The Carpentariat

Trump is a national, indeed global, threat

On Thursday, reports Politico, the White House dispatched OMB Director Mick Mulvaney and WH Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short to emphasize, to the nation's press, that Trump supported the $1.3 trillion spending bill, thus averting a government shutdown the next day. The administration also released a statement affirming the wisdom of the president's support: The bill is a "win for the American people," said the White House.

On Friday, however, the president threatened (via Twitter, of course) to veto the people's win. For as Trump said post-tweet — in what the Times labeled a "bizarre" signing ceremony — "Nobody [is] more disappointed [in the bill] than me." (This, added the Times, from a "master dealmaker.") Just before the president's expressed exasperation, a reporter asked a White House official if Trump was serious about his veto threat. "Who knows," was the official's reply.

Such is the confidence the administration has in its president's stability. Coordinated rollouts are always subject to Trump's eleventh-hour shifts, which derive not from deeper reflection on any given topic, but from what George Will superfluously noted yesterday: "Let’s say this one more time: Trump. Has. No. Convictions." His ministrations descend mostly from whims, his positions from populist intuition, his governing, as it were, from cliffhanging before the commercial break. "People who regularly speak to Trump," observes Politico, "say he hates seeing his next moves previewed in the press and he delights in keeping people guessing."

And on frequent occasion, as we know, Trump's delight in notional careening comes less from pleasure in calculated surprises than from mere happenstance. "White House officials say they’ve left meetings believing an issue is settled only to see the president publicly re-litigate the issue after speaking to an outside ally on the phone or seeing an alternative take on cable news." How can the most powerful man in the world be so weak and impressionable? Let's say this yet one more time: He. Has. No. Convictions.

He's also oblivious to immensely changed circumstances. Jonathan Swan, of Axios: "Trump is doing what he used to do at Trump Tower. He’s waking up, watching cable news, making phone calls, watching more cable news, having some meetings, taking more calls (sometimes from cable news hosts and guests), watching more cable news. And improvising all the way." Thus Reince Priebus, quoted in a forthcoming book on the history of WH chiefs of staff: "Take everything you’ve heard [about the administration's chaos] and multiply it by 50" — because variations in cable-news opinion keep the president in eternal flux.

Trump's ill-schooled rootlessness is a terrifying invitation to bamboozlement by much bigger minds. Think Bolton. You will have then thought of the truly catastrophic consequences of an intellectually shiftless president.

The perils of Trump, as we also know, are enabled by spineless congressional Republicans. Yet far more than that, this grievously dangerous president is enabled by his base. "Really wish more people would stop convincing themselves there’s a grand plan at work," tweeted Maggie Haberman yesterday. Those people are Trump's abundantly fleeceable, profoundly gullible voters who insist against all evidence that he's working from some diabolically clever "drain-the-swamp" blueprint — a plan so cunning, the president's careening only looks like chaos.

This is a ghastly misapprehension, and it keeps Trump invulnerable from congressional Republicans who know better. Were the misapprehension to be corrected by some statistically significant degree, Trump's invulnerability would collapse, for those congressional Republicans would finally run for cover. Thus, systematically stripping the base of its Trump delusions is, I hope, a strategic element of Democrats' 2018 campaigns. Which is to say, the perils of Trump transcend the concerns of congressional districts — the axiom that all politics are local. They aren't. Donald J. Trump is a national, indeed global, threat.

 

Among Republican strategists, "doom and resignation"

Charlie Cook, of the Cook Political Report:

In my meetings with GOP strategists, there is a sense of doom and resignation…. At least today, it looks fairly likely Republicans will lose their House majority, while there is enormous uncertainty about how their 51-49 Senate majority will fare.

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll released Sunday and Monday shows that … Republicans dropped from 6 points behind (43 to 49 percent) in the generic congressional ballot test to 10 points back (40 to 50 percent). With those numbers, if the election were held today Republicans would surely lose the House, where their majority is just 24 seats…. A grand total of 73 GOP-held seats … are in play or potentially in play…. Totaling it all up, Democrats have 178 districts that today appear locked up, Republicans just 167.

