Law And Order...

Richard Nixon, previous holder of the Presidential title belt for Worst Defender of the Constitution, ran as the "Law and Order" candidate. What this meant was that Nixon would arrest the civil rights and anti-war protestors that offended the sensibilities of his Silent Majority. 

Trump, who surrounds himself with a few of Nixon's old ratfuckers, is taking that to the next level.  "Law and Order" was always racially coded, but Nixon benefited from small measure of doubt, as he wasn't actively trying to roll back basic civil rights for minorities.

His contempt for the rule of law can best be seen in the two cases where he has pardoned someone.  Joe Arpaio got a pardon, and now Dinesh D'Souza gets one.  D'Souza has a felony conviction for campaign finance law violations that were transparently illegal - he funnelled money through his mistress (family values!).  Partly because Trump is himself a criminal and partly because D'Souza is a similarly tempered troll, this pardon makes perfect sense.

As long as fairness, the rule of law and a sense of justice don't enter into it.

Well, This Is Interesting

Illinois just ratified the ERA.  Only one more state is needed before it reaches the threshold, though there is some question about whether or not that will matter.  The original ERA had an expiration date and that has long since passed, so it will create an interesting constitutional issue.

When you look at the states that haven't ratified, it's about what you'd expect: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.  In addition to former slave states, Arizona, Oklahoma and Utah have not ratified. 

Virginia could be the next state to take it up, or maybe Florida.  If it passes, it will be interesting to see what Congress and the Courts do next.

Ironic if Trumpistan led to the passage of the ERA.

Racism Has A Body Count

Racism kills people.  Generally speaking, it's tough to put an exact number on how many, though.  How many black people killed in police encounters were killed because of racism or police fears in an over-armed society?  Or for legitmate reasons?  We don't really know.  How many people of color die because of poverty and poor access to health care or because they live in "food deserts"?  We don't really know.

Every once in a while, we get some clarity on the number of people that racist attitudes kill.  We have that now in Puerto Rico.  Trump - bring the vile human shit stain that he is - was bragging about how Maria wasn't as bad as Katrina.  We now know it was twice as devastating.

But Geraldo and Shep Smith weren't on the streets screaming at their news headquarters.  There were no pictures of the bodies floating through the streets, because this was a different type of catastrophe.  This was a catastrophe that killed people over weeks and months of neglect.  Like Flint, Michigan, this is a story of slow motion devastation that doesn't film well on the evening news.  With Trump routinely tweeting outrageous things, with Mueller uncovering more and more corruption, with our government ping ponging all over the place as an impulsive narcissist drives the ship of state like a two-year old, it is difficult to focus on stories that lack the drama that an attention deprived media audience needs.

The needless deaths that the Trump administration's callousness, racism and incompetence killed should be as big a story as Katrina.  The Trump people didn't help these people because they were Puerto Ricans.  They helped the people of Houston and other disasters.  They did shit for Puerto Rico.

Conservatives love to rail against George Soros as a rhetorical counterweight to the Kochs, Adelson, the Mercers, the Scaifes and every other shady billionaire who read too much Ayn Rand.  If Soros was as evil as the GOP says he is, he should be flying Puerto Ricans to swing districts and states like Florida and Texas to register to vote.  They are American citizens, and they have every right to be furious at how they are being treated.

The Record

Josh Marshall re-posted two of his essays from the day Trump was elected and the day he was inaugurated.  Marshall has always been very insightful into Trump's character.  He understood Trump earlier than most, and his predictions and observations have mostly held true. 

The fears for American democracy are both real and overstated in Trumpistan.  I shudder to think what could happen if Democrats fail to win back one of the Houses of Congress next November.  But Trump is not dragging us towards Erdogan's Turkey or Putin's Russia.  He's dragging us to the Jim Crow South, towards the internment camps of 1942.  We beat those once.  We can beat them again.

Law Breaking

If I understand the expressed rationale of the Trump Administration for stripping children away from their parents, it is because the parents broke the law and that's that.  You can't break the law and expect to keep your kids.  We obviously follow this procedure when we are talking about violent felons.  You wouldn't want someone convicted of negligent manslaughter to retain custody of kids.

The idea that refugees fleeing violence in Central America are somehow the same as violent felons is thin soup.  You have to question whether they believe their own bullshit.  Especially because this same administration is complaining about the legal consequences that are befalling people like Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papadopolous, Rick Gates and Alexander van der Zwaan.  Clearly, the overall position of this administration is that some laws apply to brown people and most laws don't apply to rich white people. 

Nixon ran as the "Law and Order" President, which clearly meant suppressing black and youth protest, as he was the most corrupt president we've had.  Until now.

