PMC Commentary

One giant leap for mankind

Good news. The liberalization of 21st-century Saudi Arabia under its enlightened crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is proceeding apace, what with its stunning announcement today that the 9th century is no more. In this gentle authoritarian Islamic theocracy of brutality, flogging has been abolished!

For the princely kingdom, friend of Trumpian autocracy and model of religious oppressiveness that causes right-wing Christians to wet their pants in envy, the abolition of flogging is a "major step forward" in social and legal reform. Yes it is. Because the kingdom's human rights commission says it is.

After all, it was only a few years ago that a Saudi blogger was sentenced to a decade in prison and 1,000 lashes for having "insulted" Islam. Today in tolerant, civilized Saudi Arabia, the blogger would merely be sentenced to years in prison for having liabled a medieval, illiterate merchant who heard voices in his head.

Some Saudi traditions are simply too precious to let go of, though, such as the hacking to death of conscientious, liberty-loving journalists while visiting foreign consulates. That, and executions in general — for example the number of Saudi prisoners put to death last year was three times the number of counties in Alabama.

When it comes to letting God sort them out, this kingdom has other ideas.

Disinfect this? No way.

Trump's reelection campaigns — according to current reports, effectively there are two: his own, and the Republican National Committee's — are split on the question of how to proceed. The RNC envisions a kind of glad-handing, happy-face approach, at least for a while, while Team Trump is urging a thematic emphasis on the candidate's natural persona: hustle the vile, malicious little toad who's happy only when everyone else is miserable.

A 17-state polling excursion has rattled the RNC. Trump's future in known battlegrounds is looking rather bleak, said the survey, hence the committee has launched what Politico calls a "massive effort" to attract millions of battleground states' theoretically persuadable voters by presenting an "affirmative case" for Trump — in other words, a fantasy.

You can see the problem with this approach, as Republican strategist Alex Castellanos has: "Donald Trump’s numbers are harder than diamonds," he observes. "He can’t budge them with dynamite because he is who he is" — i.e., a vile, malicious little toad.

The sensible alternative for Team Trump? "Define Biden," adds Castellanos.

By "define," Trump officials mean, of course, a sniveling, squawking, scorched earth campaign against the former vice president — just more-of-the-same selling of "anger, division and 'we’re the victim,'" as veteran GOP congressman Tom Cole unapprovingly framed it to the Times. The Oklahoma pol has had enough of Trump's grievance politics, arguing instead that "you got to have some hope to sell people."

Regrettably for Cole and his party, as long as this president is president, Dante Alighieri's 14th-century lament shall reign throughout Republicanism — as well as throughout the republic, should this president remain president:

Wasted Days and Donald Trump and Wasted Nights and Donald Trump

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley is pleased to inform us that his boss is not pathologically obsessed with television. Rather, "Trump’s highest priority is the health and safety of the American people," says Gidley.

It's a priority over which he obsesses daily, as he first watches seven uninterrupted hours of television news.

"Trump arrives in the Oval Office these days as late as noon," reports the Times. "He has been up in the White House master bedroom as early as 5 a.m. watching Fox News, then CNN, with a dollop of MSNBC thrown in for rage viewing."

After his Oval Office appearance, there's lunch, after which he avoids the task force meetings held in preparation for the White House coronavirus briefings, where he spends two hours rhetorically strutting before the television cameras.

Then dinner, perhaps with Melania.

Trump then "turns back to his constant companion, television. Upstairs in the White House private quarters — often in his own bedroom or in a nearby den — he flicks from channel to channel, reviewing his performance."

It's a full day. And we should be thankful that in this president's hands, every one is devoted to "the health and safety of the American people" by watching a blinding, mind-numbing amount of television — and rarely if ever devoting himself to world affairs or, God help us, our more general domestic welfare.

Trump tunes out by tuning in — and that's just fine with us.

A headline I thought I never would see

*****

Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?

— President of the United States, 23 April 2020

This is not willy-nilly, off-the-cuff, maybe-this-will-work advice. This is dangerous.

