PMC Commentary

Once there was a remark, for one brief shining moment, that was Honesty

I saw Rep. Trey Gowdy on the news a couple days ago defending Bob Mueller and essentially instructing his partisan colleagues to leave the special counsel alone. The Republican congressman said Mueller would do his job well if he were just allowed to actually do his job.

That a Republican pol would say this was striking. I recall wondering at the time what prompted Gowdy to make such commonsensical remarks, which were of course sharply critical not only of his conspiracy-huckstering colleagues, but of the autocratic, Muellerphobic Donald Trump as well. Today I — we — got the answer. He's retiring from Congress.

"'I will not be filing for re-election to Congress nor seeking any other political or elected office; instead I will be returning to the justice system,' the South Carolina Republican said in a statement."

Bob Corker criticized Trump. He's also retiring. Jeff Flake criticized him. He's retiring, too. Charlie Dent. Same. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Yep. Is there any Republican pol who's been critical of Trump but isn't getting the hell out of Dodge? I can't think of one.

Republicans' collective cowardice has been even more striking.

***

Update: Thought you might enjoy the below, a just-discovered gift from "The Daily Show." The folks there say their favorite is #8 (which they call "The Benghazi Blowout"). Myself, I'm torn between #5 and #6, although #6, I think, is just a mature version of #5. I do know if I came upon either one on the floor, I'd stomp the hell out of it.  

 

Was there ever a more perfect metaphor?

A Republican train wreck.

"A train carrying [GOP] members of Congress -- including House Speaker Paul Ryan -- to their legislative retreat in West Virginia hit a truck Wednesday, multiple sources told CNN."

***

Note: The sad news of a resulting death was not known when this post was published. My sense of humor isn't that sick.

 

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Only in America?

No.

Only in Trump's America.

Politico: "The Trump administration’s top public health official bought shares in a tobacco company one month into her leadership of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,] charged with reducing tobacco use." 

To return to "American Carnage" for a moment, let us remember that before the Trump administration, "the establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country…. That all changes starting right here and right now. Because this moment is your moment. It belongs to you."

But Brenda Fitzgerald is keeping the fucking stock.

 

Trump to America: You jackasses don't realize how great you've got it

So much winning — for real!

Last night, Trump declared that "this, in fact, is our new American moment. There has never been a better time to start living the American Dream."

And yet it was only one year ago, in his "American Carnage" inaugural address, that Trump saw an America riddled with "mothers and children trapped in poverty"; a devastated republic with "rusted out factories scattered like tombstones" — "factories shuttered … with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind"; a malign country in which "the wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world."

He saw an "education system flush with cash" that nevertheless left "our children behind." He saw all "the crime, the gangs and the drugs." He saw that "Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth." He saw that "every decision" previously made by politicians "on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs" had been an unspeakable disaster.

He saw that in America, there were "divisions."

But all that — the poverty, the shuttered factories, the abandoned workers, the improperly redistributed wealth, the grossly unfair educational system, the crime, the gangs, the drugs, the disastrous decisions and the country's divisions — all that is now but a wretched memory of those Obamian days.

Now, a mere one year later, "there has never been a better time to start living the American Dream."

I guess I wasn't paying attention. So much winning, in such a short time — and I missed it. All of it.

 

Beginning Sunday, we'll have a 2-way presidential race. (That number just might grow.)

Some of you will love this, and some will despise it. I'm in the former camp. Because …

I just can't get enough of presidential campaigns — the first of which has been launched by Democrat John Delaney (below, right), a Maryland congressman. This Sunday he'll begin a $37,000 ad buy in Iowa, and he'll invest an extraordinary $1 million in the following four weeks. His first spot is titled "Dirty Word."

This is the first Democratic ad to run. Trump ran his first reelection ad eight months ago.

My guess as to Delaney's strategy is that he's guessing the Democratic nominee will be a woman (Harris, Gillibrand, perhaps Warren), in need of a male sidekick. So he'd better start raising his vice-presidential profile now.