Deathbed Confession

John McCain, as he faces the end of his life, is making some interesting concessions.

Why is that it takes retirement or imminent death to prompt Republican politicians to find their most honest voice?

Performative Cruelty

Donald Trump is an objectively horrible human being.  His primary mode is to attack people who offend his sense of self-aggrandizement.  He lies constantly.  He seems to be involved in countless illegal acts as a business man and a presidential candidate.  He is contemptuous of democracy.

But this really strikes home how awful a human being he is.  America has commited ethnic cleansing before in its past.  Most of us thought we had put this sort of aggressively racist and cruel behavior behind us.  We were wrong, because Republicans can't win elections without appealing to the racism of a certain group of white voters who can't distinguish between the people who are actually making their lives worse and brown people.

Tearing a four year old from his mother.  That is Trump's America.

Hot Take

The NFL's ham-handed decision to stop players from kneeling during the anthem is being framed in some quarters as a civil liberties issue, with the players losing their freedom of speech. Sadly, that's not the case.  While there is some merit to the argument that the President* orchestrated this via his Tweets, there is no evidence that the state as an entity pressured the NFL to prohibit sideline protests.  If anything, this is similar to the dynamic from a few months ago, when the Marjory Stoneman Douglas kids pressured various business groups to discontinue their NRA discounts.  Corporations are controversy averse.

I can think of few workplaces where you are allowed unfettered political speech.  This isn't a first amendment issue, but a worker's rights issue.  Can I have a political bumpersticker on my cubicle wall?  That would vary by workplace.  But regardless, there is no guarantee of political protest in the workplace.

So, even though this a bullshit nontroversy that has been willfully misrepresented in Foxlandia as being against the troops (it's against cops that kill people for no reason), and even if they shouldn't be forced to participate in involuntary displays of patriotism (though in fairness, they can stay in the locker room), they really don't have much of a legal case.  Perhaps they have a case surrounding the CBA, but they don't have a civil liberties case.  And even if you agree with them and the point of their protests, that doesn't make it an enfringement on their liberties, anymore than The Atlantic firing Kevin Williamson is a press freedom case.

UPDATE:  Here's a contrary view that seems pretty far fetched.  It takes a rather broad view of both labor and free speech law and extends it in ways that there is just no way the Roberts' Court would.  You can make an argument that political speech is protected at work, but that's a novel argument and many people have been fired for doing just that.

Donny, You're Out Of Your Element

The collapse of the North Korea summit is perhaps the most predictable thing that has happened in politics since Trump got inaugurated.  His negotiation style is entirely that of a real estate guy.  Take it or leave it.  The problem, of course, is that unlike a two bedroom apartment, there are no other buyers waiting to potentially buy it if the first buyer falls apart.  If you don't sell that unit, someone else will.

In diplomacy, there is no fallback buyer.  Trump - being stupid, incurious and hidebound - was never going to learn this.  Like so much of his presidency, it a failure born of his own limitations. 

There will be more.

Dem Primaries

Yesterday, Democrats across the South nominated some interesting candidates for competitive seats.  They tended to go with outsiders over established pols.  Vox ran a very misleadingly titled article suggesting that the "Democratic establishment" was hammering a female Marine fighter pilot, Amy McGrath. The DCCC may or may not have urged Lexington Mayor Jim Gray into the race, but there is no evidence that Washington did anything to tilt the scales of that primary.  It is true that established politicians attacked McGrath for being an inexperienced outsider who hadn't lived much in Kentucky.  She responded that she was deployed.  In other words, politics occured, and McGrath, who IS a political novice, had to sharpen her skills to respond.

The only case we have of the DCCC really putting their thumbs on the scale was in TX-7, where, ironically, a long time DC insider, Laura Moser, was running against the DC establishment's pick, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher.  Moser had some derogatory things to say about Texas (not Houston where she is running), and the DCCC released that information to sink her candidacy before she won the nomination and the GOP released it.  As it is, Moser got whupped in the run-off last night, 67%-33%.  The more centrist candidate won by hefty margins.  Meanwhile, Texas Dems nominated a Lesbian Latina for Governor, so it's not like the DNC is running around forcing a bunch of milquetoast moderates on every race.  Stacey Abrams historic win in Georgia is another example of this dynamic. 

Some of these races are going to be very, very tough come November.  The Democratic electorate has established a clear preference for female candidates with compelling stories.  Given the path to victory likely lies with suburban, moderate Republican-leaning women, this seems like a good idea.

The worry, of course, is that there is a certain wing of the Democratic Party <cough Sandernistas cough> that sees nefarious plots to derail their "revolution" by doing things like holding elections.  The defections of Sanders diehards could very well have tipped 2016 in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.  My guess is that it won't matter that much in November, because anti-Trump sentiment is so high. 

