The Carpentariat

Despicable

 

Typepad is having technical troubles today. Should I disappear, you now know why.

 

The politics of wombatism

Republican Claudia Tenney of upstate New York, who, in 2016, squeaked into the House with only 44 percent of the vote in a multi-candidate race, is doing some other imitations of Donald Trump as well. That is to say, she's open about being a crackpot.

In a local radio interview, her host noted in a display of the commonplace that more Americans are killed each year in the inner cities than in mass shootings. Rep. Tenney thereupon decided to turn a commonplace into the spectacularly bizarre. "It's interesting," she replied, "that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats." (No doubt they all supported Hillary Clinton, too.) Tenney added, "But the media doesn't talk about that."

CNN, a member of the willfully blind media, got word of Tenney's Trumplike absurdity — and very much wanted to talk about it. Suddenly it was Tenney who turned reticent. She didn't care to talk to CNN, so she sent the network a statement instead, which read:

"I am fed up with the media and liberals attempting to politicize tragedies and demonize law-abiding gun owners and conservative Americans every time there is a horrible tragedy. While we know the perpetrators of these atrocities have a wide variety of political views [which is not what she said], my comments are in response to a question about the failure to prosecute illegal gun crime [which was not what was asked]. I will continue to stand up for law-abiding citizens who are smeared by anti-gun liberal elitists."

Damn that's impressive, in its own twisted kind of way. In a mere 78 words, the Republican congresswoman managed to work in virtuous gun owners, the evil media, virtuous conservatives, the evil courts, virtuous law-abiding citizens and those evil anti-gun liberal elitists. That, in this age of Trump — which is now in its fourth decade — is what passes for Republican analysis of the gun issue.

(Trump would also be proud of Tenney for this: "Last week … she questioned in a radio interview in the wake of Rob Porter's firing from the White House whether the two previous wives who accused Porter of assaulting them should be believed since charges have not been filed." Thus did the congresswoman accuse the abused wives of a felony, since, in Tenney's view, they had lied to the FBI about their mistreatment.)

It should go without saying that a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reacted rather poorly to Tenney's assessment of mass murderers-as-Democrats, saying it was "unhinged, shameful and disgusting," and adding that Tenney herself is "completely unfit … to serve in Congress." The Washington Post asked Tenney's office about the DCCC's, ahem, counter-assessment, but of course the congresswoman did not wish to talk to the Post, either.

The objection might be raised that devoting a post to one wombat of a (seemingly) insignificant Republican congresswoman is a waste of space and time. To that I would say, except for a couple dozen moderate Republicans who are retiring (fleeing), today the Republican Party is Ms. Tenney — plus 44 percent of NY's 22nd congressional district, as well as roughly 40 percent of voters nationwide.

The good news is that a majority of Americans see the Tenneys as indeed wombatty; the bad news is that the majority isn't pretty much unanimous. The even worse news is that given the sizable minority's temperamental closure, there is no way to get to them — to explain just how "unhinged, shameful and disgusting" they've become.

 

The Trump photo that left me nearly speechless

A lot is being made of Trump's handwritten reminders to actually show some interest in what Parkland, Florida students and parents had to say at yesterday's White House gathering on gun reform. A Washington Post photographer caught this image of his notes, which revealed two of five prompts for Trump, should he find himself in an extemporaneous bind. Almost unbelievably, he required a reminder (No. 5) to say: "I hear you."

Are we surprised? We shouldn't be. Unless Trump is yammering at one of his Bund rallies, where he is free to let loose whole chapters of despicable speech on dirty immigrants and the life and criminal times of Hillary Clinton, he requires meticulous guidance. Ordinarily politicians are at their best when they can just be themselves — "Let Al be Al," that sort of thing. Not in Trump's case. There's always a chance he could say something unimaginably stupid, such as, oh, I don't know, maybe joking about some "Pocahontas" to a group of native Americans?

That, however, is not the point of this post. Which is this. An AP photographer got a shot of Trump's notes from a different angle, which I have reproduced below.

Notice anything unusual (other than his freakishly little fingers)? How 'bout a closeup?

Yes, a monogramed "45." And the Washington Post says nothing?

All I can say is that next time I see a number on Trump, I want it to be eight or nine digits long, right above his left shirt pocket, and in black and white.

