PMC Commentary

Trump'd ground game: S.N.A.F.U. & F.U.B.A.R in one

Politico mis-titled their story ("alarms raised" and all that) on Trump's get-out-the-vote campaign. I corrected their error, above. But I do hope they got the gist right.

For months we have suffered through dark and stormy days as a terrible spectre hovered over GOTVland. About thrice a week we'd read of meteorological powerhouse super PACs, American Bund organizations, religious fanatics and Elon Musk, too, raining down tens of millions of dollars on a Trump ground game. On Election Day, the other land, the one of the free and generally decent, would be washed from Earth in a torrent of greenbacks.  

Now this, from Politico: "Some battleground state Republicans say they’re worried they see little evidence of Donald Trump’s ground game — and fear it could cost him the election in an exceedingly close race.

"In interviews, more than a dozen Republican strategists and operatives in presidential battlegrounds voiced serious concerns about what they described as a paltry get-out-the-vote effort by the Trump campaign, [and] an untested strategy of leaning on outside groups to help do field work. several Republican operatives said they aren’t seeing the same kind of presence either from the Trump campaign itself or from those outside groups that they did during his previous presidential runs, in 2016 and 2020."    

The operatives may be misremembering those past efforts, or this year they are indeed seeing less effort, to be addressed momentarily. (I guess they don't remember that Trump lost the popular vote in those other years by a total of 10 million. Whither the admirable GOTV?)

The contemporary shortfalls are easily explained. In that wretched era of the Tea Party, the GOP began ostracizing and dooming businesslike Republican pols and the organizations that helped them. Wingnuts, purists, radio talk-show audiences, snake-handlers and felons began directing the entire political operation. Then they found their bungling messiah in 2015, no Mormons required.     

Hence the Republican Party has operated with less business skills than even I have. Of the Trump campaign's training of GOTV people, one operative said "it’s almost like a timeshare scheme. You have to go in and do the training, and you get the swag and the hat and the yard sign. That’s what you have to do to go get it. It doesn’t seem like people are really being activated, and the campaign’s not very forthcoming." Well blow me down.

Firsthand, on-the-ground accounts are enlightening. A Republican strategist in Michigan said "they are out-matching us in money, in enthusiasm and in the ground game." A Nevada operative told Politico "there’s really no organization. He comes out, they scramble to do a rally … but after that, there’s just really nothing else." And in Arizona a consultant mused, "It’s not a good place to go. But it’s logical, given the fact that they’re not giving the other segments of the electorate any place for buy in."

What is the consultant's doubleplusungood "place to go?" Where low- and mid-propensity voters dwell, largely rural, low-income areas. But that's the electorate the Trump campaign is centering its efforts on, seemingly unconcerned about all the higher-propensity voters it has alienated. Observers hanging with higher-income voters, then, aren't seeing all the wonderful things the wizardly Trump can do.

Still, I'll feel better about his strategy once Kamala Harris begins polling above the even mark or plus-2 or 3 points.

AI is an idiot

I posted my first morning piece — "Trump's dandy new $500 watch to the world's greatest master of incongruities, David Horowitz — on Facebook, a normal routine.

The searching, blind eye of Meta's AI then went to work, scrupulously safeguarding the innocent, the delicate, the vulnerable.

Within minutes it was on the case, rather, on my case. Alert, said a FB message. Your post violates "community standards" — the crime of weakening the site's efforts to make "people feel empowered."

The predicate adjective made its contaminate debut in high American society in 1983, says Webster, another plague visited upon us during the Reagan administration. I've never quite known what feeling empowered means, other than how Muhammad Ali always felt or maybe the state of a manic bipolar high.

I have, however, learned what violating community standards means. Other than failing to respect your dignity and safety, FB itemizes the transgression as the promotion of violent or criminal behavior, adult or child sexual exploitation, an absence of "integrity and authenticity," infringement of intellectual property and the posting of "content-related requests."

Now, AI is programmed to identify these online crimes, and in my public-enemy case I assume it spotted a content-related request: a $500 watch, which I was hawking. So, AI is really quite brilliant in such spotifications. But AI is also an idiot, in that it has no understanding whatsoever what a post's title means and what a post's content means.

Thus, it arbitrarily deleted the post. This happened once before. I submitted a "review" request, which FB said it would rule on and get back to me in a few days. It didn't.    

That I don't much care about. I do care about some brainless hunk of metal obliterating my posts because it has an IQ somewhere lower than that of an amoeba's. And what I care about much more than that is a future in which this inhuman moron is making truly consequential decisions for us all.

"Concepts of a catastrophic scam"

10 September 2024, presidential debate, subject: healthcare 

ABC moderator: "So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan."