— Director of Global Health, New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center

Below: Be sure to check out Dr. Birx's paralyzed-with-horror reaction to what indisputably is the dumbest damn thing ever uttered by a president. And Mike Pence's nervous shuffling, at the end? By this I was shocked only because he resisted stepping in, and blithering: "We shall, Mr. President, at your brilliant direction and under your magnificent leadership."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!? pic.twitter.com/dx6yJVqnyF

— David Leavitt (@David_Leavitt) April 23, 2020

In a statement today, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the president, noting that "[he] has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors" before downing a pint of Clorox.

Trump's only Bright idea

​​​​​Coincidental to Trump's sacking and Stalinlike airbrushing of HHS' Rick Bright — POTUS had "never heard of" the vaccine wizard, as this pandemic rages on — the distinguished immunologist penned a 516-word statement of protest, the contents of which I've reduced to a 70-word essence, below.

To me the most surprising part of Bright's letter is his sign-off reference to "other conscientious scientists" still in the corrupt Trump administration's precarious employ. I thought Bright was the lone and last one. At any rate, let us hie to his complaint and, as outlined, his next step:

"I will request that the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services investigate the manner in which this Administration has politicized the work of [the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority] and has pressured me and other conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections as well as efforts that lack scientific merit. Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths."

That final sentence is one of unsettling irony. In advocating a counterfeit treatment, Trump did rush, blindly and belatedly, toward countless more deaths. Yet early on, when he could have been rushing toward a lower death count through genuine means, he just sat and yelled "hoax."

If Trump labored as strenuously in the pursuit of good as he does in the accomplishment of evil, his legacy would already inhabit the annals of presidential greatness. At the very least he might have been another Chester A. Arthur, who, as president, acquitted himself with noted integrity, after years of taking machine kickbacks as a customs collector at the port of New York.

But Trump is irredeemable, just a simple city grifter who's gotta grift — as well as a cheap, tinpot authoritarian who can brook no criticism or correction, and will just airbrush critics from existence.

Darn. We may "have to use medical doctors" for a treatment

How to medical pic.twitter.com/0EDqJcy38p

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) April 24, 2020

Sharp as a hack

American exceptionalism has been replaced - by American exceptionalism

​​​​​I'm sure the Times' Katrin Bennhold, a native German with a masters in economics, is an able, well-read woman of the world. But the answer to why she was assigned to write an above-the-fold story on the erosion of America's historiographical reputation — "The coronavirus pandemic is shaking bedrock assumptions about U.S. exceptionalism" — lies far outside my comprehension.

Ms. Bennhold addresses a topic quite worthy of exploration; or, I should say, she was meant to address it. Somewhere along the line, however, her piece on the modern troubles of American exceptionalism encountered a bit of a problem: It either forgot to address the topic, or its economist author failed to understand the topic. After reading Bennhold's story on the acute decline of US exceptionalism, we are left without a reminder of what "US exceptionalism," in its generally accepted way, has meant to historians, political scientists and philosophers for decades.

"As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world," writes Bennhold, "people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief…. The pandemic … is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world."

That America's postwar stature engulfed the notion of exceptionalism is incontrovertible. Yet the once-nameless concept was hatched and cultivated in religious, colonial and nationalist fervor more than three-hundred years before. As international relations professor Stephen Walt has defined it: "Most statements of 'American exceptionalism' presume that America’s values, political system, and history are unique and worthy of universal admiration. They also imply that the United States is both destined [presumably by God] and entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage."

Most contemporary historians, I'd say, have rejected the premise of American exceptionalism. But if its broad meaning is twisted into the singularity of American "leadership," as Bennhold has done, then acceptance of the exceptionalist theme becomes virtually inescapable. Just as obligatory is the certain knowledge that America's descent into global banality and domestic incompetence has been guided by the infinitely feckless Mr. Trump.

"America has not done badly" in fighting the covid pandemic, said one but representative political scientist to the Times. "It has done exceptionally badly."