 

Parkland's young

In watching these grieving young people from Parkland, Florida's high school gather and speak at a gun-reform rally, one realizes that we needn't worry about the next generation. They're far more intellectually sophisticated than mine was, even in a far more complicated world. We often hear that demographics are destiny. If true, and I believe it is, then we'll be just fine.

 

On his word of honor

The saddest thing is that because I'm the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department.

— 2 November 2017

— 21 February 2018
 

You have to read it to disbelieve it

I just read another of Marc Thiessen's hyperventilating defenses of the criminal Trump, "Democrats are crippling America’s response to Russian interference," and I am weary. It takes a lot of stamina to tolerate this former Bush speechwriter's Big Lies, in the mold of both his hero and Sean Hannity. In fact Thiessen is so taxing, I limit my reading of him to roughly once a month. I just don't have the strength — or ignorance — of a Trumpeteer.

Part of what wearies any conscientious reader is in deciding which of Thiessen's Big Lies, in any given column, is the Biggest Lie. After no little labored thought about today's column (which also includes the suggested silliness of Trump's innocence because Mueller hasn't yet indicted him, and the supposedly exonerating fact that Russia's assault on the U.S. began in 2014, before Trump's entrance into the race), I have chosen this:

"Perhaps evidence of collusion between Trump officials and Russia will still emerge. If it does, those officials should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But Trump’s response is not the behavior of someone who is worried that Mueller will find evidence he knowingly engaged in collusion."

The Big Lie often succeeds because it is … BIG. That is, it's so obviously mendacious and enormously fraudulent, people figure that no one would just make it up. There must be some truth to it. To write that Trump's "is not the behavior of someone who is worried that Mueller will find evidence he knowingly engaged in collusion" is such a lie.

What's especially amusing about Thiessen's column today is that right next to his cris de coeur of Trump's innocence act is David Von Drehle's column, titled "For an innocent man, Trump sure does act guilty."

"Surprising as this is in a veteran of showbiz," writes Von Drehle, "Trump seems not to understand how a close-up magnifies every gesture. His jumpiness around the subject of Russia; his hand-wringing over ways to end the investigation; his rhetorical flop-sweat at the mention of the letters F, B and I — all these and more have his audience thinking: Gee, for an innocent man he sure does act guilty."

He sure does. And surely, even Thiessen has noticed. But I guess he's rehearsing to guest-host for Sean Hannity.

 

Billy Graham. A few thoughts.

I suppose today was among Billy Graham's happiest. "I’ll be glad when the moment comes when the Lord calls me to heaven," he once remarked. "I get tired down here sometimes." That, I can imagine, given the furious pace at which he moved.

Some of his success was as much due to luck as activity. Although he had gained a respectable reputation in evangelical circles by 1949, also in that year "newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst … had decided that America needed a spiritual awakening," notes the Washington Post's obituary. Graham happened to be preaching in Los Angeles and he "caught the eye" of Hearst, who next ordered his editors nationwide to "Puff Graham."

Graham inherited a fundamentalist community that, by the mid-20th century, had been ravaged by overindulgence. "The profession had become badly tarnished … for a variety of reasons," writes the Post, among which "were the rigid fundamentalist religious dogma held up to ridicule in the Scopes 'monkey' trial of the 1920s and the unscrupulous excesses of itinerant evangelists traveling the 'tent-and-sawdust circuit' as portrayed in the Sinclair Lewis novel 'Elmer Gantry.'" I recently read a biography of Clarence Darrow, whose letter from Eugene Debs — about the Scripture-thumping William Jennings Bryan — gives a flavor of the anti-fundamentalist sentiment building at the time. Debs charged that Bryan was a "shallow-minded mouther of empty phrases," a "pious, canting mountebank," a "prophet of the stone age" who was but one in the "age-old rule of crowning frauds, hypocrites, time-servers and scoundrels."

As for "Elmer Gantry" — one of my all-time favorite films, in part because as a wee lad I fell in love with its prostituting femme fatale, Shirley Jones — I wonder if it also affected Graham. From the pulpit, said Burt Lancaster as the fiery Gantry, "I know nothing of theosophy, philosophy, psychology, ideology or any other ology." Said Graham, once, "I’m not here to teach psychology or philosophy or theology."

