The Carpentariat

The bottomless abyss of NeverTrumpers

I have mentioned before that I prefer reading the few genuinely conservative, typically NeverTrump writers still out there, rather than liberal writers. This is not — not, I must emphasize — because I agree with their conservative politics (although I also prefer reading writers I largely disagree with, which keeps my analytical and critical skills sharper than just nodding my head to each paragraph). Instead, I enjoy their writing because, simply put, they're better writers than are liberal thinkers. Perhaps that's because genuinely conservative policy ideas run from the scanty to virtually nonexistent (enough, nonetheless, to critique), thus freeing conservative minds to concentrate on style. Liberal writers — more so progressive writers — tend to the stylistically arid, as they plod along, more common than not without humor, explaining how the world can be saved and humanity perfected.

I'm a trifle unclear on whom they write for; with Trump's Republican approval rating at 80 to 90 percent, their devoted readership must be quite small. As we know, real Republicans either don't read at all or they read only Trump-adoring blowhards, keeping the Trumpeteers safe from dangerous, outside ideas. Maybe these conservative NeverTrumpers just write for each other: David Frum faxes his stuff to Jennifer Rubin, who faxes hers to Charlie Sykes, who then Pony Expresses his scribblings to George Will and Michael Gerson and Max Boot. Geez, I still read chrestomathies of the late Charles Krauthammer.

At any rate, Peter Wehner, a veteran of the Reagan and both Bush administrations, is among this group whose writing I admire. Mr. Wehner was once a rather reserved man of letters, But since the advent of Trumpism's Trump, he's grown fangs and he drools rabid saliva. The man positively loathes Donald Trump, and all who support him. In the last two years I've read nothing from Wehner that wasn't polemically bloodstained. And yesterday, on the heels of the Jordan, Meadows et el. inquisition of Michael Cohen, came his "Republicans Sink Further Into Trump’s Cesspool."

In the most transparent and ham-handed way, they saw no evil and heard no evil, unless it involved Mr. Cohen….

By now Republicans must know, deep in their hearts, that Mr. Cohen’s portrayal of Mr. Trump as a "racist," "a con man" and "a cheat" is spot on. So it is the truth they fear, and it is the truth … that they feel compelled to destroy. This is the central organizing principle of the Republican Party now….

The ethic that became the norm at the Trump Organization —- defacing the truth and disfiguring reality in the service of Donald J. Trump — is the ethic that has become the norm of the Republican Party and the American right. This is what some of us who are conservatives ... have warned since Mr. Trump began his quest for the presidency — that his corruptions would eventually become theirs….

As Mr. Trump was elected and then inaugurated, Republicans became more and more reluctant to call him out and more and more vocal in defending him and attacking his critics; rather than weakening, their loyalty to him intensified.

That last phenomenon is, of course, easy to explain: see the "80 to 90 percent" statistic cited above. From what I've read from reporters who excel at loosening politicians' tongues, privately most of these public Trump defenders abhor the monstrous incivilities of the degenerate gargoyle. But when you're a junior-grade congressperson whose party overwhelmingly loves the president you hate, watchca gonna do? Trash a $174,000 annual income and resplendent benefits by telling your constituents they're amoral imbeciles? Not likely.

So that leaves the question for the Wehners and Boots and Frums: What's the point? What's the point of railing against a party and president who will never see your writings, or would pay no mind if they did? The only readers they have are the choir, hence they're preaching from the same pulpit as mine. So I suppose they continue writing for the same reason I do as well: They're addicted to it. It's not much of a living — nor for me, anyway — but addictions care only about the next fix. And mine will come tomorrow morning. See you then.

You Brexit, you fix it

I suspect I derive so much undiminishing pleasure from reading about Brexit because it's comforting to know that even with Donald Trump and his Capitol Hill asylum squad, the United States still isn't the most suicidally demented nation on earth. We always have Britain, where both major parties are hopelessly daft — with equally daft hardcore bases behind them. Observes WaPo's bemused Robert Samuelson:

They promised complexity, confusion and uncertainty — and, by golly, they delivered...

The most fearsome possibility seems to be "no deal"…. “Supply chains would stop," says Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, an expert on [international economics]….. The cross-border flow of parts and components … would plunge…. "The UK auto industry would have to close," says Kirkegaard. Nor would it be an isolated example, he adds. Supermarkets have already warned that they won’t be able to import many fresh fruits and vegetables from the continent….

All this sounds enormously risky and confusing, because it is enormously risky and confusing. The irony is inescapable. Aside from resenting the E.U.’s bureaucrats, the supporters of Brexit aim to restore some of Britain’s lost glory and power. But the reality is the whole Brexit process has weakened Britain’s economy and promoted political polarization.

