yet more Republican pols to secure and expand its socioeconomic position.

Are these facts and this reality generally known by the electorate? Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton did a bit of surveying in 2014 and found that "Americans don’t have the faintest clue how severe economic inequality has become — and if they only knew, they’d be appalled." Which is to say, they just might thumpingly turn on the twisted Republicanism that has poisoned American society for so long.

Thus, Sens. Warren and Sanders, ask not how Republicans might work with Democrats. 'Cause there ain't no way it's gonna happen. Pound instead on the reality of the degenerate Republican Party. Midterm elections aren't about all the wonderful things that the out-of-power party would do; they're about the many ways the in-power party is screwing things up. And not since the American Civil War has one party screwed things up so egregiously.

 

"The Christian Machine" steamrolls one of its own

From Politico Magazine's story, the "Evangelical Leader [Who] Denounced Trump":

*A popular evangelical author and speaker, [Jen Hatmaker] started getting death threats. Readers mailed back her books to her home address, but not before some burned the pages or tore them into shreds. LifeWay Christian Stores, the behemoth retailer of the Southern Baptist Convention, pulled her titles off the shelves.

*Up until [last fall], she had been a wildly influential and welcome presence in the evangelical world, a Christian author whose writings made the New York Times best-seller list.... But then 2016 happened, and, well, of course everything changed.

*Hatmaker effectively joined the coterie of "Never Trump" evangelicals, telling her more than half a million Facebook followers that Donald Trump made her "sad and horrified and despondent." After the "Access Hollywood" tape leaked and prominent evangelical men came to Trump’s defense, she tweeted: "We will not forget. Nor will we forget the Christian leaders that betrayed their sisters in Christ for power."

*That’s when the full weight of conservative Christian outrage crashed down on Hatmaker.

*There were soon angry commenters and finger-wagging bloggers. She says people in her little town of Buda, Texas, just south of Austin, pulled her children aside and said terrible things about her and her husband.

*"This year I became painfully aware of the machine, the Christian Machine," she wrote in April on her blog…. Hatmaker wrote that she understood now the machine’s "systems and alliances and coded language and brand protection," not as the insider she had long been, but "from the outside where I was no longer welcome." During the election season, she added, the "Christian Machine malfunctioned."

*Back in 2013, she wrote a blog post about getting uninvited to speak at a church, partly because of her critical tone toward ministries that do not emphasize social justice.

__________

I can think of no higher or more appropriate social justice than being uninvited to an evangelical church.

The ultrapoltical Christian Machine has been a satanic plague on this republic for centuries. Even its 19th-century reform of temperance was partially rooted not in self-improvement but in a more efficient capitalist system (sober workers), and its Northern abolitionism was more than counterbalanced by its Southern justification of "the peculiar institution." (Credible historical assessments of Northern abolitionism put its influence at around a paltry 5 percent of the public — hardly a formidable force of deliverance, and the principal reason Lincoln delayed selling abolitionism as a war objective.)

In the 20th century the Christian Machine made a colossal fool of itself in opposing monkeys at trials, and well afterward it has made an obscurantist ass of itself by pushing creationism on the educational system. It demands public funds for parochial purposes, it propagandizes taxpayers tax free, it is staunchly anti-enlightenment and anti-science, and it has monolithically supported the most anti-social-justice pols among us, from Louie Gohmert to Ronald Reagan, from Jessie Helms to George W. Bush, from Ted Cruz to the paradigmatically unholy Donald Trump.

The Christian Machine is a gothic, ungodly relic of mean-spirited dishonesty and deeply unspiritual malice. It deserves to be unplugged from all matters of public discourse, which deserves utmost honesty and good faith.

Just ask Jen Hatmaker, former machinist.