The Carpentariat

Thank you, Sir. May we all have another? McConnell/McCarthy applaud Trump's cruelty

The obsequiousness, the timidity, the shamelessness, the cowardice and praise of reality turned upside down just never end.

​​​​​I applaud President Trump’s decision to get hundreds of billions of dollars of crucial Covid-19 relief out the door and into the hands of American families as quickly as possible….

His leadership has prevented a government shutdown at a time when our nation could not have afforded one.

— Mitch McConnell, 27 Dec. 2020

Thank you, Mr. President, for putting people over politics.

— Kevin McCarthy, 27 Dec. 2020

The least the Senate majority and House minority leaders could have done was to let the president's calamitously belated signature pass without comment, to try to ignore the rattling skeleton now forever in Republicans' closet, to simply overlook the dayslong conflagration which has come to define this infantile, tantrum-throwing, authoritarian narcissist and sociopathic "disgrace" — the infant's ironic, preferred description of all things anti-Trump.

But, hell no. Praising the arsonist for not striking the last match and dousing the fire he ignited is always the go-to indemnification of the party that, for five years, has handed the firebug all the kindling he needed.

A disgrace indeed.

The relief bill, Trump's spiteful indifference, and breathtaking torment

Here is Trump's public schedule for the past several days:

23 Dec.: The President and The First Lady depart Washington, D.C., en route to West Palm Beach, FL.

24 Dec.: As the Holiday season approaches, President Trump will continue to work tirelessly for the American People. His schedule includes many meetings and calls. The President goes to Trump International Golf Club (9:57 AM - 2:05 PM).

25 Dec.: During the Holiday season, President Trump will continue to work tirelessly for the American People. His schedule includes many meetings and calls. The President goes to Trump International Golf Club (9:57 AM - 2:05 PM).

26 Dec.: During the Holiday season, President Trump will continue to work tirelessly for the American People. His schedule includes many meetings and calls.

Today: During the Holiday season, President Trump will continue to work tirelessly for the American People. His schedule includes many meetings and calls.

It's also a perfect description of what President-elect Joe Biden has called an "abdication of responsibility," which will lead to "foreclosures, hunger, homelessness [and] suicide," as Michele Evermore, a policy analyst for a nonprofit workers’ rights group, put it.

While Trump works tirelessly on the golf course and tweets infuriated slander and election-fraud disinformation from his playpen at Mar-a-Lago, millions of already battered Americans watched their unemployment benefits evaporate yesterday and small businesses face the prospect of Washington's financial assistance collapsing on 31 Dec. His appallingly cynical refusal to sign the $900 billion relief bill has, as well, now ensured that unemployment checks will be delayed by at least a week and truncated in 10 weeks, not 11, since the benefits meet a hard drop-dead date in March.

A true populist, a man of the people, a leader agonized by heartless parliamentarians' miserly abuse of the destitute and beleaguered — which is to say, as in most instances of populist "leadership," an authoritarian sociopath who's as worried about "the people" as he is cheating on his golf score.

By an act of Congress, could we simply declare tomorrow to be January 20th?

***

8:30 p.m. Eastern.

So what was gained from all that drama? https://t.co/bn4tNeWlQZ

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) December 28, 2020

The oddly backward approach to enacting progressive ideals

From ​​​​​William Barber II — a tireless, sublime advocate of human decency whom I much admire — and Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, here's what I really don't get about progressive doctrine, as related by the two activists in a recent NYT op-ed:

"To address the political obstruction that has made so many other policy changes impossible, the Biden administration must push to expand voting rights to include universal early voting, online and same-day registration, re-enfranchisement of citizens affected by mass incarceration, statehood for Washington, D.C., and full restoration of the protections of the Voting Rights Act."

I could not agree more with each of the specified voting reforms. They are rational, necessary, and only fair. They would greatly enhance the legislative possibilities of doing what then could be done just as rationally, and as comprehensively outlined by the op-ed's authors: overnight relief directed at low-income and minority populations which have undergone the worst blows of the covid-19 pandemic; accessible, affordable healthcare for everyone; a $15 minimum wage; enhanced union rights; low-cost housing; a federal jobs program; the forgiving of financially suffocating and therefore economically stifling student loan repayments; improved public education; and intelligent immigration reform.