Worth keeping an eye on, though.

Transparency

I just finished a book about the French Revolution that confirmed a theory that I've long suspected to be true: I don't like reading about the French Revolution.

That revolution set the template for unsuccessful, radical, militantly violent revolutions that are more typical of revolutions than the American revolution.  They begin with lofty ideals and stirring rhetoric.  They seek to fundamentally alter the entire nature of society - economic and social relations as well as political arrangements.  And they fail, precisely because they attempt so much.  Human beings can only assimilate so much change, before they kick back.

Because the revolutionaries are so ardent in their idealism, they are usually unable to  admit that they might have erred, and so, like Robespierre, the slip in coercion, authoritarianism and eventually Terror.

Another thing that happens are high-minded ideals are translated to political action is corruption.  Danton and many others enriched themselves during the revolutionary period.  They do so, because you aren't allowed to check the revolution's books.  That would be counter-revolutionary, and that gets you a visit to the guillotine.

I was struck by that when I read this article about Elliott Broidy - former GOP treasurer - and George Nader - a "fixer".  The details - as so often happens with these detailed corruption schemes - are a bit mind numbing.  Broidy and Nader represented authoritarian regimes in the Gulf who were trying to drive a wedge between America and Qatar.  They succeeded to some extent, as Trump early on sided with Saudi Arabia and UAE against Qatar.  It was a curious move then, but it seems pretty clear now that corruption was involved.

Most non-Trump supporters are aware, either generally or atomistically, of the extraordinary corruption in the Trump Administration.  Ironically, it was Trump's anti-corruption message - "Drain the Swamp" - that resonated with many of his supporters.  Because people don't like to admit when they've been conned, they tend to stick to the illusion that the con-artist sold them.  Trump supporters will be very difficult to convince that they supported the most corrupt president in history, because that would clash with their own self-image of being virtuous, upright citizens.

Sunlight, the old saw goes, is the best disinfectant.  Transparency is what destroys corruption.  For years during the French Revolution, the corrupt and the brutal elements in the regime were able to hide their crimes behind the solidarity of the revolutionary moment.  Trump is more or less banking on the same thing.

When the Terror unfolded under Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, it was impossible to ignore the continuous thud of the guillotine.  What will happen it take to get his softest support to notice the heads piling up in the public square?  Because Trump has - from the very beginning - assaulted the very idea of objective truth, his supporters are innoculated from evidence that is mounting against him.  The various Cleetus Safaris that return time and again to the struggling communities of WWC voters catalog the degrees to which the overwhelming crush of evidence of Trump's corruption simply does not penetrate their world view.

If you ask any Fox News viewer which administration was more corrupt, Obama's or Trump's, they will easily rattle off the imaginary crimes of Obama: Solyandra, Benghazi, the JCPOA, God know what else.  The existing indictments and guilty pleas of the Trump Crime Cartel - more in one year than in all of Obama's eight - simply won't register.

I've argued and will continue that there aren't enough Trump voters to re-elect him.  He continues to lose women voters who otherwise lean towards the GOP.  Every Cleetus Safari to Rustbucket, Ohio, skips over the suburbs that are moving away from the GOP. 

However, I worry about the willfully ignorant Trumpenproletariat.  They cling to their delusions about "their man."  They eat his lies like honey.  They ignore the continued blows of the guillotine.  What will they do when the Reign of Error turns on their Danton?

Good

The Democrats are preparing to do what I would hope they would do: run against corruption.  What's more, they are properly trying to tie the broader Republican agenda to pay-for-play politics.  Here's an important 'graph.

Democrats, the official said, will make the case that they are best equipped to rein in what they are calling “the most corrupt administration in modern times” and are prepared to connect the corruption allegations to a Republican governing agenda that has delivered outsize tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and dismantled financial and environmental regulations that aimed to protect average taxpayers.

This is where you can tie up all the loose threads.  Why do Republicans stand in the way of popular gun safety measures?  Because they are being paid.  Why do Republicans shovel tax cuts at the rich?  Because they are being paid.  Why do Republicans gut environmental and consumer safety regulations?  Because they are being paid.

Shit writes itself.

Toxic Manhood

The Santa Fe HS shooter apparently targeted a girl he was stalking, and in fact mostly shot at females.  This comes as we are being made aware of the "incel" cult and being treated to a serious discussion of Jordan Peterson's idea of a sexual marketplace.  This is the brave "Dark Web" bullshit again.