The most delicious passage in the Post's obit is this: "In 1950, Mr. Graham made his first White House visit, calling on President Harry S. Truman, who was cool to the young evangelist. When Mr. Graham suggested that they 'have a word of prayer' together, the president answered, 'I don't suppose it could do any harm.'"

(Oh, and Graham "was not invited back during the Truman administration.")

A regular feature of Graham's evangelical spiel was, "Are you frustrated, bewildered, dejected, breaking under the strains of life? Then listen for a moment to me. Say yes to the savior tonight, and in a moment you will know such comfort as you have never known." It would have been pleasant had his audiences experienced those metamorphoses. In my experience with evangelical Christians, however, they are far from earthly bliss: calm, collected, uplifted, floating along in the river of life. They are instead petty, judgmental and seemingly miserable.

Still, Billy Graham was more honorable than most at what he did; he managed to steer clear of today's evangelical spitefulness, bigotry and hate. (It's a shame his son failed to catch some of that spirit.) With Graham's passing, who of any note is left in the evangelical community who sounds more like their Savior than Satan?

 

The awful truth of what the Republican Party really is

What is it with the right and conspiracy theories? Why do the latter flow from the former like indictments from Bob Mueller?

The last conspiracy theory — or the closest thing, anyway, to a conspiracy theory — confected on the left was from Bernie Sanders supporters who believed that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee had destroyed Bernie's presidential hopes by secret hook and devious crook. Turned out, Hillary and the DNC had only done what other presidential candidates have done in the past, and in fact Bernie had been offered the same internal arrangements by the DNC. As conspiracy theories go, this one — from nearly two years ago — was rather feeble; I'm not even sure it would qualify as the real thing, since in the beginning, there were at least some grounds to suspect Clintonian skulduggery.

On the right, however, conspiracy theories thrive with absolutely no grounds whatsoever. Mere imagination is required for the right to work itself into the most fantastic frenzies. Indeed its current leader would not be where he is today had it not been for his improvisational huckstering of birtherism — that crackpotted ideal of all conspiracy theories, the notion that Obama's mother had somehow known that her Kenyan son would someday run for the presidency, so he needed some fast and secretive identity-shuffling, as well as a Hawaiian hospital. Stunningly? a majority of Republicans still believe in the truthfulness of Trump's grotesque fraud.

I repeat — a majority. Conspiratorial thinking is no fringe phenomenon on the right. It's a way of life.

Thus how many Republicans today believe there's something to the conspiracy theory concocted by one Benjamin Kelly, a very former aide to a Florida state representative? I give you this passage from the Tampa Bay Times:

It bubbled up from the darkest online corners then began to take off: conspiracy theories about Parkland students who've spent the past week on TV demanding action on the gun violence that killed 17 and reawakened a national debate.

By late Tuesday afternoon, the conspiracy climbed to a new level when an aide [Kelly] to state Rep. Shawn Harrison, R-Tampa, was fired after emailing a Tampa Bay Times reporter with a stunning assertion: "Both kids in the picture are not students here but actors that travel to various crisis [sic] when they happen."

The story continues:

Kelly sent another email … that included a link to a conspiracy video on YouTube. The video showed [Parkland student David] Hogg in a news clip from California over a dispute with a lifeguard involving a boogie board. Hogg had posted a video of the confrontation with the lifeguard on YouTube and it "went viral," a news reporter said. Now, conspiracy theorists have questioned what Hogg was doing in another state, some branding him a "crisis actor."

Wrote Kelly to the Times: "There is a clip on you tube that shows Mr. Hogg out in California. (I guess he transferred?)"

If that scribbled filth wasn't enough to send grassroots Republicans into paroxysmal fits of handwringing, there was this alternative filth offered by the Trump-adoring website, Gateway Pundit: "EXPOSED: School Shooting Survivor Turned Activist David Hogg's Father in FBI, Appears To Have Been Coached On Anti-Trump Lines." The story, whose thesis was that the Hoggs were diabolically attempting to divert attention from the FBI's lapse in pursuing pre-massacre leads, was "liked" by Donald Trump Jr.

Vox's Matthew Yglesias keenly empathized with the right's understandable conspiracy-theorizing:

And of course there was that old right-wing standby, as reported by the Tampa Bay Times: "Students were also accused of being … dupes of a liberal news media." Somehow, merely "watching their classmates be murdered" wasn't enough to enrage the Florida teenagers; somehow, it took CNN and MSNBC's muckraking to rile them up.

