The Carpentariat

Donald Trump, painfully perfect (as always)

Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman:

Trump is growing increasingly frustrated by being mired in a deteriorating political situation beyond his control. On Monday morning, a Republican briefed on Trump’s thinking said the president has been considering pulling Kavanaugh’s nomination…. Trump allies are imploring him to cut Kavanaugh loose for the sake of saving Republicans’ electoral chances in the midterms…. Trump has been unhappy with how Senate Republicans are handling the nomination process…. As Kavanaugh’s poll numbers plummet, Trump is telling people in private that he was never a fan of Kavanaugh’s selection…. Trump complained that establishment Republicans foisted Kavanaugh on him.

Trump is a real Mensch, isn't he? And fun to work with. The politics of the Kavanaugh nomination are screwed up. Senate Republicans screwed up. Grassley screwed up. Kavanaugh screwed up. Establishment Republicans screwed up in their selection. But Trump? Spot on, all the way, right down the line.

 

McConnell's legacy will stink to high heaven (and low hell)

In the capacious annals of political grotesquery, few events will ever surpass — perhaps no event will ever surpass — Republican outrage over Judge Kavanaugh's purported maltreatment by Senate Democrats. "Hypocrisy" is the prevailing word applied to McConnell & Co.'s clangorous wailing, yet mere hypocrisy is nothing when thrust against the fetid rot of GOP cynicism.

Here is partisan squalor that exceeds description, but can nonetheless be summarized by three little words: Merrick Garland denied. That Mitch McConnell was a pre-Garland scoundrel of the lowest order has never been rebutted by Beltway opinion. That McConnell is a post-Garland Beelzebub is nothing less than secular scripture. His sordid abuse of Judge Garland, the Constitution, the Senate and the U.S. presidency was an appalling act of historic evil.

When it comes to institutional decadence, the Supreme Court has Dred Scott and Bush v. Gore, the White House has Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump, the House has Preston Brooks and Louie Gohmert, and the Senate has Joe McCarthy and Mitch McConnell (& Friends), although the latter lacks the integrity of the Wisconsin tail-gunner.

Joining Mitch in breathtaking cynicism are, of course, the editorial board members of the Wall Street Journal. One is brought to either laughter or grief at their knowingly clueless assessments of The Kavanaugh Affair. "Democrats are using the #MeToo movement as a weapon of political destruction to defeat a Supreme Court nominee and retake Congress," moaned the Journal's high thinkers yesterday. Democrat Dianne Feinstein has been "demanding a fair and public hearing for Ms. Ford … [but] what about fairness for Mr. Kavanaugh?" they asked. Seriously.

The board then plunged farther into doubleplusgood McConnellThink. "The obvious [Democratic] strategy is to delay the hearing, and Mr. Kavanaugh’s chance to be heard and get a vote, for as long as possible." Heaven forfend such an unprecedented ploy. Concludes the Wall Street Journalists: "Once Ms. Ford and Mr. Kavanaugh are heard on Thursday, there should be no more delay. Call the roll and vote." Yes, fair is fair — and never let it be said that Mitch and his senatorial minions are anything less.

On the saner side of things, the Washington Post's Dan Balz notes that "world leaders" (among whom Balz inexplicably includes Trump) are convening for their yearly United Nations confab, "providing other government leaders front-row seats to the political warfare that has only intensified in the United States since the 2016 election. If the country once was seen as the world’s most effective and enduring democracy, the latest events tell a far different story, that of a nation at war internally and with its institutions under assault."

Quite. What's even more distressing, however, was the arrant needlessness of America's internal war. The strife of the 1960s, embodied by the Civil Rights Movement, was long overdue and therefore, in a way, inescapable, as was the vast human-rights strife of the 1860s. Today we're bombarding each other, assaulting our institutions, gutting serviceable government, befriending foes and alienating allies for no commendable reason of origin. Before the election of 2016 the economy was humming, workers were working, the gross domestic product was producing and our warriors, by and large, were pleasingly warless.