About any of that, Mr. Barber and Ms. Theoharis, you'll hear not a wisp of disagreement from me. I'm on board, full steam ahead, let us clear a battleship slot for progress.

There is, however, a problem. And it's not a minor, cranky, or nitpicky one. It lies in the op-eders' exhortation "to address the political obstruction that has made so many other policy changes impossible."

That — stubborn, systematic, and indeed popular political obstruction — is the immense armada "that has made so many … policy changes impossible." The activists concede this — this impossibility. Yet it's also dismissed in a mere 14 words in a full-length commentary on what otherwise "must" be done.

The latter is not in question by reasonable thinkers; rather, the seemingly indestructible blockades to civilized progress — enforced by cynical reactionaries voted into office by the ranks of right-winging populists — is the most fundamental challenge before us.

The Biden administration can "push" for expanded voting rights to counter the repressive onslaught all it wants, but its pushing and fight-fight-fighting will have the biting effect of a baby flea on an elephant. The "impossibility" of salubrious policy changes springs from the very people who are entrenched in Congress and statehouses and establish the bulwarks for voter repression and political obstruction: They won't vote, they'll never vote, to dismantle the defensive cordons that keep them in power, notwithstanding whatever the force of President Biden's determination.

Hence, excepting the occasional primer on the bitter absence of government's human decency and legislative heedfulness, the full-throated advocacy of much-desirable policy changes is, essentially, a waste of activists' energy — an empty beckoning for the now-roundly impossible; a hollow, progressive bellowing for a Lennonlike "Imagine," but nothing more.

Instead, virtually all progressive and center-left mobilizations must be grounded in aiming for universal voter turnout in 2022 and beyond for thoughtful lawmakers, to the now-legal extent possible. We can propose and insist on smart, human-centered policies from here to eternity, but until throngs of GOP revanchists are unseated from Congress and state linchpins, ain't nuthin' gonna happen.

A "Merry Christmas" and "Screw you" to the downtrodden

The Wall Street Journal has accumulated prizes for the dumbest columns and op-eds ever, but this one, by former senator Phil Gramm and AEI's Mike Solon, transcended the boundaries of mere trinkets: "In Defense of Scrooge, Whose Thrift Blessed the World: In the 1840s, Dickens didn’t see how businessmen like his hero were already lifting mankind from poverty."

A sampling: "While the literature of the Victorian era paints a dark picture of mid-19th-century life in England, virtually every official measure of well-being shows the period from 1840-1900 to have been the beginning of a golden age for workers."

The writers chose their words carefully: the beginning — as in, the period before government intervention. The average life span of British coal miners in the cited period? 18 years. The Scrooging of laborers, however, was long-lived.

The writers could have chosen a better role model for hard-driving businesspeople than the unrehabiltated Ebenezer Scrooge. But the ideal they choose is conspicuously revealing: The literary antagonist mirrors their own proud, promotional self-styling of … Fuck the poor; it'll all turn out Okay … someday … meanwhile, we've got ours.

Sing it with me! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Halleluuu..uu..jah!

On Christmas Eve I gave myself the gift of ​​​​​expunging from my Twitter feed the right's most voluble year-round Grinches who blather nothing but the evil of all who oppose Trump and post only schoolyard taunts beneath the dignity of even eight-year-old bullies. The deletions were one present I simply could not postpone until Christmas morning. I had had it.

These infantile miscreants and mountebanks — ranging from House Freedom Caucus types to primetime television sleazoids — were amusing for a while, in all their boogeymen hysterics and nastiness. But as I began perceiving my descent into the addictive, depraved underworld of Twitter, I also began contemplating an escape hatch and the subsequent execution of flight.

The overwrought far right was bringing me down, for this was the sort of mindless, unremitting, bulldozing bullshit which, in time, will numb the mind.

The Left wants to cancel America.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 22, 2020

No President has been treated more unfairly by the media than President Trump.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 23, 2020

WATCH: Marsha Blackburn has had ENOUGH of the Swamp's antics! https://t.co/TIUxLChteo

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) December 24, 2020

And,

VP PENCE: ‘Under Last Administration, We Saw a Steady Assault on Our Values’ https://t.co/wgxNwc7lSu

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) December 23, 2020

I already see too much of this insanity in the news; I don't need an in-my-face glut of it on Twitter. From here on, I'll stick to respectable tweeters who have something enlightening to say or link to something that does. Thus have I declared my independence from tweeting, rabble-rousing Reds — except Trump, of course, since from him flows the poison in their veins and, alone, adequately defines their hatreds and will continue to heavily influence politics — who no more live in the real world than do Moonies. 