And here's the real stunner:

Finally, while Democrats are running 24 points ahead of Republicans on the generic ballot test in Democratic-held districts, the generic is tied in Republican-held districts — and that includes interviews in the strongest of GOP districts as well as the vulnerable ones.

Seldom are doom and resignation so enjoyable.

 

Trump's trade "innovations" stagger the mind

Krugman:

If you want to pressure China into respecting intellectual property, you need to assemble a coalition of nations hurt by Chinese ripoffs — that is, other advanced countries, like Japan, South Korea and European nations. Yet Trump is systematically alienating those countries, with things like his on-again-off-again steel tariff and his threat to put tariffs on goods that, while assembled in China, are mainly produced elsewhere …

… such as Japan, South Korea and European nations; i..e., these "allies" are being indirectly taxed by the United States on non-steel items they ship directly to China. In other words, we're only hurting the ones the sane among us love.

As for that on-again-off-again steel tariff, the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell notes that "First we shielded Canada and Mexico." Then we gave "a reprieve to Europe, Australia, South Korea, Argentina and Brazil." One wonders if Trump is even aware of these exemptions. But you can safely bet that his base isn't. And that's all that Trump really wanted — to pull off another con on the people who trusted him most. Imagine Trump's base as the student body of one enormous Trump University. I'd feel sorry for them, except that if these white working-class boys are too "lazy" (as John Kelly would put it) to simply read a newspaper now and then … well.

On the humorous side of these sad! tariff stories, Rampell also notes that "the smart way to confront China … would involve banding together with allies." And guess what? The new director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, has announced that "he’d like to see the United States and allies join forces against China in a 'trade coalition of the willing'" — some sort of, oh, I don't know, trans-Pacific partnership.

Damn! It's a brutal testament to Obama's incompetence that he didn't think of that. If he had, I wonder what he would have called it?

 

With Bolton, our national nightmare of Trump just got much, much darker

Our longer, even fiercer national nightmare is just beginning.

CNN reported on-air that Trump made John Bolton promise that he "won’t start any wars." Yet hiring Bolton to not start any wars is like hiring Hermann Göring to not invade England. Bolton's chickenhawk soul has been committed to starting wars throughout his professional career, although it was, as well, committed to personally avoiding them. "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy," wrote Bolton in his 25th Yale reunion book. "I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." Bolton graduated from Yale in 1970. Did he consider the war lost when he avoided the draft by entering Yale in the far more hopeful year of 1966?

Had Bolton served in the Vietnam war, which he supported from the quiet of Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, he likely would have returned with tail between legs and flowers in mustache. Thanks to his yellow and hypocritical streaks, however, he went on to serve in the neoconservative forces, which, most notably, sent other young Americans to their deaths in Iraq. He was "credibly accused," as Vox puts it, "of manipulating US intelligence on weapons of mass destruction" so that thousands of patriots could lose their lives in vain.

Since then, Bolton has regularly reaffirmed his daunting manliness in the war-happy, intellectual desert of Fox News, the sitting president's primary source of intel. He has advocated a first strike against North Korea (and therefore the loss of thousands more American lives, in addition to tens of thousands, possibly millions, of South Korean lives) and an end to the nuclear accord with Iran, where "Our goal should be regime change.” In a 2015 NY Times editorial, he wrote that "The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program," which it effectively did. "The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq … can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed." After which, one presumes, Iran would simply say, "Ok you won, we lost, we quit." Bolton's childlike grasp of consequences is rivaled only by Trump's.