Trump: "I have concepts of a plan. I'm not president right now. But if we come up with something I would only change it if we come up with something better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that. And you'll be hearing about it in the not-too-distant future."

Trump's customary dodge of a question about policy is to say he'll be releasing details of what he intends to do "in two weeks." He knows he will have propelled a veritable volcano of unrelated infamies by then; everyone will have forgotten about the unforthcoming plan.

At the debate and in the matter of his healthcare plan he tried a variation on the theme: not two weeks but "in the not-too-distant future." Twenty days have passed, and five'll get you 10 that Trump's definitely planned banana republic's second banana JD Vance will re-vomit tomorrow night that with which he fouled NBC News' airwaves in mid-Sept.  

Naturally my wager assumes that Americans' health, an incidental issue I grant you, comes up in question form. If so, way back to lo those distant two weeks past, JD up and offered this almost unbelievably catastrophic, second-hand healthcare draft:  

"[Trump is thinking of a] deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them." And that means? Because everyone's needs differ, Trump will "promote some more choice in our healthcare system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families."

And with that, JD whacked thousands of Americans living in a potential Project 2025 cesspool, which replaced Obamacare's risk pools. Having the absolute largest number of people in a national healthcare plan is the entire thrust of achieving the absolute lowest cost for people covered, since everyone is contributing to its fund.

And what would we call such a plan? "A one-size-fits-all approach." The mathematical and fiscal reasoning behind it is so bloody obvious it nearly goes without saying. A child could understand it. Who might not?

Millions of Trump supporters — many of them the very people now benefiting health-wise and financially from Obamacare's structure. They either simply don't grasp the math or they don't care because their sole interests lie in Trump's trans-bashing and lib-owning — in brief, whatever cultural folderol affects or improves their lives not one whit.

When Trump's most nettlesome ghost, before Sen. John McCain became he, gave a thumb-down to Republicans' 2017 homicidal attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, numerical estimates of Americans who'd lose their healthcare under the GOP alternative ranged up to 30 million. Had the alternative prevailed, many of the millions would now be dead. 

The issue is receiving little notice in this presidential election season, largely because of Trump's determination to keep the media and voters focused on Kamala's laugh or Tim's coaching status or non-opponent Joe's crookedness. The real pity of it is, his determination works.

From Trump's dandy new $500 watch to the world's greatest master of incongruities, David Horowitz

I gather The Bulwark's Jonathan Last knows watches. He understands their values, components, production, marketing — just about everything there is to know. And in a crackerjack chucklesome piece he alerts us to the latest grift of Donald Trump: Having peddled items for which there are better alternatives at better prices — "diplomas, vodka, steaks, water, sneakers, coins, and NFTs" (non-fungible tokens) — he's now huckstering watches.

And you're in luck. Donald is offering two models; one, the one below, you can have for tha affordable, fits-every-budget price of only $499. But before rushing to his order page, you might want to give this some thought: Aside from its characteristic gaudiness — the Trump signature of all his fine products — Mr. Last ran the all-inclusive-production numbers and came up with the seller's cost of about $60. (Plus you can buy a better watch for half that.)   

Model No. 2 you don't want to know about — its retail price, $100,000 — but if you do want all the specs, they're here. 

Before leaving this urgent topic, there's one other item I must share. While pondering the ins and outs of the ex-president's infinitely tacky, unpresidential junk-mongering, this glaring incongruity in his carnival barking occurred to the columnist. 

Does this not "prove that Trump’s depiction of the American economy as a hellscape is ridiculous?" asks Last. Only guessing but I'd bet Trump was the first to know how ridiculous it is. He just doesn't care; he disregards truth as a thing of any value. (See: Prof. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit.)

He's likely to contravene something he said only five minutes ago; he gives it no thought; he throws contradictions around precisely because he's anything but thoughtful; and again, he simply doesn't care what he said, whether five minutes or 16 days ago. Critically, because all he does care about is himself, Trump is without ideology. 

I confess, I posted the upper body of this piece only as a perfect lead-in to another jarring incongruity, one by the once-New Left ideologue turned far-right ideologue David Horowitz. He's a true master of the despicably deliberate inconsistency. He's capable of knowing truth,  which means he cares about it — especially when twisting it. What was true for Horowitz on Monday might be heresy on Wednesday, yet by Friday he's back to orthodox Monday. 

My memory of this particular incongruity is 20 years old, the oddity itself spanning two or three years. and to me it remains the granddaddy of all incongruities, because a) former academic Horowitz knew the truth, so b) his initial incongruity with the truth was done knowingly, then c) he contradicted his first incongruity with a second incongruity with the truth, which means, I suppose, d) by twice leaping for untruthful, extreme incongruities, Horowitz actually strikes an equilibrium, wounding up at a point of truth.  