Have a terrific Christmas Day

​​​​​Merry Christmas!

I wish you a non-you-know-who day as well, which I'll also try to savor, and I'll trust you aren't holding a huge family blowout, nor will you attend one, and furthermore I hope you get all the goodies you wanted and, the bigger thrill, that you enjoy the many happy receptions of what you give. In short, have a very merry holiday before we return to the front.

— PM "Phil Phillip Papa" Carpenter

***

Addendum.

My bestest present ever — actually, to all of us:

(As usual, I screwed up my gift-giving; I gave my daughter a knit-it-yourself cardigan sweater which I confused with cashmere. )

That "mounting evidence of voter fraud"?

Mark Meadows, Trump's White House chief of chaos, tweeted this week that there is "mounting evidence of voter fraud."

If "mounting evidence" translates into a tiny number of incidents, as the Washington Post reports, then indeed there are mounting cases of voter fraud, "some of them … [involving] Republican voters aiming to help Trump."

In Pennsylvania, for example, three voters "have been charged with voting illegally this year — all Republicans." The state's lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, said two of the cases were "out of a Benny Hill skit." (He "cited the cases in response to a call-out on Twitter by his Texas counterpart, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who offered a $1 million reward for anyone who brought forward a valid complaint of fraud. Fetterman requested that his reward money be paid in gift cards to Sheetz gas stations. Patrick, he said, has so far 'stiffed' him on the offer.")

Downright mind-boggling is that Trump has managed to brainwash so many Americans — 88 percent of his voters — into believing that President-elect Biden and his diabolical team somehow pulled off an illegitimate election. Just. Mind-boggling. I knew, of course, that the Republican base has long been an aggregation of the always outraged, the untiringly malicious and the stupendously gullible, but only rarely did I suspect that nearly all of them are clinically, pathologically nuts.

Any longer, it seems pointless to repeat this warning; but perhaps that in itself presents the danger that we might soon forget our four-year nightmare: Should the above aggregation's electoral strength ever regain what it achieved in 2016 — throngs of wavelike madness, quite similar to the current, physical pandemic — America as a beacon for any manner of decency will, to borrow from Sen. John Thune, go down like a shot dog. And unlike this time, it won't resurrect.

A twofold, bizarre swindle

Alert! Or better yet, Achtung! — to which goose-stepping Trumpers might be more attentive. (In unsympathetic instances, however, they never are. They're a delicate bunch.)

Winona County, Minn., flipped from Obama to Trump and then back to Democrat Joe Biden. He won there by less than one point, and in 24 additional Obama-Trump counties nationwide. Trump? He won the other 181 swing counties.

Trump "increased his support in [Iowa's] rural towns where farmers embraced his trade wars — and even more so in the working-class county seat of Clinton," reports the Times. "If you’ve seen a drain of manufacturing jobs and all of a sudden you have someone who shows a lot of interest in redeveloping that, people will vote their interests," said a local high school teacher.

(Such Trump-voting people simply disregard that under their would-be savior, the economy has shedded hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs across the country. Not only in Iowa, but for instance in Michigan and Ohio as well, thousands or even tens of thousands of such jobs have been erased in the last four years, "many for good," as Politico wrote in Sept. 2020.)

Biden won the popular vote by millions, but "his inability to flip more than a handful of swing counties that were carried by a Democratic nominee as recently as 2012 may be a yellow warning light for his party."

The warning light is blinking brightly, in fact, largely because of the reasons noted above, which further renders the Electoral College a national obscenity.

Still, the laugher is that Trump and his adoring Trumpers persist in their bizarre fantasy that Democrats somehow defrauded them out of a great and glorious second Trump term. The unscrupulous Dems, in Iowa alone, also somehow neglected securing for Biden even one of its 31 swing counties. That's an even more bizarre kind of fraud.

Trump's defenseless children of malignity

Following the president's unforgivable issuance of forgiveness yesterday toward the latest batch of his favorite, unrepentant obstructers of justice, financial fraudsters, witness tamperers, liars to Congress, bank swindlers, tax evaders, campaign finance violators, thieves and federal civil rights abusers — to wit, a cop who enjoyed releasing her K-9 dog on a surrendering, unarmed suspect — Trump jetted to Mar-a-Lago, where he was greeted by hordes of "mostly unmasked supporters wav[ing] Trump flags and signs and chant[ing] 'Four more years!'