Though Britain spawned the future economic super power of the United States, even banana republics no longer look to it for commercial guidance. They'd prefer to look up to more elevated models of economic acumen, like Zimbabwe.

Once again, Trump takes the word of a murderous tyrant

After complaining about the money we spent on "playing the war game" — which was "fun" and "nice" — with our close ally, South Korea, here's Trump being questioned about American student Otto Warmbier, who died following release from his brutal North Korean imprisonment.

***

REPORTER: Have you in Singapore or here confronted [Kim Jong-un] about Otto Warmbier’s death and what has he said to you, and why do you call him your friend?

TRUMP: I have. And I really don’t think it was in his interest at all…. What happened is horrible. I really believe something horrible happened to him, and I really don’t think the top leadership knew about it.

The others [captive Americans] came back extremely healthy but Otto came back in a condition that was terrible. And I did speak about it, but I don’t believe [Kim] would have allowed that to happen. It just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough, they’re rough places and bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he was — I don’t believe he knew about it.

REPORTER: Did he tell you that — did Kim Jong-un tell you ...

TRUMP: He felt badly about it. He knew the case very well, but he knew it later. And you’ve got a lot of people, big country, a lot of people. And in those prisons and those camps you have a lot of people. And some really bad things happened to Otto, some really, really bad things. He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.

***

In 2013, Kim's uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was escorted to Pyongyang's Gang Gun Military Academy, where he was forced to witness the execution of two of his top deputies, who had been convicted of crimes against the state. (One "was said to have been executed for falling asleep during a meeting chaired by Kim.") Both men were "torn apart by antiaircraft machine guns," their bodies then incinerated by flamethrowers. Mr. Jang "fainted during the ordeal."

After the death of Kim's father, Kim Jong-il, the son and now North Korean leader was assisted by Uncle Jang in consolidating his power, while also "vastly expand[ing] his own influence — and ambition." Later in 2013, the state accused Mr. Jang — called, by the state, "human scum worse than a dog" — of "betray[ing] the Kim family by plotting to overthrow the younger Mr. Kim … and to rule the country himself as premier and 'reformer.'" (The state also made note of Mr. Jang having "stood up and clapped only 'halfheartedly' when Mr. Kim was being upheld as supreme leader.") Convicted of treason, Kim's uncle "was executed at the same place and in the same way as his deputies."

Now, says Trump of the avunculicidal Kim Jong-un, "I don’t believe he knew about" Warmbier's inhumane treatment; "He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word"; "He felt badly about it."

Sort of leaves you speechless, does it not?

Trump's charm fails again

The NY Times:

Trump and Kim Jong-un … cut short their second day of meetings in Hanoi, Vietnam….

First, a working lunch was cancelled. Then the signing of a joint agreement was scratched.

By midday Thursday, a closing news conference originally scheduled for 4 p.m. was moved to 2 p.m.

The White House said no agreement was reached during the meeting. The press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, told reporters that Mr. Trump would explain at the news conference.

 Which I just watched (3:20 a.m. Eastern). Said Trump, in classic Trumpian doublespeak, "We’ve had very very productive discussions" — except for the fact that the very very productive talks were an unmitigated bust.

Kim wanted the sanctions lifted and Trump wanted denuclearization first, which was never going to happen. But Trump won't read history or briefings, so the aforementioned unmitigated bust was predestined — out of unmitigated ignorance.

Any rational administration would have first worked on a lower diplomatic level to agree on fundamentals before bringing the two leaders together. But not this administration, whose Great Negotiator can always usually, sometimes, on rare occasions overcome any entrenched obstacles.

As one would expect, Trump simply blamed his failure on previous administrations. 

The GOP's show trial

My supreme delight (I can't think of a more felicitous word) over the Cohen hearings came from Republicans screaming about Democrats' stagecrafted drama ...

… when the only stagecrafted drama to emerge from the hearings was that of Republicans screaming about it. 

Some secondary delight was derived by Republicans' emphasis on what a waste of time these hearings are, when the nation is facing so many pressing problems that Congress should instead be addressing ...

… after years of Republicans squandering Congress' attention on Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi, and then a few more servings of … Benghazi! … 

… among other farcical investigations dramatically stagecrafted only for Republicans' political benefit. 

***

We learned nothing staggeringly new from Cohen's testimony, since its most damning "newness" — that Trump committed campaign-finance fraud as president; not only as a candidate — was revealed yesterday. And Cohen had the dated, bank paper trail to confirm Trump's crime.