Trump is now braying his support of more stringent background checks and bump-stock regulations, which is hardly courageous, since, as the NY Times reports, "the National Rifle Association supports the background check legislation and also backs bump stock regulation, although not an outright ban." Yet I'd be surprised if even that much is done in this Republican Congress. Because it knows, as well as the Gateway Pundit knows, that the Republican base is as much the party of Alex Jones as it is Donald Trump. For that matter there is no real party still standing; it's largely just a scattering of lunatic conspiracy theorists.

 

Backsliding in a constant struggle

This, from the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, is rather shocking:

In the poll conducted after a gunman killed 17 people at a Florida high school last week, more than three-quarters, 77 percent, said they think more effective mental health screening and treatment could have prevented the shooting.

The Post-ABC poll also finds that 58 percent of adults say stricter gun control laws could have prevented the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but there is no rise in support for banning assault weapons compared with two years ago.

In simpler form, about 20 percent more Americans believe mental illness — not the easy availability of lethal weapons — is responsible for the repeated massacres of children in this country (as though other, gun-controlled countries experience no mental illness).

In a short, 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." To see what's at the root of all the mass slaughters in this gun-saturated country wouldn't seem to require much of a struggle. Nonetheless, we are challenged. And we can thank the power of pseudoconservative propaganda.

 

From optimism to the "dark underbelly of America"

Appearing on CNN, just after the 2016 election, historian Douglas Brinkley criticized legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin for not giving Trump a break and for being "bleak" and "nihilistic" about the future, merely because the pathologically ignorant, utterly unprepared candidate was heading for the most powerful office in the world.

Toobin countered that nihilism wasn't his objective, but he was a bit worried about all that power Trump would have, especially since he'd have both houses of Congress as well. Together, what might they do to health care, the environment and fiscal stability? wondered Toobin.

It was then that Brinkley starting steaming, accusing Toobin of framing Trump as a "right-wing cartoon." Brinkley added that the left had done the same to Ronald Reagan, who turned out to govern more moderately than anticipated.

Brinkley then completely lost it, shrieking to Toobin that "You’ve been dead wrong about this whole election!… We need to give people a chance right now!" That was then.

Brinkley now says that "Donald Trump represents kind of a dark underbelly of America," that he's a "bully," he's "cruel," he's a racist and totally without ethics.

The point? There was never a time to give Trump a break.

Toobin knew that; Brinkley didn't. Most of the country knew that; some didn't.

 

Well, Comrade, here's to hoping that Russian skulduggery did the trick

Former Trump strategist David Bossie concedes that Russia conducted a "malicious, disruptive campaign" against Hillary Clinton, but he dismisses talk of decisive, pro-Trump Russian assistance with this clean, compact history of the 2016 presidential contest: "The election was still won because Donald Trump was a better candidate with a superior message taking on a horrible candidate who people thought was corrupt" ("people" just sort of thought that — independently — you know?).

Naturally, Trump endorses the Bossie theory of election simplicity. "Wasn’t I a great candidate?" he tweeted Sunday at the tail end of his epic meltdown. Whenever Donald gets to feeling sad, whenever the dog bites, or the bee stings, he simply reminds himself of his awesomeness, of crisp apple strudels and doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with McDonalds noodles.

A "great candidate" — a "better candidate with a superior message." As a way to suppress talk of foreign and almost certainly illegal assistance, this is the fiction that Trump and his former consiglieri tell themselves: that the candidate ran a brilliant campaign of superior messaging. (Hillary's horribleness was mere icing.) We can only hope that Trump & Co. is stupendously wrong about this. For if it is right, Trump's campaign will be emulated by virtually all other political hopefuls, and that will be the end of American politics as anything close to a serious and noble profession.

Just what was Trump's "superior message" that Bossie spoke of? You can search your memory banks, but you won't find it. Trump had no real economic plan — not, that is, one beyond disingenuous promises of returning industrial and manufacturing jobs to the white working class. He would accomplish this, in large part, by executing his ignorance of trade policies. Only the working class' gullibility and equal ignorance allowed him to get away with this claptrap.