 

Trump's 88 ("HH") minutes of Big Lies

Post-SOTU, Ross Douthat observed that "read[ing] tonight's remarks" was "a better idea than listening to their somewhat soporific delivery." As you may know, I opted for reading. When delivered by Trump, the written, teleprompted magic of Stephen Miller's perfervid brain somehow escapes me. But as Trump droned on soporifically, I was reading not the SOTU transcript but the even more fevered exuberance of his followers, which was captured in this comment left on Laura Ingraham's Twitter feed: "Tremendous fantastic state of the union speech President Trump !! You hit a home run !!!"

There were thousands of virtually identical comments left on Ingraham's feed alone — and I read just enough of them to be heaved into a kind of vertiginous stupefaction. Supportive partisanship is to be expected in events such as last night's, but these people — Trump's people, the Trumpeteer Club — were carried away to heights of exhilaration that absolutely dumbfounded. While reading their orgiastic howls of pleasure I also followed the play-by-play tweets of dozens of others. Only one, Frank Luntz, was as enraptured as the Trumpeteers: "This speech represents the presidential performance that Trump observers have been waiting for – brilliant mix of numbers and stories, humility and aggressiveness, traditional conservatism and political populism…. Tonight, I was moved and inspired. Tonight, I have hope and faith in America again. Only one word qualifies: Wow."

Wow, indeed.

Luntz is, of course, a hack, but even some hacks can understand English. And most of Trump's words, which is to say, Miller's words, were a strikingly conspicuous labyrinth of lies. "In an address remarkably devoid of new policies," noted the Times, "Trump instead recited what he described as his greatest accomplishments" — descriptions accomplished via a buttload of mendacity.

"Just as I promised the American people from this podium 11 months ago," brayed Trump, "we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reform in American history." Untrue. "Trump won’t stop making this claim, even though zero evidence supports it," wrote the Times. "The recently passed tax bill appears to rank 12th in American history."

By implication, Trump also lied about the pace of new jobs — i.e., his implication that job creation accelerated in 2017, which it did not (in fact, job growth under Trump was "somewhat slower"). By implication he lied about wage growth, which is up, but "at a slower rate than [it was] at the end of President Obama’s second term." He lied, again by implication, about having "liberated almost 100 percent of [ISIS] territory," much of which was actually regained under Obama. By implication he lied when he said "the stock market has smashed one record after another," for in the comparable period, it rose at a brisker pace under Obama. And once again by implication, he lied about having "eliminated an especially cruel tax that fell mostly on Americans making less than $50,000 a year" — a lie, since taxpayers could acquire exemptions from Obama's "cruelty."

Trump lied about Apple having "just announced its plans to invest a total of $350 billion in America." Apple's new investment "appears to be roughly $37 billion," reported the Times. He lied about automobile plants' expansions that "we have not seen for decades." Simply untrue. And automotive jobs? They're "down from a year ago." He lied about "end[ing] the war on beautiful, clean coal," in the sense that there is really no such thing as clean coal, since the process of cleaning coal is too expensive for energy companies to implement. Trump lied when he said "One of my greatest priorities is to reduce the price of prescription drugs." Well, that perhaps was not a lie. Perhaps that has been a priority. Problem is, he has done nothing about it.

On immigration, let it suffice that he lied about damn near everything related, namely the grand "security" of a wall and the outrages of the visa lottery. ("The third pillar [of immigration reform] ends the visa lottery — a program that randomly hands out green cards without any regard for skill, merit or the safety of our people," said Trump. Rather, "visa winners are … subjected to a lengthy background check that can last for months," said the NY Times. Said the L.A. Times: "The visa lottery does not 'randomly' hand out lawful permanent residency visas or green cards…. Entrants must have a high school education or have worked for two years in a skilled job."

And all those "unfair" trade deals that Trump was going to cancel or renegotiate to protect our "prosperity" and "companies" and "jobs" and "wealth"? Yep, another lie. Jonathan Chait said it well; Trump "simply offered redundant promises of great deals to come."

Merely reading the enhanced crap of Trump's SOTU address was painful enough. I can't imagine having sat through all 88 miserable minutes of lie after lie after lie. And I definitely can't imagine three more miserable years of his crap.

 

SOTU alternatives

I wanted to provide you with alternative television viewing for 9pm Eastern, viewing which is more informative and intellectually deeper than that offered tonight by a certain clown's usual con artistry.

