The Carpentariat

Joe Biden's rugged road, but salvation lies ahead

It takes a lot to provoke the famously unflappable E.J. Dionne into bitterness and partisan hostility, but the GOP has managed to do it.

​​​​​Biden said over and over that he wanted to be the president of all Americans and honored the dignity of voters who had supported Trump in the past by expressing an understanding of their discontents….

And the GOP’s response to the outreach? With just a handful of exceptions, abject refusal to stand up against the anti-democratic lunacy of Trump’s efforts to nullify the results of a fair election.

Anyone advising Biden and members of his party to turn the other cheek and reach out to Republican congressional leaders as though none of this has happened is urging them down the path of political suicide.

As one of Dionne's fellow pragmatic progressive-conservatives — and on that last predicate nominative, E.J. sustains his characteristic refinement in his column — I am confidant that President-elect Biden sees vividly the ugliness, the pettiness and Trumpian vindictiveness which await him. When Biden mused last week, "What's wrong with these people?" I suspect he had in mind more than just Trump and his nonexistent transition staff. He was thinking of the nearly entire, collective squalor of the Republican Party.

What I don't know, what I cannot imagine, is how in hell he's going to navigate his way through that nest of pseudoconservative vipers, other than by signing reams of executive orders — many of which will be struck down by Trump's godawful Supreme Court legacy.

Nonetheless, I do know Joe Biden will proceed with dignity, and a return to as much normalcy as he can muster. And that is precisely what we need after four years of such mind-blowing national degradation.

Question

Yesterday I needed to go to the store for a couple basics. On my in I followed an older gentleman wearing no mask and passed a younger one coming out. "You forgot your mask," I said to the "exiting" shopper — as the police like to write — hoping the guy in front would hear also. "What?" replied the departer. "You … Forgot … Your … Mask!" I barked back, though he clearly did not give a damn.

For the last week I have run a low-grade fever, suffered from really annoying nausea, and last night I underwent two miserable hours of severe chills. I have taken all-known precautions against covid; I tested negative last week but the nurse and my primary have advised that I quarantine for at least 10 days, just in case the test was a false negative.

I am doing so, excepting essential runs for what little food I can stomach (while avoiding any closeness to fellow shoppers). And yet every time I skip out for a quick trip for staples — because my valet quit on me — I encounter at least two sons of bitches trying to kill me — and you.

So I put it to you: Would any reasonably sensible jury convict me of manslaughter? 

Great news

I haven't so patriotically saluted a news item — this one from the Associated Press — since bin Laden received a Bugsy Siegal-like bullet in the head and was dumped in the sea in his jammies:

"The White House said it's still planning to host holiday parties despite dire warnings from health experts…. The White House gatherings are scheduled to begin later this month, soon after the Thanksgiving holiday may give rise to another dangerous COVID-19 surge."

Said first lady Melania Trump's chief of staff, "It is a longstanding tradition for people to visit and enjoy the cheer and iconic decor of the annual White House Christmas celebrations."

Ah yes, the cheer and splendor of a Trumpy White House Christmas. I wish them all a not-too-speedy recovery.

Twitter itself lends danger

Why wouldn't they? From WaPo's front page:

"Twitter and Facebook will hand over the digital keys to @POTUS, as well as other official social media accounts, to Biden on Inauguration Day even as Trump continues to reject his election defeat."

Even Trump knows it's over. This, for instance, from another front-page piece in the Post:

"In the 19 days since the election, 12 have included no events on the president’s schedule [although he's played golf a half-dozen times]. He has taken no questions from reporters…. He averaged about 48 minutes on camera every day in 2020…. He has spent about 50 minutes on camera total since Nov. 3."

And yet he's still conning the riffraff.

In certain swing states, there were more votes than people who voted, and in big numbers. Does that not really matter? Stopping Poll Watchers, voting for unsuspecting people, fake ballots and so much more. Such egregious conduct. We will win!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 23, 2020

What escapes me is why there is no orchestrated effort to have him banned from Twitter and Facebook. His isn't "free speech" — it's sheer humbuggery designed solely to disrupt President-elect Biden's legitimacy, spitefully undermine Americans' trust in the election process, and thus keep the nation divided.

