P.M. Carpenter

Kasich weasels out

This would have been an interesting race. But ...

"There is no path right now for me. I don't see a way to get there," said former governor John Kasich today about a 2020 challenge to Trump…. "Ninety percent of the Republican Party supports him. It may be a shrinking Republican Party, but nevertheless. Maybe somebody wants to run and make a statement and that's fine, but I've never gotten involved in a political race where I didn't think I could win."

My guess is that 90 percent of the Republican Party supports Trump only because the president has no competition. In February a Monmouth University poll found that 43 percent of Republicans would like to see Trump primaried, although the same poll found that Trump would "trounce" any competitor.

But for all-American Kasich, is that really the point? I've lost track of the times I've heard Kasich express the sentiment that the country should come first, and then the party (and by extension, any candidate). Thus his primary potential should be as secondary to Kasich as the party.

He's right that it would be "fine" if "somebody wants to run and make [an anti-Trump] statement" — the GOP's future depends on a multitude of independent thinkers and disaffected activism — and Kasich is probably the supreme Republican choice to do just that. Yet he's more worried about his loss column than the nation's or his party's well-being.

I've always suspected that John Kasich's fate is the most critical question lying before John Kasich — a down-home demagogue at heart. And now we know it for a fact.

Par for Trump

This is a somewhat dated piece (2 April), but Trump's dishonesty is timeless. From CNN:

A longtime sportswriter … claims in a new book [Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump] that President Donald Trump frequently cheats at golf [and] likened Trump's habit to a way of "showing you that he's better than you."

"He cheats like a mafia accountant. He cheats crazy. He cheats whether you're watching or not. He cheats whether you like it or not," Rick Reilly told CNN....

Reilly recounted several stories from his new book … of Trump allegedly cheating, even against professional players.

According to Reilly, Trump hit two balls in the water when he played professional golfer Tiger Woods and then claimed to have almost tied with him, [and] kicked sportscaster Mike Tirico's ball into a bunker when the two played….

Trump's caddies also allegedly know to accommodate his penchant, Reilly said — "He kicks the ball out of the rough so many times, the caddies call him 'Pele,'" after the famous soccer player.

How can a man who habitually cheats at golf (or any other competitive endeavor) convince not you but himself that "he's better than you"? He knows he must cheat to win, thus he's only conning himself — so what's the point?

If a psychiatrist ever scanned this guy's brain for cognitive dissonance, the maximally intense readings would blow up the scanning machine.

The ugliest American, in Japan

We're scarcely into Trump's third year of exotic paranoia and galloping immaturity, yet both of these presidential attributes have more than tripled in strength since he took office. The most recent incident to highlight his prepubescent approach to internal conflict was of course the USS John S. McCain fiasco. Here was a train wreck of melodramatic peevishness that makes one think more of middle school antics than the White House's prestige, which at any rate died more than two years ago.

It's an almost unbelievable tale of tarps, barges and USS McCain sailors turned away from Trump's oratorical pomposity on the USS Wasp (the latter of which seems to me like a favor, not an insult). It's a tale of presidential übersensitivity and a concomitant tale of scrambling subordinates eager to please the madman at a watery Berchtesgaden.

As the Times' Michelle Cottle notes: "It seems we have reached a point where the president of the United States is considered such a snowflake by his own staff members that they tripped over themselves to avoid having him even see the name of someone he didn’t like … that was inconveniently emblazoned on a destroyer within his line of sight."

Or, more broadly, the Washington Post's Helaine Olen observes that "the entire episode contains more than a whiff of a reminder of how censors in the Soviet Union made formerly prominent figures who’d fallen out of favor with Joseph Stalin disappear in official photos."

Olen also writes that "there is no reason to doubt" Trump's word that he knew nothing of the peek-a-boo game which played out at the Yokosuka Naval Base. I'd counter that there is abundant reason to doubt him: He has acted the colic toddler since he donned the mantle of authoritarian dorkdom; and off-the-reservation dissents from, and challenges to, his highness' genius instability are the only things he's well informed about. Sen. McCain provided both dissent and challenge in spades, and they still haunt this neurotically oversensitive infant of a would-be president in more than name.

