The Carpentariat

The unrestrained genius of Dear Leader, totalitarian in training

Once a Marine Corps general and then a White House chief of staff, John Kelly has seemingly fallen victim to that scourge of retirement: the combined evil of drugs and alcohol — that toxic brew so often abused by those elderly who've too much free time and too little to do.

Of Kelly's involvement in this geriatric goofjuice ring, we now have damning evidence. In lieu of diagnosed dementia, only a drug-addled, hooch-dazed cranium could conceive of something so ludicrous:

"I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place [as WH chief of staff]," reported Kelly, "I said whatever you do, don't hire a 'yes man,' someone who won't tell you the truth — don't do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached."

Instructing this president to forego a yes man — that singular animal species that Trump's enfeebled ego can tolerate — is pathetically futile enough. But it gets even worse:

"Someone has got to be a guide that tells [the president]," added Kelly, "that you either have the authority or you don't…. The system of advising, bringing in experts, having these discussions with the president so he can make an informed decision, that clearly is not in place…. I believe if I was still there or someone like me was there, he would not be kind of, all over the place."

When Kelly was there, was Trump a model of informed decision-making? A bit more than a year ago, when the general was indeed still there, "Anonymous" reported that "meetings with [Trump] veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions."

This president, continued Anonymous, is "impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective." Which is another way of saying that Trump is just being Trump, always has been, always will be.

Kelly's replacement, Mick Mulvaney, has been anything but an improvement — with one exception: He's much funnier than Kelly.

One imagines that the befuddled former Freedom Caucuser dipped into some of Kelly's left-behind gateway stash before blurting out at a press conference that which Trump had been denying for weeks: You're damn right the $400 million in Ukraine's military aid was the extortionist quid to Trump's profane quo. So get over it, you Constitution-abiding pansies, even if you can't handle the truth.

Mulvaney's statement was astoundingly short-tenured as the unrivaled Zaniest Thing To Be Shat By This White House. We thought it could not be done. But Stephanie Grisham, the executive asylum's press secretary, of sorts, managed to do the impossibly undoable.

She released a statement accusing Kelly of being "totally unequipped" to cope with the majestic splendor of Donald J. Trump, which Grisham otherwise called "the genius of our great President."

Thereupon observed MSNBC's unflappable Jonathan Alter: Grisham erred in her statement; she should have written "the genius of Dear Leader," since never before has a U.S. president aspired to the squalid monstrosities of every totalitarian thug.

We gather that Grisham either takes dictation from this horror of a small man who fancies himself not only a president, but a great one, or she too had dipped into Kelly's little treasure chest of chemical relief.

Before long, we — like the staggering, desperate subjects of Putin's hellish Russia — will all be popping diazepam and guzzling vodka just to get through one more day of Trump's hellish America.

The distortions of ideology - in feminism (or politics)

John Barry, a clinical psychologist and associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, has an essay in Quilette ironically titled, "How Feminism Has Constrained Our Understanding of Gender." Drawing on the work of contrarian feminist Prof. Alice Eagly and social psychologist Kurt Lewin, one-half of Barry's argument is that:

Feminist research into sex differences has typically concluded that the number of sex differences is small, and therefore unimportant, thus making the logical error that a small number of differences means those differences are inconsequential. This error is exposed if we think of the small number of genetic differences between mice and humans (five percent) compared to the similarities (95 percent). Feminist research routinely overlooks or discounts examples of cognitions and behaviours that show sex differences. The large number[?] of such differences … call into question the idea that gender differences are negligible, and suggest that such differences cannot be explained by socialisation alone.

I can't say that I'm wildly receptive to Barry's "error-exposing" statistics, which seemingly compare women to mice on the evolutionary scale and, unexplained, switch in numbered significance from "small" to "large." However confirmation bias in mainstream feminism, which reinforces the gloomily gendered, is incontrovertible. He cites the findings of Prof. Eagly, who writes that "'feminists fail to recognize the positive trends' which keeps them in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction despite major advances." Positive trends being, for example:

*in academic science, women have a better chance than men of being interviewed and receiving offers;

*experimental simulations of academic hiring in STEM found a strong favoring of women over equally qualified men;

*female business management job candidates have recently begun to enjoy a wage premium over men because of their diversity value.

I would add that student majorities in medical and law schools are now composed of women. Yesterday it was men removing the wrong organ and screwing you sideways in your divorce. Tomorrow it'll be women.