Such was the vacant core of Trump's message, which he rounded out by demonizing the press, hurling ad hominems at his opponents, promising to imprison his main opponent, making wild claims about the election's outcome being "rigged," inciting violence at rallies, and other idea- and policy-free messaging.

A certain amount of demagoguing goes into every campaign, but Trump's defined his candidacy in toto. His "superior message" was no message at all, outside of offensively simplistic propositions and rabble-rousing emotionalism. The level of both were unprecedented in American politics. And should they become the campaigning norm, politics will become wholly untethered from addressing the real problems of everyday Americans.

That's why we should hope that Russian skulduggery was decisive in putting Trump in the White House. For if the emptiest rhetoric to ever hit the stump was what did it in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — not Russkie hacking and leaking and fake ads — our biggest and most worrisome problem is us.

 

The latest presidential rankings are in, and Trump comes in at …

The power is back on and I'll try to get this up before it blinks out on me again.

The latest presidential rankings (conducted by the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section) are in, and though they include the scorings of Democratic, Independent and Republican scholars, Trump comes in …

dead last.

Even among Republican scholars alone, he ranks 40th, behind Andrew Johnson (a drunk), Franklin Pierce (another drunk), William Henry Harrison (who was dead in 30 days) and James Buchanan (who wished he had joined Harrison).

In the overall rankings, Barack Obama is now in the Top Ten — at No. 8 — followed by Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson.

Here are the Bottom Ten rankings, as scored by Democratic, Independent and Republican scholars, left to right:

 

I'm cashing it in for the day. Typepad has been having technical problems and my power has been going out every few minutes. I was lucky to post as much as I did. See you tomorrow.  

 

From the adjustment bureau

 

Or, Rush Bunker

Remember when everyone knew this was a joke?

Well, here's the same joke, told on yesterday's edition of "Fox News Sunday," although millions no longer realize that its zaniness is a joke. 

The solution is we need concealed carry in these schools — Archie Limbaugh 

 

A weekend of despair: The Great Trumpian Crackup

The Washington Post describes the president's weekend cyberbombings as an adventure in "profanity and misspellings" that "opened a window into his state of mind." Better yet, the NY Times talked to "three people with knowledge" of that mindless state; they related that it began in a vat of delusion — Trump believed that Bob Mueller's indictment meant that "something good had just happened to him" — but soon morphed into a cauldron of fury — he "began watching TV," uh-ho, and his "mood began to darken as it became clearer to him that some commentators were portraying the indictment as nothing for him to celebrate."

Yes, as a general rule, rare is the "good" day when the word "indictment" is used in any sentence that includes "the president." Even worse for this narcissistic kind was that those TV commentators were suggesting that indeed he had had some help in sorta winning the election. This ignited a "two-day Twitter tirade," writes the Times, "that was unusually angry and defiant even by Mr. Trump’s standards."

The Times could have fairly added "unhinged." Embarrassingly unhinged. Trump's weekend tweets are hard to read; one wants to look away, mortified as one is by their reeking instability of mind. "There was no Collusion," he wrote, which he then substantiated, or so he believed (thus the embarrassing part), with a line from a NY Post columnist: "[Hillary] lost the old-fashioned way, by being a terrible candidate. Case closed."

Trump went on to butcher logic by claiming that Russia's early 2014 meddling disproved any 2016 pro-Trump shenanigans; he despicably exploited the murder of 17 children by implying that "the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter" because it was "spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign"; he rebuked his national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, for "for[getting] to say" in a recent speech that Trump won fair and square and "that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems"; he again assailed "Liddle’ Adam Schiff," this time for being a "monster"; he flatly lied about having "never said Russia did not meddle in the election"; he further degraded the presidency by publicly writing that the Russians "are laughing their asses off"; and he finished the weekend by attacking … Oprah Winfrey.

That's quite a weekend's work. Still, with all that activity, not once did Trump address The Russia Question. "What is it we’re going to do about the threat posed by the Russians?" asked the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, on CNN. "He never talks about that. It’s all about himself."

It seems the answer is: nothing, as long as Trump is president.

The other question is, of course, Why? And that question, Bob Mueller will answer. He'll conclude that Trump is either titanically incompetent as commander in chief — "[Putin] said he didn't meddle…. And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it" — or that he's being blackmailed by the Russian autocrat and his money-lending oligarchs; that, as the abovementioned NY Post scribbler called it, the "discredited Steele dossier" isn't so discredited after all.

