PMC Commentary

Jimmy Carter says what Bob Mueller couldn't

In a panel discussion convened by the Carter Center, Jimmy Carter said yesterday what Bob Mueller was unable to prove:

"There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf."

I notice Trump hasn't yet ridiculed Carter on Twitter, but that's only because he's been busy schmoozing with Vladimir Putin in Japan, At one point he joked about exterminating the free press. "Get rid of them," said Trump as he hand-signaled Go away to a coterie of reporters. "Fake news is a great term, isn’t it?" he continued. You don’t have this problem in Russia," he said to Vladimir, "but we do." Well, Vlad still has some problems with the press, but much fewer since he began assassinating journalists: 26 to date, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Asked by a reporter if he would demand that Putin not further interfere in our elections, Trump sarcastically replied, "Yes, of course I will." This brought laughter from the Russian dictator. "Don’t meddle in the election, please," said Trump to Putin twice, as the latter grinned..

Of course the only reason Mueller was unable prove the 2015-16 conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government was that both the Trump campaign and administration obstructed the means of justice to do so.

But, whatever, the Trump-Putin get-together was great authoritarian fun, especially since Trump beamingly took the opportunity to show Putin he had successfully evaded American law enforcement. I guess taking pride in one's criminality and screwing one's country are the sort of things authoritarians like to joke about between themselves.

The panel discussion's moderator, presidential biographer Jon Meacham, asked Carter if he thought Trump is "an illegitimate president." Carter hasn't lost his sense of humor, which naturally is far more sophisticated than Trump's. "Based on what I just said," quipped 39, "which I can’t retract ..." (Video is 55 seconds.)

The right loves to smear and trivialize Carter and his presidency. They claim, above all, that he was "weak." But whatever one thinks of Jimmy, he didn't collude with hostile foreign powers, obstruct justice, undermine American institutions, and, as for the border crisis of Trump's own making, "send a disgraceful signal around the world," as Carter remarked yesterday, "that this is what the … United States government stands for, and that is torture and kidnapping of little children."

With Trump, that too is probably good for a laugh.

Sojourning in Michigan, but still in business

Just hit town -- New Buffalo, Mich., that is, about a three-hour drive from our humble home, and where my daughter and I, on a whim, decided to spend the weekend. I shall be posting as usual, though, except just one post Monday morning, then, probably, more later in the day.

This -- Southwest Michigan -- is a beautiful area, rolling hills and forest everywhere; walking distance from "downtown" New Buffalo to Lake Michigan and a local beach, where I plan on getting good and sunburned. The town has an eatery of regional fame, The Stray Dog, where, as I understand it, cheeseburgers, beer, and wine by the vat may be had, the first and third of which I intend to partake.

Has Kamala Harris been sworn in as president yet? While I was on the road? The sacred event is far overdue, what with her demonstrating Thursday night that she can baselessly, obliquely accuse a civil-rights champion of -- racism, or at least happy fellowship with racists -- and somehow be applauded for it. That takes balls the size of Lake Michigan -- real presidential behavior, from the Trump collection.

It should be fascinating to watch 22 Dems learn this indispensable Harris Lesson and thereby begin ripping each other into soundbite pieces; ready-made soundbites for the Trump campaign to air throughout 2020. The party will eat its own, precisely when unity against America's #1 threat is most needed. We're barely into primary season, and Democrats are already blowing it.

See you in the morning.

This is no way to defeat Trump

NeverTrumper Joe Scarborough, on Thursday night's debate:

"My only hope is people were not watching.... They're lined up in trench warfare, ready to get out of the trenches and charge Donald Trump. Instead, they all turn their guns on each other and shoot each other."

We ain't seen nothin' yet, I'm afraid.

By ambushing Joe Biden with a garish, backhanded allusion to the civil-rights-advocate's racism — which, Friday, she shabbily escalated, accusing Biden of possessing "nostalgia about who [the segregationist senators] were" — Kamala Harris soared from a 1 or 2 percent standing to top-tier contention.

That was all it took: hatching a few tawdry innuendos designed solely to detach from Biden his strong base of support among the black community — and presto, she now rivals second-place Elizabeth Warren (who, for the first time, I feel sorry for: Wonkishness just can't compete with McCarthyite tactics).