These tech giants are private enterprises; they have no duty to acknowledge the fetid madness of an imminent felon, adding only that "this claim … is disputed." It's not disputed. It's insidious rubbish. Do they not ban neoNazis intent on pushing hate and inciting violence? No less than the sitting president is doing the same.

And he should be stopped. Not by government edict, but by the enterprises.

Full of hope, but still dreading

Trump is already setting the stage for a comeback. The Times:

*Ronna McDaniel, Mr. Trump’s handpicked chairwoman, has secured the president’s support for her re-election to another term.

*[He recently formed] a political action committee.

*[He's fighting for control of the RNC-Trump] voter data and donors lists [which] contain thousands of names of contributors and detailed information about supporters.

*Trump will try to bend the national party to his will by exacting retribution on those lawmakers who have not pledged total fealty to him.

None of this involves what is also sure to follow: repeated claims of election theft and President Biden's illegitimacy; racist snark directed at Vice President Harris; more "illegal alien" scares; loud denials of his past criminal activity and civil violations in attempts to poison jury pools; collaboration with Putin and God knows whom else; 100,000 more tweets of vile and national division [to which Twitter will do nothing more that attach an insignificant disclaimer]; incitements to violence; the rapid suppression of any moderate Republican presidential wannabe's hope of domesticating the GOP's horned cattle; and the further propagation of astounding ignorance and circus routines, continuing America's four-year acquisition of laughingstock status.

As I've written previously, we're looking at a long, long civil war.

​​​​​Rudy & Sidney - three boobs of Trumpism

I missed nearly all of Thursday's Rudy-Sidney disaster, but the Bulwark's Tim Miller wrote up a scholarly summary of the literal meltdown immediately after:

"The press conference began with Giuliani presenting as a 'tumefied alcoholic from an Edvard Munch painting'" — journalist Peter Hamby's words — "replete with a black hair dye brook babbling down his cheek and wiping his brow with the vigor of a drag queen removing make-up between sets. His visage went from subtext to center-stage when the audio of the Trump livestream was interrupted by a pair of Beavis and Butthead-sounding tech managers saying: 'Can they hear us on the stream…. I guess not…. See fuckin’ Rudy’s hair dye dripping down his face?'"

Can the Traveling Trump Clown Show ever get any better? But things did turn serious when legal-team member Sidney Powell took to the microphone with all her technical expertise, intellectual heft and Clouseaulike sleuthing:

"[Software] can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President [oops] Biden. Which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system and that’s what caused them to have to shut down. That’s when they came in the backdoor with all the mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually fabricated. Some were on pristine paper with identically matching perfect circle dots,,,, Others were shoved in in batches."

All of this boobishness received a rave review from Trump himself, of course, and millions of his minions have since toddled along in agreement. What shocked, however, was Tucker Carlson's on-air reaction that night:

"What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history. Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government…. [When I invited her on this program to detail her accusations, she became] "angry and told us to stop contacting her."

Does the once-much ballyhooed Tucker for President see an alternative path to the White House? — a path only 99 percent as crazy as Trump's?

It won't work. Trump's lickspittles are too clever for that. "How quickly we turn on our own," said Rush Limbaugh's producer, Bo Snerdley, in a tweet. "Where is the 'evidence' the election was fair?" You know, like where is the evidence that Bertrand Russell's sun-orbiting teapot doesn't exist?

Your attention, please

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Rhetorical question alert: Will the right accept Joe Biden as president?

Monmouth polling finds that "three-quarters (77%) of Trump backers say Biden’s win was due to fraud…. A majority (54%) of Americans believe we have enough information on the vote count to know who won the presidential election, but a sizable minority (44%) feel we, in fact, do not. Fully 88% of Trump voters believe we need to wait for more information on the count before we know for sure."

