The Carpentariat

"I am still waiting for [Trump] and Republican members of Congress to express their concern and support."

From a reader in Southern California:

The northern part of our state is being terrorized by wildfires and suffering through horrendous loss of life, evacuations and blackouts. Firefighters from several states are struggling through blazing heat and fierce winds to protect us. And I am still waiting for the President of the United States and Republican members of Congress to express their concern and support.

 

Does Trump know he is President of the entire country? He is happy to use presidential authority to punish my state. But when he should be "Consoler in Chief", he acts like the toddler who is mad at you because he didn't get ice cream. You are nothing to him if you are not meeting his needs.

 

Yes, we are a blue state. No, most of us did not vote for you. We are still citizens of this country. And you, Mr. Trump, are still the President.

 

I have bent over backwards to resist when people smear Republicans as a group. I have tried to believe that they are sincere in their actions and not driven by spite and greed and utter partisanship. I trusted that there was a line they would not cross. But, I give up. I absolutely give up.

 

If you do not have the decency in your soul to express compassion for another human being who is going through hell, you confirm every smear against you. 

 

It is now trite to say but, how would Republicans have reacted if President Obama had ignored a tornado in Oklahoma, or a hurricane in Florida?

Oh yeah, almost forgot ...

BOO!

One quarter in the life of Trump's failing economy

People are VERY disappointed in Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve. The Fed has called it wrong from the beginning, too fast, too slow. They even tightened in the beginning. Others are running circles around them and laughing all the way to the bank. Dollar & Rates are hurting...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2019

No, Donald, many people ARE disappointed in Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve for Failing to Follow the recommendation of Kansas City and Boston's Fed Bank presidents, who, having Voted against yesterday's Rate Cut, say "they would prefer to see a more pronounced deterioration in economic data before lowering rates."

I'm particularly disappointed, in that the Fed might be seen as having cowered before a president who understands neither macroeconomics nor the tradition of political noninterference.

That said, even a layman like me fathoms that whatever drag slightly higher interest rates may have caused the economy, it was insignificant compared to the braking effects of Trump's dumbass trade wars.

Business investment has fallen by 3 percent, factory and office spending has fallen by 15 percent, and the third-quarter GDP, reports the Times, sits at a meager 1.9 percent — meager, that is, in view of the administration's projections of 3 percent averages.

To be fair, the U.K.'s rather novel approach to international economics — some Brits just want to watch the world burn — has contributed to global sluggishness, and thus ours. But Trump's ignorance has contributed more, with its tentacles spreading far beyond the Europe Union.

"While the central bank was on a steady march to raise rates just a year ago," writes the Times Fed correspondent, Jeanna Smialek, "it has spent the past several months trying to insulate the American economy against [the threats of 'Trump’s hot-and-cold trade war, paired with a tenuous global outlook']."

Another four years of this arrogant, incompetent president and we'll be in a depression.

Twitter, right; Facebook, wrong

Applause for Twitter.

Yesterday, its chief executive announced that all political ads will be banned from its platform, effective Nov. 22. The decision came on the chronological heels of Donald Trump's radical lobotomization of political decency, honesty, and reality. Trump's intention was, and remains, to remake the American system of politics in the image of Central American anarchy, where authoritarianism can thrive.

Responsibly, Twitter has intervened, observing that unchecked political lies have "significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle." The chief executive's use of the conditional was a light touch for an imposing, incontestable truth; pseudoconservatism's 40-year campaign of befouling our "democratic infrastructure" and reducing American politics to Mad Max theatre — in which the apocalypse precedes itself — has become a one-party norm, ripe for foreign exploitation and the further degeneration of tens of millions' prefrontal cortex.

Like a horsefly penetrating the hide of a jackass, the Trump campaign squealed, naturally, at Twitter's stab at bettering our civic discourse. The campaign manager protested that the social medium is but a propaganda arm of "biased liberal media outlets," and that "this is yet another attempt to silence conservatives." In other words, the same dreck that Republicans have been peddling to the cognitively vulnerable since Nixon-Agnew.

Reenter the amoral cyborg, Mark Zuckerberg, of whom one pundit asks, "Do you … go home at night to some offshore island where the long-term damage you’re doing to America doesn’t matter?"

