The Carpentariat

What a tedious spectacle; the Democratic "debate"-droning of me me me

I have no intention of blogging tonight's debate. But I must say with no relevant urgency that all this "I'm the only candidate on this stage who …" — a rhetorical tic performed mostly by Sens. Warren and Sanders, and why-in-hell-is-he-even-up-there Tom Steyer — had me reading the papers more than listening to the debate after the first 30 minutes or so.

As Eastern philosophers observed thousands of years ago, the more strenuously and theatrically one reaches for something, the farther away it becomes. Warren and Sanders, especially, should read some Taoism. 

Liberated feminism in the 21st century

Yesterday we indulged the alluringly related issues of gender equality, constitutional interpretations, and topless women in public, so that your little Johnny could go home after a mall visit and lock himself in the bathroom, with Dad's latest issue of Hustler.

Today we ask — and of this issue I was unaware, until a commenter raised my consciousness — what, oh what, as advertised, does Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina smell like?

Thanks to her marketing department and alert Guardian reporter Hadley Freeman, our curiosity can be satisfied without fingering through our wallets for a spare £58:

"According to the candle, it is a 'funny, gorgeous, sexy and beautifully unexpected scent', a mix of 'geranium, citrusy bergamot, and cedar absolutes juxtaposed with damask rose and ambrette seed'. To which one can only say: boy, Gwyneth sure does spend a lot of time [with her head up her vagina] to have picked up on all that. I’ve read entire wine menus with fewer descriptive references."

Ms. Freeman further informs that Gwyneth has sold out of her candles, so I guess I'll just have to go knock on Gwyneth's door.

Because I'm all for sniffing out the cause of women's rights wherever they can be found — before they sink to rank commercialism by the leading feminists of our times.

Of "principled" Republican senators and Mad-Matthews disease

CBS News:

"Senior White House officials [say] they increasingly believe that at least four Republicans, and likely more, will vote to call witnesses…: senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and possibly Cory Gardner of Colorado."

Counting on any one Republican to do the right thing is a risky proposition. Counting on several Republicans borders on madness.

Last night I heard Chris Matthews describe the particular batch above — as opposed to the general GOP batch of wingnuts and crackpots — as those who are "principled," which is like honoring George W. Bush because he wasn't as conspicuously psychotic as Donald Trump.

White House officials' wording to CBS News was peculiar; they believe "at least four Republicans … will vote to call witnesses," but of the four they name, Cory Gardner is only a possibility. And for good reason. He's up for reelection, thus he's been firmly in the Trump camp of late, merely to please Colorado's electoral wingnuts and crackpots.

And Sen. Susan Collins? To count on that sniveling Janus of syrupy Maine gibberish is to count on winning the state's lottery. Like Cory, it's principles, shminciples for Susan — she simply wants to be reelected. Sure, she'll vote to call witnesses if her internal polling data unmistakably tell her to, but I wouldn't buy a ticket for that.

Chris Matthews has a habit of engaging mouth before thought. If he had given any amount of the latter before his vocal eruption of principled Republican senators, he would have shut the fuck up before that spilled out, since every last one — "principled" or not — has in general defended the galactically corrupt, little man in the White House.

Bull Moose Bernie

In a NY Times editorial board interview, Bernie Sanders displayed two fundamental political illiteracies that would make his White House occupancy (or presidential roaming) a long, miserable, unproductive and even counterproductive fours years: He knows little about the political history of the United States and even less about the U.S. presidency. I quote:

"What my administration is about is not sitting with Mitch in the Oval Office or wherever it is, negotiating something…. [It's] to convince the American people that in fact we can have a government that represents working people and not just the 1 percent. And that will mean, by the way, that I suspect we’re going to use Air Force One quite a bit. We’re going to get around the country, we’re not just going to be in the Oval Office."

That, in brief, is Sanders' concept of his "political revolution," which he further described as "an administration unprecedented, certainly in the modern history of this country, maybe going back to F.D.R."

In his first term, Roosevelt was able to accomplish his New Deal reforms chiefly because he possessed overwhelming congressional majorities as well as the support of the American people. In fact, on occasion these two political factors combined to push FDR toward legislation he was lukewarm on, at best; for example the establishment of federally insured banking (FDIC), which he feared would pose a "moral hazard."