Trump's thinnest of skin also reminds us of a Caligula in charge of the Roman Empire. The upside to that analogy, however, is that the Empire endured well after Caligula's subordinates had had enough of his neurotic infantilism. In the end, it would be outsider Visigoths and Huns and other rustic roughians who would decimate Rome to the fullest, not its internal, Trumpian nitwits.

Let us hope that we should be so lucky in the imminent, post-Trump age.

A Trumpism that will floor you

Trump's ignorance of even elementary law and government functions still astounds:

Omg... clueless as ever about how it all works... https://t.co/THCT6gaFNt

— Martina Navratilova (@Martina) May 30, 2019

The description laughable springs to mind, until one recalls that this prodigious ignoramus is in exclusive possession of the nuclear football.

And if he's this clueless about the fundamentals of impeachment — which he is — just ponder how ignorant he must be about legislative proposals, complex social problems and the proper exercise of executive authority — not that he cares the least bit about the latter.

Three 'Republicans for the Rule of Law'

If you've five minutes to spare, watch this video of three former Republican appointees — two of them from the Department of Justice and one from Homeland Security — who are now part of Republicans for the Rule of Law.

(I would  have pasted the video here, but every attempt to do so prompted the message that I had entered "a URL that is either invalid or a URL for a media that can no longer be found.) 

Most if not all of what they say you'll already be familiar with, but together they offer a concise, forceful and convincing argument for the eventual prosecution of Donald Trump for obstruction of justice. It's five minutes well spent.

If only the Democratic National Committee had the cash to buy airtime on all the network news programs to present this videoed case, edited for time, against Trump — not from Democrats, but from conservatives of former Republican administrations. 

Their heads are flat … but Earth?

I used to think that members of the Flat Earth Society had joined only to be kitschy and a neighborhood novelty. But I'll be damned: These people are true believers.

Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube….

Interviews with 30 attendees [at a Flat Earth annual conference] revealed a pattern in the stories people told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the same thing….

The interviews revealed that most had been watching videos about other conspiracies, with alternative takes on 9/11, the Sandy Hook school shooting and whether Nasa really went to the moon, when YouTube offered up Flat Earth videos for them to watch next.

Some said they watched the videos only in order to debunk them but soon found themselves won over by the material.

And I'd wager every one of them voted for Trump.

A tangle of lies: Trump, Sanders and Giuliani

From a White House statement — via the impeccably honest Sarah Sanders — on Bob Mueller's post-report appearance yesterday: "The report was clear — there was no collusion, no conspiracy — and the Department of Justice confirmed there was no obstruction."

Notice that when she came to the question of obstruction, Sanders switched from the "clear report" to what Attorney General Barr had to say, misleadingly, about the report. Thus even the White House now implicitly acknowledges that Mueller nailed Trump on obstruction — 11 times.

Meanwhile, Individual 1 admitted in a tweet this morning that "Russia help[ed] me to get elected," while also contradicting what his press spokeswoman slyly conceded yesterday about obstruction.

....say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2019

This motley gang of swindlers and liars can't even coordinate a fresh batch of relatively simple fiction without crashing into each other — much like, when one adds Rudy Giuliani, a Three Stooges routine.

A declination by any other name is a declination. Mueller’s statement just repeated his report there is no case, collusion or obstruction. Despite DOJ policy on charging, he used over 430 pages and a brief press statement to reach that result. No case!!!

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) May 29, 2019

Here, Giuliani hopelessly muddles the connection between "DOJ policy" and Mueller's "result," which was anything but "No case!!!" DOJ policy precludes bringing a case against a sitting president. But the way in which Giuliani wrote his tweet suggests that Mueller effectively did just that, which profoundly conflicts with Giuliani's conclusion of no case.