Who, his supporters must be reminded, campaigned on the stupidity of Bolton's Iraq war. "As recently as March 4," notes Politico, "Trump called the invasion of Iraq 'the single worst decision ever made.'" The second worst decision ever made was to put one of that war's leading champions in charge of funneling intelligence and the intelligence community's assessments to the Oval Office (which, if Bolton's past is prologue, will be a highly selective, ruinously biased process). "It is a very odd choice for someone who says he was against going to war in Iraq," said Larry Diamond, formerly of the G.W. Bush administration. "It is a damn strange pick," he added. But is it? As Politico also notes, "Before he campaigned against past U.S. military action in Iraq and Libya, [Trump] made public statements expressing support for both actions."

Indeed I expect Trump and Bolton will get along fabulously, for they're both cut from the same lunatic cloth. Both are impulsive to an infantile degree; both don't play well with others (a former federal contractor, Melody Townsel, once recounted that Bolton "chase[d] me through the halls of a Russian hotel — throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally, behaving like a madman"); and an assistant secretary of state under Bush once told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Bolton is a "bully" who "kisses up and punches down." A better description of Trump is unimaginable.

Perhaps the most poignant reaction to Bolton's appointment as national security adviser came from Chris Murphy. "My God." The senator did elaborate, though, reflecting to the NY Times that "The person who will be first in first out of the Oval Office on national security matters passionately believes the U.S. should launch pre-emptive war against both Iran and North Korea with no authorization from Congress."

I'll say it again. Inside of six months, you can start the body counts.

 

McMaster ~> Bolton

Six months —> war.

 

Quite a day in the annals of presidential dysfunction

Life of the party and councillor of the piepowder court John Dowd has resigned, reports Politico, "just days after calling for special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe to be shuttered" — which was the president's idea, said Dowd, though it wasn't, added Dowd.

Jay Sekulow, a fellow member of Trump's C- legal squad, "declined to address how [they] would be organized going forward," but mostly sideways and backward. The latter was stunningly accomplished earlier this week by the hiring of Joe diGenova, whose tin-foil conspiracy theories will keep the press entertained while Ty Cobb is botching the legal maneuvering.

Some speculate that one other addition might be Alan Dershowitz, whose unfortunate retirement from the profession of teaching law has led to the exigent circumstance of his surveillance by muscular men in white coats. But, he has a friend, as the children's song goes.

The initial, gigantic probable cause was Trump's obstruction of justice by firing top investigator James Comey. This seems not to have played into Dershowitz's legal theory of presidential innocence.

As a personal distraction from Bob Mueller's vulturous circling, Trump opted today to crash the markets by imposing nearly $60 billion of tariffs on China, which will produce higher domestic prices, higher interest rates, a financial burden on low- and middle-income Americans, a slower economy, a substantial erasure of greater personal income derived from the recent tax cuts, and Chinese competitors replacing China's material contributions to the U.S. marketplace. Not one American job will be created by Trump's tariffs. Thousands, however, will be lost.     

Just another day in Donald J. Trump's magnificent clusterfuck of incompetence. 

 

I want my own insidious "Deep State"

Being the toddlers they are, Republicans have a new, imaginary friend — or rather, whipping boy. Whatever happens that falls under suspicion — empty cookie jars or $31,000 dining room tables — members of the GOP can simply point to the "Deep State" and shriek, He did it!

Here's Rep. Claudia Tenney, Republican of central New York state, responding to a question about Carson's Folly on a local radio show recently: 

"First of all, I like Ben Carson a lot. I think he’s really trying to do a great job there. But his staffer, one of his key people, was in my office the other day to talk about some of the housing issues that we have in our region and we were talking about that and he said 'you know, that’s the most ...' [temporary garble] …

"Somebody in the Deep State, it was not one of his people apparently, ordered a table, like a conference room table or whatever it was for a room. And that’s what the cost was. Ben Carson tried to — he said 'you know how hard it is to turn it back because of the way that the procurement happens?'"

Like Master Trump's Fake News, the Deep State is a political convenience beyond thanks.

