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The almost unfathomable carnage and chaos of a U.S. strike on Iran

Wendy Sherman, President Obama's undersecretary of state for political affairs, 2011-2015:

[Trump] has demanded that [our European partners] agree to new language on Iran’s ballistic missile development and inspections of Iranian military installations, and he has asked for a change in the timeline of the nuclear deal so that the restrictions on Iran will not expire. In essence, he has asked Europe for help changing the terms of the deal itself … [and] is demanding that they solve a political problem he created by campaigning against the deal….

If the White House rips up the Iran deal, it will give the United States exactly what it needs least: international isolation. The deal was negotiated by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, coordinated by the European Union, and endorsed by a 15-to-0 vote in the United Nations Security Council. Mr. Trump will not isolate Iran by nixing the deal; he will isolate America.

Somewhat downplayed by Sherman is that which is most frightening: the almost inescapable prospect of a military conflict with Iran. Trump's new national security adviser, John Bolton, still "believes that the United States should have bombed Iran years ago, rather than negotiating an international agreement to prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon," which by all accounts has been accomplished, peacefully. Nonetheless, "Trump appears committed to killing" the accord, and "Bolton's appointment has only cemented the expectation that the nuclear deal’s life expectancy is short," muses Sherman. Trump's refusal to recertify Iran's compliance (the deadline is May 12) "will increase American calls for military action against Iran as the only viable option."

For an intellectually challenged president who once wondered aloud why we have nuclear weapons if we can't use them, we cannot rule out such a U.S. strike on Iran. The civilian toll? "One key site that would almost certainly be targeted in a bombing campaign, the uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan," noted Time magazine in 2012, "is located on the city’s doorstep; toxic plumes released from a strike would reach the city center within an hour, killing or injuring as many as 70,000 and exposing over 300,000 to radioactive material," many of whom would die in the hours and days to follow.

In 2013, Mother Jones looked at "What Would Happen if Israel Nuked Iran." Assuming a 100-kiliton nuke is a 100-kiliton nuke — that is, its origin of production being irrelevant — "A nuclear assault on the city of Arak, the site of a heavy water plant central to Iran’s nuclear program, would potentially kill 93% of its 424,000 residents. Three 100-kiloton nuclear weapons hitting the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas would slaughter an estimated 94% of its 468,000 citizens.... A multi-weapon strike on Kermanshah, a Kurdish city with a population of 752,000, would result in an almost unfathomable 99.9% casualty rate."

And should we go full Boltonesque: An "attack on the Iranian capital of Tehran using five 500-kiloton weapons would … kill seven million people — 86% of the population."

If we were to use conventional weapons, how would Iran likely retaliate? Last year, the website Just Security predicted that Iran would readopt cyberwarfare against the United States. Wired magazine wrote that "the U.S. [would have ] to keep Iran from blocking the ultra-important Strait of Hormuz … through which flows around 20 percent of the world's oil and liquid natural gas supplies. And America has to protect its energy-producing allies in the Persian Gulf, or else there will be no oil or gas to send through the Strait." Also, "Iran … can use long-range conventionally armed missiles or drones against large military or urban targets as terror weapons. It can attack sporadically and unpredictably in a war of attrition or attempt to 'swarm' U.S. and Gulf naval forces." Iran could "hit Riyadh or Kuwait City."

Concluded Wired: "Some politicians may be calling for a preemptive strike on Iran. There's a reason military planners are so wary."

But who's the unwariest politician on earth? The only guy with the say-so.

 

A largely pictorial recollection of … yesterday

Only those not beaten down by the defeats of the past could find the courage and the strategic initiative to win old fights in new ways. On a crisp and beautiful spring day, we witnessed a new dawn in the struggle against gun violence.

— E.J. Dionne

How did the gun-happy right react to our youths' courage?

And this is the way they depicted the courageous young people who lost good friends to gun violence.

Again, the mostly white-male purveyors of such adolescent denigrations of our courageous youth are also voters to whom the Democratic Party should cater? Should offer special concern? Should address as a particularly oppressed class? These ignorant louts are the oppressors. In their crude, offensive, anti-social behavior they are indistinguishable from the arrogant "elites" and plutocrats against whom they rail, when they're not belittling the emotionally strong. To the Democratic Party I would say, You don't want them anywhere near your camp — as friends. They are poison.          