To paraphrase Animal House's Dean Wormer: Fake, mendacious and stupid is no way to go through life, people.

Mueller also had accountability, but evaded it

Speaking from a Justice Department podium this morning, Special Counsel Robert Mueller all but reconfirmed that the sitting president of the United States is a crook, and urged Congress to undertake impeachment proceedings accordingly.

Said Mueller in words that require no interpretation: "If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime" of either obstruction or conspiracy— not only because the Trump administration's many manifest obstructions of the investigation made a solid finding of conspiracy (collusion) impossible (which Mueller's report makes clear), but also because Justice Department rules forbid the special counsel's office from indicting a crooked president (even if his obstructions are manifest).

Hence Mueller's undisguised recommendation that impeachment proceedings should commence. As the NY Times paraphrased the special counsel's advice: "[Mueller] said that while Justice Department policy prohibits charging a sitting president with a crime, the Constitution provides for another process to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing — a clear reference to the ability of Congress to begin impeachment proceedings."

Would Mueller advance such an argument if he believed the president, as Bill Barr and other Trumpers insist, had committed no crimes? That of course would be both preposterous and outrageous — two characteristics that Muellerian prudence has never allowed. And yet Trump and his loyalists persist in arguing that Mueller's report cleared the president of conspiracy and obstruction of justice allegations — which is both preposterous and disingenuously outrageous.

I remain disappointed that Bob Mueller refused to go further in his report on Trump's criminal activities. His defense to such disappointment is that going further effectively would have constituted an indictment. Yet in the absence of an official indictment, Trump would then have to defend himself against little but legal phantoms, which would have been unfair of Mueller — and Mueller is anything but jurisprudentially unfair.

It seems to me, however, that a fact-finding mission such as Mueller's should lay out whatever facts it finds and, just as important, whatever conclusions it reaches internally. In leaving the latter undone, Mueller has left all final determinations of Trump's rank criminality in the hands of a dead-end Congress, and permitted Trump, Barr & Assoc. to sing a foul song of "discovered" innocence.

Trump's pitiful walk-back

Trump soon realized that his foreign bashing of Biden — not to mention his customary cosseting of dictator Kim Jong-un — was a political blunder, born of reptilian spontaneity. But since an apology was out of the question for a self-proclaimed übermensch who can do no wrong, he had to come up with something — and this, pathetically, was it:

I was actually sticking up for Sleepy Joe Biden while on foreign soil. Kim Jong Un called him a “low IQ idiot,” and many other things, whereas I related the quote of Chairman Kim as a much softer “low IQ individual.” Who could possibly be upset with that?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2019

North Korea's state-run media is more honest, in that unlike Trump, it's sticking by its original protest: "Biden has gone reckless and senseless, seized by ambition for power. [He had] reeled off rhetoric slandering the supreme leadership of the DPRK. What he uttered is just sophism of an imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being, let alone a politician." Concluded North Korea's commentary: "[Biden] is a fool of low IQ."

If only our "very smart" POTUS could be as pure of heart and consistently direct as Kim's editorialists.

And if only Trump's party and state-run media could be as honest and openly critical of the president as were two — count 'em, two — Republican congressmen. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois tweeted this to Trump: "It’s Memorial Day Weekend and you’re taking a shot at Biden while praising a dictator. This is just plain wrong." Added New York's occasionally independent Peter King: "Wrong for @POTUS Trump to criticize @JoeBiden in Japan and to agree with Kim Jong-un…. Never right to side with murderous dictator vs. fellow American."

As far as I know, the other 248 Republican congressfolk have been silent on Trump's utterly unAmerican partisan blather while in Japan.

Joe Biden's campaign, by the way, waited until Trump had returned to the White House before returning fire, which is the old-school, more genteel way of American politics. However with less gentility, his deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, said, among other things, that Trump‘s partisan comments while overseas were "part of a pattern of embracing autocrats at the expense of our institutions — whether taking Putin’s word at face value in Helsinki or exchanging 'love letters' with Kim Jong Un."