In a flash, easily seduced pundits — let's take the Times' Frank Bruni — were penning overnight verdicts as to who should lead the world's most powerful nation in 2021; "And Now, the Dream of a Harris-Buttigieg Ticket." One or two tasteless, untruthful, preprogrammed jabs at the frontrunner were, for too many, sufficient to conceptually elevate Harris to the White House.  

Doubtless, the other 1-2 percenters have heeded the lesson. It's not as though this was a political insider's secret, but profaning the presidential frontrunner is a rather reliable way for a nonstarter to get noticed, to create copious buzz, to monopolize cable-news chattiness for a few news cycles, to surge in the polls. Which is next.

The irony is that some other 1-2 percenter will unfairly, just as tastelessly blast Sen. Harris should she rise to frontrunner status. In one way it's an unenviable position; a bit like a mob boss having to always look behind his shoulder, for fear of some antsy upstart. Harris' days as a prosecutor are the likeliest target for gross distortion, even though she was just doing her job. And should that pass, I'll defend her against the attacker's sleaze.

What's most unsettling is that these presidential candidates are now sure to wallow in more bloodbaths, when their target should be singular and unwavering: Donald J. Trump.

Peekaboo!

 

 

Till now I have never lifted a photo from a current publication, only from publicly available galleries. But this, from "What to Look For on the Candidates in Tonight's Debate,"  from the NY Times Style section, was a photographically thieving opportunity I just couldn't pass up. (By the way, no, I'm not a patron of the Style section. My daughter pointed this out collage. I thought I should say that, lest my immense, tough-guy masculinity come into question.)  

Remember when Trump denounced executive orders? And his base cheered?

Reports Bloomberg:

"The White House is developing a plan to cut taxes by indexing capital gains to inflation … in a move that would largely benefit the wealthy and may be done in a way that …

bypasses Congress."

We may now safely say that this bypassing-of-Congress thing has become routine with the Trump White House. Cool, awesome authoritarians don't wait around for parliamentary procedures, such as research, debate, public scrutiny. They're macho guys who know what they want and just take it. Putin and Xi get to, so why not Donald? (Mother Trump: "Donnie, if your friends wanted to jump off a bridge…,")

This particular end run around congressional approval, via an executive order, is a double insult to representative democracy, because of what the White House sees as the necessity of speed. Obeying the constitution's mandates for the legislative passage of plutocratic goodies is nonetheless a drag, of course. And in this case, the Trump administration is in a hurry. "Consensus is growing among White House officials to advance the proposal soon," reports Bloomberg, "to ensure the benefit takes effect before President Donald Trump faces re-election in 2020."

As always, politics and what's good for Trump dominate.

Tying the taxation of capital gains to inflation would "slash tax bills for investors," says, logically, Bloomberg, with 86 percent of the windfalls going to the highest-income households, the 1 percent crowd.

We are not amused; nor are we surprised.

How do you solve a problem like Elizabeth Warren?

Nicholas Kristof's latest, "Why I Was Wrong About Elizabeth Warren," is an amusing read. in that he sees going the wrong direction to be an improvement in thinking. Originally he was skeptical of the Massachusetts senator ...

"My first objection was that she appeared to have parlayed possible Native American heritage to gain academic jobs…. Second, I thought she shot from the hip and, with her slight political experience, would wilt on the campaign trail. Third, I thought she was a one-note Sally, eloquent on finance but thin on the rest of domestic and foreign policy"…,

but, he now says, he's coming around.

"Warren has become the gold standard for a policy-driven candidate, and whether or not she wins the Democratic nomination, she’s performing a public service by helping frame the debate…. She has been a geyser of smart proposals," such as universal child care, whose benefits to both child and society span years. Others range from "election reform to housing, antitrust to corporate governance. Then she offers a wealth tax to help pay for social programs."

I don't disagree with Kristof's revamped sentiments about Warren. She's a policy wonk extraordinaire, with only a few gaps of reasoning and forthrightness — what today is unfailingly, mercilessly called "transparency" — that at first seem harmless. She's a walking encyclopedia of "plans"; no one, including fellow wonker Bill Clinton, can match her intricate knowledge of what's wrong, and how to fix it.