Then came Donald Trump to dynamite stability — as well as labor with the immensely disagreeable likes of Mitch McConnell in the service of divisive nominations such as that of Brett Kavanaugh, an ideological bruiser unlike President Obama's eminently moderate Merrick Garland. With unexampled malevolence McConnell and his Republican Senate denied Judge Garland his deserved seat on the Supreme bench, and yet now they decry "delays" in a Kavanaugh floor vote.

We're again in a civil war all right — and as in the 1860s, there is only one righteous side.

 

Way too much fucking information, literally

Ms. [Martha MacCallum of Fox News] asked Judge Kavanaugh about rumors that he and his high school friends targeted women for sex at parties.

"I did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter," the judge replied.

"So you’re saying," Ms. MacCallum interrupted, "that through all these years that are in question, you were a virgin?"

His face frozen — and his confirmation on the line — Judge Kavanaugh had little choice but to respond. "That’s correct," he said.

—The New York Times

 

Oh, and you can always use the comment section to make a suggestion, or register a complaint, or just sound off on anything that grabs you.

 

American intellectual conservatism, withering in irrelevance

The confirmation process has followed the crumbling, descending path the rest of American politics has taken into the depths of cynicism, faux outrage and pandering to the parties’ hysterical bases….

In recent decades, all civilian institutions important to national governance — Congress, the presidency, the parties, the bureaucracy, the media — have, by their ignorance and arrogance, earned the disdain that now engulfs them.

—George Will, 21 September 2018

Inherent in Will's corresponding observations is the intellectual dullness of both-sidesism, which is one step up from blaming Democrats exclusively for America's ills; a step down from any fair, detached assessment; and the distressing embodiment of one intellectual's pseudo-sincerity.

As a student of American politics and its history, Will knows better. Both sides are scarcely responsible, in equal parts, for the "descending path" of our politics. The work of American pols has always leaned to the squalid — as C. Dickens put it transatlantically in The Pickwick Papers, "each [has] darkly hinted his suspicions that the electors in the opposite interest had certain swinish and besotted infirmities which rendered them unfit for the exercise of the important duties they were called upon to discharge" — i.e., voting.

Voters' infirmities are merely reflections of voters' political leaders, hence swinishness and besottedness have always trickled down and then back up again "in the opposite interest." To entrust the nation's many treasures to the hands of rubes and rednecks or elitists and effete bleeding hearts is the biannual foolishness of American politics. To hear office-seeking tub-thumpers tell it, our country's welfare hangs entirely, every two years, on the patriotic virtues of only one side. Whence, then, the laziness or dodge of both-sidesism? And why does only one side hustle the peculiar fallacy of coextensive, two-party stupidity?

Also inherent in Will's weekly writings is a partial but substantial answer to our query. The Washington Post columnist is no longer a Republican, yet for him to acknowledge the historical sins of the Republican Party would be tantamount to acknowledging his own. Will has been on the inner periphery of conservative politics since the early 1970s; he was there, rooting the GOP on, from the New Right to Reaganism to the Gingrich Revolution — then on to Bushism and much less rooting, and finally, to Trumpism, which irreparably broke his partisan loyalties. Yet the line from the 70s' New Rightism to 21st-century Trumpism is a straight, and straightforwardly disgraceful, one. For the murmurs of the New Right were in fact the embryonic murmurs of Republican populism, about which Will's Post colleague, Sebastian Mallaby, wrote last week: "Do not be surprised if the populists are temporarily popular: Popularity is what they crave most, after all. But recall that, everywhere and throughout history, the populists’ folly is unmasked in the end."

This unshakable truism, the intellectual George Will either forgot, ignored, or fooled himself into disbelieving. Populist hogwash (laded with racism) delivered the white working class into the GOP's beguiling hands; the party was suddenly a party of true widespread appeal, no longer merely "the grass roots of a thousand country clubs,” as Alice Roosevelt Longworth once quipped. And in time, it was the irrepressible contradiction of conservative populism that bit Will in the butt.