In simpler terms ...

I saw him once in an interview in which he was whipping one of his very favorite boys: college professors. They're sloths who pull in outrageously high salaries merely for giving two, maybe three lectures a week — and with that they're done, said David. Three or four hours of work each week for an annual $100k or more. Professors, he argued, are lazy good-for-nothings who deserve neither their titles, their salaries, nor the community's respect.

Perhaps a couple years later I saw David again, and this time the subject was the scarcity of women professors in science disciplines. The debate: What might be the cause of this academic deficiency? David had the answer, the answer, and he asserted it with great confidence. College professors, he explained, are burdened by long hours of research, writing, lecturing, faculty meetings and conferences. In a typical week they'll exhaust perhaps 80 hours as well as themselves, said David — and women, he continued, either don't want or can't handle such a brutal and taxing job. 

I can still marvel at his sophistry. And I'm convinced that in the running competition for greatest all-time incongruities, it's David Horowitz and Donald Trump neck-and-neck, but the former might even have a slight lead. In the category of grift, however, it will take a genuine Olympic champion to overcome Trump, what with his watches, diplomas, vodka, steaks, water, sneakers, coins and NFTs.

The cowardice runs so deep, it's in their bone marrow

Last week Congress had to shorten the last day of its members' intensive labors from Tuesday all the way to Thursday, their usual schedule, so they could have a little more time to pack for a quick vacation. They'll be back after the election.

Two senators did hang around a while longer — conference leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in town to chat with the defenders of American democracy who work on the taxpayers' dime, although many of them strongly oppose taxpayers helping to defend Ukrainian democracy.          

Still, Chuck and Mitch thought it only courteous to meet with Volodymyr. The retiring minority leader, who happens to support Ukraine''s fight, was so thoughtful and courteous he especially wanted two senators vying for his job, South Dakota's John Thune and Florida's Rick Scott, to join the meeting with Volodymyr. Also John Barrasso, Republicans' probable No. 2 Senate guy next session.

After all, in their high-ranking capacities each will soon carry the heavier end of Ukraine's legislative load: its future. Will it be that of democracy, freedom and Western alignment? Or, once the mass executions are over, one of fascistic oppression by Trump's mass-murdering good friend, Vladimir Putin? In carrying the aforementioned load, would it not also be courteous — and thoughtful — of Thune, Scott and Barrasso to at least listen to what Zelensky had to say? 

He came wanting to share with senators of both parties his government's "victory plan," something long demanded by Congress. Reports are it includes more military aid, holding on to Russia's Kursk region as both a bargaining chip and display of Ukraine's military prowess, fast-tracked NATO membership and striking Russia proper with long-range missiles, with the West's approval.

In fact Zelensky told the senatorially gathered that his military forces could possibly forego further U.S. funding if allowed to fire deeper into Russian territory. That option would satisfy virtually every member of Congress; no longer could constituents complain about America's defense of others' freedom. Zelensky knows he must move fast for Ukraine's sake and Congress' tolerance, for he's entering a war phase that plagues democracies: His people are beginning to tire of the fight.

Decisions about Ukraine's future are among the most vital to be thoughtfully weighed by Congress. Incumbent on U.S. senators is to ask questions, to press for answers, to seek solutions and conclude a policy. But of course none of that can be thoughtfully accomplished in the absence of facts, informed minds and good faith. Senate leaders Schumer and McConnell and other senators met with President Zelensky so that all parties could proceed on those conditions.

But, as Axios reported, "Three important names were missing from [the] Senate huddle with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky." In the next congressional session, each occupant of those names — Thune, Scott and Barrasso — will be in the highest ranks of Senate Republicans, quite possibly as leaders of the chamber's controlling party.  

And in their first preliminary act as the driving decision makers in this profoundest of issues facing the U.S. government, all three fled the scene as would invertabrate burglars at night or the most cowardly soldiers in battle. Essentially they're both: thieves robbing the taxpayers of what they pay them to do — embrace the challenges of leadership —  and even more so, the most poltroonish, lily-livered of men confronting political danger.

Sen. Thune was perhaps the yellowest of the faint-hearted trio. He's likely the frontrunner to replace Boss McConnell and he has supported Ukraine in the past. But now of far greater urgency to Thune is not the future of 44 million Ukrainians under the sheer evil of Putin's shadow but rather placating a twice-impeached ex-president and fourfold indictee. The senator's pitiful reason for skipping the Zelensky meeting? A scheduling conflict — the banality of fear.

The other two sad sacks, Scott and Barrasso, who fled this most fundamental of governing responsibilities are almost too ethically bankrupt and conspicuously simple-minded to trouble oneself with condemning. Both team leaders of the intellectually vacuumed and lowlife obstructionists of goodwill have dome nothing but aggravate Ukraine's desperation. And nothing is what could change their meager minds.          