That particular perception comes about less because of Zuckerberg's foregoing damage to America — 2016, anyone? — than because he has promised much more. The Facebook mogul has committed to reopening the political gates of hell by first unleashing his sinister indifference to integrity and credibility.

In a speech at Georgetown University, Zuckerberg professed earlier this month that he "stand[s] for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us…. I believe people should decide what is credible, not tech companies."

Here, he stacked the philosophical and even emotional deck in trying to intimidate all who honorably believe in free expression. Does Zuckerberg also believe that people should decide what is credible, not automobile companies, if one of the latter advertises that its cars are guaranteed to prevent death or injury in the event of a high-speed collision? This would be one way to allow natural selection to take its culling path, no doubt; but all in all, modern civilization cares for even its imbeciles.

There exists a huge difference between societal free speech and private, special-interest speech meant solely to commit fraud, earn a profit, and convince the prefrontally disadvantaged of 1984's Orwellian soundness. More to the point, political incumbents and challengers are certainly free to spew in public whatever lies they like. But as Twitter's chief executive noted, the dissemination of outright mendacious garbage "should … not [be] bought."

One practical, entirely non-philosophical effect of Zuckerberg's unlimited carelessness is that the Trump campaign has been permitted to run a Facebook ad that turns Joe Biden's reality on its head: "[He] promised Ukraine $1 billion if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company, but when President Trump asks Ukraine to investigate corruption, the Democrats want to impeach him."

The Trump campaign insists, of course, that the ad is "entirely accurate," while CNN, "which rejected two ads from the Trump campaign last week … said it rejected [this] ad because it 'makes assertions that have been proven demonstrably false by various news outlets.'" One would be hard-pressed to argue that CNN opposes free expression.

Tuesday, Facebook refused the Biden campaign's request to stop running the ad. The media giant even had the gall to write Biden and say its refusal was based on "respect for the democratic process." More than just the Trump campaign, Zuckerberg's Facebook is literally a paid-up member of Oceania's democracy-sabotage association.

Still, given enough heated blowback, perhaps Mr. Zuckerberg will switch tracks.

Gabbard drops a "big hint" about her "spoiler campaign"?

Jonathan Chait is better than this: "Tulsi Gabbard Drops a Big Hint About Running a Spoiler Campaign for Trump."

His evidence for that claim is so flimsy, so faint as to be virtually undetectable.

Now it may be that Gabbard is in fact running a spoiler campaign for Trump — or more broadly, as Chait asserts, for Republicans. That I can't say, because I've seen no hard evidence of that, specific to Gabbard. One could reasonably argue, I suppose, that all the second- and third-tier Democratic candidates are running a spoiler campaign, in that their presence keeps Democrats divided for longer than is politically advisable. It is also quite plausible that Gabbard is merely running just another ego campaign.

Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? But with the "evidence" Chait provides by discerning Gabbard's "big hints," it's just as evident that he hasn't a clue, either.

He writes suspiciously of "her pattern of working closely with Republican-controlled media, like 'Hill TV' — John Solomon’s propaganda outlet — and Sean Hannity. Gabbard used both forums to promote Republican talking points discrediting the impeachment process," before, my emphasis, eventually reversing course. It could be that Solomon and Hannity reached out to Gabbard merely to underscore Democratic division; that is, perhaps it was not the case that Gabbard sought out Solomon and Hannity so as to identify herself with Republican talking points.

"Gabbard’s [Wall Street] Journal op-ed today is the clearest sign yet of her future course," alleges Chait. "It has an ambiguous passage that merits close examination. Read this a few times:"

This isn’t a petty "spat" between Mrs. Clinton and me. It’s a serious contrast in views about the choice voters face as they decide which Democratic candidate is best equipped to defeat President Trump. Mrs. Clinton already lost to Mr. Trump once. Why would Democrats think a Hillary 2.0 candidate would result in anything different?

I have now read it a few times, as I have her complete op-ed. And that passage reads, unambiguously and strikingly unamazingly, as though Gabbard is saying she's the "Democratic candidate … best equipped to defeat President Trump."