For years he cheered the very demon that would destroy his Republican Party — that which pioneered "the crumbling, descending path" of American politics, that pursued "the depths of cynicism, faux outrage and pandering to the [party's] hysterical" base, that "by [its] ignorance and arrogance, earned the disdain that now engulfs" it.

All this, Will either cannot or will not acknowledge as his own, co-conspirator's doing. Nor can virtually every other prominent conservative commentator; they are in denial, or in a state of outward mass deception, or in the even deeper rot of profound self-deception. Until they awake from their Kantian dogmatic slumber, of a sort, America's intellectual conservatives will continue to be relevant to absolutely no one but themselves.

 

This is big: Rosenstein splits

From 18 minutes ago, via Axios:

"Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has verbally resigned to Chief of Staff John Kelly in anticipation of being fired by President Trump, according to a source with direct knowledge. Per a second source with direct knowledge: 'He’s expecting to be fired,' so he plans to step down."

He should have waited to be fired. Same difference, really, but Trump will use his resignation as a defense, naturally. What happens from here is anyone's guess — one I'll have to think about before pontificating.

***

Update: The NY Times reports that "It was not immediately clear whether he expected to be fired by Mr. Trump or whether he planned to resign…. [O]ver the weekend, Mr. Rosenstein called a White House official and said he was considering quitting, and a person close to the White House said he was resigning" — which, unquestionably, is the position the WH will take, no matter the truth, as always.  

The Times adds: "It was also unclear whether Mr. Trump would accept a resignation that would likely thrust the administration into further turmoil just weeks before November’s midterm elections." I would add, unnecessarily, that turmoil has never been a barrier to Trump's decision-making. As a practical matter, though, he'll never get a newly appointed deputy attorney general confirmed by the Senate before the midterms — after which, the Democratic House will be free to investigate and publicize every sordid tick-tock of this volatile affair.  

It seems to me the important point to be made — again — is that the earlier, reputedly explosive NYT story on Rosenstein's secret maneuverings was, in itself, of little import. Trump was sure to fire him after the midterms (therefore, we must ask, is this story actually that big?) — or otherwise find a way to get at Bob Mueller — thus, in the long run, the Times' journalistic intervention will have had no real influence on Trump's dirty dealings.      

***

Journalistic mayhem.

While the Washington Post is reporting that "Rosenstein has told White House officials he is willing to resign," NBC News' Pete Williams is reporting that the Justice Department insists that Rosenstein will have to be fired — he ain't leavin' by a jet plane, or in any other voluntary manner.

(Correction: My mistake. The Post quote is drawn from a White House source, which means it's a lie.) 

***

The Last Word?

From Reuters: "Rod Rosenstein has not resigned and is still serving as U.S. deputy attorney general."

On the other hand, from Politico's Breaking News (emailed): "Trump and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will meet Thursday," meaning that just before, during, and whereupon the journalistic chaos will resume. 

 

The Fabian peril

From the ever-quotable Ben Carson, speaking at the ever-panicky Values Voter Summit last Friday:

"If you really understand the big picture of what's going on, then what's going on with Kavanaugh will make perfectly good sense to you. There've been people in this country for a very long time, going all the way back to the Fabians, people who've wanted to fundamentally change this country [because] they don't like what America is and what it represents, and they want to change us to another system."

The, uh, the who? The Fabians? I haven't heard of them since undergrad school, probably because in the United States the Fabians are now, and always have been, essentially nonexistent. Fabian socialism was a powerful, fin de siècle intellectual force in Britain, whose adherents included such luminaries as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. I once regarded myself as something of a Fabian, and I suppose I still do. Its original emphasis was on an intellectual cadre leading incremental, democratic change in society — a perfectly elitist, infinitely snobbish concept, which of course appealed to me. We need more elitism in this horrendously pedestrian country, not less. (Fabians are still around, by the way, as an influence on the Labour Party.)