They just didn't attend. Zelensky, I imagine, said a silent "Thank you for that." Still, the two whackjobs and singularly Trump-debased Thune had been asked by their Senate leader to momentarily pause their habituations of ignorance, intransigence and cowardice and pretend they are serious men. But a mere pause was too much to ask.

Heaven help us all if this sorry-ass triumvirate is put in charge of the next United States Senate.

War is no board game in which humanity is not a player

Less than a week ago, former congressman, White House chief of staff, CIA director and secretary of defense Leon Panetta said in a "CBS News Sunday" interview that Israel's pager attacks in Lebanon were "a form of terrorism." The form it took was terrorism's core, in that it "makes people ask the question," he continued, "What the hell is next?" — the prime objective of all terrorist acts.

Few people with even the slimmest knowledge of foreign affairs, which excludes everyone involved in Trump's campaign, would dispute Panetta's competence to make such a judgement. The assessment also applies to his additional remark. "The forces of war are largely in control right now of what’s going on. [And if] the nations of the world ... don’t try to deal with it now, mark my word, it is the battlefield of the future." (Quotes from The Times of Israel.) 

Yet one person in dispute is Andrew Exum, whose résumé speaks for itself. He was once the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. Writing for The Atlantic, he inserts the aside of "Panetta went so far as to describe" Israel's pager attack as “terrorism.” His choice of predicates also speaks for itself: The defense secretary's remark was out-of-bounds. The reader soon realizes where Mr. Exum is headed. 

He is fine with "The forces of war" being "in control" and it's pretty clear that he's either in disagreement with, or indifferent to, Panetta's follow-up observation of  "deal with it now" or "it is the battlefield of the future." For Exum is gung-ho when it comes to "Israeli attacks over the past two weeks that have wreaked havoc on Hezbollah as an organization."            

That's his enthusiastic focus: Israel's incessant leveling of Lebanon's structures in pursuit of this or that Hezbollah leader, notwithstanding the civilian masses that are "leveled" right along with them. Exum thrills at Israel's "making it very hard for Hezbollah to organize itself coherently," "taking away the ability of Hezbollah operatives to securely communicate with one another at the tactical level," and with the aggressor dealing "a serious blow to its adversary."      

Most Western observers haven't a problem with "much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership" being "devastated" (by other means), as Exum writes, yet he's more than content with it. He's ecstatic. He revels in writing that it's "Israel’s relentless air strikes this week" that are delivering the devastation, that "never before has Hezbollah’s rank and file been so publicly exposed and, worse, humiliated," and that "Hezbollah is surely reeling." 

But aren't others surely reeling? Only in his penultimate paragraph does he "spare a thought for the innocent Lebanese living in the high-rise buildings that collapsed in Israel’s air strike. They didn’t ask for Hezbollah to build its command center underneath their home following the 2006 war. They didn’t ask for any of this." There, Exum is word-perfect. They didn't ask for any of this, just as Palestinians didn't request the same of Hamas. 

Sure it's a darn shame that hundreds and soon into the thousands of Lebanese innocents are being massacred by Israeli airstrikes. (Photo, one of its "precision" strikes.) On the one hand, those faceless Israeli bomber pilots manage, on occasion, to whack one or two Hezbollah bad guys. Otherwise, Exum does spare a thought, the briefest of thoughts, to the atrocities befalling blameless Lebanese civilians.

He also bounds from word-perfect to word games in writing of "the high-rise buildings that collapsed in Israel’s air strike" — not "the Israeli airstrike that obliterated the high-rise and residential buildings into choking dust and rubble." Exum could not have missed the straight reporting on these strikes. "Israeli warplanes flattened several residential buildings just south of Beirut ..." is the first sentence in a NY Times piece.

In that there is no suggestion of a kinda proximate cause; THE BUILDINGS COLLAPSED! in an Israeli airstrike. Exum also thought it advisable to omit that the buildings were residential, miles more to the point and more painful than just "high-rise buildings." Yes, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense knows how to mitigate reality, soften indiscriminating brutality and convert a tale of mass slaughter into an exciting story about delivering "serious blows to an adversary."

Nestled among the sanitized "metrics" of Pentagon war plans and stars and clusters on shoulders is where Andrew Exum once belonged — and where he should be today, not in The Atlantic. 

JD Vance, marriage counselor of the toughest kind of manly "love"

A reader — thank you, Anne J. — made known this Lincoln Project ad in the comment section yesterday. When I watched it I instantly knew it needed more exposure. 