Not being a French deconstructionist, as I assumed Chait to be, he concedes that the above "could be an argument for Democrats to nominate Gabbard." Yet I may have been wrong about that deconstructionism jazz, for Chait goes on to detect "an argument for Gabbard as a second 'Democratic' candidate running against Trump, using a familiar Ralph Nader/Jill Stein case that the Democrats are going to fail, so you should vote instead for the superior alternative to the GOP." Ergo, Trump's reelection.

He then cites another passage that, he says, "makes her strategy even more apparent."

Whether Mrs. Clinton’s name is on the ballot or not, her foreign policy will be, as many of the Democratic candidates adhere to her doctrine of acting as the world’s police, using the tools of war to overthrow governments we don’t like, wasting taxpayer dollars, costing American lives, causing suffering and destruction abroad, and undermining America’s security. [This full paragraph I have taken from her WSJ op-ed, not Chait's column.]

"Gabbard is saying right now that any Democratic nominee is going to be Hillary Clinton. What does that tell you about her intentions?" asks Chait.

Well, to play his mind-reading game, I'd say it tells me that Gabbard butchered the paragraph, in that she weakens her explicit statement that Clinton's "foreign policy will be" on the ballot, by writing, next words, that not all Democratic candidates agree with Clinton's policy — thus does Gabbard invalidate her unqualified statement. And in that case, I'd say it also tells me that Ms. Gabbard would like to be the Democratic nominee.

Concludes Chait: "The Journal editorial page is not normally enthusiastic about running screeds denouncing the bloodstained neocon war machine. But it’s happy to make an exception for somebody who’s in the electing-Republicans business."

I would add that the Journal is also happy to print any screed denouncing Hillary Clinton.

Don't mistake. I hold no truck with any Democratic pol who would push Republican talking points with the express intent of damaging Democrats' 2020 prospects. But Chait fails to make his case that that is the case with Gabbard. I prefer real evidence.

Chait may indeed be correct in his allegations. He just doesn't sufficiently substantiate them.

Of mothballs and Trump supporters

This YouTube posting by the "Trump Mafia" (note their bottom-right stamp) — whose Twitter page, for some diseased, entirely Trump-unrelated reason, features a partially undressed Asian woman — exhibits just how clueless many of Trump's supporters are.

This particular outfit seems to believe that this recent CNN interview of the meretricious Sean Duffy, in which host John Berman disembowels the slithering former congressman inch by inch, actually supports their vision of an ever-victorious, always invincible Trump administration.

These Trump "mafia" boys have the conspicuous IQ of a mothball, which, in their favor, is at least a couple points higher than that of the real goons.

Naturally Col. Vindman is "incredibly concerned about Ukrainian defense." That's his job, nitwit. U.S. national security rests heavily on Ukraine's defense — so Duffy, by adding that you really "don't know his [concomitant] concern about American policy," as any reasonably intelligent American would, then you should join the alarmingly low-IQ "Trump Mafia" boys in their playroom.

This isn't hard, but some progressives make it so

I couldn't make it all the way through the latest column from that oracle of both paranoid progressivism and progressive triumphalism, the Washington Post's Katrina vanden Heuvel, without chortling.

In "The Democratic establishment is right to panic," the columnist demonstrates that while she herself stands second to no man in acquiring the clinical jitters, she also misreads the establishment's cause for worry, and in the process, advocates a blinkered path to losing the 2020 presidential election against the most damaged Republican since Herbert Hoover.

"The Democratic donor class is panicking," writes vanden Heuvel, because "Joe Biden [is] burning through cash yet unable to put away his rivals." Therefore "the chances of a progressive left nominee" — Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren — "leading the ticket in 2020 are on the rise." Both progressive candidates "are outpacing Biden in fundraising and running circles around him on the debate stage."

It's this rapturous March of the left's Toy Soldiers that has vanden Heuvel taking seriously the late entry of a Hillary Clinton or Mike Bloomberg or John Kerry at the urging of Democratic establishment members, who, she says, "are seemingly desperate for someone to swoop in and save them."

She then mildly contradicts herself by noting that with his recent acceptance of super PAC assistance, Biden soon will have little or no money problems. That takes care of at least half of the establishment's "panic."