I'll start here — the Home Shopping Network's "Designer Gallery: Jade of Yesteryear Jewelry," in which "vintage jewelry is spotlighted." Or, there's "Love & Hip Hop" on VH1, or "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" on Bravo, or "Drunk History" on the Comedy Channel.

The last I would not wholeheartedly recommend, however, in that it will be too similar to Trump's SOTU. 

You're welcome.    

 

How Sean Hannity lies to his audience

How mendacious is Sean Hannity toward his audience?

Below is an item he posted on Twitter earlier today — a piece in The Guardian which he linked to (the link didn't work), describing a dossier recently provided to the FBI by a 1990s friend of the Clintons. Hannity's web post implied that the current association between the dossier writer and the Clintons has somehow been nefarious in regard to the Mueller investigation. He quoted the Guardian in his online post: "The second memo was written by Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s. Unlike Steele, Shearer does not have a background in espionage, and his memo was initially viewed with skepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organizations before the election." And there he stopped.

So what, from the Guardian's piece, did he omit? This:

"The FBI inquiry into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election has been given a second memo that independently set out some of the same allegations made in a dossier by Christopher Steele, the British former spy…. It raises the possibility that parts of the Steele dossier, which has been derided by Trump’s supporters, may have been corroborated by Shearer’s research, or could still be" (emphases mine).

I suppose if grossly misleading dreck such as Hannity's were the only source of your news and information, your knowledge of what's happening in the world would indeed be deplorable. 

 

"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble"

The FBI and Justice Department's leadership (absent Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, of course) makes its way to Capitol Hill for the SOTU address. 

 

Another insufferable SOTU - only far worse than usual

It's a rare thing when I agree with George Will, but his visceral dread of State of the Union addresses — those spectacles in which the commonplace as well as the cretinous receive thunderous applause from party bulls and halfwitted backbenchers — is, alas, most agreeable to my mind. "The Constitution laconically requires only that the president 'shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient,'" Will reminded us in 2013, reasoning that "nothing requires 'from time to time' to be construed as 'every damn year.'"

And yet, every year we suffer. I dreaded these sufferings under Bush and I dreaded them under Obama and I sure as hell would dread one (it may be the only one) under … I can't say it right now. Even the thought that this orange fright-wigged clown will be remarking on the state of our union that he is so vigorously assaulting is more than I can bear. Adds Will:

"It is beyond unseemly, it is anti-constitutional for senior military officers and, even worse, Supreme Court justices to attend these political rallies where, with metronomic regularity, legislators of the president’s party leap to their feet to whinny approval of every bromide and vow. Members of the other party remain theatrically stolid, thereby provoking brow-furrowing punditry about why John Boehner did not rise (to genuflect? salute? swoon?) when Barack Obama mentioned this or that."

And just what is it, tonight, that members of the president's party will whinny approval of and Nancy Pelosi will stoically sit through, thereby provoking brow-furrowing pundits to ask why? Infrastructure, mainly. Or, in the Age of Trump (there, I said it), a privatization racket for the benefit of his billionaire pals. Or, as the nonprofit watchdog Democracy Forward puts it, "a blueprint for cronyism."

Krugman suggests rather sensibly that the government should rebuild America the "straightforward way: if you think we should build more infrastructure, then build more infrastructure, and never mind the complicated private equity/tax credits stuff [which repays investors '82 percent of the equity they put in']." This now-unfashionable concept, however, presents a problem to those more interested in distributing the loot to private concerns — themselves. "You could try to come up with some justification for the complexity of the [private equity/tax credit] scheme," continues Krugman, "but one simple answer would be that it’s not about investment, it’s about ripping off taxpayers. Is that implausible, given who we’re talking about?" (See? Krugman couldn't write his name either.)

Of course it is not implausible. Any crooked scheme under this Republican Congress and this administration is, rather, to be expected. And I shan't suffer it tonight.

***

Note: The photo is of Woodrow Wilson's 1913 revival of in-person SOTUs.