One other exception (of mine) to Barry's essay is that he uses absolutes, such as "[gender] differences cannot be explained by socialisation alone." Of course they can't. Scarcely any differences in behavior, cognition etc. can be explained by only one influence. His argument would have been much stronger had he nixed its unexceptional generalizations. (My guess is that he tossed these in only for popular consumption, which prefers to avoid the weeds.)

Barry is more balanced in writing: "It strikes me as likely that a cognitive distortion called gamma bias" — simply put, the minimization of one gender difference while magnifying another — "skews the way many people see gender issues." One could replace "gender" with "political" or "religious" and arrive agreeably at the selfsame conclusion.

In the other half of his argument, Barry notes with a certain thunderstruck awe what cultural historians discovered decades ago: that it's "becoming clear to more and more people that it is disempowering to promote the idea of gender being merely a product of the environment." (My emphasis, and there he goes again with the absolutism: gender identity as merely a product of …") It appears conservative journalists have also been behind the curve: "Traditional feminism was accused last year in the Chicago Tribune of being obsessed with a 'dreadfully tired script,' and that 'constantly telling people they are victims isn’t so empowering after all.'"

Again, feminist historians had that repetitious downer in their crosshairs years ago. One day they were noting how terribly (and truthfully) oppressed women have always been, which, as the Tribune belatedly observed, was far from "empowering"; so the next day, suddenly and with a 180° thump, women historically had been triumphant in the industrial revolution; in government (where men were dupes of women's behind-the-scenes power); and more believably, in the realms of peddling morality, emphasizing the need for religion in the home, and demanding reforms in society (e.g., temperance, abolitionism). Virtually overnight, the feminist story flipped from one of oppression to one of triumphalism.

As so many historians in other fields do, feminists first decided on a liberating thesis, and then pursued the research. Shockingly, freshly discovered research just happened to fit the new thesis.

Prof. Eagly bemoans this ideological development in the social sciences, with reference to gender studies, since, as she writes (quoted by Barry), "ideology is the most difficult of biases to erase because its advocates seldom recognize or acknowledge it." Here we return once again to cemented political ideologies, most pronounced in the extremes of left and right — which make both appear profoundly foolish, render otherwise serviceable compromise impossible, and alienate the broad swath of sane voters. (See video below.)

Some really dumb ideas

From a failed removal to prosecuting the virtuous

Despite Special Counsel Bob Mueller's finding of the Trump campaign's probable collusion with Russia, multiple acts of presidential obstruction to keep it quiet, several guilty pleas from Trump operatives who bungled their coverups, and indictments of dozens of Russian election meddlers, part-time attorney general and full-time political hitman Bill Barr has decided on a criminal investigation of the Russia "hoax."

You simply have to love the NY Times' understatement that this "is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies" — those being the honest players who routinely and courageously disproved any hint of this president's alleged hoax.

Nonetheless, now that his Justice Dept. hatchetman has opened a criminal investigation of those who virtuously uncovered criminality, Trump can hold forth on the righteousness of his lies and huckster "a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation."

Trump and Barr's deep-state-conspiracy connivance stinks like a rotten egg or fresh beet, but just what in their little hell does not? Theirs is a perpetual corruption machine, one that seemingly defies all the physical laws of politics — except one:

An object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an external force, and in that latter role, the American political system has been remiss.

The degenerate Trump administration should never have been allowed to roll this far.

The GOP: trading its future for a criminal

Writing for Politico Magazine, National Review editor Rich Lowry argues the same case as did Hugh Hewitt the day before, although Lowry's argument is more coherent:

"A lot of Trump supporters are going to want to blame the Republican establishment even if Trump loses in 2020 fair and square, with the backing of the united party apparatus. Imagine what they will think if a couple of dozen Republican senators decide to deny him the opportunity to run for reelection, without a single Republican voter having a say on his ultimate fate.

"This is why the 'cracks in the Republican Senate' coverage is so ridiculous and overwrought. It depends on the idea that GOP senators — who, it is true, are continually frustrated by Trump’s controversies — are on the verge of engineering their party’s own destruction."

I agree with Lowry overall — that is, as far as he, Republican strategists and GOP senators care to understand it; I disagree that Republican senators will deliver Trump into the hands of safety for the good of the party. They'll do as almost all politicians would: Each will examine his or her self-interested odds of reelection with a removal vote. That contemplation will ...

then lead to an acquittal vote. To imagine otherwise is to imagine that Republican senators will somehow become principled in the course of 24 hours, after 40 years of amoral debasement. Thus, with near certainty we can predict that Trump will walk unscathed — and more boastful, more obnoxious, more criminal than ever.