Although Trump is unquestionably a titan of incompetence, I tend to put more stock in the latter explanation. It's telling that even the cited NY Post columnist conceded that "the indictments are hardly the final word, and the charges leave plenty of daylight for continued speculation" — that is, "whether Trump or his associates conspired with top Russian government officials." Your standard-issue Pro-Trump Derangement Syndrome permits no room for such speculation, but, there it is nonetheless. In other words, it further seems that the thick red line is fracturing; that even the NY Post can no longer deny that questions about what it calls "America’s political nightmare" are legitimate.

And Trump knows, Johnson-Cronkitelike, that if he loses the NY Post …

well, that's why he's cracking up.

 

 

Do Trump's followers deserve our respect?

Nicholas Kristof has written another of those soul-searching mea culpas, you know, the type that's so fashionable among the hyperdignified deacons of The Church of the Righteously Strutting Novitiates. This tells me that Kristof has too often been lunching with David Brooks. Oh the tears they must shed together over tea and tofu, confessing they're just not always the virtuous men they should be.

Kristof's thesis, in the aforementioned mea culpa, is rather self-evident in its title, "You're wrong! I'm Right!" This title-cum-thesis may be less self-explanatory to some than to others, so here it is, either fleshed or flushed out, from the columnist himself: "All of us, on both sides, frequently spend more time demonizing the other side than trying to understand it, and we all suffer a cognitive bias that makes us inclined to seek out news sources that confirm our worldview."

Hauled down its logical pathway, Kristof's argument is that WWII American housewives would have been well advised to read Der Stürmer along with Time magazine. Although that observation is reductio ad absurdum itself, it's also true that the columnist bothers not to delimit his argument. What are the boundaries of "understanding"? Are "both sides" of equal merit? Are both worthy of empathy? At times, with some sides, is demonization self-inflicted? More on that in a moment.

In authentic Brooksian tradition, Kristof proceeds to highlight assorted studies of opinionated behavior, all of them suggesting, essentially, that head-in-hand pondering of the ignorant blather across from you is the refined, enlightened the way to go. "It should be possible," he concludes, "both to believe deeply in the rightness of one’s own cause and to hear out the other side. Civility is not a sign of weakness, but of civilization."

There, I quite agree. Nonetheless I'm being hard on Kristof, and about that, I feel kinda bad. But in his column he somehow overlooks a vital objection, which is why I committed the above reductio ad absurdum about Der Stürmer and Time. And the objection is this: What if the "other side" is not only aggressively uncivilized, but brutally wrongheaded?

To wit, I spent part of Friday afternoon doing some psychosociological research at Hannity.com, where they've raised brutal wrongheadedness to both a fascinating and tedious art form. In various written offerings, the Big Cheese himself had explained to his Hannityheads that Mueller's indictments cleared Trump, which, of course, they hadn't. If anything, Mueller's indictments spelled even bigger trouble ahead for the already besieged president. I thereupon dropped a few dissenting, written offerings of my own in the comment section. My reception, in part, tracked thus:

"Your a fucking idiot,i mean you where actually dumb enough that Ruthless cunt hildabeast" … "All the hate rallies wer pro Hillary..........get it??? HUH???? get it??? the russians were pro Hillary, a thanky you for ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,give up??? URANIUM. God you are dense" … "I'd sure like to hear where you found the info that the Russians intent in all this was to assure Trump was elected" … "DID A HORSE KICK YOU IN THE HEAD OR WAS YOU BORN RETARDED ?" … "Keep drinking the koolaid" … "Trump will be remembered as one of the greatest Presidents ever in the USA!" … "You need to get better informed!!"

Without my prompting, i.e., baiting, the Hannitheads also left comments that stripped attention from Trump and threw it onto their favorite whipping folk:

"I hated hillary long before this" … "do not forget the speaking fee of 500,000 that Bill recieved." … "Sounds like [Mueller] is protecting Hillary. We know POTUS is clean." … "[Mueller] had to come up with something but obviously had no interest in Hillary" … "Aren't they reopening the Hillary email investigation?" … "Kinda like Hillary taking money from foreign governments to finance her campaign, right?" … When is it Hillary's turn?