And of course many reforms that even the wildly popular Roosevelt desired were aggressively (and successfully) opposed in Congress by mossback Southern racists and demagogues. No amount of FDR's barnstorming or fireside chats to the nation could ever convince Southern Democrats to vote against their constituencies.

But Bernie believes he can do what FDR could not?

What the senator seems to more deeply believe in is "The Myth of the Bully Pulpit," as rendered by several political historians in an Atlantic piece a few years ago.

Said George C. Edwards III, of Texas A&M University: "[Presidents] virtually never move public opinion in their direction. It happened for Ronald Reagan. It happened for FDR. It happens all the time. You should anticipate failure if you're trying to change people's minds. The data is overwhelming." Said Rutgers' David Greenberg: "It is not the magic bullet that it's often made out to be." And Princeton's presidential historian Julian Zelizer added that if progressive bully pulpits ever had any merits, they've been eviscerated by the right's massive propaganda apparatus of counterprogramming.

Either Sen. Sanders knows none of this, or he's lying to his base — which is even worse.

​​​​​"WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?"

The Washington Post:

"In a tweet [yesterday], Trump criticized Democrats for trying to determine whether Iranian attacks the administration has said were planned by Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani against U.S. targets were imminent.

"'It doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past,' Trump wrote."

He also retweeted this:

The corrupted Dems trying their best to come to the Ayatollah's rescue.#NancyPelosiFakeNews pic.twitter.com/a0ksPHeXCy

— داون آندر (@D0wn_Under) January 13, 2020

Yes, as candidate Trump said in April, 2016:

"I will be so presidential ..."

"Free the Nipple"

I'm just re-reporting:

"The Supreme Court said Monday that it will not take up a challenge to a [Laconia,] New Hampshire ordinance banning women from appearing topless in public.

"A group with the motto 'Free The Nipple' argued that the law violates the Constitution by treating men and women differently."

NBC News chose to display this rather puritanical angle of a nipple-freed New Hampshire advocate, which, let's face it, kinda defeats the purpose of the gender-equality protests:

They just don't make 'em like Goebbels anymore

The president assassinated Gen. Suleimani because, said he in a Friday interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham:

"I believe it probably would’ve been four embassies [attacked]."

For a presidential belief, there was shockingly little follow-up; in fact there was none, as the Washington Post's James Downie reports:

"No warnings were issued to staff at the embassy in Iraq or any other unnamed embassies."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was more certain on Friday, saying there was intel on "attacks on U.S. embassies, period, full stop." Seconds later, however, his certainty morphed into ambiguity; the attacks would come not only on American embassies, but "military bases, American facilities throughout the region."

By the way, and in case you want clarification, Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels believed that Poland attacked Germany in 1939, not the other way around. Well that's what he said, and he stuck to it.

You got a problem with that? Then take it up, or not, with Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, or DefSec Mike Esper, who said yesterday in an unguarded, unthinking, unhinged-in-an-unGoebbelsesque sense of befuddlement, that he "didn’t see [any evidence] with regard to four embassies."

If Joe were still alive and, undoubtedly, head of Donnie's communications staff, there would be no confusion whatsoever.

Bernie Sanders, back to his 2016 bag of party-bashing tricks

This is getting good. Politico has no less than five above-the-fold stories on Bernie Sanders, his fresh endorsements, his "surge," and, not unconnected to the preceding, his return to 2016: bashing every Democratic opponent in his abysmally militant campaign to the bottom.

"It’s Sanders with the wind at his back," declares Politico. "[His] advisers said they've prioritized winning endorsements of groups that allow grass-roots members to participate," such as Dream Defenders and the Center for Popular Democracy. The real wind at his back is another priority, however: a kind of bellowing-whisper campaign concentrated against Elizabeth Warren, his old friend and dear colleague.

She's an elitist, you see. That, according to Bernie's new talking points (obtained by other Politico reporters) for volunteers. "The script instructs [them] to tell voters leaning toward the Massachusetts senator that the 'people who support her are highly-educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what' and that 'she's bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party."

What Bernie's jibber-jabber points omit is that whatever new base he might bring to the party, its numbers will be insignificant compared to the disillusioned flight of moderate Democrats — the party's actual base — and current undecideds who will swiftly decide that the Democratic Party has lost its goddamn mind.