There are, however, cosmic parsecs between seeing what's wrong and actually fixing it. I could submit that one problem — one something of what's wrong — is the inexcusable number of health-uninsured Americans; the way to fix is to provide health care coverage to everyone. Presto. Problem solved. But you can easily see the problem with my solution. Somebody must pay for it.

And that's one of the, uh, little gaps in Warren's math. Initially she claimed that a wealth tax and surcharge on mega-corporate profits would raise $3.75 trillion over 10 years. The problem there, as many economists have observed, is that with new taxes on the wealthy come new ways to evade them. Warren "fail[s] to engage with the fact that wealthy people do a lot of things that make it very hard to tax their estates, and will make it equally hard to tax their wealth," says a Wharton School of Business professor. Other economists disagree, saying "Warren’s numbers are well-founded." In my reading of history, though, I've yet to find an example of the superwealthy not figuring a way to shaft the government and lowly taxpayers.

So there's that: a likely, substantial shortfall of billions in new revenue. However we're just now coming to the REAL problem with Warren's spending package, in toto — that being she has signed on to Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All proposal, which adds a colossal $32 trillion in health care spending over 10 years. This leaves less than $4 trillion in new revenue to cover more than $36 trillion in new entitlements. Although Warren explains all the benefits of her propositions to starry-eyed audiences, you won't hear her acknowledging that there simply ain't no way (presently) to pay for them.

None of this means that Warren's proposals are unworthy. Quite the contrary; it seems to me they are proposals that every civilized nation should enact. There are ways to pay for them — foremost, an aggressive, graduated, vastly simplified tax code — but first the electorate would have to be educated on the advantages of much higher taxes vs. the present structure. And that education process could take years of effort. (Someday we'll get there, I'm confident, but I will have long been dust.)

Don't mistake. I like Elizabeth Warren. Too many internet readers mistake unfavorable remarks about a pol's proposals for a dislike of the pol. I admire her vision and, conceptually, I subscribe to most of her many plans. Yet she'd be more helpful as a full-time policy wonk or cabinet member, where she could also be entirely honest with herself, rather than as a politician, pointing millions to an unachievable tomorrow.

Harris kicks butt! Biden folds!

I clicked off the debate last night thinking two things: 1) Because of her aggressiveness, Kamala Harris will be declared the winner, which is fair enough (aggression is rewarded), and 2) Joe Biden did what he needed to do, which was to avoid any embarrassing missteps or famously Bidenesque gaffes, and simply keep his head down, which is what frontrunners do. In other words, the debate played out as expected, with an underdog going low, while the top dog went high.

But in scanning the debate coverage this morning, I discovered that not only is Harris being coronated, Biden is being brutalized. Politico's founder John Harris is representative of this rather familiar romp in "insightful" political journalism, called "beat the crap out of the leader":

"What the hell was up with Biden Thursday night?… Since when does a famously garrulous politician voluntarily hit the brakes on his own words?"

Has Mr. Harris never attended a pre-debate briefing, in which the frontrunner is implored to take no risks, for fear of overstepping and blowing his or her lead?

"At his best, [Biden] gave spirited and plausible answers even while stumbling over a word here or there," writes Mr. Harris, who couldn't resist following "spirited" with "stumbling." But "at his worst, the frontrunner seemed to shrink on the crowded stage, coming off as tired in his manner, soggy in words and argument in ways that sometimes unintentionally reinforced the criticism. He offered some cringe-worthy moments that his obviously emboldened competitors will surely use as metaphors for dotage."

I'm a bit unclear on what Mr. Harris thought Biden should do. Physically attack Mayor Pete? Ask Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang what in hell they were doing there? Strap a muzzle on Kirsten Gillibrand? (Actually, for that he likely would have received the moderators' and fellow debaters' applause. I know I would have cheered.)

But back to Ms. Harris. She lit into Biden, just as everyone knew she would. "I do not believe you are a racist," she kindly told Barack Obama's vice president. This was akin to LBJ's tactic: "I will not call my opponent a pig-fucker." Then she followed with, "It’s personal and it was actually hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country." I'm not even sure what "it was actually hurtful to hear you talk about [these senators]" means. Harris was mawkishly incapable of hearing Biden discuss having to work with unpleasant people, which Harris herself has done with contemporary Republicans? Her assault was cheap, unwarranted, and strikingly opportunistic. But for that she was awarded the crown — although who didn't know that was coming.