There was also Cohen's confirmation of Roger Stone as Trump's official Wikileaks guy, although Bob Mueller already had the Nixon-idolizer on that possibly criminal charge. And there was Cohen's overhearing Don Jr. telling dear old dad that "the meeting is all set" — almost certainly the June 2016, Trump Tower meeting — but according to Cohen's prepared testimony, he heard no mention of a date or location. And that would present an insurmountable problem for even the most skilled of prosecutors.  

This too was nothing new — even though it still staggers — but we did again learn absolutely, conclusively, unequivocally, and completely beyond any reasonable doubt that House Republicans will never concede that their president is not only what Cohen described him as — a racist, a con man, a cheat — but also an irredeemable crook who makes Roger Stone's idol look more impish than corrupt.       

The eloquence and sentimentality of Donald J. Trump

"It’s an honor to be with Chairman Kim…. It’s great to be with you. We had a very successful first summit.  I felt it was very successful…. I thought the first summit was a great success.  And I think this one, hopefully, will be equal or greater than the first."

"I look forward to watching it happen and to helping it to happen and we will help it to happen."

Rep. Jordan, the Godzilla of human purity

Here ie Wikipedia's entry on the high ethics of the House Oversight and Reform Committee's ranking member, Republican Jim Jordan, who spent the morning raking Mr. Michael Cohen and his low ethics over the coals:

"Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach with Ohio State University's wrestling program from 1987 to 1995. OSU opened an investigation in April 2018 that looked into allegations of sexual misconduct by the former wrestling team's physician, Richard Strauss — who was the physician during Jordan's tenure as an assistant coach. Dr. Strauss committed suicide in 2005. In early July 2018, at least eight former wrestlers said that Jordan had been aware of, but didn't respond to, allegations of sexual misconduct by Strauss."

I'm waiting for Congressman Jordan to somehow drag the name George Soros into today's hearing. So far, no luck, but let's give him time.

Truth gets its 15 minutes. Much more later, one hopes.

Appearing today before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Michael Cohen will say, "I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat." Given Cohen's sworn testimony, plus that of others who know what Mr. Trump is, it's not too soon to add, "and he's an impeachable criminal."

The Times' meticulous breakdown of the former consiglieri's testimony reflects as much of a John Dean moment as preceding accounts have suggested. Separately the accusations that Cohen plans to make are damaging to Tricky Donald; together, they are devastating.

*Not only were bimbo payments made, but Cohen "will describe a surreal scene in the Oval Office, just a month into Mr. Trump’s term, in which the president assured Mr. Cohen that reimbursement checks for the illegal payments were on their way" — thus criminal activity while in office.

**Cohen will say that Trump "had advance knowledge through his longtime adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. that WikiLeaks would publish hacked emails." Here is evidence that Trump, during the campaign, was sidling up to collusion with the original source, Russia.

***Cohen: "I recalled Don Jr. leaning over to his father and speaking in a low voice, which I could clearly hear, and saying, 'The [June 2016] meeting is all set.' I remember Mr. Trump saying, 'O.K. good … let me know.'" More collusion, and this more direct.

From there, the Trump portrait that Cohen will paint before the committee is one of a two-bit grifter — less criminal than unambiguously dishonorable; the breed of dishonor that James Madison regarded as impeachable in itself. For example, Trump asked Cohen "to put off reporters asking about his medical deferment from the Vietnam draft, telling Mr. Cohen privately that there were no medical records of the bone spurs that he has said affected his heel. 'You think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to Vietnam,' Mr. Trump said."

There's much more to go into, but time presses: Cohen's testimony is about to begin. Until I pick up on developments a bit later, I'll leave you with this question — which I woke up to this morning: What sort of blockbuster distraction from the Cohen hearing will Trump unveil today from Hanoi?

Witness tampering, Francis Ford Coppola-style

"This" — witness tampering — "is what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas," explained —quite seriously — Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz to the Daily Beast.

Perhaps you recall the Godfather scene in which Sicilian mobster, heroin haberdasher and switchblade hobbyist Virgil "The Turk"  Sollozzo displayed his skills in "compet[ing] in the marketplace of ideas" by having five .38 slugs pumped into the back of Vito Corleone.

If you do recall the scene, then you know all you need to know about the office politics of modern Republicanism, which is unrecognizably far from that of our grandfathers.  

Or, as the homicidal Bugsy Siegel once defended his profession: "We only kill each other,." Maybe if we just give them a bit more time, the really gifted boys-will-be-boys GOP psychotics will eliminate each other. The Dems can simply lean back and watch the mattress war proceed. 