To those who favor Pete Buttigieg, Sanders' volunteers are told to stress his absence of — hello pot, meet kettle — African-American support; and to those favoring Joe Biden, well, "he doesn’t really have any volunteers" and "no one is really excited about him" and Trump would "clobber him on his Iraq war vote … and his support for free trade agreements," reads the script. Which then adds, cynically, "That's exactly what Trump did with Hillary and it's part of why Hillary lost."

Correction: This is exactly what Sanders did to Hillary and a large part of why she lost.

Bernie blamed the talking points script on a "rogue employee." He never approved it, he said, whereupon his own press secretary tweeted out another hit on Warren. And so Sen. Sanders inches yet closer to being a lying Trumpian twin.

There is, though, one voice of intellectual integrity in Politico's shotgun coverage of Bernie's doings — that of Jim Messina, President Obama's 2012 campaign manager: "If I were a campaign manager for Donald Trump and I look at the field, I would very much want to run against Bernie Sanders."

What incumbent president wouldn't?

It's going to get worse - much worse

More of Trump's resolve on how his own trial should be conducted; after all, the defendant's procedural wishes are always paramount in any garden-variety criminal case, including whether the trial should even be held.

At 9:30 a.m. yesterday, Trump tweeted that his Senate trial should be smothered in its cradle:

Great idea. This phony Impeachment Hoax should not even be allowed to proceed. Did NOTHING wrong. Just a partisan vote. Zero Republicans. Never happened before! https://t.co/47oV6z4RQc

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2020

Forty-three minutes later, he tweeted a demand for testimony at the trial he had said should not proceed:

Why did Nervous Nancy allow corrupt politician Shifty Schiff to lie before Congress? He must be a Witness, and so should she!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2020

Yet, less than four hours after that tweet, demanding that Pelosi and Schiff testify, Trump again decided that there should be no testimony at all:

Many believe that by the Senate giving credence to a trial based on the no evidence, no crime, read the transcripts, “no pressure” Impeachment Hoax, rather than an outright dismissal, it gives the partisan Democrat Witch Hunt credibility that it otherwise does not have. I agree!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2020

"Many" also believe that such an unstable, volatile mind — one that starts at Point A, zooms to Point Z, then boomerangs itself back to Point A, in less than five hours — is probably not the cognitive shamble that should be deciding matters of life and death, war and peace, national security and national vulnerability.

The U.S.-Iran conflict, or, rather, simmering war, marches on. Also yesterday came mortar attacks on an Iraqi airbase that "held a small US Air Force contingent as well as American contractors" — attacks almost certainly approved by Iran. No Americans were killed or wounded, but that fortunate circumstance will someday expire.

The president's confused, shambolic, self-contradicting pinball mind is but laughable when it comes to his jurisprudential diktats. Yet when it comes — again — to matters of life and death in the Middle East, the only echoing laughter will come from Trump's demonic soul.

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and thank you.

A Democratic horserace story as priceless as horseshit

In a breathless dispatch from the Iowa front, political reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin deliver a front-page NY Times story whose blandness will leave you breathless.

The health warning arrives in the headline: "Sanders and Biden Look for Dominance in Early States: [Both] have been seeking to take control of the race in its early stages, trying to deny momentum to their top two rivals, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg."

With the exception of His Frivolous Superfluousness, Andrew Yang, is there a name-recognizable candidate left who has not sought control and dominance in early states? The only theme of genuine newsworthiness here would have been Burns & Gracie's revelation that Sanders or Biden was laboring mightily to come in last.

Ah but our light-hearted anticipation is foiled, because, we are later informed, Joe Biden "is especially determined to deny his challengers a chance to seize sudden momentum." Hence even the story's portentous health warning is unfounded; it seems only the former vice president is notably determined to seize momentum.

Joe has been going about it, however, in a most unusual way. "Hopeful of an early victory, Mr. Biden," divulge our reporters, "quietly dispatched his deputy campaign manager, Pete Kavanaugh, to move to Des Moines late last year to oversee his Iowa campaign." What, did Biden whisper the travel plans to Pete?

Less quietly, Burns and Martin make much of the Des Moines Register/CNN poll, released Friday, in which Bernie Sanders led with 20 percent; Warren was second at 17, Buttigieg came in at 16 percent, and Biden, 15 — all of which merely suggests the Iowa contest is tied.