(In this case, however, even Secretary Carson disagreed with Tenney's fable, testifying Tuesday before the House Appropriations Subcommittee that "I invited my wife to come and help. I left it to my wife, you know, to choose something."

But what the hell. The imaginary Deep State had already rescued Tenney.

Then she and her base spread out their blankets and took a snuggly nap, assured once again that all was right with their happy little world — that the villain was fingered and they are blameless.)

 

They just don't give a damn

From the Washington Post, an error-filled collection of White House tweets, press releases, official texts, public schedules and posters, which reflect the amateurism and carelessness of the man in charge:

*"Special Council is told to find crimes, wether crimes exist or not."

*On Monday … the White House rolled out an executive order from Trump aimed at cutting off U.S. investment in Venezuela’s digital currency as a way to pinch strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime… The White House wrote that Trump was taking action to "address the situation in America."

*Air Force One became "Air Force Once" on the president’s public schedule.

*The White House sought "lasting peach" in … a deal between Israel and Palestinian territories.

*Last week … the commander in chief lauded his visit to the "Marine Core Air Station Miramar" in San Diego.

*The president-elect denounced the seizure of a U.S. Navy underwater glider by a Chinese warship as "unpresidented."

*Announcing the visit to the White House of British Prime Minister Theresa May, the official schedule misspelled her name three times as "Teresa May," which the London-based Independent newspaper drolly noted is the stage name of a British pornographic movie actress.

*The White House … called Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the "president" of Japan.

*After Trump held a high-stakes bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping … the White House readout referred to the "Republic of China," which is the official name of Taiwan.

*Tickets to Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in January … touted the "State of the Uniom."

Unquoted by WaPo were "no challenge is to great"; "I am honered to serve you"; "Amoung many other things"; "Attaker," "San Bernadino" and "Denmakr" (White House media list of global terror attacks since 2014); "our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo"; "Secretary of Educatuon Betsy DeVos"; "Sometimes protest is needed in order to heel,and heel we will!"; and, of course, "Despite the constant negative press covfefe."

Why do these errors, bloopers and fuckups matter? The Post asked Liz Allen, deputy communications director for Barack Obama, an actual, honest-to-God president of the United States: "We felt a burden and responsibility to get it right. We were acutely aware of the integrity of our platform. We took it seriously. No one should meet a higher bar than the White House."

And no one has set a lower one than Trump.

 

The non-personhood of Lt. Col. Ralph Peters

CNN reports that retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters' scathing letter of resignation from Fox News "rattled" the network's executives, who are "afraid that the story has the potential to grow legs, as Peters is a fierce conservative with a lot of credibility within the conservative community."

Permit me to calm the buffeted nerves of Fox's high-level goons, who, like the highest-level goon in the White House, can't seem to think even two moves ahead.

Peters may have had "a lot of credibility within the conservative movement" last week, when he was still inside the cocoon of America's conservative movement. But now that he has criticized the movement, as embodied by Fox News' Sean Hannity et al, the movement will drop a shroud of disgrace over Peters and he shall become a non-person whose traitorous name is not to be uttered. Within the movement he will simply vanish, along with his justified criticisms.

"It's possible," writes CNN, that "Peters could speak out on rival networks after he is freed from the constraints of his contract, which he said is set to expire next week." Rival networks, however, don't exist within the imaginary world of the conservative movement, and neither do articulate critics of the movement. Since Peters will likely appear on these illusory networks, he won't exist either. The former Army guy may show up on "Morning Joe" and he may commiserate with Anderson Cooper, but any such occurrences will, at best, take place in the otherworldly penumbra of the conservative movement. Those most in need of hearing Peters will never hear a peep from him, for the movement has a way of spitting out unfriendly voices, then closing itself up and rewrapping itself in singular virtue.