The word gets around

Help me out here, please

From the WSJ:

"Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, will for the first time publicly accuse the president of criminal conduct while in office related to … hush-money payment[s]…. While the payments to both women [porn actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal] were made in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Trump has faced questions from reporters about his possible knowledge of Mr. Cohen’s subsequent reimbursement for the Clifford payment, as well as about whether he had any conversations with Mr. Cohen about efforts to conceal the payment."

Lying to reporters is no crime, so how is the first sentence in the above paragraph relevant to the following sentence? I don't grasp the connection between presidential criminal conduct and Trump's misleading "reporters about his possible knowledge" of Cohen's reimbursement or "efforts to conceal the payment," since both acts appear to have taken place pre-inauguration.

Shoddy behavior? Yes. Criminal? No.

What am I missing?

***

Update: Mystery solved, perhaps. I just heard a guest on Nicole Wallace's MSNBC program say that Rudy Giuliani has said Trump's reimbursements to Cohen extended into 2017. Hence the last news article to which I linked, above, was too vague for me to read into it what I thought I had read correctly. My mistake, not the news article's.  

From the mostly unsurprising to the remarkably baffling

Political Wire reports that "A new Morning Consult survey of Democratic primary voters finds Joe Biden leading the Democratic field with 29%, followed by Bernie Sanders at 27%, Kamala Harris at 10%, Beto O’Rourke at 7% and Elizabeth Warren at 7%."

As dynamic as Warren's official opening bid has been, that she would tie undeclared O'Rourke is a pitiable sign for the Massachusetts senator. I would have wagered that Warren would come in a strong third, just behind Biden and Sanders.

Speaking of whom, there's also this curious bit from the poll, the results of "a follow-up about who Democrats would choose as a second option:

"Biden voters: 28% would go to Sanders….

"Sanders voters: 26% would go to Biden…."

Are there two more dissimilar pols running under the same party umbrella than Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders? — an everyman moderate firmly in the Democratic tradition and a New York-accented Vermont socialist who, incidentally, isn't even a Democrat. And yet roughly a quarter of Democratic voters would support either one as a second choice.

That finding is either the simple benefit of name recognition or a gravely addled 26-to-28 percent of the Democratic base. I'll go with my first guess, since the second is just too unsettling.

Trump's "intellectuals": a chillingly familiar crew

I recall reading, years ago, a book on the weak intellectual tradition of neoconservatism, just as the term was entering its most common usage with the advent of Bush II-ism. I cannot recall the book's title or author's name, but its premise is as true today for conservatism in general as it was for neoconservatism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The Democratic Party has always been a mixture of intellectual differences, but intellectual, policy-wise, it nevertheless has been. Not so with modern conservatism, or rather pseudoconservatism, the term preferred by the magnificent historian Richard Hofstadter.

Whatever you might think of Michael Gerson, a George W. speechwriter and among the few eloquent neoconservative advocates, he astutely repeats the charge of weak intellectualism against his former fellow pseudoconservatives in his latest column, "Trump’s ideology isn’t populism. It’s catastrophism," writing that "Trump’s intellectual vanguard, though puny in number, makes up for it in hyperventilation." Gerson's brief, truncated survey of Trumpian "thinkers" is instructive.

Michael Anton, once a "communications" member of both Trump and Bush II's national security councils, penned the infamous "Flight 93 election" in 2016, in which he argued that conservatives must "charge the cockpit" — or die. Notes Gerson: "Trump’s supporters did not dismiss it as the poorly written, racially tinged, half-baked, over-caffeinated effusions of an adolescent intellect. Instead, they took it as reporting from the culture war’s front lines."

The Claremont Institute's Robert Curry warned in 2016 that a Democratic successor to President Obama "would transform America 'perhaps even more radically' than a Democratic victory over Abraham Lincoln in 1864," which qualified in every way as nothing short of hysterical humbug. And Lou Dobbs — Harvard, 1967 — whom Gerson dubs Trump's "court philosopher," has imperiously advised the president, in Dobbs' words, "to declare a national emergency, and simply sweep aside the recalcitrant left in this country." (You may recall that conservatism was once synonymous with constitutional traditions and a healthy, vibrant political system.)

The list expands, but its upshot is that contemporary conservatism's "intellectual vanguard" is populated by cranks, crackpots and crazies. By itself this collection of wingnuts is harmless enough. Yet, observes Gerson, "One of the easily led people consuming [their] deceptions sits in the Oval Office." Indeed, Trump believes that the psychiatrist's couch of "Fox & Friends" is reserved for authentic public intellectuals. "It is a sad thing when a president manipulates the public," writes Gerson. "It is a sad and scary thing when the president is manipulated by people with a vested interest in cultivating crisis" — QED, "he is the victim of a plot by the 'deep state' — a conspiracy he locates in any part of government that refuses to affirm and demonstrate loyalty to his person."