 

Of Trump, Nunes, and the #BigLieMemo

Here's to hoping that, at the very least, Special Counsel Robert Mueller cites House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in his final report as an unindicted co-conspirator in the sleazy cabal intent on concealing the Trump camp's insidious dealings with Russia. Mueller would be unlikely to actually indict Nunes, since his indictment would compel the indictment of virtually all House Republicans. The #ReleaseTheMemo scam has been a party affair, not an individual undertaking. Still, absent the utterly conscienceless Nunes, would the scam have been so successful? He deserves to be rewarded with a special citation that, once the nation regains its sanity, might haunt him into political obscurity. Prison would be better, but we'll take what we can.

The "extraordinarily reckless" is now the new normal. Team Trump's unequaled crusade to defame and delegitimize the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation joins the president's coequal offensives against traditional allies, nonproliferation accords, smart trade and a livable planet (to name only four depredations). What was once unthinkable — a U.S. president not only publicly slandering the nation's leading law-enforcement organizations, but endorsing the release of sensitive intel that could do national harm — is now just another egregious breach of decency in the daily horror of Trumpism.

The #ReleaseTheMemo hysteria and accompanying presidential assaults on law-enforcement authorities with the expertise to expose Trumpian wrongdoing are of course based on the Big Lie concept, one of the fundamental, government-by-fraud planks of Mein Kampf. Ben Wittes, of Lawfare, quotes from what appears to be Team Trump's Bible:

"[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."

Expert liars and those who conspire in the fabrication of colossal untruths; a perfect description of the Trump White House and its Republican Congress. The memo about to be released is so unbelievable in its gross misrepresentations — namely, that the customarily conservative FBI and Justice Department diabolically conspired to destroy Republican Trump — only the unbelievably clueless would sign on in belief. But there are millions of them, and the "primitive simplicity of their minds" is a testament to the Big Lie's efficacy.

The most eloquent spokesman for the sanity camp is Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. And since I can't outdo his eloquence on this shameful matter, I'll let him have the last word:

"The damage to the bureau and the department is really incalculable. The public will have even less confidence in those institutions. When FBI agents fan out across the country and do interviews and prevent terrorist plots, people may view them with greater suspicion…. It’s overwhelmingly destructive and such a disservice to the hard-working law enforcement agents. Like much of what’s happened under this administration, it’s going to do long-term damage."

 

The American right and Russkie bots

I found this interesting.

 

Was Trump a political innovator?

Ezra Klein: "This was Trump’s true political innovation: He realized that presidential campaigns — and particularly presidential primaries — had become reality shows, and the path to victory was to get the most attention, even if much of that attention was negative."

Here, Klein swings and misses. Trump's "innovation" was never a winning strategy in his mind. He never believed (or "intuited"), just as no one else ever believed, that a lying, carnival-barking, universally crass, imbecilic buffoon would ever be the presidential primaries winner, let alone the president of the United States. Unlike H.L. Mencken, he overestimated the intelligence of the American (voting) public, as did the rest of us. He simply wanted to promote his "brand," so he could keep on huckstering the nation's most clueless, perhaps with a liberal-bashing media empire. (That was another original thought, right?)

Klein also, and more accurately, allows for the possibility that Trump merely "stumbled" into his "profound insight" about media coverage and attention-getting: "He says things no national politician in history would have dared say, things that the press covers because they are outrageous, controversial, unnerving, appalling." Thus he hogged the campaign coverage. That, and poor Hillary couldn't get out from under all the idiotic coverage of inconsequential emails.

It was all the perfect shitstorm — but Trump's "innovative" contributions were as old as P.T. Barnum's, Charles Ponzi's, and every other huckster who bamboozled thousands.

Sighs Klein, with exemplary liberal woefulness: "In owning our attention, in driving the agenda, in setting both the terms and tone of the debate, and in doing so by generating constant negative attention, cultural conflict, and emotional alarm, Trump makes us a little more like him, and politics a little more like the tribal clash he says it is. Trump is winning. The country is losing." True enough. But there's no way around our retaliatory bile until the national pathogen is gone. Lamenting the inevitable seems like a waste of emotional energy. 

 

Is there an alternative to impeachment?