The irony here is that those closest to the movement are those closest in sentiment to Peters, for as insiders, they are also in on the joke. Continues CNN: "[Peters'] stunning note reverberated through the Fox News community. Employees passed it along to other employees … with many agreeing with the thrust of the note: That Fox News opinion personalities were out of control in their devotion to Trump. One employee even told CNN that they were 'jealous' about the way Peters made a splash on his way out and that the person 'fantasized' about doing the same."

To what avail, though? Fifteen minutes of (liberal only) fame, merely to have the shroud of disgraced ostracization dropped over you? You'd become just another pathetic Bruce Bartlett, sitting at home, tapping out Facebook posts and occasional op-eds and waiting for MSNBC to call. "The movement" guts its heretics like a flounder.

I recall reading, several years ago, a New York Magazine piece by Frank Rich, whose thesis was that Fox News' reputation for major mischief was overblown, since the network is essentially irrelevant; its audience, a few million late-middle-aged white guys, nothing more. This morning, gutted-flounder Max Boot indirectly pushes back on that thesis: "What makes Fox’s ravings so scary is that they are not just influencing the public — they are also influencing the president."

Who, from the network of fairness and balance, will never hear that he's an idiot. And for damn sure he won't hear it from Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, the latest non-person to join the vagabond ranks of the conservatively non-heard.

 

Trump and Sessions could use some rehab, too

In his "rambling speech on opioids" in New Hampshire earlier this week, "The president went on at length about his preposterous proposal to fight the scourge of drugs by executing drug dealers….

"We … have convincing evidence that ratcheting up the war on drugs, as Mr. Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, want to do, would not work," observes the NYT editorial board. "Since the early 1980s, the federal government and states have imposed increasingly harsh criminal penalties on drug dealers and users.  Not only did they fail to stem drug use or the availability of illicit substances, but they may have contributed to their spread by taking resources away from treatment and prevention efforts."

There is a very simple, exceptionally straightforward reason that "manly" solutions to the drug crisis, such as snuffing out the lives of drug dealers, don't work: Criminals don't go into crime believing they'll be caught. Others will be caught, for sure, for they are the blockheaded ones. But the bright boys of crime — meaning, in their minds, every last one of them — will flourish in impunity.

So it's well worth the risk — which, as noted, will always fall on some other miscreant. Indeed, if I had been raised in a drug-infested ghetto whose "upper class" drove $75,000 cars and sported three women in clubs each night, and whose surrounding society didn't care enough to offer me a good education in a well-financed school, I too, most likely, would have joined the criminal class. (The "users" extend far beyond the ghetto, of course, as they always have.)

This is what clowns like Trump and Sessions just don't get. Through their hostility to healthy public schools and safety nets and social programs benefitting the disadvantaged, they provide every incentive for a poor kid to go into drug-dealing — and then they want to kill him for doing what he rather logically did. It's Trump and Sessions who could use a treatment program — for stupidity.

 

"The Love Connection"

The Washington Post:

Trump did not follow specific warnings from his national security advisers Tuesday when he congratulated Russian President Vladi­mir Putin on his reelection — including a section in his briefing materials in all-capital letters stating "DO NOT CONGRATULATE," according to officials familiar with the call.

Trump also chose not to heed talking points from aides instructing him to condemn the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain with a powerful nerve agent, a case that both the British and U.S. governments have blamed on Moscow.

CNN:

White House chief of staff John Kelly … is furious that a confidential presidential briefing became public knowledge.

And yet, no reporting on whether Kelly was furious that his imbecile boss refused, once again, to take direction from his foreign-policy betters, who include H.R. McMaster, the White House usher, the cook, and the janitor.

 

Another priceless, perfect, profoundly true Toles cartoon

I once knew a lady who was much like Trump, only without political power. She lied about everything, even when lying wasn't in her best interests. Every story she told had to be extravagantly embellished, every tale twisted, every bit of history grossly distorted — and, naturally, she always came out on top, somehow the star of the show. She couldn't help herself. With her it was a disease. And thus the term, "pathological liar" — which, in the Oval Office, is now more than just a term.   