But how did Ben Carson ever come to know about Fabian socialism? That's what puzzles. He said it's a part of American socialist forces which have "completely lost control off the deep end," and he said that with no noticeable irony. Someone must have said something about Fabianism on Fox News, which no doubt left its audience in equally pained puzzlement.

Incidentally, if the belief in changing "us to another system" in any way includes ridding ourselves of Trumpian authoritarianism, then there are indeed tens of millions of Fabians in the United States.

 

Kavanaugh is going down - with a thump

As I wrote last Friday, my money is on Brett Kavanaugh remaining as a sitting but severely wounded judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. But I'm beginning to think that Mitch McConnell's fantasy-come-true might be preferable. "In the very near future, Judge Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court," he said to a coven of right-wing activists last week.

I rather like the ring of that, in terms of this: Why not add yet another albatross to Republicans' hopes in and around 2020? More on this in a moment.

As is typical of sexual assault or misconduct allegations, where there is one, there are likely to be others. So now comes Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh, who has told The New Yorker that "she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away." A real class act, this Brett, assuming Ramirez's recollection is anywhere close to accurate. "Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident," reports the magazine. "I would think an F.B.I. investigation would be warranted," she said of any sane confirmation hearing.

The New Yorker further reports that several Democratic senators were recently clued into Ramirez's story, and that "senior Republican staffers also learned of the allegation last week and," in a bobby-dazzler of understatement, "expressed concern about its potential impact on Kavanaugh’s nomination." Republicans' cognitive powers are nothing, however, compared to their proclivity to always sink ethically lower. "Soon after," continues The New Yorker, "Senate Republicans issued renewed calls to accelerate the timing of a committee vote."

Not to be omitted from the headlines, Stormy Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, tweeted yesterday that "I represent a woman with credible information regarding Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge." The Washington Post reports that his client's information concerns "misconduct by Kavanaugh in high school." Odds are, more such clients there will be.

So why — although I'm now convinced we'll not see them — do I believe in the virtues of a Kavanaugh confirmation? As I suggested above, the man would be sheer, political dead weight on the highest bench. But more than that, he'd be an unrelenting migraine throughout the Republican Party.

This year, Kavanaugh is bad enough for the GOP, as the NY Times succinctly reiterates: "Many women furious over President Trump’s attacks on Dr. Blasey, a Supreme Court nomination that was once seen as a political winner in many conservative-leaning states could, instead, rouse female voters and independents who otherwise may have cared little about the confirmation fight." For Republicans, it could get worse. Much worse.

Yesterday, on CNN's "State of the Union," Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono observed that Maryland (the scene of Kavanaugh's misconduct, as reported by Dr. Blasey) — "has lifted the statute of limitations on criminal prosecutions of most forms of sexual abuse, adding that 'there may be an investigation along those lines.'"

Hence, going into the 2020 elections, Justice Kavanaugh could be facing impeachment charges of perjury, or sexual abuse, or both. And of course an outside criminal trial would only seal his doom. Not even eternally shameless Republican pols could protect a sitting Justice facing criminal prosecution. So at the top of the Republican ticket in 2020 would be a serial sexual assailant who had appointed a like-behaved jurist; much of what's left of women's GOP vote would flee across the aisle; many among the president's current congressional allies would join the women; already possessing the House, Democrats would be well positioned to capture the Senate in an even more violent blue wave; and Trump, naturally, in mortifying fits of characteristic self-degradation, would go right on degrading as well this land's highest office.

Do I believe Kavanaugh will indeed face a run-up to impeachment, causing political shockwaves throughout the next two years? No. Because I believe instead that Republicans will cut him loose within the next couple weeks.

 

I believe I always owe you an explanation for any absences, since this is a reader-supported site.

Same story, actually. Somehow I dehydrated Friday evening (notwithstanding rather abundant fluid intake), which is characterized by severe diarrhea and extreme fatigue. (This might be a lifetime condition, in that I'm missing my colon and part of my small intestine, both of which once absorbed water; thus dehydration always haunts.) I fought going to the ER till Sunday afternoon, when my daughter came and whipped me into reason. So off I went, for two bags of IV fluid. I had the option of staying overnight for a slow IV, but I declined. With luck and the two bags of fluid, I'll be better by Monday morning. Lord I hope so. See you in the morning?