And yet Lowry and Hewitt are committing the same short-sighted mistake that Republican strategists habitually make: They're focusing on the nearest election — 2020 — to the exclusion of the party's long-term health.

The number of self-identified Republicans is already at a historic low. Trump's acquittal will lower that number even further; not all Americans who call themselves Republicans will forgive their party's false exoneration of a conspicuously impeachable president. Thus the GOP will take a beating in 2020, and even more so in 2022 and 2024, as demographics, if nothing else, swamp the party. Even a 2020 loss could be the GOP's last hurrah.

As critical is that the Republican Party clings to a base that, as I noted yesterday, no other party would ever want. These voters are among the least informed, most backward of American citizens who abhor both reality and progress. They are the detritus of the Fox News-talk radio sewer. They are useless in a small-r republican setting.

If the GOP were ever to think long term, it would swallow hard, squeeze its lower cheeks, cashier these voters and seek more middle ideological ground in the center-right, where an authentically conservative party could thrive. But it rejects the long term. It's obsessed with salvaging Trump and his base in 2020, which could well bring about the death of the Republican Party.

No more Mr. Knowledge Guy

Damn. The president is now in danger of becoming ill informed:

"Officials in the West Wing on Thursday announced that copies of The Washington Post and The New York Times would no longer be delivered to the White House."

Your brain on Trumpism

The inimitable Hugh Hewitt:

"The Republican Party risks exile for longer than it has endured in the modern era if, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence of actual 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' it deserts President Trump during the campaign to remove him from office. Democrats are pursuing impeachment because they obviously fear that they cannot defeat him at the ballot box in 2020."

From CNN/SSRS "A-" polling:

Biden 53, Trump 43 Biden +10
Warren 52, Trump 44 Warren +8
Sanders 52, Trump 43 Sanders +9
Buttigieg 50, Trump 44 Buttigieg +4

Trump Job Approval, Reuters/Ipsos: Approve 41, Disapprove 57

As for why the Republican Party "risks exile," should it abandon Trump for merely having committed several abhorrent felonies and a handful of expressly impeachable offenses, Hewitt — who once compared Trump to stage IV cancer — offers no explanation beyond the base-alienating act of alleviating Democrats' nonexistent "fear"; the ensuing anger of a troglodytic base that no sane party would ever want; weird, inaccurate remarks about quid pro quos; and irrelevant conspiracy theories about the FBI, the intelligence community, and a deep state embedded within the White House.

Hewitt's piece nicely demonstrates, however, what unshakable ideology and misplaced partisanship can do to the brain of a Harvard and University of Michigan Law School graduate. The poor man can't even string 754 coherent words together. 

Trump's ultimate madness is yet to come

Don’t hurt them please! https://t.co/cKVa2HlJQb

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2019

All of a sudden, they just turned around, their backs to us, and stormed this secure office suite where their colleagues were preparing to interview another witness. They marched forward, shouting, some holding their cellphones up — a breach of policy in this classified area — as they barged past the closed doors. — Sheryl Stolberg, NY Times

I am not what I am. — Iago, Othello

Even before the beginning, he told us what he is — and who he never intended to be: a lawful, reputable POTUS. He was true to his word, the only known instance.

Troubled by a multitude of manifest personality disorders, Trump is a man of violence — as long as he's not physically part of it. He seems to enjoy watching others be hurt, and when hurting others can help him — or so his sociopathic brain may believe — he positively revels in violent prospects.

From his campaign instigations to his unsubtle encouragement of House Republicans' feckless rebellion yesterday — Politico: "Trump has demanded that Republicans 'get tough and fight' for him in the impeachment probe" — the cautious, reflective mind envisions a Trump gone psychotically wild, inciting something of a top-down, Peasants' Revolt redux.

Filling the gap betwixt 2016 and yesterday are his other, self-interested suggestions of violence: "The people would revolt if [impeachment] happened"; "I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad"; "If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office … it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal."

The president is a prattling time bomb, and by now it seems almost inconceivable that he'll ever vanish in peace. He does not, of course, have the en-masse support of the police, the military, the genuinely "tough people." He does, however, possess a seriously troublesome pack of bullies, wankers, tossers, morons, crackpots and knuckleheads.