I mention all this, in part, as a way of fiercely disagreeing with the downright cockamamy notion that any contemporary comparisons to Hitler's regime lie outside the bounds of respectable discussion. To be awfully platitudinous, "If the shoe fits…." I also intensely dislike preemptive censorship. We should make any comparisons we damn well please, thank you very much. And in that respect, I am struck by the vast similarity between Hitler's intellectuals and Trump's, even though the former's were often more formally intellectual than the "racially tinged, half-baked, over-caffeinated effusions of [the] adolescent" wrecking crew of Trumpism.

As the brilliant philosopher-sociologist Karl Mannheim (d. 1947) wrote, especially in "dark times," society's intellectuals should be "watchmen in what otherwise would be a pitch-black night." When their proper role broke down under Hitler's authoritarianism, intellectuals — particularly historians — surrendered their scholarly independence, and not always through state coercion, since German universities had always proudly defended their separation of intellectualism and state. Thus Nazi Germany became pitch black nearly overnight, as Mannheim had warned.

German intellectuals of the early 1930s have taken searing criticism of their professional capitulations. Few had the gutsy wisdom of, say, my favorite German novelist and exceptional intellect, Thomas Mann, who abandoned his homeland in 1933, and three years later ridiculed Bonn University's revocation of his Honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He informed the university's dean of his "irrepressible disgust" for Hitler's Germany and charged its universities for the "heavy responsibility for the present sufferings which they called down upon their heads."

Not only universities housed Germany's 1930s intellectuals. As French historian Christian Ingrao observed in his 2013 volume, Believe and Destroy, (reviewed in the Wall Street Journal), "future SS cadres were activist intellectuals, hardly of the beer-hall variety. There was 'no evidence at all for the clichéd image of the thuggish Nazi activist," wrote Ingrao. "By examining the careers of 80 German intellectuals, all of them part of the SS war machine," Ingrao offered "a chilling collective portrait of a generation blinded by the fervor of their ideology and oblivious to the suffering of others." Sound familiar?

German historians have been singled out from professional disciplines for particularly appropriate disapprobation. "Why historians?" asked Dr. Amy Sims in a 1978 edition of the Virginia Historical Review. "First, they were the intellectuals who were most engaged in critical analysis of the state and its relation to power and ethics…. Historians were most capable of maintaining a critical perspective toward Nazism and of achieving a complete understanding of its dangers. Second, historians are, as [philosopher] Albert Levi said, 'custodians of the national memory' because they are the scholars who discern the essential traditions of a country. As such, they can influence political events by the way they interpret them."

Am I arguing that Trump's "intellectuals" are all Jew-hating genocidal fascists? Of course not. I am arguing (as does Michael Gerson) that Trump's intellectuals are weak-minded, often ill-schooled enablers of a fascistically oriented, neurotic and quite possibly psychotic dimwit. Mine is not a difficult argument to defend; we've more than two years of demonstrable presidential recklessness as a historical guide. What stuns, frightens, and is inarguably indefensible is that roughly a third of the American electorate sees no problem in that so many contemporary conservative intellectuals have appallingly failed to honor America's traditional values of striving for domestic tranquility and international respect — much as Germany's intellectuals once so tragically failed their country.

Gerson is just as inarguably correct. "Trump’s ideology isn’t populism. It’s catastrophism" — not yet of the slaughterous international magnitude of Nazi Germany, but the potential is clear, present, and horrifically dangerous. Like Trump, Hitler never achieved a democratic majority in his pursuit and apprehension of power, hence "populism" in the mass-majority sense of the word was incompatible with Germany's political reality. All he required was approximately 40 percent of his once-civilized nation's approval. And with that, ultimately, came catastrophism — justified to the very end by half-baked intellectuals of hysterical humbuggery; "a chilling collective portrait of a generation [of intellectuals] blinded by the fervor of their ideology and oblivious to the suffering of others."

How true

For the second time in three days, the New York City Police Department is investigating swastikas found scrawled in places where children play https://t.co/9daxzvM4hE

— CNN (@CNN) February 25, 2019

Undoubtedly from a member of the master race, whose forebears just as undoubtedly immigrated to the United States from the Russian steppes. Unless of course the creative versifier literally hoped the skies would hail Hitlers, which I confess would make for a rather appealing, splashy mess.      