To understand the pull of this misogynistic rape cult, it's again helpful to see this as a fear-based reaction to change.  However, I do think that they are imagining a past that hasn't existed for decades.  On the one hand, yes, women have been objectified, harrassed and assaulted forever.  But the incels seem to think that there is some new paradigm that's preventing THEM from having sex.  Angry, frustrated losers have had trouble getting a sexual partner since arranged marriages went away. This is not a new dynamic.  I could make a case that I was "involuntarily celibate" when I was an impoverished grad student with poor job prospects.  I certainly wanted a girlfriend, but it never occured to me that I was OWED a girlfriend.  I might lament that ugly rich guys in LA had no trouble finding partners (though the Weinstein sage calls into question how consensual those partnerships were), but I wasn't owed anything.  Hell, even in the epoch of arranged marriages, you had to prove that you would provide for your arranged bride.

The idea that men should have to demonstrate their worthiness as a partner is not a new thing.  Women have to do the same thing.  We all participate in some sort of mating dance. We show off our bright feathers.  We work to show that we are worthy companions.  Perhaps, some of what we expressly value has changed.  Men are being evaluated for more than simply their earning potential, since women have earning potentials, too.  But the incels aren't even making that argument, that they have money and status, but women won't sleep with them.  They are explicitly making an argument that they deserve sex because they are (white) men. 

Outside of rape, that was never the case.  Like most people building an ediface of hate, they are building it on a foundation of lies and misapprehension.

Britain And Race

The royal marriage has prompted a few people to note that Britain seems to handle racial issues better than America.  That seems a bit blinkered.

Yes, people of African descent - especially African Americans - will feel less threatened in Britain by police authority than they will in the US.  Especially if they are in London or another cosmopolitan center.  However, Britain does not feel threatened by African Americans.  They feel threatened by Muslims.  And they voted to leave the EU primarily over the issue of migrants - especially Muslim migrants - being allowed into "their country."  I can certainly remember racist jokes from British teammates when I played rugby targeted at Pakistanis.

Racism is not a uniquely American phenomenon.  America's expression of racism is uniquely American, because of America's history.  The combination of chattel slavery and Jim Crow wedded with white supremacist democracy created something that is different from the legacy of racism in, say, the Caribbean. 

Racism is mostly (entirely?) about fear.  It's in-group/out-group thinking based on physical characteristics related to skin color.  Or rather, it's a system of power based on bigotry.  The British aren't especially threatened by people of African descent, unless those people happen to be Muslim.  In that case, British fears of Islam kick in, and you get UKIP and other manifestations of racial and religious bias. 

Of course Britain has its racists.  Every country does.  But Britain does not have centuries of being afraid of an oppressed racial minority in its midst.  They have class issues.  What is so impressive about the current royal pairing is the presence of a true commoner - AN AMERICAN! - in the inner reaches of the very institution that represents advantages based on birth.

Britain is very much having the same moment that the US is having when it comes to xenophobia and racial panic.  Theirs has a different flavor, because their history is different.  But they, too, are experiencing a sharp rural/urban cultural divide. London voted to stay in the EU.  The British countryside did not.  Britain has its own red state/blue state issue, but the issue is largely related to Islam, not "race" as Americans understand it.

Why Does This Keep Happening In The Country This Always Happens

The Onion has a story that they update every time we have another grisly sacrifice to Moloch.  Josh Marshall has a slightly more elevated take in which he makes a very important point.

Whenever one of these atrocities happens, I think many of us hope that it was "just another" angry white guy.  If it was a Muslim or immigrant or African American, it would be seized on by the Right (who currently has to understand that they are beginning to lose the gun debate) to change the subject from the widespread availability of guns to the particular ideology of the attacker.  Unless that attacker was seen wearing a MAGA hat and waving a Confederate flag.

As Marshall lays out, usually the ideology is besides the point. Or rather it might be an accelerant of the violence, but it's not the cause.  The cause seems always to be the rage inside a young white man about...something.  The cause of the rage isn't even always clear, and probably isn't to the shooter. If they could articulate their anger, they probably wouldn't need to demonstrate it via gunfire. 

The more interesting question that goes unanswered is whether America has more angry young men or simply more guns.  Of course, we know we have more guns.  Texas and Florida have a shit-ton of guns.  This is not a mystery.  The question is whether that surfeit of weaponry is everything or only most of the thing.

Animals

There is a vociferous argument on Twitter and other social media about whether Trump was refering to all immigrants or just MS-13 as "animals."

Who cares?

I mean, we should care that our president is a racist, but do we really need to parse his latest brain fart for intent?  Is there really any debate left as to where Trump's heart lies (in darkness) when it comes to immigrants?  Or black people?