The journalistic consensus as to last night's winner and loser reminds me of the assessments subsequent to Obama's first debate with Mitt Romney. Hair was fire all across the Beltway: What was Obama doing? — Why didn't he lace into the governor? — Why was the president so apathetic? To read the debate reviews, one would have thought the race was over; hello President Romney.

Yet that event, as was Biden's last night (assuming you agree that his performance was subpar), meant nothing in the long run. It was merely another instance of political journalism mistaking two hours for a year.

Of Democrats, Bernie, and socialism

The Washington Post's editorial board observes what an army of commentators has already observed: that Bernie Sanders' free college and student-debt cancellation proposals are "a formula for a massive upward redistribution of the nation’s limited resources."

It's well-nigh impossible to dispute WaPo's assessment. "The top 25 percent [in earnings] owe 34 percent of the money," writes the board. "People with graduate and professional degrees — usually high earners — accounted for 26 percent of borrowers but 48 percent of debt." Furthermore, the Urban Institute, notes the Post, estimates that "less than 8 percent of the benefit would go to those with household incomes of less than $35,000 a year."

Thus Sanders the democratic socialist is, ironically, catering to America's well off. "In short," says the Post, he "is running on a plan to bail out doctors, lawyers and their children to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars."

The Post also argues that those hundreds of billions in government spending would come at the cost ($2.4 trillion, in fact) of, for example, poor children's pre-K schooling or higher-education financial assistance for the disadvantaged only. In economics this is known as an "opportunity cost" — an unfavorable one, as the Post and many others see it, although that particular cost comes attached to every legislative spending proposal.

The political question is, Why did Sanders double down on education spending with his debt-relief plan — and thus go too far? The answer is: He was drowning in Democrats' progressive pool of proposals, most notably Elizabeth Warren's, and needed to somehow re-shine.

Related to that is this: The cause of Sanders' political undoing is another irony that doomed the Populist Party of the late 19th century: success.

For years the populists tub-thumped for progressive measures: among them, railroad regulation, a graduated income tax, and the direct election of U.S. Senators, rather than by state legislatures. Its reforms were indeed popular enough that both the Republicans' T.R. wing and Democrats' W. Wilson wing assumed the essential priorities of the Populist Party, which killed it.

Historically, such has been the function of third parties: They propose innovative ideas, the ideas become electorally popular, one (or both) of the two major parties then incorporates the ideas into its platform, and consequently the third, innovative party loses its distinctness — and dies.

That, in large part, is what Independent Sen. Sanders has done for democratic socialism, as an informal third party. He successfully has moved the party of Jefferson and Jackson to the left, and in the process, suffocated democratic socialism as a distinct movement.

Even though the Vermont senator's various proposals have a chance of congressional passage roughly equal to that of Trump's thorough reading of War and Peace, liberal Democrats should at least be thankful to Sanders for having broadened their party's ambitions, with all due politically appropriate modifications.

Idealistic third parties serve the salubrious purpose of enhancing major parties' principles and thereby invigorating their bases. Rather substantially, Warren has been possible because of her 2016 progressive predecessor. Sanders warmed up the left, and Warren is smartly exploiting his labors. (As for her being a "capitalist" and him being a "socialist"? Remember, even democratic socialists are in favor of market economies.)

As long as the Dems sell their progressive products as mainstream thinking, as an outgrowth of traditional America, their leftward thrusts and parries should be of benefit. Any outright "socialist" move, however, would bury them at the demonic hands of Donald J. Trump & Co.

The Census ruling: Trump will go positively bananas

The Supreme Court's decision in the U.S. Census case just came in, as of this writing, so pretty much all we know is the decision itself — which is enough. No Donald, no Wilbur, you may not ask about citizenship, intimidate the undocumented, underfinance certain districts, and further squeeze Democratic votes.

Hallelujah.

We also know that Chief Justice Roberts voted with the fair-minded. This, I anticipated, since Roberts has established a recognizable pattern of voting rationally on major questions of fairness, now and then — such as his 2012 vote in support of Obamacare. In that case, it was time to demonstrate some impartiality. So he did. Afterward, he returned to voting with the conservatives on the Court. (Just today he voted with these prehensile mossbacks in the partisan gerrymandering case.)