Typical of the Project's Never Trump devouts, the ad is well produced, well directed and, well, quite powerful. It addresses the "sickening" stuff of "JD Vance's disrespect for women," as its creators write. They add, "but don't take it from us--just listen to him yourself" — an excellent recommendation.

Other than saying I can't see how anyone born after about 1880 could agree with JD's 19th-century opinion of violent husbands as just another "fact of life," as are school shootings, I needn't say more.

I have a gripe: There is one life category that demands separate-but-equal treatment

Mine is a really big gripe. Some others may think they have the same payload of gripeness, but nay, they are bigly mistaken. Mistaken, if they spend their days in activities more profitable and mentally healthier than writing about politics and international affairs.

And here's my gripe, my grumble and grievance, preceded by the briefest of background.

I read countless articles each day from an untold number of websites. Some lead me into digging around for corroboration of this point or that, whatever seems a trifle peculiar, or just needs substantiation. This digging can then lead into a seemingly infinite number of minutes, sometimes hours, of corroborating one factoid atop a turtles-all-the-way-down hole, oddly populated by rabbits.

That's how my days begin, or can begin, with mornings turning to afternoons — and something I really must stop — afternoons straying well into night and on occasion right into the wee hours of morn again.

Now for The Big Gripe. Ir seems only in the last couple months that I've been encountering, more and more often, online-promoted articles or interviews which I then find are podcasts. Just today I've been forearmed and decked by at least two of these foul and fetid creatures. Overall, some are maybe 15 minutes, some 30 minutes, some even a wickedly one-hour long. 

For anyone who must read dozens of articles each day, of which each, as they once stood anyway, could be consumed in a couple minutes, that particular anyone sure as hell hasn't 30 minutes to squander listening to the contents of one interview, one panel discussion or the possible wisdom of just one. 

In short, readers are increasingly discriminated against in favor of folks who'd rather listen while walking or motoring on down to work. The very least these vendors of Reason and elucidation could do is offer a genuine separate-but-equal format of audio and print. Is that so hard?  

The Trump campaign's oppo-researched "JD Vance Dossier"

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein obtained the Trump campaign's opposition-research dossier on JD Vance, compiled when the infighting was raging over who should be named the Golden Child, the possible heir to the heaven-sent throne, the poor bastard whose reputation will never recover.

I say prospective poor bastard not bitch only because the mere idea of Donald having to work with a woman most assuredly hurled him and those who would suffer terribly with him into frequent episodes of severe seizures coupled with clinical depression.

The title of Klippenstein's post: "Read the JD Vance Dossier," subtitled "We're publishing the supposed Iran-hacked document." He links to it five-paragraphs down, which I twice mistook for an inserted ad. And it's a link, not the full document, on his website, since the full monty is 271 pages long.

In his post, Klippenstein's content is mostly about why he chose to publish and why arguments against publishing — primarily "the government’s campaign against 'foreign malign influence'" — don't hold up. One argument he makes in favor of light is, I think, incontrovertible: "If the document had been hacked by some 'anonymous' like hacker group, the news media would be all over it." To this he adds: "I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government."

I'll note that The NY Times, for one, got a bellyful of that practice in 1961, as did President Kennedy. When the paper acquired top-secret info on America's imminent Bay of Pigs invasion, before going to print it let the president know it had the goods. Kennedy pleaded silence on the Times' part in the name of national security. The Times agreed and the invasion was an embarrassing bust for POTUS, who later told the Times reporters that he wished they had proceeded with publication, thus nixing the CIA's boneheaded plan. 

As for the Trump campaign's top-secret info on JD, Klippenstein does us a favor by reducing the document's "highlights" to a few bullet points in its own wording. His introduction: "The Vance Dossier is factual and intelligently written. No Jason Bourne style capers appear, and there’s no sleaze. Instead, the Vance Dossier enumerates pretty reasonable liabilities as a then-contender for VP nominee, including:

• “Vance has been one of the chief obstructionists to U.S. efforts to providing [sic] assistance to Ukraine.”

• “Vance criticized public health experts and elected officials for supporting Black Lives Matter protests while condemning anti-lockdown [Covid] protests.”

• “Vance ‘embraced non-interventionism.’”

• “In 2020, Vance criticized President Trump’s airstrike killing Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, worrying it would continue to bog down America in the Middle East to the advantage of China. Vance suggested that the country had been entangled in wars in the Middle East so ‘financial elites’ could profit from the rise of China.”

Pretty dry, penetratingly dull — especially when compared to the reply that hack-inquiring Klippenstein received from the Trump campaign's uncommunicative communications hatchet-man Steven Cheung: "The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump." Oh how I wish he had written the dossier.