Joe Bien's popular vote continues to rack up — by now, a margin of nearly seven million — and his Electoral College count is 306 just as sure as God made little green men in outer space. Notwithstanding, almost 90 percent of Trump voters believe we should wait for a solid conclusion to this circus. Sometimes I wonder if they aren't some of the little green men themselves, the Barney Fifes of intergalactic travel.

Added Monmouth's director of polling, Patrick Murray: "It’s not unusual for backers on the losing side to take a while to accept the results" — the understatement of the season.

To help them along, the right will always have crackpots such as buttoned-up yet hippy-dippy Dinesh D'Souza, that master of espying conspiracies everywhere, from whom they can learn how to be as unreasonably bitter as inhumanly possible.

Okay here’s the deal: if Biden pulls this off—a big IF—then we as Republicans will during his tenure in office treat him with the same level of acceptance, legitimacy and unity that the Democrats have showed toward Trump these past four years. Lessons learned!

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) November 18, 2020

Dinesh's acerbic, yo-mama resentment should come with a few caveats. Trump lost the popular vote by millions and sidled into office only through the asinine graces of the Electoral College; that Democrats and allies have not "accepted" Trump is true, but only because he has been the most unacceptable, objectionable, callous president in U.S. history; and, in brief, the still-sitting president has been the chief disunifier of this nation, hands down.

Nonetheless, the right will cling to its caustic delegitimization of President Biden's massively convincing win, just because that's who they are.

My reply to Rachel Maddow

her condition came from family members, especially her father, who said the same. Well, you DON'T have pancreatic cancer, she responded; I do, and I'll handle it, and it's useless to say what you say. The rest is just theatre.

— The Carpentariat (@CarpenterPM) November 20, 2020

November 20, 2020

How do you solve a problem like mountains of disinformation?

​​​​​NY Times technology reporter Adam Satariano asked Matthew Sheffield, a recovering right-wing propagandist and website virtuoso, how captives of the kind of garbage he once propagated online can be freed from their epistemic prisons.

"The first step is to get people to improve their information diet. If you’re eating nothing but candy or toxic food you are going to get sick. If you can improve your news diet to include things that you like but also other things that might be challenging to you then you are going to have a much better understanding of life. In the information age, the people who control the information control the age."

The question remains — How? Convincing Trump supporters to read the legitimate press would be like convincing MSNBC viewers to tune into Fox News or OAN for hours. Of course there's a difference in the accuracy of information content, nevertheless a regular Fox viewer would argue that blocking oneself from his network only diminishes one's "news diet."

What looms instead, I'm afraid, is that networks even crazier than Fox, such as OAN, will become the right's regular diet, moving millions of Republicans to yet-imagined heights of lunacy. After all, they saw it on TeeVee.

The its that are in on it

You have to love this synopsis of the White House's legal theories by the Post's Dan Zak and Josh Dawsey:

"It’s very simple, according to Rudolph W. Giuliani and the rest of President Trump’s legal posse, but also very vast. China is in on it. Cuba is in on it. Antifa and George Soros are in on it. At least two presidents of Venezuela, one dead and one living, are in on it. Big Tech is in on it; a Web server from Germany is involved (there’s always a server involved). Multiple major U.S. cities are in on it, as are decent American citizens who volunteer at polling precincts…. The 'it' is a massive, premeditated scheme to steal the election from Donald Trump, according to Giuliani, and it also involved corralling poll watchers at great distances from the ballot counting."

What's left to add?

Anything they like. 

 

A frightful journey into the belly of the beast

Playwright, lawyer and contributing NY Times opinion writer Wajahat Ali shares his fruitless experiences of having tried to reason with Trump supporters. A few excerpts:

We are now being lectured by a chorus of voices including Pete Buttigieg and [political scientist] Ian Bremmer, to "reach out" to Trump voters and "empathize" with their pain. This is the same advice that was given after Trump’s 2016 victory, and for nearly four years, I attempted to take it. Believe me, it’s not worth it.

in late 2016, I told my speaking agency to book me for events in the states where Trump won. I wanted to talk to the people the media calls "real Americans" from the "heartland," — which is of course America’s synonym for white people, Trump’s most fervent base. Over the next four years I gave more than a dozen talks to universities, companies and a variety of faith-based communities.