But that was some time ago. Clearly, for Roberts, it was now time for another demonstration of judicial prudence; time to demonstrate to the public that the Court is nonpartisan; time to re-inject a bit of public confidence in the Court's integrity. And the Census case was the perfect candidate.

Again, hallelujah — and we've even more reason to celebrate. Always unhinged, because of the Census decision Donald will crank up his diverse mental disorders to clinical proportions on Twitter. And that's always fun. Yes, it's a good day.

Last night's debate: winners, losers, and survivors

[FOR SOUTH CAROLINA DEBATE, go HERE.]

Who won last night's "debate"?

Let's start with the authentically weird. According to a Drudge Report "instant poll," and a separate poll from the Washington Examiner, another right-wing site, Wednesday night's big winner was — Tulsi Gabbard. Don't ask me, although I suspect it has much to do with her military service; pseudo-patriotic right wingers just can't get enough of guys and gals in uniform and who play with things that go boom.

From there, Drudge and Examiner readers were in accordance with more mainstream opinion. They both chose Elizabeth Warren as the winner (in second-place, that is). Other victors were Julián Castro and Cory Booker. For reasons not entirely clear, they also liked John Delaney, who mostly made his mark last night by cutting in and not playing well with others, especially the moderators.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews had a novel take: "I think the winner tonight … was probably Joe Biden, because to quote Sherlock Holmes, 'the dog wasn’t barking tonight.' No one took on the Democratic frontrunner the whole two hours. And I think that’s a big surprise." A surprise, perhaps, but its bigness is doubtful. Each candidate possessed such little time to extol him- or herself, why squander it on Joe?

As expected, Warren dominated, except for a momentary lull midway. She aimed for progressives rather than Biden's liberals, and she scored. Although her strategy is ideal for the primary season, in which the most politically motivated prevail, it would haunt her in the general election season. "When the moderators asked the 10 candidates which of them would support eliminating private health insurance as part of a single-payer health care plan," notes the Times, "only Ms. Warren and Mr. de Blasio raised their hands."

That position is a killer with the general electorate. But since Warren's intent is to command the Democratic activist base, she has boxed herself in. Sixty percent of the electorate have a private health insurance plan and, by and large, they like it. Thus Trump & Co. couldn't be happier with Warren's mandatory single-payer-ism. The election could well turn on that issue alone.

From that perspective, Warren was the biggest loser last night.

On another note, "Do you have a plan to deal with Mitch McConnell?" Warren was asked. "I do," she replied. Turns out, though, her "plan" is somewhat gossamer. She promised to fight, fight, fight the Senate's prince of obstructionism, and that is no plan. I imagine McConnell was most amused.

Beto O’Rourke proved once again he's unquestionably not ready for the big leagues; Castro came well prepared and was surprisingly effective; and Booker, whom I had deemed little more than a wanton demagogue, was thoughtful and eloquent. Simply put, I misjudged him.

Bill de Blasio can go home now — now that he's proven himself intolerably obnoxious; Amy Klobuchar was quite reserved — which I like — but that approach became troublingly incongruent with the night's increasingly boisterous proceedings; and Jay Inslee and Tim Ryan are still Jay and Tim Who?

Now, off to another round.

All together now: "We have no obstruction. We had no collusion."

Incredible, as well ss unbelievable, as he likes to say.

"Trump lashed out Wednesday [in a Fox Business Network phone interview] at former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, accusing him without evidence of committing a crime by deleting text messages exchanged by two former FBI officials [the well-known Peter Strzok and Lisa Page] who had expressed disdain for the president.

"'Robert Mueller terminated their text messages. He terminated them. They’re gone,' Trump said. 'And that’s illegal. That’s a crime.'"

The inspector general assigned to The Case of the Missing Texts (or strawberries) concluded that "there was 'no evidence' that Strzok and Page 'attempted to circumvent' the FBI’s data-retention policies, and the 'content of the text messages did not appear to be a factor' in whether and how they were retained."