"I studied Trump's business practices while working on my MBA. No Russian influence here. Subsequently, I do believe Soros tampered with our election. Isn't he a foreign national?" … [Soros] owns alot of the voting machines and manipulated them to vote killery, but it didn't work, too many real americans showed up to vote that they weren't expecting, lol

"Wow, proof positive of ZERO Trump collusion. Sadly I’m sure the witch hunt Mueller investigation will continue despite these facts".

When Kristof writes about "both sides" and mutual understanding versus unseemly demonization, he is inescapably writing about rational political observers versus the Trump camp. The former have their faults, sure. But the latter downright demonize themselves by following a racist, a flagrant misogynist, a mocker of the disabled, an enemy of the free press, an opponent of American institutions, an indifferent destabilizer of critical alliances, a mujahid against estabilshed law, a promoter of "fake news," a philandering putz and a diseased liar and an ethical vacuum and a tinpot autocrat.

Should I, or you, or anyone who values the political traditions that had already made America great respect the opinion of those who would love, honor and obey such a monster? Are the uncivilized abominations of Donald J. Trump and Sean Hannity and their weedroots lackeys more deserving of "understanding" than were the many hateful manifestations of America's yesteryears?

Mr. Kristof fails to make these distinctions. And that's where his otherwise reasonable call for empathy and civility collapses.

 

Fake news? No. An illegitimate president.

"[Trump] has always been concerned about the legitimacy of his election," said a 2016 Ted Cruz aide, Rick Tyler, to Politico. Trump has good reason to be concerned. For Special Counsel Bob Mueller's indictment of the pro-Trump Russian troll farm, added Tyler, was "criminal activity … that helped Donald Trump get elected."

So now there's good reason for us to be concerned — that the sitting president of the United States is illegitimate.

Three states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — put Trump over the top in the Electoral College by a meager 77,000 votes, out of roughly 130 million. All three states turning presidentially red caused a notable level of wonder at the time. "Pennsylvania and Michigan had not voted for a Republican president since voting for George H.W. Bush in 1988," recalled the NY Times on 11 November 2016, and "Wisconsin had not gone Republican since 1984." All three states, throughout 2016, had consistently polled blue. And with all three states in her column, Clinton would have won the Electoral College by 274 Electoral votes, ratifying her 3 million popular vote advantage.

Yesterday, former CIA director John Brennan tweeted, "My take: Implausible that Russian actions did not influence the views and votes of at least some Americans." Indeed, it is far from implausible to reason that a mere 77,000 voters in three traditionally blue states were correspondingly influenced. Thus because Trump's Electoral College victory was due in significant part to "criminal activity" by a hostile foreign power, there quite possibly sits in the Oval Office an illegitimate president.

At his news conference yesterday, Bob Mueller's boss, Rod Rosenstein, said there is "no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant" in Russia's fraud. As Bloomberg Politics observes, the deputy A.G. "conspicuously skipped its repeated references to the Russian goal of helping Trump win the presidency and hurting his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton." Rosenstein's omissions were, in part, omitted out of prosecutorial prudence. In larger part, he skipped the indictment's rather heavy pro-Trump implications to spare his ultimate boss another off-with-their-heads temper tantrum.

Had Rosenstein included those implications in his news conference, a further implication — at the risk of his job — would have been just as conspicuous: that the sitting president of the United States is illegitimate.

Trump, either cluelessly or mendaciously, as usual, is said to have been "elated" by Mueller's indictment, believing that it somehow exonerated him. "Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President," he tweeted as proof of his innocence in a textbook non sequitur. "The results of the election were not impacted," he continued, which the indictment did not say. Finally, "The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion!" even though all the evidence — from a drunken Greek braggart to Little Donnie meeting with Russian schemers in Trump Tower to Daddy Donnie lying about it to the press — says otherwise.

If nothing else, we'll now be spared those other Trump tweets — 44 of them in his first illegitimate year, according to the Washington Post — that read, "Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media," or "Since the first day I took office, all you hear is the phony Democrat excuse for losing the election, Russia, Russia, Russia."

Because next we'll be hearing even more Russia, Russia, Russia — sans Democrats — and, increasingly, about Trump's ties to the entire fraud perpetrated on the United States, which is being perilously led by …

an illegitimate president.