True enough. Yet if Trump didn't embrace autocrats and take Putin’s word at face value and exchange love letters with Kim, he'd have no foreign policy agenda at all.

Another week of national shame

What do you call a nationalist leader who lives a luxuriously corrupt life while starving, torturing and imprisoning his nation's citizenry? Well, our own nationalist leader of ill-gotten gains calls him a "very smart man."

Yesterday, Trump also publicly favored Kim Jong-un over his own national security advisor, as well as one of our closest allies, Japan. While squandering U.S. tax dollars on a junket to that befuddled land of the rising son, Trump — characteristically, against all evidence — insisted that North Korea had not recently launched ballistically threatening missiles or violated U.N. Security Council resolutions.

“My people think it could have been a violation," said Trump, but "I view it differently" — probably because of the president's vast experience in intelligence gathering and weapons discernment. "North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me," he later tweeted. And in a show of either astounding gullibility or brazen base-bamboozlement, he added that "I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me."

Insulting an ally and openly contradicting his own advisers weren't the worst of Trump's latest buffoonery, however. Most egregiously, he chose a foreign land to launch his own long-range missiles against a domestic political opponent, the inevitable Joe Biden.

"U.S. presidents traditionally refrain from criticizing their political rivals or talking partisan politics on foreign soil," observes the Washington Post. "But when pressed about seeming to choose a brutal dictator over a fellow American," Trump did just that, thereby demolishing yet another norm, further coarsening Republicans' already deplorable politics, and in general making most of us feel ashamed to be Americans.

Kim — friend of Trump, international outlaw and a paranoid, homicidal cutthroat who giddily obliterates his own political opponents and even family members with anti-aircraft weaponry — called Biden a "fool of low I.Q." after Biden had called the tyrant a tyrant. "[I] smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse," tweeted Trump, who is still in search of the perfectly juvenile epithet to apply to the former vice president and future president.

So there you have it: A U.S. president siding with a brutal psychotic on foreign soil against "a fellow American," presidential candidate and one of the most respected men in the country. So yes, I am ashamed to be an American. Notwithstanding my uninterrupted opposition to our grifter in chief, I'm still part of the diseased body politic that put him in office. We are all tainted, it seems to me, and shall remain so until this norm-busting, American institutions-loathng, lawbreaking colossus of sleaze is bounced from the White House, one way or the other.

Update, part 2

I am home.

My apologies. I would have written about the Catastrophic States of America while in the ICU last week, but by ICU the hospital meant Intensive Commotion Unit. Not five minutes would pass before a doctor, nurse, nurse practitioner or tech would be fussing with me or one of my many mechanized life-saving contraptions. I'm not complaining. They were friendly, helpful and professional, not to mention salvational.

All the commotion, however, obliterated any chance of mental concentration on my part; any attempt at writing something worthwhile was as remote as a comprehensible Trump policy. Thus I was reduced to watching roughly 100 hours of MSNBC throughout the week, which was nearly enough opinion-saturation to send me from the ICU floor to the psychiatric unit. I must admit, though, that filling and then having my bedpan emptied while Rachel was giggling and clapping provided a certain spacetime continuum that was quite reassuring. Life as I knew it would go on.

I shall resume posting on Tuesday, since Monday's holiday writing would only be squandered by readers' hotdog-and-beer blowouts. I'll most likely be posting a bit later in the day than usual for a while, since my breathtaking pulmonary embolism has substantially altered my previous morning routine. A complete recovery will take four to six weeks, I'm informed, accompanied by a swarm of early morning lab tests and doctor appointments. (In addition I have a massive distraction to straighten out insurance-wise, which as of today appears to be a trifle dicey; and if dicey morphs to reality, I'll be looking at a $100,000 bill, minimum — at which point I'll request that hospital personnel undo whatever they did to cure the lethal embolism. I cannot chase that big of a cash acorn.)