Make that one bullish columnist in Bernie Sanders' corner

WaPo's "data analyst and political columnist" David Byler has penned an exotic musing in search of reality. You be the judge. Is it dismissively subjective of me to opine that Mr. Byler was, well, a wee bit out of touch with the planet when he wrote three days ago: "I think I’ve been underestimating [Bernie Sanders] this cycle, and it’s definitely possible to imagine scenarios where he ends up with the nomination…. The race is chaotic — and that chaos has caused me to become more bullish on Sanders than I have been in the past." (He thereupon, soberly butt-covered his bullishness by adding, "But the smart money is still on the rest of the field.")

Byler's almost singular argument is that Sanders enters the race with a strong, solid base — even though he "has spent the past two years losing steam. He ended the 2016 primary with 43 percent of the national vote, but now he’s polling below 20 percent nationally." I suppose one could also argue that Byler's curious "data" reasoning is a splendid example of the Fitzgeraldian concept of holding two opposing ideas simultaneously as a sign of a first-rate intelligence. To me its an example of New Math.

The analyst-columnist surprises with this revelation: "Having a base is a huge advantage in a crowded primary." He proceeds: "These sorts of races sometimes have a boom-and-bust feel to them — an unknown candidate grabs some media coverage, catches fire and then withers under scrutiny or just flames out as voters move on." The most memorable object lesson of this recurring phenomenon was 2016's now virtually forgotten "frontrunner" Scott Walker.

Continues Byler: "But it didn’t happen to Donald Trump in 2016 because he, like Sanders, had followers who weren’t just jumping on a bandwagon." This would be the same Donald Trump whose initial, 2015 support ranked in the single digits. By May of that year, when asked if they could see "supporting [fill in the blank candidate] for the Republican nomination for president," 23 percent of rand-and-file Republicans said yes to Trump. By January 2016, the madness had spread even farther. Byler, in implicitly channeling Chris Cillizza, agreed that "It's hard to overstate how remarkable it is that the number of Republicans who could see themselves backing a Trump nomination rose 42 — FORTY TWO — percentage points in 10 months." You know what that's called? The "bandwagon effect" — precisely the opposite of Byler's own argument about Sanders.

As an aside, he also observes that "It’s hard to deny the nomination to the candidate who gets the most votes." That may be true, although it seems rather easy to reward the total-vote-losing candidate the presidency.

Perhaps Byler was simply, or rather desperately, in search of clicks. His eye-catching piece was provocatively titled "Bernie Sanders’s biggest strength for 2020 is his ability to thrive on chaos." If Byler's incoherent analysis is an indicator of Sanders' appeal to chaos, then the senator will do well. Otherwise, the Honorable Senator Bernard Sanders is toast. There is far too much potential in his numerous competitors to lose out to a man whose brain is unshakably mired in 1968.

Kim Jong-un, a bloody, misunderstood tyrant

His naiveté is beyond staggering.

"I’ve developed a very, very good relationship” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, said Trump yesterday to an assemblage of the nation's governors, each of whom must have sat positively aghast at the president's ignorance, compounded by an ego-inflated compulsion to advertise what he's convinced is genius. "He’s never had a relationship with anybody from this country, and hasn’t had lots of relationships anywhere."

From those words, one might think that America's Korean War deaths of 36,574 and 103,284 wounded, along with South Korea's 217,000 military deaths and 1,000,000 civilians killed, were merely the result of a colossal misunderstanding. The world simply failed to recognize the North's need to launch an unprovoked invasion. Since then, the nation has dedicated itself to perpetuating a hell on earth that separates it from any garden-variety despotism, outside of the past nightmares of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia.

Quite aside from the infamy of its military nuclearization and repeated threats to use it, North Korea's gulag of "parallel penal camps" run by the country's secret police is a horror of almost unimaginable savagery. These Konzentrationslager house upward of 70,000 prisoners, most of whom are held behind "gated high walls and barbed wire fences [and] guard towers" for having committed crimes against the state. This according to a heart-wrenching, 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry, which perhaps, just perhaps has contributed to North Korea's paucity of "lots of [benign] relationships."

The "political" camps are kept out of sight from the general population and are "extrajudicial" — meaning their inmates "can be held incommunicado for life. Family members are held there also." Their purpose is to "preemptively purge, punish, and remove from North Korean society" (my emphasis) anyone the state suspects of ideological apostasy. Parallel camps of "punishment" are meant to house actual criminals, but the camps imprison political dissidents as well.

What constitutes a political crime? "Taking part in unauthorized gatherings; criticizing the state or even expressing dissatisfaction privately; possessing 'decadent' drawings, written materials, periodicals, music, movies or videos; and 'foul, hostile, or superstitious activities.'" Here's a twist for the international law books. A North Korean political crime can even include "not rightly selecting winning athletes for important competitions." As the Washington Post put it in its coverage of the U.N.'s report, "In other words, pick the wrong team goalie, and you're off to jail" — where prisoners are subjected to "deprivations … including starvation, forced labor and brutal conditions that lead to large numbers of deaths."