Trump repeated himself: "Here’s the problem. Robert Mueller, they worked for him; the two lovers were together, and they had texts back and forth. Mueller terminated them illegally…. He terminated all of the stuff between Strzok and Page."

The reality? The [IG] report … makes no mention of Mueller playing any role in the deletion of texts.

Nevertheless, Trump moaned that "It never ends," which is true only of his unremitting lies. He then added those tedious words which, doubtless, he'll have inscribed on his headstone: "We have no obstruction. We had no collusion."

The faces of Rs and Ds

Does Ralph Nader still believe there's no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties? Check out these faces in both group photos, and then, at merely a glance, tell me what significant difference you see. (Montana's Gov. Steve Bullock is missing in the Democratic photos, as he will be at tonight and tomorrow's debate..)

and

To state the visually obvious, in the upper, Republican group we have virtually all Brooks Brothers, middle-aged white guys; in the Democratic group we have diversity, which looks like America. The latter compels "big tent" legislation, while the former aims to make bankers and corporate CEOs happy. 

Sarah Sanders' farewell party - and a farewell to responsible reporting

Yesterday I briefly pondered writing an equally brief post about Sarah Huckabee Sanders' farewell party — or rather, a repugnant gathering to a fare-thee-well — at Washington's Rare Steakhouse. But it was too much. Too much after having read Michelle Goldberg in an awful mood; and writing, again, about the dreadful Donald J. Trump and downcast Democrats; and suffering through a piece about the fatally idealistic Progressive Change Campaign Committee. It was just too much.

Before recovering my senses, I got so far as reading a NY Times story on the appalling affair, at which dozens of White House reporters convened to toast a press secretary who had, for two years, lied to them, belittled them, and just plain disappeared before them. I would have thought Sanders' demeaning behavior toward these journalists would have called for a journalistic attendance of zero. But I should never underestimate the pitiable groveling of more than a few White House correspondents.

The party was hosted by Politico and Dailymail.com reporters, however many of the others knew they should not have been there. "Even for clubby Washington," wrote the Times' Shawn McCreesh, "it could be a bad look to clink glasses for a woman who rode shotgun for a president who refers to the media with a Stalinist epithet." Yes, however undignified, these enemies of the people attended, though with bowed heads. "You’d better not say I was here," said one reporter. "Me either," said his interlocutor.

Well, some attended with bowed heads. Others, such as W.'s press secretary, the shameless Ari Fleischer, said these gatherings are "what polite people do with each other. You can still clash. You can still differ. You can still be professionals who hold the administration to account and go to a goodbye party together." To my mind, that's selling out, just as attendance at the WH Correspondents Dinner is selling out.

Among the polite people Monday night were Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley and the WH director of strategic communications — strategic? — Mercedes Schlapp. Are reporters not free to quiz these folks during regular business hours? Are they available for accountability only when chilled Chardonnay and "bar nuts" are available? Does not getting chummy with politicos diminish — even subconsciously — the possibility of aggressive questioning?

Were I Politico's managing editor, I would instruct my reporters that they can have a job, or eat bar nuts with Hogan. But in the interest of detached reporting, they can't have both.

The larger meaning of Trump's atrocious migrant detention centers

The Bureau of Labor Statistics can add one more to the unemployment count — that being John Sanders, the Customs and Border Protection agency's acting commissioner. What a damn shame. He was doing such a capital job, for which any true-believing fascist would gladly write him a letter of recommendation.

Sanders' resignation came amid reports that 100 Central American children have been re-sentenced to Trump's Konzentrationslager in Clint, Texas. There they'll enjoy luscious accommodations of extraordinarily close quarters — claustrophobiacs need not apply — and of course they'll want to bring their own bathtub, clothing that's been washed at least once this year, and, well, food.

In a separate Times article — infamous by now — a visit to the Clint facility by a team of lawyers produced reports that justify what some might mistake as this post's opening lightheartedness of exceptionally poor taste. Because — "Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears are caring for infants they’ve just met," related the lawyers, via the Times. "Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk."

Most of the youthful inmates haven't showered or washed their clothes since arriving in Clint. "They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap." Said Columbia Law School's facility-visiting director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, Elora Mukherjee, "There is a stench. The overwhelming majority of children have not bathed since they crossed the border." (Even "the Taliban gave me toothpaste and soap," tweeted journalist and former captive David Rohde.)