See you Tuesday, and take care with your holiday exuberances.

—PM

Update

Well, you see, it's this way. What I thought was just another episode of u.c. after-effects (low sodium, which can make it hard to breath), was in fact a pulmonary embolism. My daughter, Ellie, practically held a gun to my head to get me to go to the hospital on Sunday. I was operated on Monday, the arterial tube in my neck (dripping heparin, to break up the blood clots in my lungs) is to be removed Friday, and I may be home by Sunday.

I love the old lines: "Why me?" The obvious answer to which is, "Why not?"

***

Progress! Friday night, I was released from intensive care. I'm now in a "regular" room, awaiting news of my immediate fate. 

Sorry but I forgot to mention that I need to attend the local hospital either late this morning or early afternoon for a fill-up.   

At last, one honorable Republican

The real thing, the Honorable Justin Amash, U.S. representative from Michigan's 3rd Cong. District, has become what I hope isn't the last Republican member Congress to openly charge that the president has hit the 'threshold of impeachment.'"

Amash's singular act of conservative conscience came in an avalanche of Trump-like tweets. This, of course, incurred he inevitable: "Jim Lower, a [pseudo]conservative state representative, suggested he might run against Mr. Amash next year." In the Republican Party, truth is both rare and dangerous.

Yesterday, House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin (Md.) said, in the words of the NY Times, "that an increasing number of his colleagues were moving toward a conclusion that some kind of impeachment proceeding was inevitable." Said Raskin himself: "We have to keep this in proportion with everything else we’re doing, but believe me, the anger and frustration is growing, not just in the public, but within the ranks of Democrats, too."

Last week, in what I assume was merely a placation of her caucus' more militant members, Speaker Pelosi "declared her openness … to initiating an impeachment inquiry as a means of forcing administration officials to comply with the subpoenas of the six House committees investigating Mr. Trump’s conduct." His reaction, I imagine, was one of base-invigorating joy.

Here is just a handful of Amash's more poignant Twitter fusillades (to really appreciate his full bombing campaign, you should access his account read them all):

Few members of Congress even read Mueller’s report; their minds were made up based on partisan affiliation—and it showed, with representatives and senators from both parties issuing definitive statements on the 448-page report’s conclusions within just hours of its release.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019

Impeachment, which is a special form of indictment, does not even require probable cause that a crime (e.g., obstruction of justice) has been committed; it simply requires a finding that an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019

The evidence against Trump mounts, and mounts, and mounts

Mueller's obstruction count against Generalissimo Trump remains firmly at 10 — irrefutably.

A federal judge ordered the release of a "public transcript of a November 2017 voice mail involving Flynn. In that sensitive call, President Trump’s attorney left a message for Flynn’s attorney reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn at a time when Flynn was considering cooperating with federal investigators."

The transcript of the conversation —much  more than merely "sensitive" — reads:

"[I]t wouldn't surprise me if you've gone on to make a deal with ... the government," [Trump's] attorney said in the voicemail message.

"[I]f... there's information that implicates the President, then we've got a national security issue [so] ... we need some kind of heads-up. Just for the sake of protecting all our interests if we can .... [R]emember what we've always said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains."

How is that not conspiracy to obstruct justice? How is not witness tampering? The denial of both, in a federal court, would be legally gossamer at best.

This was brazen mobster activity. Gee, Michael, it would be a shame if you were to lose the president's "fondness" for you by telling the truth. So much for a pardon.

And this line was so screamingly criminal, even to a non-lawyer such as myself, it makes one wonder why Robert Mueller didn't defy DOJ "regulations" (not the law) and have Trump and his lawyer summarily indicted: "[I]f... there's information that implicates the President, then we've got a national security issue [so] ... we need some kind of heads-up. Just for the sake of protecting all our interests."

Just for the sake of protecting all our interests.

Even the now-delightfully dead John Gotti was smarter than to put incriminating telephone messages on tape. But then again, Gotti didn't own the DOJ, as the Generalissimo does.