Such is the tenth circle of hell with which Trump (believes he) is fostering "a very, very good relationship," coincidental to his hostile relationships with America's traditional allies. Poor Kim, says Trump: "He’s never had a relationship with anybody from this country." Just a fluke of misguided history, I guess. From Truman to Obama, previous presidents simply failed to see the goodness of North Korea. Trump's "very good brain" knows better.

No way to start a week

Good morning! What a busy little world to wake to, having finally removed my head from yet another charming, two-day stint with a vomit bag. My marginally improving semi-consciousness was greeted this morning by the following global tales, all of them — every last bloody one of them — compressed onto the front page of the NY Times. Let us begin.

Is Brexit the looming cause of Britain's manifold troubles? Hardly. It seems more the coup de grâce to a nation with the preexisting condition of economic cretinism. As you'll recall, the Conservative government, in a 2010 move antithetical to all modern macroeconomic theory, ushered in a policy of austerity, rather than pump-priming. The result? Britain is now "less like the rest of Western Europe, with its generous social safety nets and egalitarian ethos, and more like the United States, where millions lack health care and job loss can set off a precipitous plunge in fortunes." One young bloke, Alex McIntyre, 19, "part of a vast cohort" of ideological reactionaries, has "started reading Marx." (Five will get you ten he doesn't make it all the way through Das Kapital. Fidel Castro couldn't.) Alex would be better off reading the old Fabians.

A German correspondent summarizes the human condition of Britain's continental neighbors. "Italy is governed by a maverick government searching for an open confrontation with France. Hungary and Poland are slowly slipping into authoritarianism. And we are headed for a European election in May that could result in further gains by populist parties" — unquestionably with the assistance of "Russian interferences in European elections." Once a model of international comity and cooperation, Europe is in a state of fragmented free fall.

In the Levant, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "has enraged Jewish leaders in Israel and the United States by striking a bargain with a racist anti-Arab party whose ideology was likened by one influential rabbi to Nazism." What took him so long?

Far south of our southern border, itself reeling from the effects of the absence of a crisis, President Nicolás Maduro’s blockade of "humanitarian aid at the heart of a Venezuelan border standoff … [is] still intact." It's now "clear that the opposition leaders trying to oust him had little in the way of a Plan B," which is incontrovertible proof that opposition leader Juan Guaidó is still taking Trump's advice. Guaidó, by the way, has hightailed it to Colombia, which, I suppose, is sort of a Plan B.

South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, is hoping that Trump and mass-murderer Kim Jong-un issue an "end-of-war declaration" at POTUS' upcoming, second photo op. Ordinarily an end to official war is cause for celebration. But President Moon's reasoning? "To build trust between North Korea and the United States and to prod the North to move toward giving up its nuclear weapons." Right. And Vladimir Putin will convert to Quakerism.

Last, although this failed to make the Times' front page for the first time in two years, the United States is led by a mob syndicate, whose boss of bosses in actual Mafia history resembles the now-deceased Vincent Gigante, New York's City's "Oddfather," who "could often be seen shuffling around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, mumbling to himself and appearing to be a disturbed but harmless person. Law-enforcement agents, prosecutors and Mafia defectors described his behavior as a staged performance calculated to evade prosecution" via an insanity defense.

And there you have it — far from all the news that's fit to print, but enough to make me reach once again for the vomit bag.

The Trump Doctrine: "Who knows?"

The NY Times reports that "The Trump administration has not discussed with Pyongyang pulling out the roughly 28,500 [U.S.] troops stationed in the South … and Mr. Trump’s top advisers uniformly oppose it. The president said this month that he had no plans to do so, though he noted that the troops were costly, and added, 'Maybe someday — I mean, who knows?'"

We know one thing, though. And what we know is that if anyone knows, it would be, or at the very least should be, the president of the United States. Yet there's no risk in assuming that the president does not, in fact, know, as evidenced by his cavalier attitude toward the hottest thermonuclear spot in the world. He conceals his ignorance of international affairs and potential mass-casualty Armageddons by exuding an air of superior wisdom and insight, which only a second-rate Manhattan real estate developer could possess — and if nothing else, to keep his "top advisors," who "uniformly oppose it," hanging by a thread.

Kim Jong-un, however, knows exactly what he knows. "There is absolutely zero indication — none," said Michael Green, of the Center for Strategic and International Relations, "that North Korea has any intention of being anything other than it has been, which is a nuclear-weapons state."