Such are the ochlocratic cretinoids of imagined victimization who await The Presidential Word of violent discontent. And Trump is Shakespeare's philistine agitator Jack Cade to this anti-elitist mob.

Of yesterday's elected, Trump-allied cretinoids, Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) said it best: "It’s a bunch of Freedom Caucus members having pizza around a conference table pretending to be brave. All they basically did here was to storm a castle that they already occupied."

True enough. But in larger numbers — say, of Charlottesville's Unite the Right size — the pretense of bravery can erupt, like the unthinking beast it is, into a ghastly show of real violence. Any such eruption need not be singular. We could see pockets of rampaging irrationality scattered throughout the country. We could see blood. We could see deaths.

The madness of Donald Trump has yet to crest.

The ultimate deterrent for teenage wrongdoers

We should cease imprisoning youthful criminals and, in long-term confinement's place, just make them watch this video over and over, for hours on end. They'd never offend again, for fear of an encore showing.   

My favorite phrase in Trump's presumably pre-scripted babble: The permanency of Middle East peace is somewhat questionable. Yes, and Willie Sutton was somewhat of a bank robber.

Biden is crushing it, while would-be competitors are badmouthing it

My unyielding conjecture is that the plodding herd of Democratic would-be presidential competitors — Sherrod Brown, Deval Patrick, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Mike Bloomberg, Mitch Landrieu, Eric Holder — has managed to throw political journalism into a frenzy of doom-feeding, perhaps journalism's most cherished avocation.

That is, the doom hangs emphatically over the existing passel of Democratic competitors, while the bright hope of salvation lies only within the competitively forsworn — those invisible pols who still want to be president and whose falsely frantic leaks to the press have the latter pumping out dreary copy on the existentially dreadful.

The NY Times now has the Washington Post doing it:

After 10 months of campaigning and 15 hours of nationally televised debates, [an] emotion is rising: anxiety. Party leaders and activists are citing weakness in all of the leading contenders, including former vice president Joe Biden, who has been forced on the defensive about his family’s ethics, performed haltingly in debates and set off alarms with his poor fundraising. They also fret that the two other top-ranking candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are too liberal to win a general election. Other candidates have had moments to shine, but none yet have fully transformed that into anything approaching momentum.

Right — but Brown, Patrick, Kerry, Clinton, Bloomberg, Landrieu or Holder could!

Meanwhile, back in the real world ...

Former Vice President Joe Biden's lead in the race for the Democratic nomination for president has rebounded, and now stands at its widest margin since April, [according to the widely respected pollster SSRS, rated "A-" by 538].

Biden has the support of 34% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters…. [Warren and Sanders] are about even for second, with 19% and 16%, respectively.

So much for the would-be competitors' fabrications of candidates' weaknesses, especially Biden's.

The squalid totality of Trump's betrayals

Ambassador William Taylor's testimony (pdf) before Congress reads like a Shakespearean tragedy, a twisted tale of Tom Clancy intrigue, a Mario Puzo account of mob-family degeneration. Or, as Taylor puts it, his is a "rancorous story about whistleblowers, Mr. Giuliani, side channels, quid pro quos, corruption, and interference in elections."

He then added, "in this story Ukraine is an object" — a political plaything for Trump, not a proud sovereign nation under Russian siege and American assistance. 

But if one had to characterize the entire, sordid yarn in just one word, that word would be, unquestionably, betrayal.  

The subplot of Taylor's story involves, of course, himself as the betrayed. He accepted the ambassadorship to Ukraine only on the condition, as promised by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that Trump was wholly committed to militarily aiding the country against Russian imperialism. 

Pompeo’s promise proved a lie. In his moving account, Taylor writes that the truth of betrayal thundered home in a profoundly personal way on the day after Trump’s infamous July 25th call to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky — a transcript of which Taylor was denied. On July 26th, the American ambassador stood with Zelensky on Ukraine’s embattled front, thinking, “Over 13,000 Ukrainians had been killed in the war…. More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without U.S. assistance.” 

Just days before, Taylor had learned — from the Office of Management and Budget — of Trump’s extortionist hold on military aid. “I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened,” he testified. With Trump’s kicking away of that pillar, so too was America’s word. For personal gain only, the U.S. president had converted our word, in a different sense, from “honor” to “betrayal.”