"One small boy had a sign that said, 'We’re going to miss you.'" (Washington Post.)

Just a trifle amiss in your ghoulish sentiment, kid, though I can't blame your prepubescent self for having got stuck with brain-damaged, ethically absent parents. You're merely the helpless seed of the nationally dishonorable and they're the generational procreators of our seemingly eternal — and internal — malignity.

All I can advise, kid, is that when you reach maturity, run like the wind from your familial wretches. Otherwise they may forever contaminate and ultimately exterminate your humanity. Hence, when the liberating opportunity arrives, Go, get you out! Make haste! In the name of God, go!

All I want for Christmas is practically nothing, a cinch

All I want for Christmas is for President Biden, on Day One, to invoke the National Production Act to rationalize the current administration's incomprehensible tangle of covid distribution, and only a few more trifles: on Day One, a bundle of moderately sane congressional Republicans to help push through a multi-triilion dollar covid and economic relief bill; on Day One, implementation of climate-change legislation; on Day One, rescission of 2017's idiotic tax cuts for the most well-off; on Day One, reversals of Trump's cruel immigration policies; on Day One, vast improvements to the Affordable Care Act; on Day One, severe repercussions inflicted on Putin's Russia for its massive, unprecedented, round-the-clock hacking; on Day One, a reflowering of all our traditional alliances; on Day One, racial-justice reforms; on Day One, enhancements to the Voting Rights Act; and on Day One, overhauls of Secretary DeVos' scandalous educational revisions. 

That's all. Simple as a Christmas pudding. Oh, and a pony.

Because so many among the quixotic left can so dream and then expect those dreams to materialize, virtually all of them on Day One, so can I, for what little it's worth— which is pretty much nothing in the real world. 

On the covid bill, Trump has hurled Republicans into Hell's ninth circle

​​​​​"I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000."

Thus spake zany Donald Trump, who has tunneled his way into covid relief legislation at the 11th second, having long squandered his political influence in exchange for whining incessantly about how this cruel world hates him.

True to unsavory form, having also bemoaned that "it’s called the Covid relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with Covid," he insisted that business lunches and dinners and booze be made fully tax deductible in the legislation not for two years, but indefinitely. (Most of his objections related not to the covid bill, but the attached government spending bill; as usual, he hasn't a clue as to what he's talking about.)

Nevertheless, Democratic leaders reacted to Trump's reversal of absentee landlordship with a mixture of elation and a dram of visualization. Pelosi: "At last, the President has agreed to $2,000 — Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it!" Schumer: "We’re glad to pass more aid Americans need. Maybe Trump can finally make himself useful and get Republicans not to block it again."

Meanwhile, Trump has thrust Republicans into the ninth circle of political hell. No matter which way they turn, a large segment of the base will be unmercifully pissed. If they back Trump, then their assurances of fiscal frugality will tank; if they oppose him, well, you know.

Notwithstanding the delightfulness of all this Republican infighting, the totality of urgent relief legislation is now in doubt. And that alone ain't so delightful.

On "Crime and No Punishment"

​​​​​Trump's full pardons — which of course don't include commutations — yesterday alone:

15.

The number of political scofflaws and foreign-aligned villains, crooked GOP congressmen, and homicidal, war-criminal goons.

Dec. 22, just another Trumpian day that will live in infamy. After Flynn and Stone, just the beginning. But who didn't expect this? As we all know, even those who deny it, this president is altogether void of scruples and conscience. Thus 20 Jan. 2021 will be a day that will live in glory.

Going forward, someday we may have a judicious Congress and a great majority of rational states (38). That would open a path to a constitutional amendment circumscribing a president's pardoning power by abolishing, at a minimum, his or her single federal authority to grant clemency to collaborating hacks, pals, and criminal co-conspirators — as well as him- or herself.

I doubt I ever see that day, for the wheels of thoughtful governance grind slowly. Yet, that day is surely coming. As the 19th-century reformer Theodore Parker first so eloquently noted in the anti-slavery cause — which, he too, never saw to fruition — "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one,… [but] from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."

Paid sick leave? No way. Tax-deductible martinis? You got it.