And yet, such a suggestion is in danger of a thumping reality-check correction, for Messrs. Burns and Martin then concede that "only two-fifths of respondents said they had made up their minds." So of that much-made-of Register/CNN poll? It sleeps with the fishes.

Next up, though: Prepare to be shocked. That mountainous heap of obnoxiousness from 2016 and beyond, Bernie-adviser Jeff Weaver, disclosed to the Times that Sanders was not only "extremely encouraged" by the poll, he is, in fact, "focused on driving up turnout in the caucuses"!

Even more excitingly informative, we learn that a "top adviser" to Biden "thinks they can win the state outright," and "[other] advisers to Mr. Biden projected confidence." Just remember, you read that here, or there, first.

About midway through the Times story is the only conceivable rationale for it — one deserving of the reporters' probing, gum-shoeing elaboration, which is absent:

"[Mike] Bloomberg’s advisers … have indicated to Democratic officials that he would not be inclined to keep pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a prolonged contest with Mr. Biden for the nomination. If the former vice president emerged as an overwhelming favorite after Super Tuesday, Mr. Bloomberg would reorient his campaign into an organization dedicated to battering Mr. Trump, the advisers said."

One wonders how many Iowa Democrats are aware that Joe Biden has possibly a billion dollars in the offing, with which to batter Trump. All we can be sure of is that many more would be aware if the Times' Burns and Martin had only written that story, rather than one about both Bernie and Joe hoping to win.

#FilmsForRepublicans

AND THE #1 FILM … NOT A SEQUEL … 

Want to buy some American troops? You're in luck.

The sociopath is now literally selling American lives. https://t.co/qNQDkvgrLS

— The Carpentariat (@CarpenterPM) January 11, 2020

Two conservative voices, two views of interest (but not much more)

That old black magic of neoconservatism has David Brooks in its spell, once again:

"In the anti-Trump echo chamber,… led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, they avoided the hard, complex problem of how to set boundaries around militias. Instead, they pontificated on the easy question not actually on the table: Should we have a massive invasion of Iran?

"A great cry went up from the echo chamber. We’re on the brink of war! Trump is leading us to more endless wars in the Middle East! We’re on the precipice of total chaos! This was not the calibrated language of risk and reward. It was fear-stoking apocalyptic language."

To his credit, Brooks, with a rose stem in his teeth and distressed damsel in arm, pulls up short of whipping out a neocon scimitar while chandelier-swinging from prudence to Trumpian insanity. He doesn't so much endorse the reckless act of Suleimani's extermination as he does open the floor for its reasoned consideration.

What Brooks fails to include in his analysis is that Suleimani's demise, at the end of a targeted U.S. missile, was the last, unthinkable option presented to Trump by national security and military advisers.

Brooks' NY Times colleague, Bret Stephens, is more domestically minded this morning, admonishing us: "To say Sanders is unelectable," as Stephens himself once believed, and admits, "is indefensible."

Then I, plucky soothsayer that I am, will stay with the indefensible. To say Sanders is electable is madness.

This commonly grounded conservative's "Of Course Bernie Can Win" strikes me as little more than clickbait. He runs through all the usual suspicions of a Sanders candidacy: He is disastrously Jeremy Corbyn-like, he struts a radical agenda in a centrist nation, his base is "cultlike and off-putting" — Sanders is, in short, too outside his party's orthodoxy to win either nomination or the general election. Just as Trump was in 2016, answers Stephens.

In that, however, lies a logical fallacy, or at least the mathematical error of assuming that a dime coming up heads 100 times in a row increases its 101st odds of being heads. Trump's catastrophic election was a black swan event; its horrifying occurrence neither adds to nor subtracts from its odds-on reoccurrence. And odds are this centrist nation will, in 2020, revert to centrism.

Still, Stephens piles it on, this Sanders-cum-Trump analogy: The former's "depth of conviction? Check. Contempt for conventional norms? Check. Opposed by all the right people? Check. Running against a 'crooked' opponent? Check. Commitment to drastic change? Check." Yawn? Check.

Stephens knows better.

Brooks does not.

Trump supporters' S.H.I.T.: Smarts, Honesty, Integrity, Thoughtfulness

Trump supporter was asked a question by reporter in Toledo, Ohio: “What is something that you believe the president has done well?” Response? Wait for it... pic.twitter.com/2ktNSbUi5S

— Max Howroute▫️ (@howroute) January 10, 2020