 

Trump's America - where a porn star is a role model, and the president is a skunk

If the media insists on unfailingly applying the description of "pornographic film star" to Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. Stormy Daniels, it could at least apply it even-handedly; that is, every reference to Daniels as such should be matched by references to Trump as a "pornographic political charlatan." Even that wouldn't even the score, though, since Daniels has more integrity in just one of her neural synapses than Trump has in his "mini corndog," as the performer once knowingly characterized the president's second most offensive body part. (His mouth will always rank #1.)

At any rate, her "60 Minutes" interview has now come and gone — that "quintessential moment of the Trump presidency," as the Times labeled this "must-see television" and "something of a national event," which, it seemed to me, was something akin to Geraldo's vault. By that rather snarky remark I'm not suggesting that the story is unimportant. Quite the contrary, it appears that Trump accepted an illegal $130,000 in-kind campaign contribution, which Bob Mueller can add to his swelling collection of impeachable offenses. It's just that last night's must-see TV was something we had seen many times before. We knew of the hush money, its illegality, its coverup, of Trump's malevolence and how it manifested — clichéishly — in moblike threats toward Ms. Daniels' personal safety.

So there was nothing new in last night's telling, although the story's repetition has made the story itself no less potent. "This is about the extent that Mr. Cohen and the president have gone to intimidate this woman, to silence her, to threaten her, and to put her under their thumb," said Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti. "It is thuggish behavior from people in power. And it has no place in American democracy."

What Avenatti means to say is that Trump has no place in American democracy, nor do all the little Trumpeteers who have rendered American politics an absolute cesspool of denial, distraction and mental dullness. This morning I (foolishly) checked Twitter for some honest, right-wing reaction to the "60 Minutes" piece. All I found was the usual tripe — i.e., anything but the subject at hand. "Why didn't Anderson Cooper ask Stormy Daniels if she was coked up during that 60 Minutes interview?" asked one Trump-supporting cretin with more than 300,000 Twitter followers. (Pupils [that] dilated are not normal. WTF?" he added.) Wrote another clown with nearly 20,000 followers: "Instead of this paid-for and scripted Stormy Daniels story maybe 60 Minutes could do a story about sex that actually matters… Like the rampant pedophilia going on in Hollywood."

(As an aside, I confess I was not up on the right's latest obsession-as-distraction: rampant pedophilia. Before seeing the above reference to it, I received this puzzling message in response to my main piece yesterday, from one of Trump's adorers: "You are a sick fuck. A. Truly sick soul. You will burn in your after life. Better stay away from ppl. Cause ive posted your face everywhere as a traitor. Soon you will face judgement for backing pedophiles and rapists. There is a special place in hell for your kind you sick piece of crap. Soon your wife and kids will know of your taint. The secret pact you made with the sick. Soon they will know and your world will come crashing down on yourself. I have all the proof i need to destroy your perverted world. So enjoy the show!" I don't know which pedophiles and rapists I've backed, but it seems everyone on the right knows.)

But back to Ms. Daniels' integrity, a quality to which Trump has yet to be introduced. With such integrity, Ms. Daniels is, if I may, much more "manly" than Trump. "This is not a 'me too' [situation]," said Daniels. "I was not a victim. I've never said I was a victim…. I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone's room alone, and I just heard the voice in my head: 'Well, you put yourself in a bad situation, and bad things happen, so you deserve this.'"

Has Trump, the eternal victim, ever conceded that he brought something unfavorable upon himself?

This is where we find ourselves: A setting in which a pornographic film star outshines, in every way, a truly pornographic president of the United States — a president who, with his mini corndog, could not even cut it in the actual porn industry.

 

Well, damn

The NY Times:

Trump has decided not to hire two lawyers who were announced last week as new additions to his  legal team…. According to two people told of details about the meeting, the president did not believe he had personal chemistry with Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing.

But, there's always some humor associated with anything Trump does.

[Also today], one of Mr. Trump’s closest friends, Christopher Ruddy, said the president was "perplexed" by reports of turmoil in his administration.