 

Bringing back "Bert the Turtle"

Just this morning did I stumble on this astonishing Jan. 26 piece from the Washington Post, which transported me back to the 1950s. I was first intrigued by its tease:

After I struggled through nearly all of its most-reassuring text, I arrived at this ending: "When most people think about a nuclear explosion, they probably imagine a global wasteland and the end of life as we know it. If one, or even two nuclear bombs were to be detonated in the United States, it would be one of the worst things to happen to this country — but it could still recover. Government response would look a lot like the natural disaster response you see from FEMA."

A lot like a natural disaster response you see from FEMA. Ho-hum. This shockingly nonchalant line was penned by one Daron Taylor.

Ms. Taylor should stick to writing about food. Either that, or she should leave journalism and become a public-service producer for the carefree innocuousness of Trump's fire-and-fury administration.

 

Fox News analyst storms out of Fox, quitting the moronic, unAmerican right

The Putin- and Obama-loathing, anti-Muslim, pro-Iraq war, retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, U.S. Army, has finally had enough of his 10-year stint as a "Fox News strategic analyst," telling the NY Times he "simply could not continue with Fox in good conscience." In a memo to colleagues, Peters unleashed a pounding barrage of righteous contempt for the Hannity-housing network of unAmerican repute, since it "is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit."

Continued Peters: "Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration"; its primetime stars — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham — "dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller"; "Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers"; and "Now I am ashamed" for having been a part of it.

Peters has even more reason for shame than what he laid out, but nonetheless implied: the network's "fostering" of an unprecedented corrosiveness among the right. As the Daily Beast reports, "During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson last year, Peters compared the primetime anchor to a Nazi apologist for defending Putin’s actions in Syria." And Nazilike apologists — or so I suspect Peters suspects — is what, at large, modern right wingers have become in their reflexive, mindless defenses of their supreme leader. A few days ago, in response to my piece titled "The most vindictive man in America" (that of course being Trump), I encountered this sampling of comments left by the right: "VINDICTIVE!? You people are stupid!! 24/7 attacks on 'YOUR' President Trump and he's still kicking your butts!" … "No matter how much you pansy assed haters hate, Trump is still your President" … "Liberals are very stupid!!!!!" … "Will go down as one of the greatest Presidents" … "You're an Ass eat shit and die."

There wasn't a thoughtful, analytical comment among them.

This is the mindset that, above all others on Fox News, Sean Hannity has fostered. Sometime, when you feel like ruining a good day, read also the comments left on Hannity.com. A viler bunch of sieg-heiling ignorance you have never seen, and any pushback, such as mine, once, will get banned. In right-wing media, especially, the principle of defensive censorship is aggressively exercised — for its viewers and readers are the true hypersensitive snowflakes, poor dears.

Peters is correct when he writes that Fox has transmogrified into "a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration"; that it's "assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers." But as a business model of fatuous malice, Fox News would have been calamitously unsuccessful had it not been for a fatuously malicious base. Little innovative effort was required by Murdoch, Ailes & Co. to exploit the preexisting malevolence and violent stupidity of America's Trumpeteers.

They're a hopeless assemblage, beyond redemption, too dumb to know they're being had and too indifferent to human decency to care that they're harming others. And yet we on the left are often piously instructed to reach out to these unprincipled morons on the right. To which I say, and indeed have said many times, in many other ways, that Lt. Col. Ralph Peters is also correct in simply quitting the whole wretched crowd. These neofascists are a minority who believe they're a majority because they dwell in the toxic, self-reinforcing bubble of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart.com. There, let them stay, and ignore them as best one can. Ostracize them, and then just turn out to vote against their political coddlers.

 

You want to fucking scream

The NY Times:

"Trump on Tuesday congratulated President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on his recent re-election victory, but failed to ask him about either the fairness of the Russian vote … or about allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election … [or about] Russia’s apparent role in a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil."