From Aaron Schlossberg yelling that he will call ICE to the batshit insane Georgia GOP primary, we are confronted daily with the evidence that any African American could've told you (and likely did) for the entirety of the Obama Administration: Racism is very much still woven into the fabric of this country.  Now it includes immigrants (the "wrong kind") and could even be said to include those who oppose racism.  It's always been there.

As an historical optimist, I'd like to think that ten years from now, we can look back on the Trump years as the moment the ethnonationalist, racist wing of  the Republican Party took off its mask and showed the country what it really was.  Trump has tossed aside the dog whistle for bullhorn, and in doing so, he has shown just how many people want to hear what the bullhorn is spewing.

UPDATE: Hate to admit it, but Michael Gerson covers this topic better.

Infinity Wars

Vox has a typically Voxy piece on Infinity Wars and Kantian vs Utilitarian philosophy.  In particular, it acknowledges the hole that the story dug itself into in a way that so clearly points to a repudiation of the original outcome.

I don't think Kant will play a big role in Deadpool 2.

Old White Dudes

Greg Sargent lays out the Republican strategy for 2018 and presumably 2020.  In some ways, there are echoes of 2012 at play.  Back then, you might remember Karl Rove's epic meltdown on Fox News about the results from Ohio.  Rove's model had him convinced that Romney would win Ohio.  In reality, we know that Obama was able to motivate large numbers of young people and minorities that usually didn't vote. (And who didn't vote as much for Clinton.  Russia worked hard on that.)

Nevertheless the idea of the "Missing White Voter" took hold.  When the GOP establishment issued its "postmortem" on the election, they recommended moderating on social issues like immigration and race.  The GOP base told them to screw themselves and four years later coughed up an orange colored hairball on the carpet of the Oval Office.  Trump was vindication of the idea of the Missing White Voter.  Certainly Mitt "Bain Capital" Romney was a poor person to motivate these WWC voters to come out and vote. Trump tapped directly into their id in a way that Romney and McCain couldn't.  McCain, because he had a shred of decency, and Romney, because he was an android.

The problem with Missing White Voter strategy should be obvious to readers of this blog.  Those MWV are old.  Old people die or simply become unable to vote because of infirmity.  There are fewer of those voters every year.  Meanwhile, the suburban, college educated white women appears to be waking up.  Maybe she will still call the cops on the black real estate developer, but more likely, she's horrified that Sheryl called the cops on that guy.  Or the family having a BBQ in the park.  Or the people leaving their AIRbnb.  She's moving away from the GOP, because Trump horrifies her as a human being.  (And she's running for office, too.)

And finally, Trump won 46% of the vote.  That can't be repeated enough.  He won roughly same amount as Michael Freaking Dukakis.  He does not command the allegiance of the majority of Americans, and while his core supporters might not care, the Americans that hate him REALLY hate him and will crawl over broken glass to tear him down.

"No One Could Have Predicted..."

Barbara Tuchman wrote a book called The March of Folly about three historical decisions that were widely understood by credible people to be stupid decisions at the time but were made anyway.  She focused on the Renaissance Popes, British mercantile policy towards America and the decision to enter the Vietnam War.  Folly is something that is apparent at the time, not just from the benefit of hindsight.

The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was folly.  There were ample voices saying that we should not attack and occupy a country that had not attacked us and posed no threat to us and that we poorly understood.  This was a bad idea in February, 2003.  In fact, it was understood to be a bad idea in 1991.  I'm reading Rick Atkinson's Crusade about the first Gulf War.  It was written in 1993, and it laid out the thinking among senior policy makers about why an assault on Baghdad was a bad idea.  Ironically, two of the figures who understood this - Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz - were knee deep in the 2003 decision.

The Trump Adminstration is the apotheosis of folly.  As Hair Furor has stripped his national security cabinet of every plausibly reasonable voice, he descends further into folly and poor decision making.  The withdrawal from the Iran deal - unless it is salvaged by Europe and Iran - makes it more likely that Iran develops an atomic bomb, which either results in an invasion of Iran or a nuclear armed regime in Teheran.  Those are objectively horrifying outcomes.

The decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem provoked the most easily predictable response from Palestinians.  This has led to the Trump Administration doubling down on its alliance with the Likud Party and the entirely predictable increased isolation of the US from the rest of the world.  This has certainly happened before, but in the past, we had a credible foreign policy establishment and provided a critical role in world affairs.  Trump is working to make America no longer the "indispensible nation."  That will further isolate us.

Finally, in a move that surprised exactly zero Korean experts, Kim has withdrawn from the summit that was supposed to lead to a nuclear-free Korea.  First, John Bolton's rhetoric over the year and his comparison to Libya as a successful model for what the US would accept makes it obvious why Pyongyang would balk.  And then there is the decision to withdraw from JCPOA, which basically means that you can't trust the US to follow through on its treaty obligations.