Politico's Marc Caputo was struck not by "what’s in the 271-page file" — that, I'd say, was a given, for there's nothing striking about it — "but what was left out." The omission is indeed a rather curious one: the warm, personable JD Vance's observation about "childless cat ladies." He made the off-the-point-of his-head remark in a 2021 interview on Fox News, the host, Tucker Carlson.

Writes Caputo: "The exclusion suggests that Trump campaign researchers either missed Vance’s incendiary remarks or thought they were no big deal. The former, however, seems implausible as the document posted by Klippenstein included dozens of other citations of Vance’s appearances on Carlson’s show." 

I agree. The oppo-research was conspicuously deep, 271 pages deep. That the diggers happened to overlook this one interview as they were lifting material from other Fox News interviews is, in the word's true sense, unbelievable. Yet there's a prima facie case to be made in advocacy of the "no big deal" alternative.

Trump has cocooned himself with 100 percenters, which is to say, those who think in unconditional conformity with the whats and whys of that which passes for his thinking. Caputo doesn't advance the perfectly "plausible" case I'm making, probably because he'd see it as unseemly of an upper-ranks, among-the-elites journalist.

I'm unburdened by such august monikers, hence I can say without fear of reputation harm and with the highest of confidence that the oppo people of the Trump-cloned absence of sophisticated cognition watched JD's Fox interview and gave it no thought — precisely because, at most, they chuckled a bit at his "childless cat ladies" punching-down routine (another characteristic of TrumpThink), thought maybe What a guy, what a real man, and went on, unconcerned about a soundbite that would do the campaign its greatest damage.

But in any case, the much-mysterious super-secret Trump documents could have remained so, while in no way subtracting from the sum of whatever might have been interesting — excepting my proffered, unilateral and unmitigated guesswork, which you're welcome to rip into pieces. 

The mightily virtuous one has fallen

I adhere to 11 rules of better living through refined trust.

* Never trust a Christian who tells me what a good Christian he is.

* Never trust my ex-wife.

* Never trust but-you'll-pay-less shoes.

* Never trust that someday I'll get organized.

* Never trust a Republican, any Republican.

* Never trust private enterprise over government service.

* Never trust promised money. 

* Never trust expiration dates on canned food.

* Never trust GPS for the best driving route.

* Never trust my internet provider to provide internet.

* And — never trust a New York City mayor who hammers the message of his upright, clean-living, hates-crime virtues.

Note: Number 11 is closely related to Number 1. 

Quote of the week, the year, the last decade and this one

She'll do things, some will be good; some won't be. But she's a politician, and he's the apocalypse.

— anonymous political activist, speaking to Politico

She includes Hillary, and she is also a he named Joe.

Israel's latest war - its grotesque beginning

In one of those hearings from a friend of a friend instances, though this one is verifiable and publicly known, word came that another friend had seen firsthand the systemic destruction of Lebanon and the many deaths going with it. He witnessed Israel's carpet-bombings and was dumbstruck. His fury intensified at the world's inaction; once again, there'd be no peace imposed by more powerful countries. And his stomach turned at it all. 

Here at home, The Times' front-page headline was "U.S Pushes Israel-Hezbollah Cease-Fire in Lebanon." Inside, the expected whiplash: "Netanyahu Vows to Keep Up Strikes on Hezbollah." In a statement he said Israel would continue bombing the even smaller country "with all our might. This is the policy." The Biden administration's "push" was also an easy prediction: It was academic to its last word and final period. 

What's all too real is the lamentable, even pathetic persistence by the U.S. — to a lesser degree its European allies and several Arab nations that together wrote the three-week cease-fire proposal — in believing that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty war cabinet will stand down before they're goddamn good and ready. No benefactor, no world partnership, no anyone can tell them to cease leveling Beirut in their "targeting" of the Hezbollah militia.

The Biden administration's national security spokesman, John Kirby, took extraordinary refuge from the likely incredulous press by talking about the proposal as though he just happened to anonymously drop in from the streets. He said the White House believed that Netanyahu & Gangsters Inc. was "on board" with the cease-fire idea — "otherwise," and he was only guessing here, mind you, "otherwise the group would not have publicized it." So Kirby believed the WH believed ... but don't ask him, he's only a bystander.

With Israel's warmongering snub of what's titanically humane and logical, we must also acknowledge that neither is Hezbollah known for world-class statesmanship. Yet between it and Israel's chieftains, the Lebanese militia can make reasonable claim to at least some effort expended on instant peace. For nearly a year Hezbollah has made it known that it will cease hostilities against Israel if Israel does likewise in Gaza. Therein lies a perfectly sound basis for proceeding to perhaps a lasting peace.

The militia's offer has been met by the chieftains' slaughter of 42,000 Gazans, to date and counting. Yesterday the Israeli military struck a northern Gaza school compound used in a polio vaccination campaign, claiming it was a Hamas hideaway for a command center whose inhabitants were plotting an assault on Israel. It provided no evidence of such, nor were there reports of militants killed. But the military did manage to murder 15 civilians, women and children included, of course.