Which soldiered on — wholesale. Some of Trump’s betrayals victimized the guiltless, such as Taylor’s predecessor, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. She was “treated poorly,” he testified, “caught up in a web of political machinations both in Kyiv and Washington.”

To that we must add more of the singular as well as the aggregate: from national security adviser John Bolton (now there’s a humdinger of an “innocence” twist) and assistant Fiona Hill and America’s global reputation to the war-weary people of Ukraine. 

Most of Trump’s victims, however, deserved the presidential betrayal they’re getting. They’ll each go down, to one hell or another, while the faithless serpent who dragged them into this squalor — and who will presently sell out each one of them — will simply stroll away, as the situation now appears. 

Facing probable indictment are Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union; Kurt Volker, the U.S. special representative for Ukraine; soon-to-resign Secretary of Energy Rick Perry; White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney; and perhaps most deservedly, that immensely unhinged globetrotter, Rudy Giuliani.

Mike Pompeo, we can at least hope, faces impeachment and the possible ruination of his political aspirations. (Merely "possible," since one never knows about corruption-attracted Republican voters.)

Let us also hope that the next chief executive honors Ambassador William B. Taylor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Trump's seven prodigious lies in just 91 words

Count 'em:

We went through hell, my administration. People were destroyed, their lives were destroyed. Not one person colluded, they found nothing. There was a DNC server that never went to the FBI, it was taken by somebody. You hear about Ukraine. I hear Clinton was involved; I hear somebody who wrote the fake dossier was out of Ukraine. I would like the Attorney General to find out what’s going on. We’re investigating corruption. I have an obligation to do that, we have an obligation to investigate corruption. That’s what it was, corruption.

That's his story, he's sticking with it, and tens of millions will buy it.

(Odd, is it not, that Trump's principal concern — corruption — was the one topic he didn't raise by phone with Ukraine's President Zelensky.)

Help the ASPCA — dun Subaru for 10 bucks

Meet the Underdogs, the hardest-to-adopt shelter dogs. As part of National #MakeADogsDay, you can help support all Underdogs by buying them something from the @ASPCA Charity Lists. For every item purchased, Subaru will donate $10, up to $250,000.

— Subaru (@subaru_usa) October 22, 2019

I bought a "nuts for knots" ball — $13 — for a neighbor's dog. 

A groundswell absent the swell

The NY Times' Jonathan Martin reports, as they say, breathlessly:

With doubts rising about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s ability to finance a multistate primary campaign, persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election and skepticism that Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., can broaden his appeal beyond white voters, Democratic leaders are engaging in a familiar rite: fretting about who is in the race and longing for a white knight to enter the contest at the last minute.

Oh, my. I didn't know. But just who are these "Democratic leaders"?

Six, a mere six, mind you, "Democratic donors [who] gathered at the Whitby Hotel in Manhattan last week." And sad to say, "the mood of alarm is even more intense because of the party’s hunger to defeat President Trump."

"'There’s more anxiety than ever,' said Connie Schultz, a journalist who is married to Senator Sherrod Brown," who would like to be president. "We’re both getting the calls," added Schultz. "I’ve been surprised by some who’ve called me."

Mr. Brown, who nearly entered the race earlier this year, said the pressure on him to reconsider from labor leaders, Democratic officials and donors has "become more frequent." And Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor [who would like to be president], said he too has been nudged by friends to reconsider.

"I can see it, I can feel it, I can hear it," said Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor who would also like to be president.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. [Mike] Bloomberg [both of whom would like to be president] have both told people privately in recent weeks that if they thought they could win, they would consider entering the primary.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Attorney General Eric Holder — two others who would like to be president — have considered jumping into the primaries.

Are these the people you'd really want to ask about potential competitors' — Biden and Warren's — prospects?

Jonathan Martin is. He's an eager-beaver mammal who is closest to the cliché used by wingers on both sides: "the lamestream media." Aside from the Times, he's been with Politico, the National Journal’s "Hotline," National Review magazine, and "has appeared frequently on television and radio as a political analyst and commentator, including on CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, MSNBC and NPR."

All of which is to say, the man knows how to peddle sensationalist politics, most of which is useless. The Times should be ashamed to have a "national political correspondent" who so superficially fails at reporting on significant national political developments.

The absolute crap that Trump's base hears, sees

Mark Levin: "While [Trump's] been president there hasn't even been a hint of scandal. Not a hint." pic.twitter.com/XjD3yu0Tci

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) October 22, 2019