In the past week, Trump cheerleaders were actually pushing his name forward for the Nobel Peace Prize, no doubt to appease his vanity, because Obama won one, so he wants to win a better one.  Before the echoes of laughter from this suggestion died away, Trump has already made a nuclear arms race in the Middle East substantially more likely, endorsed the slaughter of Palestinian protesters and screwed up the negotiations between Pyongyang and Seoul.

If this surprises anyone, they haven't been paying attention.

UPDATE: Jesus, no sooner than I post this then I catch this doozy.  The idea that we would eliminate the person responsible for protecting us from our singl biggest vulnerability is just mindblowingly stupid.

Hive Mind

I spent yesterday evening at a bar with Fox News on.  The sound was off, but you could get the gist from the chryons scrolling at the bottom of the screen. 

The basic news program was interesting in how they ordered the story.  The slaughter of 50+ Palestinians was covered very late in the broadcast, after they had already covered the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem.  I wasn't listening, but clearly there was an attempt to separate the embassy opening and the mass shooting of people in Gaza.

What was really amazing was watching Tucker Carlson's show.  Again, I couldn't hear, but I don't think it mattered.  Even without the sound, it felt like a panicky defense of Trump.  "I'm not the puppet, you're the puppet."  There were extensive rebuttals to arguments that haven't been explicitly made.  Repeatedly, the show hammered the point that Mueller has not proved collusion, which...yeah, he hasn't.  Anyone with a shred of journalistic integrity would note that Mueller's investigation has been remarkably leak free.  We have no idea what Mueller knows.  We do know that whenever someone else leaks something about the investigation and a new person is revealed to be involved, we also discover that Mueller's team has already talked to them.  In other words, Mueller's investigation is 50 steps ahead of journalists. 

Carlson's show then veered off into how colleges and the media are full of liberals and how even one "liberal" running for mayor of San Francisco doesn't like the idea of sanctuary cities.  Yes, college professors are more liberal.  In some ways, this is because of the nature of modern liberalism and modern conservatism.  Modern conservatism is hierarchical, provincial, ethno-nationalist and even authoritarian in nature.  Academia rewards pretty much the exact opposite (not Administration necessarily, but academics).  On Fox, the presence of liberals in academia is proof that "knowledge" has a liberal bias, but one could make a case that the absence of conservative academics is a condemnation of conservatism.  Why do conservative arguments fall flat in intellectual communities?

Instead, what Carlson's show fed me was a tidal wave of grievance and petulance. About liberal professors and Robert Mueller and Mexicans...it was pure distilled cranky, racist uncle. 

A lot of ink has been spilled about "where did Trump voters come from."  That's easy.  They came from Fox News.  They are willfully misinformed and angry as hell.  And they are breaking this country.

Feed The Warpig

There are a number of trends that are geniunely frightening in the world right now.  First has to be the ascension of warporn enthusiast John Bolton to National Security Advisor.  HR McMaster was a combat veteran and understood the chaos and unpredictability of warfare.  Bolton still thinks Iraq was a good idea. 

This is important, because of a number of other trends.  First, we have the American violation of the JCPOA with Iran.  Europe and Iran are working to hold the deal together, but it's unclear how belligerent the Trump Administration will be with European countries that continue to honor the agreement.  At least one of the rationales for going to war with Iran is their nuclear program.  Withdrawing from the one thing that could have kept them from a nuclear weapon seems to be creating a climate for war.

Now, we have Israel striking Iranian targets in Syria.  Iran responded feebly, but Iran's strength is not in its missle forces in Syria (or Iran, despite what the fearmongers would have you believe).  Iran's strength is in asymmetrical warfare. 

We can now add to this the unrest in Gaza prompted by Trump's decisions - which few diplomats endorsed - to move the American embassy to Jerusalem.  This removes the United States as an "honest broker" in the Israel-Palestine conflict.  We are now firmly on the side of the Likud Party. 

It is now in Iran's interest to foment a Third Intifada.  Whether it is in the interest of Palestinians, I can't say, but I can't imagine they are feeling any warmth towards an Israeli government that has all but abandoned any pretense of accepting a Palestinian state in any form. 

The Iraq disaster, followed by the Syrian disaster, has kept the focus off Israel.  There is a certain soft alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran, but if Israeli troops start killing Palestinians (well more Palestinians), the pressure on Riyadh will be intense. 