Israel has bombed four other northern Gaza schools in the last six days, reports The Times. Those airstrikes killed "at least 20 other people, including a couple and their two children." I've not looked for the massacre videos being spread throughout social media; for me it's enough that the Times has verified their authenticity and writes that some show "the gruesome aftermath of the strike on the [first school referenced herein], with people carrying badly injured children and some carrying only parts of bodies."

Now Israel has again taken its massacre show on the road. I'm informed that the nation's founders took its name from the Hebrew Yisrael, meaning "God perseveres." I don't know about God, but I do know that Israel does — and with a vengeance nearly unmatched. Its bombings of Lebanon are among recent history's most destructive. Israeli said yesterday that a high-ranking Hezbollah commander was killed in one of its 1,000-plus sorties that have taken out other senior militants, although their numbers are indistinct in the propagandistic fog of Israel's claptrap factory.

Israeli leaders don't care but the world (kind of) does when asking, At what cost? The body count will change as soon as this is posted, but we know airstrikes killed 558 civilians, including 50 children and 94 women, on Monday alone. That according to the Lebanese health ministry. About a half-million Lebanese have been displaced, roughly 40,000 of them seeking shelter in more than 200 government-recommended schools. Lebanese officials might want to rethink that, given what Israel is doing to schools in Gaza.

The health ministry also said "at least 92 people" were killed on Thursday, most in southern and eastern Lebanon airstrikes, the regions of Israel's heaviest bombardments. As for that total accounting, since October nearly 1,600 Lebanese civilians have been killed. That by itself is heartrending, but somewhere beyond even that rank brutality lies the heart of the darkest war criminality: Nearly half of the lives were lost to Israeli goon squads in only the last 11 days.

This two-minute video puts faces on merely a few of the victims.    

Returning to the man whose stomach turned at it all, I can assure the gentleman he's not alone. 

The vast spillover of Trump's bile and gangsterism

Way down in Louisiana, not even Huey Long, the kingfish (once) of all demagogues, played the race card. He politicked on economic equality in place of what all other Southern demagogues were tub-thumping about. For that much, credit to Huey.  

None, though, for Louisiana's U.S. Representative Clay Higgins. He deserves some sort of prize, but not for anything related to human decency. My thanks to The Bulwark for its post on what genuine nasty looks like — and one congressman who made sure we could see him in his natural habitat of wanton nastiness.

It seems a nonprofit group that works on behalf of Haitian immigrants in the U.S. recently advocated the filing of criminal charges against Trump and running mote JD (not a typo) for endangering the lives of Springfield, Ohio Haitians with their maliciously forethought incendiary rhetoric and mob incitements. This was the true outrage for Rep. Higgins. So he took to Twitter.

Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters," wrote The Honorable Gentleman from Louisiana, "but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of the country before January 20th.

The irony hurts — that it's Clay, Donald, JD and their kind converting the United States into the "nastiest country in the western [sic] hemisphere."

The congressman's seething malice was itself, you might say, somewhat less than "sophisticated." On the other hand, he was honored by a Maoist Great Leap Forward in his national ranking within America's professional stupidity tournaments. He earned that by strongly advising legal U.S. residents to vacate this land of the free before the ultimate of "slapstick gangsters" — the not-our-president-and-vp — deport them unconstitutionally. 

Higgins' tweet caused a bit of a ruckus on the House floor, reports The Bulwark. Among others, the Democratic chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and even Trump BFF Rep. Byron Donalds, who is black, confronted him. So dad had to step in to keep the two from pummeling the one, or so I'm imagining.

The Republican speaker and in-House parent of all the Higginses quelled any further ruckus by assuring the press that The Honorable Gentleman from Louisiana had "prayed about it, he regretted it, and he pulled the post down." Of Mike Johnson's three claims, only the last was accurate. (Still, for a GOPer, a 2:1 ratio is pretty good.) The Bulwark also reports that "Higgins later expressed absolutely zero remorse for the post in comments to CNN."

The publication goes on to say it's "remarkable" that House Republicans "were willing to admit he’d done anything wrong in the first place." While I agree with that assessment, I differ in thinking that we could expect — in the way of accept — that GOP Housers "covered for Higgins."

My disagreement stems from an unwillingness to embrace the notion that Higgins' vileness was but another "normalization" in American politics. (Also see: MTG, Gosar, Gaetz & Assoc.) Americans long ago went way over the line in that category of mind-readjustment, and we should damn well begin taking several steps back.