 

Today

A bit of a rough day. I'll be back tomorrow. I will leave you, however, with one quick thought about the Rosenstein blowup, which I had planned on expanding on this morning. And my thought is this:

The left is overreacting. Trump was bound to fire Rosenstein anyway, sooner or later, and this blowup only means sooner, probably. The timing could actually be beneficial to the left: Just before the midterms? Bring it on, Donald.

At any rate, I think that's what the left is overlooking in it's outrage about the NYT story: the inescapable fact that Trump would fire Rosenstein at one time or another, so the story itself is a rather minor affair. If anything, the NYT story may hasten Trump's fall.      

 

Rod Rosenstein's heroic 2017 thinking

It has been a few hours since the last one (take your pick), thus a fresh scandal has come to light in the news: the deputy attorney general plotted in the spring of 2017 to first secretly record, and then methodically oust, the hopelessly feckless president of the United States, via the 25th Amendment. That, according to the New York Times.

Rod Rosenstein's surreptitious taping of Trump was meant to "expose the chaos consuming the administration," as the Times puts it, while his invocation of the 25th Amendment reflected just how profoundly "unfit" Trump was, and remains, for the presidency.

To Rosenstein (and millions of others), evidence of the administration's free-fall into strife and anarchy was both ubiquitous and chilling. The Times economically depicts the widespread breakdown of presidential governance: "Trump’s firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director plunged the White House into turmoil"; "the president [had] divulged classified intelligence to Russians in the Oval Office"; "revelations emerged that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey to pledge loyalty and end an investigation into a senior aide"; "Rosenstein" witnessed little but "tumult"; "the hiring process [for a new F.B.I. director] was emblematic of broader dysfunction stemming from the White House," and "both the process and the administration itself were in disarray."

Hence Rosenstein's desire to get at least some of it on tape, and then ease, or dynamite, Trump out of office. Yet according to one person who was there when Rosenstein raised the idea of a wire, he was merely being "sarcastic." And Rosenstein has denounced the NYT story as "inaccurate and factually incorrect."

NYT reporter Matt Apuzzo, who contributed to, but did not write, the Rosenstein story, appeared this afternoon in an MSNBC interview. And there he made an indispensable remark. To paraphrase him, it matters little (if at all) whether the deputy attorney general was being serious or sarcastic. What does matter is that even Rosenstein's gallows humor — if that's what it was — was a grievous sign of an administration in absolute shambles.

Everywhere he looked he saw turmoil, confusion, corruption, possible treason and unmistakable deceit. Rosenstein had every reason to plan secret recordings and ponder the beginnings of the 25th Amendment unleashed. None of this will end well for Trump, but far more important is that meanwhile, it's the American people who will suffer.

For now, though, Mr. Rosenstein had best start mailing out his résumé.

 

The Washington Post asks a spectacularly puzzling question

"Fairness left the GOP long ago. Is decency gone, too?"

That's the title of Eugene Robinson's latest, and I find it immensely perplexing.

After Watergate; after the Reagan administration's demagogic assault on "welfare queens" and its butchering of fiscal stability; after the unspeakably offensive Gingrich Revolution of '94, led by the eponymous unspeakability himself; after the George W. Bush administration's further butchering of fiscal sanity and its launching of a costly and unprovoked war; and after the rise of the bigoted, ignorant, cryptofascistic lump of inhumanity known as Donald J. Trump — after all that, can we still ask if decency is gone from the Republican Party? Seriously?

That, anyway, is what a Washington Post headline writer asked. Robinson was a trifle more judicious: "By now, we should know not to expect fairness from this Republican leadership…. But we must at least demand basic decency — which, in this case, means giving Ford’s allegation the hearing it deserves."