You want to face-palm. You want to run. You want to fucking scream.

 

The Trump-Ryan non-aggression pact

Said Speaker Paul Ryan at his regular news conference today, "I received assurances that [Bob Mueller's] firing is not even under consideration" by the White House.

If it's true that Ryan received such assurances, and if those assurances were genuine, then there must exist a non-aggression pact between the Oval Office and the Republican House: The president promises to not fire Mueller as long as the speaker promises to not hold impeachment hearings when Mueller emerges with an indisputable litany of Trump's impeachable offenses.

Otherwise, the White House's assurances would make no sense. Short of Ryan's vow to eventually dismiss all of Mueller's evidence as a rabid anti-Trump conspiracy or as prosecutorial overzealousness, Trump most assuredly would go down. Thus he could genuinely promise Ryan no assurances that Mueller won't be fired — and soon. Only if the speaker promised to dig in and resist intensifying calls for impeachment hearings could Trump provide a no-fire assurance.

Plus, almost certainly, Ryan will be speaker for only nine more months. So what does he care? Mueller's investigations are likely to extend to at least November, and by early January we'll have a Democratic House. Then the headache of impeachment or no impeachment will be Nancy Pelosi's.

 

Facebook: the new Russians?

Bloomberg:

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is probing whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree over its handing of user data that was transferred to Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge, according to a person familiar with the matter.

I suspect the expanded question before the FTC will be much like the Q&A of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Any suggestion that such interference assisted Trump's brilliant victory must be muzzled, for he will not share credit with the Russians. Therefore, will not the question before the FTC — assuming it rises to that level — be answered in much the same way as the Russia Question? There may have been a bit of Facebook-Cambridge Analytica hijinks here and there, but nothing significant enough to have tangibly benefited Trump, for he was the singular genius of his electoral triumph.

 

Trump is "an assault on America’s self-conception"

Never have I quoted nearly an entire column. Michael Gerson's, today, is worthy of being a first. It is moving, inspiring and, regrettably, nostalgic.

Journalist Marguerite Higgins was among the first to enter the Dachau death camp as it was being liberated by the 42nd Infantry. She found the main yard empty. But then "a jangled barrage of 'Are you Americans?' in about 16 languages came from the barracks 200 yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium. Tattered, emaciated men, weeping, yelling and shouting 'Long live America!' swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled"…. It is easy to forget the epic scale of this transition. On the American side, World War II was won with a combination of idealism and unimaginable ferocity….

An extraordinary group of leaders — politicians, military commanders, diplomats — defined a practical and moral role for America in the global defense of free governments and institutions. "In natural abilities and experience," writes historian Paul Johnson, "in clarity of mind and in magnanimity, they were probably the finest group of American leaders since the Founding Fathers." Harry S. Truman lent his defiant moral sensibilities to the enterprise. Dwight D. Eisenhower matched humility with power. John F. Kennedy gave poetry to the struggle. "For it is the fate of this generation," he said, "to live with a struggle we did not start, in a world we did not make…. And while no nation ever faced such a challenge, no nation has ever been more ready to seize the burden and the glory of freedom."

This is what some now dismiss as "globalism" — the combination of America’s founding purpose with unavoidable international responsibilities…. Both America and our allies benefit from American security commitments in Europe and East Asia. Both America and our trading partners can benefit from relatively free global markets.

I have been asking myself: Why is our political moment not just pathetic but also traumatic? America now has a president who is staggeringly ignorant of this history — unfamiliar with its heroes and unmoved by its moral achievements. President Trump’s view of the world is built on grievances — against migrants who corrupt our country and against foreigners who economically exploit it….

The Trump administration is not only an affront to decency and the rule of law; it is also an assault on America’s self-conception. In Trump’s view, the United States is a nation like any other nation, defined by ethnicity and oriented toward narrow interests…. Trump’s form of extreme nationalism makes us ordinary — just another power scrambling for advantages.