So American exceptionalism — albeit another kind of American exceptionalism — indeed lives: The United States is the only world empire to have flushed itself down the toilet — through just one man's stunning ineptitude and staggering obtuseness — in only three-and-a-half years.

It isn't all about covid

John C., reader, commenter, contributor, good friend and director of Borjan Children's Fund, updates me on social conditions in the Philippines in this age of covid-19, as his organization continues to provide indispensable aid to children through vaccinations, antibiotics, and providing adequate food for stronger minds and bodies — all of which we in the West take for granted. For the much less fortunate, we can't. So here's a thought: With your contribution of merely $35 to the fund a Filipino child can be cured of tuberculosis, which still ravages the Philippines' poorer areas.

Enough from me. Here is John's update:   

"The nation is in] lockdown, government food assistance is rationed, and the only people allowed to leave their home must carry a government issued pass to do so. Those are also rationed. A gathering like the 'patriots' in Michigan would be met with automatic weapons from the military police.

 

"My brother-in-law obtained a pass, hired a multi-cab (sort of a minivan taxi) made it through checkpoints and into town, and bought sacks of rice (the blue ones). Once back home, we split them into smaller bags (the white ones) and were able to hand out 100!"

 

Imagine your child among them.

But Mitch, Trump is in his last year!

Earlier today, on the "Hugh Hewitt" radio show:

McConnell: We need to have hearings, and we need to confirm judges. Hugh, you and I have discussed this before. My motto for the year is leave no vacancy behind. That hasn’t changed. The pandemic will not prevent us from achieving that goal.

Hewitt: That is music to my ears.

Again, Hewitt, in his Washington Post column, September 2018:

By refusing to hold even hearings on President Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, "it is not an overstatement to say that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has saved the Constitution as we know it."

If a right winger ever stumbled on honesty, decency or consistency, well, he wouldn't be a right winger.

Social commingling

A savage reader sends this:

What should the media do about Trump's daily burlesque?

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson asks "What should the media do?" about Trump's ​​​​"stage-managed afternoon performances" which are far from actual briefings; which are "campaign rallies designed to stoke passion among Trump’s loyal base"; "blame-shifting exercises in which he points the finger" at everyone but himself; and "unhinged sessions [that] primarily serve as opportunities for Trump to complain bitterly about how nobody appreciates what a 'perfect' job" he has done.

The columnist offers five possible responses to Trump's on-air rallies by a different name. Numbers three and five left me in puzzled disagreement:

"[We could provide] accurate, corrective information before quoting the lie, even in headlines. That is difficult, but not impossible. Broadcast media should consider either taping the briefings and airing only newsworthy excerpts, or providing some means of fact-checking Trump’s statements in real time. Split the screen, if necessary. Cut away altogether when things go completely off the rails.

"Should the White House correspondents walk out en masse? No, because covering the president is their job. Making a pact to follow up on questions Trump refuses to answer truthfully won’t work: Trump can back up a lie with another lie, or just walk away."

Providing either real-time or post-briefing corrections of Trump's lies (which CNN and MSNBC already do) are of course a fundamental purpose of political journalism, while an orchestrated boycott of Trump's on-air rallies and propaganda hours hint at an abrogation of real journalism. On these, I'm with Robinson.

If, however, broadcast media were to cut away altogether when things go completely off the rails, I and probably you — not to mention Joe Biden — would go completely ballistic. Trump's bizarre, mentally disheveled theatrics are what define this unpresidential buffoon, and voters have a right to be reminded of them every day.

Emphatically disagreeable is Robinson's rejection of his final proposal: that reporters should make no pact to follow up. The absence thereof has for decades been political journalism's unoriginal sin. The follow-up is the profession's essence, in that the politician's answer to a question, initially posed, is merely his or her opportunity to lie, dodge or obfuscate.

That Trump will lie every time is his logical modus operandi, since he knows the odds of a follow-up are slim. And if the selfsame reporter or another does follow up, he just lies again — for there, he also knows, is the end of it. But for the press, it shouldn't be. Fourth Estaters should dog him till Sunday and back, and should he choose to walk, so be it; he'll look even more like the lying, dodging, obfuscating, unpresidential buffoon he is.