President-for-life Xi Jinping also knows, with unbridled glee, that Trump's insouciance toward our military presence in South Korea is an invaluable gift to China. What did Xi ever do to deserve such good, gratuitous fortune? Well, he rolled out a red carpet and flew a few jets overhead during Trump's visit to Beijing. I suspect Xi, by now, believes in a personal deity.

Were this the Nixon administration, we and the world would all know that behind the scenes were all manner of purposeful, Machiavellian maneuverings — secret deals, side accords, cloak-and-dagger handshakes, the playing of one state against another, and of course covert operations, just for the added fun of it. But with Trump, what we see is what we get: shoot-from-the-hip chaos, confusion and … who knows?

We accept our historical ignorance at great risk

Since yesterday was Trump's 761st day in the White House, I though I'd make your 762nd day even worse. To wit …

"A survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that 'more Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.'"

Still insufficiently dispirited? Then try this:

"More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place and half of the respondents believed the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation or the War of 1812 were before the American Revolution."

So whenever our president says something along the lines of, "Lincoln was a Republican … Did you know that? … I bet a lot of people didn't know that," we may clear our throats in mortified discomfort — but the truth is, our president knows more about what Americans know about than we who know that the Civil War followed the Spanish-American War. He never underestimated the ignorance of the American people, many of whom, regrettably, vote. Hence the idiot in the White House.

(I have never been sympathetic to those election-year exhortations to Get out and vote, since the message always lacks the more important part: … assuming you know why in hell you're voting.)

The above statistics are taken from Max Boot's latest column, "Americans’ ignorance of history is a national scandal." And when one simultaneously ponders "ignorance" and "scandal," one naturally thinks of Donald J. Trump. This, then, compelled Boot to recall: "Asked when America was great, Trump pointed to the early years of the 20th century and the 1940s-1950s."

Yes, those eras had their upsides, to be sure, but their road also had a few bumps: WW I, the Palmer Raids and commie hysteria, the Great Depression, WW II, McCarthyism, "the Bomb," burgeoning racial strife, Stepford Wives, a Man in the Gray Flannel Suit culture that threw virtually every public intellectual into mind-numbed despair.

Boot notes as well that we can't blame our paucity of historical knowledge — born early in our educational lives and continuing throughout — on students alone. History teachers, and more egregiously, university professors, have, in the past half-century or so, drifted almost exclusively into the theoretical fields of race and gender (class was once coequally preeminent in the teaching of history, but Marxism's subordination of race and gender theories pretty much killed it off). To be just as sure, neglecting the significance of race and gender's historical magnitude had prevailed far too long. But the nearly singular concentration on these fields tragically squeezed out the teaching of political, economic, and diplomatic history — the very fundamentals of a classical history education (a knowledge of civics, innovation in goods and services, what good government requires, our foreign policies and how they have influenced the present).

As for the teaching of political history alone? The tragedy here is one I have hammered away at for years (in large part, I suppose, because that was my field), and one that Max Boot raises almost in passing: "The fact that so many Americans know so little about the past means that we as a society are vulnerable to demagogues." That, I am sure, needs no further comment.

And, no further urging of the importance of reintroducing a classical history education in our schools and universities.

Incompetence atop malice

BuzzFeed:

Although President Donald Trump tweeted that he had ordered his administration to cut off disaster aid to wildfire victims in California, federal officials confirmed on Wednesday that they never received any such directive….

In January, Trump accused California of failing to properly manage its forests to prevent wildfires and announced, via Twitter, that he had ordered his administration to stop sending money to hundreds of thousands of survivors [bold mine]….

Since October 2017, California has been working to recover from an unprecedented series of massive wildfires that have killed more than 130 people, destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, and left many rural communities and towns across the state in tatters…. FEMA told BuzzFeed News several times that it had no plans to stop helping survivors.

Trump has repeatedly blamed California's devastating wildfires on state water policies and management of its drought-crippled wildlands, despite the fact that the federal government is responsible for 60% of the state's forests…. Experts, firefighters, and fire officials have also pushed back on the president's oversimplified analysis of why California's wildfires have become increasingly overwhelming, pointing to a confluence of factors, such as climate change and urbanization, that have thrust the state into uncharted territory.

Even Vladimir Putin must wonder by now if Trump has lost his mind. A president of the United States withdrawing emergency aid from fire-ravaged (blue) California? What are the odds that Trump would have pulled this malicious stunt on (red) Alabama amid some similar catastrophe?

Even more bizarre is that this POTUS seems to believe that a "tweet" carries the same official weight as does a formal, presidential directive. Third year in office and he still doesn't know how to sign an order.

As this post's title implies, incompetence heaped on malice is likely the most perilous combination in a presidential persona.