We are, of course, always free to demand it. We're also free to demand that the president read a briefing paper now and then, which, just as obviously, he'll never do, what with all those tweets he has waiting to be viciously conceived and malevolently sent.

So, yes, by all means, demand some decency from the GOP. Just keep in mind that decency is something the Grand Old Party jettisoned decades ago; with it, it wouldn't be the foul, godawful party it is today.

Decency will have to be imposed by outside forces: Senate Democrats, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, perhaps a few inquisitive FBI agents, the press, political activists, principled commentators. Decency will have to be grabbed by the ears and shoved down the throats of Senate Republicans, with them gagging all the way. Decency must, in short, be a wholly non-GOP entry in this concluding chapter of a Court nomination gone miserably sour.

 

Our pubescent president

You have to love the juxtaposition of these Political Wire stories. First up:

And then, just three stories later:

Indeed:

***

It's more than a bit frightening to know that the president of the United States has the impulse control of a 16-year-old.

 

A surprising take on Kavanaugh

At least one person is (surprisingly) convinced that Brett Kavanaugh is guilty as charged by Christine Blasey Ford.

It's just a shame that a person like Judge Kavanaugh who has a stellar record — that somebody can bring something up that he did as a teenager close to 40 years ago. That's not relevant. We've got to look at a person's life and what they've done as an adult and are they qualified for this position so this is just an attempt to smear him. I hope the Senate is smarter than this and they're not going to let this stop the process from moving forward and confirming this man…. There wasn't a crime committed. These are two teenagers and it's obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away.

—Franklin Graham, whom the Christian Broadcasting Network humorously describes as an evangelist and "humanitarian." If Graham is a humanitarian, then I'm an evangelist.

 

Of Kavanaugh, mistaken identities, a woman's skirt, and religious hypocrisy

Now here's a novel approach. Christine Blasey Ford was assaulted in that hellish Maryland bedroom years ago, but not by Brett Kavanaugh. This entire ordeal is simply a matter of mistaken identity. So suggests Ed Whelan, friend of Kavanaugh, supporter of Kavanaugh, coworker with Kavanaugh, and a buddy of "the head of the Federalist Society who has been helping to spearhead the nomination."

Who was the real attacker? asks this sleuthing Perry Mason of Twitter. A boy by the name of Chris Garrett, a Kavanaugh classmate, answers Whelan. (Garrett now teaches at a middle school, or he will until the school's administration sacks him because of Whelan's speculation.)

As the NY Times relates, a letter from Ford's attorneys "strongly suggested that it would be offensive to assert that she would not remember who pinned her down to a bed, groped her, tried to take her clothing off and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming at that party in the 1980s." Late yesterday, Ford herself said "There is zero chance that I would confuse" Kavanaugh for Garrett. One would think, wouldn't one.

Meanwhile, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been interviewing outside lawyers — all of whom have a vagina, and one of whom would do all the questioning of Ford, as the committee's 11 Republican senators line up and hide behind her skirt. "It could help with [the] optics issue," says the Washington Post. But I'm not so sure. Would not the cowardice displayed by these quivering he-men of conservative righteousness dominate the coverage?

Also in the news is the evangelical community, which, reports the Times, is "expressing frustration that Senate Republicans and the White House are not protecting Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh more forcefully … and warning that conservative voters may stay home in November if his nomination falls apart." This line is especially rich: "[Republicans need to] do more to defend Judge Kavanaugh from what they say is a desperate Democratic ploy to prevent President Trump from filling future court vacancies."

Where were evangelical leaders when desperate Republicans were preventing President Obama from executing his constitutional duty to fill a Supreme Court vacancy? The deafening hypocrisy of Republican pols is bad enough; but that which comes from those who claim to represent God's charity is just downright sickening.

The saving grace will come when divine Democratic ploys are successful in keeping Kavanaugh off the bench. Which, if I had to bet, will indeed materialize. If you're one of the blessed many who recently contributed to this site, you may have your money back if I'm wrong.