On another befuddled note, vanden Heuvel insists, in a whopper of neurotic suspicion, that Pete Buttigieg has forsaken his Medicare-for-all support for a public option "in an apparent effort to elevate his standing among the party elite" — rather than simply positioning himself for a general-election race.

These party elites, observes the columnist, protest that centrist ideology plays no part in perhaps wanting a nominee alternative to the weaknesses of Sanders, Warren, and Biden (who, by the way, former U.N. Ambassador Nicholas Burns said yesterday is by far the most competent in matters of national security).

Vanden Heuvel quotes former Obama adviser David Axelrod as being a part of this elitist, non-ideological ruse:

"There is genuine concern that the horse many have bet on [Biden] may be pulling up lame and the horse who has sprinted out front [presumably Warren, though she hasn't] may not be able to win."

Ah-ha! counters the columnist. "The truth is that establishment angst is being driven, above all, by power" — my emphasis, although one can almost hear vanden Heuvel shrieking — "and moneyed Democrats who can feel their grasp on power in the party slipping."

But wait. Won't those "moneyed Democrats" now be giving to Biden and Buttigieg, essentially ensuring a moderate nominee? No matter. "Big donors," she continues, "may be willing to pay more in taxes under a Democratic president, but they seem unwilling to abide the loss of access or influence over the party’s direction that a Sanders or Warren presidency would bring" — the prospect of which, again, vanden Heuvel takes seriously.

It's true that a Sanders or Warren presidency would bring a mammoth change in the party's direction. It's also true that a Sanders or Warren presidency is as likely as Pee Wee Herman's.

Just as far too many progressives are wont to do, vanden Heuvel makes the characteristic right-wing mistake of eyeing dark, complex conspiracies where there is none, while overlooking what would be William Occam's simplest, most straightforward explanation, rather than one requiring further assumptions:

The Democratic establishment principally wants Donald Trump gone; it knows a political moderate could make that happen, while Sanders and Warren's Medicare-for-All proposal alone would send them packing.

Why is political reality so hard for so many progressives to grasp?

A dog's life, and the extermination of bad guys

Seeing how all others could and should have resigned on Day One, here's the only national-security member of the Trump administration for whom I have unqualified respect.

Giving no thought whatsoever to his own safety, this handsome, heroic canine — as all german shepherds are — helped to track down ISIS's al-Baghdadi. 

The photo was declassified only today. Rin Tin Tin's true name remains classified, however, mostly because federal government spooks are classification-happy. 

Haunting Mitch McConnell beyond the grave

I missed this 10-second footage last Friday, but I post it now, in case you also missed it.

Shot at Elijah Cummings' memorial, the digital film's significance has been misinterpreted by the right, which, of course, is only par for its pixilated course. The right sees the pallbearer's breeze-by of Mitch McConnell as an intolerable snub (the emphasized distinction is critical): a lack of grace and — get this — a violation of norms, which, in all its goodness, the right would never think to commit.

The snub was anything but a lack of grace. It was a courageous act of conscience.

The pallbearer, Bobby Rankin, was a close friend of Rep. Cummings, who crusaded tirelessly throughout his honorable life for social justice and equal rights for all. McConnell heads a congressional party that has, for several decades, maliciously battled pretty much everything Cummings stood for.

Would it be ethically proper to then fake a warm handshake with such a snake in the Kentucky bluegrass? A man who has consistently defended another man who for three years has crusaded for little but an unjust America and the superior rights of the few, the proud, the white wealthy Republicans? A Senate leader who has outdone in shamelessness what Machiavelli only pretended? (The author of The Prince was, in truth, a republican.)

Here, propriety was one-sided — and it wasn't standing in line.       

The creepy thriller of Trump's incompetence and Republicans' fear

From the Washington Post's Robert Costa and Philip Rucker's "Republicans feel anxious and adrift defending Trump":

"In hushed conversations over the past week, GOP senators lamented that the fast-expanding [impeachment] probe is fraying their party, which remains completely in Trump’s grip. They voiced exasperation at the expectation that they defend the president against the troublesome picture that has been painted, with neither convincing arguments from the White House nor confidence that something worse won’t soon be discovered."