Guards, it was further reported, wear "face masks to protect themselves from the unsanitary conditions." They also — I kid you not — pack weapons, presumably to protect themselves from savage 3-year-olds who could pounce and viciously attack any minute.

A Justice Department lawyer has claimed before a U.S. Court of Appeals that the government was free to deprive the children of soap and toothbrushes, and to furnish them with nothing but a concrete floor, intensely lit throughout the night, on which to sleep.

Last, Trump has denied, in customary form, any knowledge of John Sanders as well as his gross mismanagement of the Customs and Border "Protection" agency. "I didn’t speak to him. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him actually. We have some very good people running it," he said. "And, you know, I don’t know anything about it. I hear he’s a very good man, a good person. I don’t know him. I don’t think I ever spoke to him."

Virtually every day, Donald Tump does something that stains the once-dignified character of the United States. Only then does he claim ignorance; he's the Sergeant Schultz of the American presidency. Meanwhile, one might think that his Christian, church-going base would recheck the Scriptures — upon which they rely for personal guidance (and that should tell you something about their inability to independently arrive at a wholesome system of ethics) — and thereby discover the towering discrepancy between malign Trumpism and benevolent Christianity. But, perhaps benevolent Christianity is simply a commonly presumed thing of the past. If it isn't, Trump's base is working hard to make it one.

The Trump-Sanders Affair is about far more than a Christianity-forsaken detention facility in Clint, Texas.

Michelle Goldberg and the despicable art of progressive propaganda

The Times' Michelle Goldberg, a progressive columnist who concedes that her ideological fervor has incurably damaged her political judgment, is so desperate to similarly damage the candidacy of moderate Joe Biden, she callously exaggerates portions of Biden's conversational occasions as "unnerving" "gaffes." If she can't find plausible reasons to despair of his campaign, how about just characterizing the commonplace as despair-worthy?

Two cases in point from her current column, "Joe Biden Doesn’t Look So Electable in Person."

Ms. Goldberg was in South Carolina of late, as was Mr. Biden. There, at a Planned Parenthood event, , a discussion moderator "asked him what he’d say to pro-choice voters who have concerns about his mixed record [his Hyde reversal] on the issue."

Biden's reply, in part: "The fact of the matter is that we’re in a situation where mortality rate for poor women and black women, here in this state, 26.5 percent of the, 24, 25.6 people, who of 100,000 who need, who end up dying as a consequence of birth, it’s absolutely absurd."

Goldberg was appalled. The maternal death rate is in fact 26.5 of 100,000 births, which Biden had at first correct but then transposed the last two digits, to 25.6. This exceedingly minor factual misstep horrified the columnist, hurling her to the depths of aforementioned despair. Would you have found this to be an unforgivable error?

Later, at the same event, where "preselected audience" members were called on to ask questions, a young lady related her traumatic ordeal of "being sexually assaulted by her abusive husband not long after having a baby. She became pregnant and needed an abortion, and later needed two more. She wanted to know what Biden intended to do to protect and expand abortion access for people like her."

Again, in part, Biden's response was, "First of all, a lot of you women, maybe a lot of men out here, don’t realize what incredible courage it took to stand up and say that." He also cited his experience in formulating domestic violence legislation, and asked the young lady to stay at the event's conclusion, so that the two of them could speak privately.

All in all, a rather touching example of the frontrunner's well-known compassion. Goldberg's second-hand assessment? "For some of the activists there, the moment was another Biden screw-up — they saw him mansplaining rape trauma to a room full of feminists."

I, for one, was mortified and not a little incensed by Goldberg's vicarious anguish. How Biden's endearing remarks could be judged a "screw-up" was, and remains, beyond my capacity for bullshit-dismissal. But baseless, vindictive hyperbole and invented harm is a threadbare, shabby tactic of political propagandists.

Goldberg is a good writer and quite obviously devoted to her political agenda. Nothing wrong with the latter. Deliberate distortions of reality, however, lessen the writer's credibility and expose the writer's willingness to deceive. Goldberg has penned countless denunciations of Trumpian tactics, such as wretchedly misleading propaganda. She should reread her denunciations, and reform accordingly.