We have already embarked on a revisionist history of the Iraq Debacle.  Trump,  it is being said, has rehabilitated George W. Bush, because Bush - while incurious and impulsive - is no Trump.  Some have noted that Iraq is having elections, which were impossible under Saddam Hussein.  The fact that pro-Iranian, anti-American militant Moqtada Al-Sadr looks primed to win the election should tell us all we need to know about the wisdom of that decision.  But the proper counterargument was "Do you want Saddam Hussein to still be in power?" is "How many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and millions of Syrians need to die to fulfill your next promise of war?"

If the Middle East erupts again, it will erupt along two lines: Israel/Saudi vs Iran, but also the old Israel vs Palestinian feud.  There is no reason to expect anything positive.

Make China Great Again

Another story that will never pierce the veil of ignorance surrounding the Trumpenproletariat.

Perspective

Here's an pair of book reviews from scholars looking at America today, with an eye towards the past.  Meacham, in particular, feels correct.  It isn't that Trump is a new phenomenom, it's that we naively assumed we'd outgrown that type of boorish rube bumper.  The Fallows' book sounds like it fails to grapple with the creation of this profound rural/urban split that as much as anything aside from age defines the polarization of our times.

Anyway, interesting reading and happy Mother's Day.

Summary

Here's a twitter run down of where we stand with Mueller and Trump.  The first tweet seems important.  Every time another shoe drops, like with Cohen and Vekselberg's monetary relationship, we find out that Mueller has already interviewed the people involved.  We also know that Mueller's investigation has been airtight when it comes to leaks.  We have no idea what they know, but they know more than us.

And what we know, as the tweets suggest, is that this is the most corrupt administration in the country's history.  As Jamelle Bouie writes, Scott Pruitt alone is probably worse than Teapot Dome.  Michael Cohen's pay-to-play scam is as bad as the Whiskey Ring.  It's amazing that whenever a new story or allegation starts to break, we get a range of what it could possibly mean.  Almost invariably, the worst explanation is the operative one.  If every allegation is a confession, I like the tweet that snarkily suggests that before this is all done, we will find out the Trump was born in Kenya.

The Narrative

The WaPo has an exhaustively long Cleetus Safari in today's edition.  This one, at least, is talking to people whose support for Trump is softening some.  I've always felt that incumbents often win re-election because people don't want to admit that they may have made a mistake when they elected the person in the first place.  Trump can't win re-election without expanding on his 46% vote total from 2016.  Democrats will - hopefully, I mean they're Democrats - rally around a standard bearer, and the marginal candidacies of Jill Stein and Ron Johnson shouldn't siphon off votes.

Trump cannot, will not and has not grown that 46%.  As they are older, there will be fewer of them in 2020 anyway.  His temperment has turned off quite a few suburban moderates, people who are largely absent from the media's interminable series of Cleetus Safaris to the Rust Belt.  If a re-match were held of the 2016 election today, I think Clinton wins, because she gets bigger margins in the suburbs of Philly, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee, plus larger minority turnout.

As Trump hovers perpetually around 37-40% approval, the question inevitably becomes "Where is his floor?"  Right now, a majority of Republicans think the FBI is framing the President of the United States.  That's insane, but they believe that.  What the WaPo article gets at is those who may have voted for Obama in 2008, but switched to Trump, precisely because he was an iconoclast, precisely to shake up a system that wasn't working for them.

Given how impervious most Trump votes are to evidence, it will be interesting to see if they can hear this piece of news.  As Jon Chait lays out, Trump has retreated from every economic populist promise he made during the campaign.  His administration is already the most corrupt in American history (if half the allegations are true).  The twin narratives of corruption and betrayal - "Trump lied to you, it's not your fault" - are a compelling story to bring to voters.  You don't have to promise impeachment or miracles, just honestly and clean government.

You aren't going to win rural House seats very often, if you're the Democrats.  But you have to decrease the margins that Trump ran up in the countryside.  That's how you hold on to Senate seats in West Virginia, Indiana, South Dakota and Missouri. 

Run against the corruption, nurture the narrative - not that they are racists, even if they might be - that Trump lied to them to enrich himself and his other millionaire friends.

That's the stuff of a Blue Wave.

The Case For Optimism

Ezra Klein writes a very good summary - much of which I think I agree with - about how Trumpistan is not the worst era in American history.  I certainly feel like Trump should be the final gasp of a dying white supremacist America.  His supporters are older, they are a clear minority of the population and, as Klein points out, Trump is such a vulgar figure that he's laying all the ugliness of white supremacist politics out for us to be reviled by.  Some Bernie Sanders supporters actually welcome this epoch, because it "heightens the contradictions" and exposes the core truths of the modern "conservative" movement, a movement that is more reactionary than it has defined itself in polite conversation.  This, of course, is easier to do if you're a relatively comfortable white guy than a 16 year old DREAMer whose parents face deportation to a country where they might be killed.