The Times' David Leonhardt:

There are good reasons to be wary of impeachment talk. Congressional Republicans show zero interest, and they’re the ones in charge. Democrats, for their part, need to focus on retaking Congress, and railing about impeachment probably won’t help them win votes. But let’s set aside realpolitik for a few minutes and ask a different question: Is serious consideration of impeachment fair? I think the answer is yes. The evidence is now quite strong that Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice. Many legal scholars believe a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. So the proper remedy for a president credibly accused of obstructing justice is impeachment.

Leonhardt goes on to list the specific instances (10 of them), overall pattern and general intent of Trump's obstructions, from pleading with a now-fired FBI director to be "loyal" (i.e., bury the investigation of Michael Flynn) to his many "untruthful statements about American intelligence agencies’ conclusions regarding Russia’s role in the 2016 election."

Still, although to any fair-minded person Leonhardt's question, "Is serious consideration of impeachment fair?" answers tself, is it not inseparable from realpolitik? On the face of it, the enormity of Trump's culpability is imposing, especially when one thinks on Leonhardt's sign-off line, "He may not be finished [obstructing justice]." In its precedent of a majority party protecting its politically aligned president at all costs, the unfolding of four crime-riddled years of a Trump presidency would do lasting, devastating harm to the republic. Doubtless, Republicans would do it again. And Democrats, with their own president, would be tempted to play payback. The rule of law as a political joke would become a fait accompli.

Hence not only is "serious consideration" of Trump's impeachment a fair proposition; it is, it seems to me, an inescapable one. Yet Leonhardt is also correct when he notes that Democrats "need to focus on retaking Congress, and railing about impeachment probably won’t help them win votes." There's the rub. The right thing to do is occluded by the other, rightly pragmatic thing to do: nothing. The predicament becomes even more torturous when you ponder that a Democratic House majority pursuing impeachment could well be politically self-wounding — and with no practical payoff. Even if Dems were to retake the Senate, they sure wouldn't have the supermajority needed to convict.

Is there another option? — assuming Bob Mueller's findings are released only after the midterms? There is, though it's exceptionally risky. House Democrats (we're also assuming they're in the majority) could signal to Mueller that impeachment is off the table, but a criminal indictment would be just peachy. The legality of an indictment against a sitting president — and here of course is the risky part — would then be decided by the Supreme Court. Here's that word again: Assuming Mueller is green-lighted to go, he could then plea-bargain with the colossally guilty president — resign or do time. Trump would shriek, as he always does, that he'll fight. But he almost always caves, too, because he knows as well as anyone that he is colossally at fault.

When it comes to Democrats' impeachment predicament, this is the only workaround I can conceive.

 

A couple minutes of Grammy-watching worthiness

If you hadn't seen "this," the "idea" in motion, you would perhaps be likely to agree with NeverTrumper Charlie Sykes, who nonetheless tweeted of the award show's "full anti-President Donald Trump" feature (as the delicate folks at Breitbart.com put it): "Who at the Grammys thought this was a good idea?"

"This," in its original airing, I also didn't see, because watching award shows — any award show — is, in my book, a blight upon personal time in this short life. To me it's a seemingly eternal torture to watch the beautiful people congratulate each other and thank other people whom no one has ever heard of for having contributed to the award recipient's natural brilliance. Were I a Trumpian dictator I wouldn't ban such shows, but I'd make it clear that of them, I disapprove. I'd do it on Twitter. I would then sit back and watch their ratings sink like the NFL's, since weak-minded suckers and bootlicking authoritarian personalities are born every minute. 

That said, I would have tuned in last night, from time to time, if I had known that Nikki Haley would soon tweet, "I have always loved the Grammys but to have artists read the Fire and Fury book killed it." Whatever do you mean, Nikki? Having artists and one actually winning presidential candidate read from Fire and Fury was the only thing that could have possibly saved it.

And it did. So if you didn't see the original airing of "this," just as I didn't until this morning, I offer YouTube's 00:01:55 forever-archived version.

Some folks might see "this" as tasteless. But since the advent of Trump the National Plague, traditional standards of civility have slipped a bit. Hence, as the joke goes, these sorts of public beatings will continue until national morale improves.