Other options are perfectly reasonable as well — such as throwing a shoe at him, faking a pistol-hammer click, screaming "Yo mama, bitch," or moving on to ask Pence if he actually swallows the little prick's lies.

A literally poisonous sociopath

Since you already know them, I won't bore you by rehashing all the reasons why this Associated Press story has been a head-shaker waiting to happen:

A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating
the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported.

About 28% who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11% of those getting routine care alone. Hydroxychloroquine made no difference in the need for a breathing machine, either.

Researchers did not track side effects, but noted a hint that hydroxychloroquine might have damaged other organs.

At yesterday's briefing, a reporter asked Dr. Don about the AP story. He gave the usual political answer — he wasn't aware of it — repeated that other "studies" have revealed different results, then hastened to another reporter.

No doubt he'll go right on prescribing a useless, organ-damaging drug before ever conceding that the snake-oil question he put to the nation — "What have you got to lose?" — was correctly answered by the AMA's president a couple weeks ago: "Your life."    

The Republican Senate Intel Committee says Trump is full of shit

This is almost worth letting Sen. Richard Burr walk blithely away from his recent unethical, possibly illegal unloading of up to $1.7 million in publicly traded stock while remaining mum to the general public about why.

Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Republican Burr, "reaffirmed its support for the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the goal of putting Donald Trump in the Oval Office."

The report "undercuts Trump's years of efforts to portray allegations of Kremlin assistance to his campaign as a 'hoax,' driven by Democrats and a 'deep state' embedded within the government bureaucracy."

Of course the Republican base, assuming the hoax-demolishing Senate report ever makes it onto Fox News, which it won't, would simply dismiss the chairman's committee-confirmed truth as a scurrilous, lies-filled, NeverTrump conspiracy intent on dimming the radiant light of their glorious Orange Boy.

Nevertheless, Sen. Burr, you and your millions should take a much-advertised bow. That would really piss off the Trumpeteers.

The poisoned fruits of a sociopathic president

This is how a sociopathic president governs:

The U.S. had just 245 confirmed cases of coronavirus when President Trump stepped to the mic at CDC headquarters on March 6 to proclaim that "anybody who wants a test gets a test" for coronavirus. Four days later, Vice President Mike Pence promised 4 million coronavirus tests would be available by that week’s end.

Six weeks later, because of test kit supply shortages that doctors and public health experts have been shouting about, the U.S. crossed that 4 million test threshold only yesterday….

[WH aides finally] announced plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up manufacture of swabs, reagents and other test kit supplies and grant governors access to federal labs to run tests.

Though Hanlon's Razor — "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" — is a truth that lives in axiomatic certitude, and unquestionably applies to Trump, in his clinically abnormal case there was more than just malice in play. His incurable sociopathy rendered him psychopathically indifferent to what nurses, doctors, public health experts and state governors had been shouting about for weeks.

Only his reelection to the now ethically vacant White House has occupied his life-long privileged mind. Purely out of self-interested political concerns has he bounced from states-are-own-their-own to my authority-is-total and now back to states-are-on-their-own. He's done such a wretched job of sparing lives by aggressively confronting covid-19, he seems to have settled on the pandemic's final solution: Let governors take the blame.

Because this crisis is at once not at all about him and yet altogether about him. He has habitually dumped responsibility for this awful age of black death on governors, Democrats, "Biden/Obama," the media, hospitals, China, the WHO and General Motors. Meanwhile, as he whined yesterday, past reports about ventilator shortages and current reports about testing-supply shortages — which have taken the lives of thousands — have been written for only one purpose: "To get" him.

Turns out, the solipsistically diseased are rather lucky, in that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy speculates that they might only possess a deficit "in the capacity to attribute minds to others." Trump's mental condition is far more severe. To his mind, he's the only human entity in the entire cosmos who is favored with a firm, beautiful existence. And whatever threatens it is never his doing. Nor would he care if, in indisputable fact, it was.