 

Trump - a killer who will live in infamy

What a fascinating development — an epic irony worthy of one of Maupassant's short stories. While we were busy predicting the death of the Republican Party, Trump had already killed it.

The GOP's death is no longer predictable, for the party sports an obituary. Mitt Romney will arrive in the Senate only to rescue a corpse, and Jeff Flake will primary a man in a party other than his own. The GOP is no more, although its shell is enough to house the personality — and its cult — that murdered the party.

"Look, people don’t ask about issues anymore," said the retiring Sen. Bob Corker to Ashley Parker of the Washington Post. "They don’t care about issues. They want to know if you’re with Trump or not." Confirming that scuttlebutt is a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which found that "59 percent of registered Republican voters said they consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than the Republican Party." Personal loyalty oaths can't be far behind.

Compounding the irony of death-as-a-death-watch is that Trump's egocentric personality is a dead ringer for the mammoth personalities the GOP once detested. The only important difference between Trump and the authoritarian scum he imitates is that the latter knew what they were doing; they were, for the most part, interested in history, eager for useful briefings and cared about policy from either an ideological or pragmatic posture. Trump is an ignorant slate for anyone to write on, as long as they flatter him and simplistically hurry through complex topics. One is wise to avoid the autocratic yawn.

With admirable brevity, WaPo's Parker scribbled the Trumpian metamorphosis. "Over just a few days last week … the president ignored his advisers by congratulating Vladi­mir Putin, took the first steps toward imposing tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese goods and signed a huge $1.3 trillion spending bill that will balloon the federal deficit. In each case, President Trump cast aside years of Republican orthodoxy — and most of the party followed right along."

Had such a bill been passed by a Democratic Congress, then signed by a Democratic President, Republicans at large would have apoplectically hit the skids of Fox News and bellowed an end to America as we knew it. As it was, a former White House official told Axios' Mike Allen that "online conservative ire (Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, etc.)" was "the hardest I've ever seen the base turn on Trump over anything." But the official was rather confused. "The base" didn't turn on Trump; Ingraham, Coulter and Levin turned on Trump. Their ire will soon erode, however, as their ratings begin to do the same. There is no tolerance of dissent in The Party of Trump.

Of course, securing huge spending bills is scarcely a novelty for Republicans and Republican presidents. Indeed, drowning the nation in debt is a Republican-orthodoxy standby — so there, Trump hardly broke with partisan tradition. And by now, Republicans are accustomed to Trump's deep affection for Russia's homicidal, democracy-interfering tyrant. True, tariffs are a unique Trumpian fixation — hatched from habitual ignorance — but those he keeps announcing dramatically and then quietly scales them back.

No, Trump's betrayal of the base — and above all, himself — lies ironically in the reinvigoration of the very Republicanism he had purportedly and so proudly slain. That is, the George W. Bushian sort. "[John Bolton is] very clear that there should be regime change in Iran and North Korea, and military force should be used to achieve those goals,"said the former American ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, to the NY Times. "If you hire him, you’re making a clear signal that’s what you want." As Times columnist Maureen Dowd puts it this morning, Trump as a presidential candidate "present[ed] himself as a noninterventionist, focus-on- America candidate. But somehow, in his King George madness, Trump has circled back to elevate one of [W.'s] chief Iraq war hawks to be his national security adviser."

W. just about annihilated his party with the disastrous Iraq war, and the trillions squandered on it. Trump has picked up where W. left off — and the end of this story is already a Rumsfeldian known known. The Hair and the Mustache will ensnare the U.S. in costly, bloody encounters with at least Iran, possibly North Korea and God only knows where else. After all, what are chickenhawk tough guys without a war, or two or three? With those wars will come the deaths of thousands of America's youth, hundreds of thousands of foreign innocents — and the Republican Party.

When I opened this piece and proclaimed the GOP's death as a done deal, I was writing proleptically. Since we know how Trump's wretchedness will end, he's merely and rather mechanically checking off the boxes to get there. In effect his party, the Republican Party, is already dead. And Trump — complete with ghostly Bushian overtones — killed it.

Following impeachment, resignation or electoral defeat, his reputation will rest with the worst of them — the Maos, the Castros, all the despicable tyrants of the modern age. The tragedy is that so many will have to die, before he rests in infamy.

 

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.