As conservative Charlie Sykes recently asked on MSNBC: Hey, Republicans, do you think things are going to get better?

"It feels like a horror movie," said, to the Post, one yearslong GOP senator.

Hollywood horror movies nearly always end with the slashing perpetrator receiving his justly applauded deserts. Yet the horrifying Trump I administration, lurking wickedly behind pretty bushes and slithering under rocks, might well stay on as the doubly sinister Trump II administration — Egads! Look out! — unless Democrats employ some moderate levelheadedness in their selection of a presidential nominee. (Yikes!) 

Write Costa and Rucker: "Most GOP senators have been taking cues from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose paramount concern has been maintaining his party’s control of the chamber in next year’s election" — rather than deploring the Trumpian stench of the present and, consequently, helping to safeguard our future.

Meanwhile, treacherous It clowns like Sen. Lindsey Graham see the deodorizing impeachment inquiry as what is truly "dangerous to our country."

In seeming agreement with Graham is Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan: "Secret hearings, selective leaks. And that’s due process? In my America, that’s not due process."

Sullivan, then, was undoubtedly upset by the veritable botulinic buffet of secret Republican Benghazi inquiries and now even more upset by Attorney General Bill Barr's secretive, selectively leaking, unAmerican no-due-process investigation of everyone who helped to finger the Russia-friendly Trump, Campaign & Assoc.

Says the sagacious William Galston, a Brookings senior fellow in governance: "There’s a reason why Profiles in Courage is a very short book."

Five of (merely) eight Republican senators who initially objected to Graham's freakish resolution denouncing the impeachment inquiry as "illegitimate" soon backed off from even a hint of conscience, "leaving only [Utah's Mitt] Romney and Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska as the holdouts," note the Post reporters, who aptly festoon their story with Exorcist-like, Trumpian visages such as this:

In an unmistakable sign of just how pathetically, incompetently Trump is countering House Democrats' professional probe of his assorted iniquities, the totality of his "fight," so far, lies in the damp, dismal form of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon's basement, where he "has launched a podcast that he calls an outside 'war room' for the president."

Pleads Missouri's Sen. Roy Blunt — whom I once asked on talk radio why all levels of government, in the right's opinion, are somehow exempt from inflationary effects on their revenue needs but private enterprises are not: no answer — "We need to be thoughtful about waiting for the House and whatever conclusions they reach."

Swinging back to Charlie Sykes' droll observation, however, is a Republican strategist who asks: "What else is out there? What is around the corner?"

Whatever it is, it cannot be good for this impeachable president and congressional allies' public relations, nor can it make any better the foul, fetid, swampish hellhole of Trumpism.

A peculiar way for human scum to behave

Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an immigrant from Ukraine at age 3 who went on to work in the White House as a Eurasian expert, will testify today in the impeachment inquiry. A portion of his testimony, which, because it's truthful, is damning to Trump, reads: 

"I sit here, as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, an immigrant. I have a deep appreciation for American values and ideals and the power of freedom. I am a patriot, and it is my sacred duty and honor to advance and defend our country, irrespective of party or politics."

Said a family friend to the NY Times: "When you talk about what good immigrants do, look at what these immigrants are doing for this country."

So, Mr. President, is Lt. Col. Vindman also part of the unpatriotic deep state, working feverishly to destroy your administration and nullify a national election?

Is he, too, human scum?

"Compare and contrast" THIS!

Remember those "compare and contrast" assignments in secondary school? Commenters Freesia and Savage do.

Again I give you Trump's first-term reception, last night:

Comments Savage: "One could wish the Obamas had shown up in the next inning. The contrast would have been devastating." Adds Freesia: "And you just know [Trump] remembers every time Obama showed up at a sports event and how the crowd cheered and when he popped up on the Jumbotron with his wife the crowd went wild."

Thus, as assigned, I give you President Obama at NBA finals:

God! I miss that guy.