I disagree with The Bulwark largely because of what the publication also writes about our exceptions and bowing downs before today's kingfish of demagogic vileness: "After all, Trump has been lying and rabble-rousing about Haitians and other migrants in similarly grotesque terms for weeks, with zero pushback from the likes of Johnson."

The electorate's metamorphosis into its unthinking GroupThink acceptance of Trump's "lying and rabble-rousing" is the sole cause of its political normalization. The lying rabble-rouser had nothing to do with it; he merely sat back and waited — and not for long — for massive swaths of voters to listen, become rather accustomed to it, and the final step: to broadly see it as just American politics S.O.P. — even though it was, historically, American politics extraordinaire.     

The media as well has come to accept it. Imagine this is the year 1980, and Republican nominee Ronald Reagan bought newspaper ad space to run what Trump ran last week on Truth Social. The Gipper is then swiftly denounced as entirely unfit for the White House on every broadsheet's front page and in the opening of every evening newscast. His party scrambles to strip him of the nomination, which it does overnight. And Ronald Reagan is no more.    

It was The Bulwark that alerted me to what Trump posted. I sure as hell didn't see it in The NY Times. He knows acceptance — so too, horrendously, does the old Grey Lady. And so here's what this year's Republican nominee understood would be embraced or simply brushed off as just everyday American politics. 

Pretty good excuse

The latest from Andy Borowitz.

Trump Says He Will Be Too Senile to Debate in Late October

PALM BEACH (The Borowitz Report)—Explaining his claim that a second debate with Kamala Harris would be “too late,” Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he expects to be “way too senile” by the end of October.

“People are saying that they can’t understand a thing I’m saying, and, quite frankly, neither can I,” he said. “I’m like RFK Jr. on steroids.”

“I have the most amazing dementia in the history of dementia,” he boasted. “I’m winning at dementia.”

Trump predicted that, were he to participate in a late October debate, “That thing I said about ‘they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs’ will seem like the Gettysburg Address.”

What voters should know about our economy since WW II

The Kennedy School of Government's economics professor Jeffrey Frankel has served twice under both a Republican and Democratic president on the Council of Economic Advisers. In a March 2024 post for Harvard's Belfer Center, he cited two "puzzles."

One, he wrote, is that "US economic performance under President Joe Biden has been much stronger than voters perceive it to be," which, unfortunately, is less puzzle than fact. And two? Also fact. "The US economy has since World War II consistently done better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents." 

His focus was on the long-term record, which is "even less widely known, including among Democratic voters, than the truth about Biden’s term" — most people believe "the reverse, that Republican presidents are better stewards of the economy than Democrats." He further noted that this "is not exactly surprising" since "the proposition sounds implausible on the face of it," as though it's a partisan assessment and nothing more.

What Frankel failed to note is that there is a partisan assessment at work, but not by the economy's better stewards. Republicans have invested decades of ahistorical humbug into conning the electorate to believe that because they're businesslike and opposed to money-gobbling big government — to repeat, both are a con — they're just naturally better at all things economic. Yet Democrats' superior record "is completely true," wrote Frankel.

It's wise to always keep in mind that presidents are often more the economy's puppet than puppet master. Still, Democratic presidents have been more inclined toward economic stimuli in various ways (curiously, this was left unmentioned by Frankel), which in part explains their success.

The economist details the comparative past; the bullet points are his words. The also-concise, humorously titled chart is from The Economist, no left-wing propagandist. 

* US GDP has averaged a rate of growth of 4.23 percent per annum during Democratic administrations, versus 2.36 per cent under Republicans, a remarkable difference of 1.87 percentage points.

* This is postwar data, covering 19 presidential terms—from Truman through Biden.  If one goes back further, to the Great Depression, to include Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, the difference in growth rates is even larger.

* Since World War II, Democrats have seen job creation average 1.7 % per year when in office, versus 1.0 % under the GOP.  

*The results [for both GDP and job growth] are similar regardless whether one assigns responsibility for the first quarter of a president’s term to him or to his predecessor.

* Relatedly, the average Democratic presidential term has been in recession for 1 of its 16 quarters, whereas the average for the Republican terms has been 5 quarters, a startlingly big difference.

Back to me ... all are big differences that I hope Kamala Harris points out from time to time. Without dragging herself through the statistical weeds, she can frame the historical discrepancies favoring Democrats in simple English, e.g.:

"Since the Second World War, America's economic growth has performed "startlingly" better under Democratic presidents than the other guys. It's on the record and in 'the book' — you can look it up if you have a mind to."   

As for inflation under President Biden, now down to 2.5%, nearly the target rate, during Trump's first 42 months in office the rate of inflation was 6%, "according to the government’s consumer price index," wrote Forbes magazine two weeks ago. That statistic certainly startled me, as it would a whole lot of voters.