Just what is it that runs through Mitch McConnell's veins? It sure as hell isn't warm human blood.

Whereas last spring Congress mandated that employers must provide two weeks of paid sick leave to workers at home with covid or caring for a quarantined family member, this winter McConnell made sure that that provision in the latest relief bill was stricken.

Meanwhile, he also made sure that the fully tax deductible three-martini lunch was back in congressional favor — at Trump's insistence and requisitioned as essential by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in "relief" negotiations — which even the Wall Street Journal editorial board condemns.

Don't care for martinis? Then "go ahead and order that [nearly $700] Clos de Tart 2005. You can write it off," quips the Journal. "This is bad tax policy now or any time."

Oh well, look at it this way: With a super-creative CPA or hyperaggressive tax attorney, that covid-inflicted worker can at least treat an acquaintance to a $1,500 lunch while discussing outside business opportunities; after all, he can also just write it off from his impossibly meager income. All he must really do is think like Mitch.

Our swarm of Gilded politicians and their chumps

​​​​​Matthew Zeitlin, a NYT reporter covering finance and economics, editorially ponders (perhaps) the sociopolitical upside of government intervention via deficit spending.

"As people reap the benefits of their belated concessions," he writes, "they’ll likely see that the nation’s public finances remain intact, despite fearmongering … [from] the remaining supply-side voices and small-government types in the Republican Party like Senator Ron Johnson [who] were so afraid of [deficit spending] they either threw roadblocks in front of new relief bills or opposed them altogether: If government can afford to bolster the incomes and living standards for a broad segment of the population in a crisis, they might ask, then why couldn’t it have done more from the start?"

Is the fear of deficit spending as so alarmingly circulated by the Sen. Johnsons of this country sincere? It sure wasn't when they jammed through Trump's flippant tax cuts in a non-recessionary period which are producing, and will continue producing, enormous government-budget gaps. When a Republican president is in the White House, their deficit fear turns to nothing but joy.

Also, no matter the reams of macroeconomic analyses that testify to the unalterable fact that tax cuts don't pay for themselves, that massive deficit spending is essential in bad economic times — again, no levelheaded economist would advise that particular spending during good times — and that the alleged fear, when we have a Democratic president, of imperative red ink is empirically unfounded, "supply-side voices and small-government types in the Republican Party" merrily go about bewitching their base over the fiscal barbarity of providing proper aid to struggling Americans.

But, their base is plenty accustomed to buying into bullshit: Whether they believe the bullshit is irrelevant; bullshit contributes mightily to owning the libs. And what could be sweeter? Nearly half of this nation dwells in wanton, politically crack-addled crapola, and there they will stay. They'll persist in fellating millionaire politicians in obvious no need of help, such as Ron Johnson, even though they need it themselves.

What a swarm of suckers and self-harming cretins. Much more harmful, however, is that they preserve this country in frivolous yet ominous divisions.

Bill Barr causes severe gastrointestinal pain among the crazies

Conservatives are already LOSING IT over what AG Barr just said about the potential investigation into Hunter Biden...

WATCH: https://t.co/YS9MldvBnP

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) December 21, 2020

That, from yesterday.

Should you not care to "WATCH" or you failed to catch it on the news, Barr said he stands by his earlier assertion that there was no "broad-based" fraud in the presidential election, adding that before his departure — and this really unhinged D'Souza's "conservatives," meaning not conservatives but "losing-it" radicals — "If I thought a special counsel [to investigate Hunter Biden] at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one and I haven't and I'm not going to." (He further said that "to the extent there’s an investigation, I think that it’s being handled responsibly and professionally currently within the department." Afterward, in an online video, D'Souza charged that Barr offered no explanation as to why he would not appoint a special counsel.)

Pseudoconservatives and jackbooted rabble-rousers demand as an article of faith that whatever claptrap they hustle or is otherwise hustled by far-right press organs or shouted on brownshirted broadcast outlets should be accepted as equivalent to Holy Scripture. It must not be questioned. Of course Hunter Biden is an evildoer; The blessed, unassailable saints of Breitbart and Newsmax say so. He — and his father — are not only worthy suspects ensnared by their web of irrational hate, they are manifestly guilty.

The U.S. Constitution was amended to protect such voices of blathering jackassery, and I'm damn glad it was. For there they are, quite free to embarrass themselves in all their contemptible squalor.