Warren's troublesome, corporate hauntings

Just a reminder to all those who inveigh against Biden-as-presidential-nominee because of whatever assailable histories one might cite, Elizabeth Warren-as-presidential-nominee would face — in addition to her Cherokee scandal, as it dispiritingly would be labeled — a torrent of Everyman backlash because, in the words of the NY Times …

* in 1995, she found herself up against the Clinton administration, representing the Cleveland-based conglomerate LTV Steel. Even though LTV had sold off its coal mines during the 1980s, a new law required it to contribute to a health fund for retired miners. LTV believed that it should not have to pay.

* the LTV case was part of a considerable body of legal work that Ms. Warren … took on while working as a law professor — moonlighting that earned her hundreds of thousands of dollars over roughly two decades beginning in the late 1980s.... Much of it involved representing big corporate clients. (In 1998, the Harvard Crimson reported that she was paid $192,550 in [professor] salary plus $133,450 in "other compensation.")

* Warren’s critics have seized upon her bankruptcy work for LTV and other big corporations to question the depth of her progressive bona fides. How, they wonder, could someone whose reputation is built on consumer advocacy have represented a company seeking to avoid paying for retired miners’ health care?

* among her corporate clients were Travelers insurance and the aircraft maker Fairchild, as well as one of America’s wealthiest [and most right-wing] families, the Hunts of Texas. She advocated for a railroad company that wanted to avoid paying for a Superfund cleanup, and advised Dow Chemical as its subsidiary Dow Corning dealt with thousands of complaints from women who said they had been harmed by its silicone breast implants.

* Warren’s campaign did not make her available to discuss her outside legal work.

Even though "scholars say [her work] should be understood primarily as an effort to preserve the right to file for bankruptcy and the integrity of the bankruptcy system," with what frequency will those considerations be coupled with the many political attacks?

That's right. You guessed it.

Thus Warren would lose many progressive votes because of her prior dedication to multibillion-dollar corporations, while also alienating millions of undecided populists, same reason.

And Warren defenders cannot say that this is just idle speculation, going nowhere, because every day they bark idle, speculative, hair-raising warnings about Joe Biden's nominated future. Having it both ways is nice, except when everyone notices.

The real "struggle": keeping a Democratic House

As fascinating as the presidential race will be the battle for the House, where Republicans took a gruesome beating in 2018 as most Americans looked on in relief and delight.

But now, many of the previously ousted backbenchers see 2020 and its confluence of impeachment proceedings as their ticket back to a government paycheck, a pension, lifetime perks, junkets and a taxpayer-funded staff, all of which small-government Republicans are exceedingly fond.

Said one of them, former GOP congresswoman Claudia Tenney, to Politico: "I think it’s going to be a good year. In a presidential year" — the absence of which, in Tenney's opinion, accounted for 2018 being "a tough year, just not a great environment for Republicans."

Though Donald Trump correspondingly accounted for Republicans' piss-poor environment then, those same Republicans are now counting on the same cataclysmic president to bail them out of their awash rubber rafts.

They may not be wrong. There are 30 Democrats who represent congressional districts that Trump won in 2016, and with the powerful abuser back on the ticket next year, his frothing, fulminating fans are likely to swarm the polling booths in barbarian hordes.

They're incensed that goo-goo House Democrats wish to impeach a punkish little gangster — exposed in flagrante dilecto, which only further infuriates his fans — whom Senate Democrats wish to remove, with the assistance of a few insufficiently numbered Senate Republicans.

As for House Democrats at least, rank-and-file Republicans are pursuing their removal in the GOP's customary exercise of illogic, indecency, and dishonesty.

From Politico, this oddly humorous, Republican piece of work: "Many of those who have picketed [freshman Rep. Anthony Brindisi's upstate NY office] have focused squarely on Democrats’ impeachment push. And it doesn’t matter to them that [Democrat Brindisi] remains one of seven holdouts in his caucus who oppose the impeachment inquiry."

On the other hand, these again-wannabe Republican congressfolk may be magnificently wrong.

Imminent impeachment is taking a toll on Trump's popularity among independents and most other voters not confined to a psychiatric hospital for the electorally insane, and Democrats are financially crushing it in 2016 Trump districts: $14.3 million, third quarter; only $6.08 million for Republicans.

But money will mean nothing and impeachment will mean nothing if conscientious voters fail to execute what is still the most effective, fundamental weapon against demagogues, swindlers and bait-switchers: the vote.

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