As Truman might have said: To hell with that. We are the nation that liberated death camps, rebuilt our enemies, inspires dissidents, welcomes refugees, secures the peace on every contested frontier and seizes "the burden and glory of freedom." This does not make us "globalists;" it makes us Americans.

 

With Joe diGenova, Trump piles a crackpot atop chaos

"This is not some complicated chaos theory of management — it’s just chaos," says journalist, filmmaker and White House historian Chris Whipple of Trump's legal team, which, reports the Washington Post, is "increasingly operating with conflicting information, feuding internally, and pursuing strategies that many legal analysts and friends of the president view as dubious — if not downright dangerous."

In other words, Trump himself is in charge of his legal defense; thus, in Lincoln's famous formulation, he has a fool for a client. He chooses his lawyers not by "consulting with top advisers," writes the Post, but by "watching television and calling friends," some of whom "told the president that he needs a legal heavyweight on his personal team." Hence, in view of his Fox News addiction, the president's latest hire to his "personal team" was virtually inevitable: that boorishly pixilated cable-news regular, Joseph E. diGenova — a Kudlow kind of Trump doppelgänger.

DiGenova's purpose is to serve less as a legal mind than as "an outspoken player for the president," reports the Times. In plainer English, a "crackpot." And in that role, the new guy is a leader of the feral pack.

It was, as I recall, in the turbulent, Clinton-impeaching 1990s that diGenova stopped practicing law and turned to the more extravagant allure of a schizoaffective disorder. In diGenova's clinical case, this is characterized chiefly by paranoid delusions, which evidently have, since the '90s, accelerated in their darkness. These days, diGenova raves about a secret cabal of sinister F.B.I. agents, recently led by whom he calls "America's best-known dirty cop," the boy scout James Comey.

I quote the mad mouthpiece, from January, on Fox News: "There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime. Make no mistake about it: A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime."

That would be, of course, the Russian Connection, which diGenova sees as "the largest law enforcement scandal in history." As the former U.S. attorney once explained, "It wasn't the Russians who corrupted the presidential election; it was the American officials at the Department of Justice and the F.B.I…. Everything that we've seen … shows that the F.B.I. and senior D.O.J. officials conspired to violate the law and to deny Donald Trump his civil rights."

What's the evidence for this? There isn't any. But that doesn't deter diGenova. He practices Fake Law in the same manner as Trump practices Fake Governance: ethically disturbed malice replaces even minimal competence and preposterous conspiracy theories substitute for analysis.

The diGenova hire exemplifies Trump's equally delusional and cloistered notion that he can govern as Fox News propagandizes. The presidency, in his febrile mind, is little more than an extended version of "Hannity," where crackpots assemble to dissemble. It also suggests that Trump believes Bob Mueller can somehow be overcome by over-the-top distractions.

Never has a presidential gamble been so foolish.

 

True Renaissance Men: from banking to meteorological manipulations

I found this, from the Washington Post, irresistibly hilarious:

D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) posted [a] video to his official Facebook page at 7:21 a.m. [Sunday] as snow flurries were hitting the nation’s capital. The video, shot through the windshield of a car driving west on Interstate 695 through downtown Washington, shows snowy skies while White narrates.

"Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation," he says…. "And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful."

The Rothschilds are a famous European business dynasty descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, an 18th-century Jewish banker who lived in what is today Frankfurt, Germany. The family has repeatedly been subject over the years to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories alleging that they and other Jews clandestinely manipulate world events for their advantage….

White did not return calls for comment. In a series of text messages, he confirmed the voice in the video is his but expressed surprise that his remarks might be construed as anti-Semitic.

See? The Democratic Party really is a big tent; it too has anti-Semites — and exceptionally clueless ones.

I of course knew that the Rothschilds — along with the Illuminati, Freemasons, Bilderbergers and New World Orderers — controlled world events. What I didn't know was that that included atmospheric happenings.