My standard speech was about how to "build a multicultural coalition of the willing." My message was that diverse communities, including white Trump supporters, could work together to create a future where all of our children would have an equal shot at the American dream. I assured the audiences that I was not their enemy.

Not one told me they’d wavered in their support for [Trump]. Instead, they repeated conspiracy theories and Fox News talking points about "crooked Hillary." Others made comments like, "You’re a good, moderate Muslim. How come others aren’t like you?"…. [One said] "They’ll never take my guns. Ever,” explaining that his Facebook feed was filled with articles about how Clinton and Democrats would kill the Second Amendment and steal his guns.

We cannot help people who refuse to help themselves. Trump is an extension of their id, their culture, their values, their greed. He is their defender and savior. He is their blunt instrument. He is their destructive drug of choice.

I applaud Ali for attempting to psychologically aid those who persist in irrationality. But his brotherly outreach was like debating religious fanatics, who know what they know and no amount of reason will abate their fanaticism. The even scarier part is that Trump, after four years of regularly scheduled clownishness and criminality, received 10 million more votes in 2020's go-around. His appeals to racists and other ignoramuses never diminished, they only grew in popularity. It appears the sooner America's white populations is reduced to minority status, the better off this country will be.

A Rudy henchwoman, totally nuts

Sidney Powell, a former Assistant United States Attorney, declares her repudiation of American democracy.

"We will not be intimidated...We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it. And we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom."—Sidney Powell pic.twitter.com/8KCEOGuL7w

— GOP (@GOP) November 19, 2020

She got one thing right: American patriots are fed up with corruption from the "highest level of our government."

Can this would-be dynasty expire soon enough?

Lara Trump — presidential daughter-in-law, wife of nincompoop Eric and former personal trainer — who "emerged during the 2020 presidential campaign as a defender of President Trump’s basest political instincts, is now eyeing a political future of her own in her home state of North Carolina," reports the Times.

Stock market wizard Richard Burr has announced his upcoming retirement from the Senate, leaving a yawning gap in N.C. for a nasty Trump family member to possibly fill. No doubt Donnie Jr. has an eye on high office, and Ivanka is also just vile enough to cater politically to the equally nasty unwashed among Daddy's base.

Don't unbuckle yet, even if Ossoff and Warnock prevail. The slime just keeps creeping in and around.

Some of our pseudoconservatives are down with 2020

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page deputy editor, Daniel Henninger, is knee-slapping giddy about the overall election results:

"At the risk of arousing the dark side, we are here to posit that the 2020 election results are reason for optimism…. Some thought the Senate next year might have a Democratic majority of 54-46, a wipeout…. [And] after the Democrats rolled up House seats in the 2018 midterms, they expected to ride an anti-Trump wave to a bigger majority. But their majority narrowed, and the tides of history look likely in 2022 to push Nancy Pelosi into retirement….

"The 2020 election results in toto have given the party a historic opportunity—if it can keep it."

For now, a historic opportunity to do what?

To persevere in refusing to address the pressing pandemic fallout of sprawling joblessness, small-business closures and food insecurity, as well as state and local government budget collapses?

To continue increasing an already overfed Pentagon budget?

To obstruct all moderate judicial appointees named by President Biden?

To persist in abetting loony right-wing Christian authoritarianism?

To hustle more racism and other disgraceful "American values"?

To pursue more appearances on Fox News and similar outlets to insist Trump waz robbed and our election processes are hopelessly corrupt?

One could go on, but the historic opportunities envisioned by the likes of Mr. Henninger are both unmentioned — for good reason — and predictable. The shamelessness grows deeper by the day.