Klein's central point is very valid: Moments of racial progress (really any progress) create their own backlash.  I saw someone else denigrating Arthus Schlesinger's argument that increased racial and cultural identity threatened America's "vital center."  But Schlesinger was also the historian who posited that there was a "cycle of reform" in American politics.  As we enfranchise and empower historically oppressed groups, the dominant white power structure - especially the marginal people of that structure - will fight back.  They did in Reconstruction.  But the trusts fought back against the Progressives under Harding and Coolidge.  Reagen tried to unravel the Great Society (and the civil rights movement). 

America is changing.  That provides a great deal of energy among those working class whites who had one thing going for them: their whiteness.  The most brutal segregationists were usually the poorest whites, because their very whiteness was their one, true advantage.  That's mostly gone, and what's left will erode soon.

The possible quibble I have - and Klein admits as much - is that perhaps this is moment when America fails.  As America stops becoming a majority white nation, perhaps it can't survive as a state.  But, as Daniel Webster argued during a similar crisis, how would we separate?  Where would we draw the line?  Perhaps instead, this will lead to a time of American decline.  While Trump's incompetence and stupidity - whether on the Iran deal or the Paris Accords - has created its own set of immediate and long term problems, perhaps our politics just continues to break so much that America will no longer be able to exercise it's vision among the other nations of the world.

Maybe we are broken, and Trump didn't break us.  He's just the indicator of the fracture.

Here Is The Script

INT. - Soundstage

Benjamin Netanyahu presents a report that purports to show that Iranians were lying about the thing we knew they were lying about.  His audience of one nods along.

INT. - White House

Donald Trump, in a speech largely devoid of facts, violates the JCPOA by withdrawing the United States absent any evidence of violations by Iran.

EXT. - Syria

Israel launches attacks on Iranian forces around Damascus.  They do this under the pretense of preemptive action against Iranian strikes against Israel.  No evidence is offered that Iran was planning attacks

EXT.  - Golan Heights

Syrian and Iranian forces respond somewhat feebly to the Israeli attacks by launching their own attacks.

EXT - Damascus

Isreal escalates the attacks.

(This is our current situation.  What follows is conjecture.)

INT. - Republican Guard HQ in Iran

Republican Guard and Quds forces prepare asymmetrical warfare responses to Israeli actions in Syria.  These includes attacks on Israeli forces and civilians, crossing the line from asymmetric warfare into terrorism.

INT.  - Prime Minister's Office

Netanyahu blames the rash of suicide bombings in Israel to Iran.  He launches military strikes againt Iran by flying over friendly Saudi air space.  The Saudis are happy to see two of the largest militaries in the Middle East go to war.

EXT. - Teheran

Israeli bombs explode across Iran, at nuclear sites and military sites.  Some bombs hit civilian targets.  The Revolutionary Guard responds by attacking more civilian targets in Israel. 

INT.  - White House briefing room

John Bolton explains to a momentarily focused Trump that Israel needs our help.  We launch cruise missiles from the Persian Gulf.

EXT. - Persian Gulf

Iranian forces sink several oil tankers.  Gas prices soar to $5.00 a gallon.  Inflation roars across the developed world, while economic growth slows.

INT. - Khamenei's Command Bunker

Supreme Leader Khamenei restarts the Iranian nuclear program over muted objections from President Rouhani.  He authorizes attacks on American targets in Iraq, Turkey and across the Middle East and the world.

INT. - White House Briefing Room

Sarah Huckabee Sanders explains that Iranian actions prove that they can never be trusted to keep the peace.  Neo-Cons, who have been abandoning Trump, return home in droves, as they feverishly fondle themselves while watching bombs explode over Teheran.



So?  Tell me I'm wrong...

Where To Begin?

Let us ponder, for a moment, May 8th, 2018.

Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA or Iran Nuclear Deal, primarily because his hatred of Obama created a presumption that the deal was terrible.  How does Donald Trump know it's terrible?  Because he said it was terrible, and Donald Trump is never wrong. The lack of evidence of any violations by Iran means that the US is increasingly marginalized.  Israeli missiles fell on Damascus last night.

North Korea is on the verge of a diplomatic coup: a summit with an American President.  The American President is too thick and unknowledgeable to understand that there is no way North Korea follows through on their promises. The release of hostages today is simply more bait to appeal to Trump, so that he shows up at the summit and Kim gets what every North Korean leader has wanted: a shared stage with an Ameican president.

Reports from a pornographic actress's lawyer demonstrate that the slush fund that the president used to pay her hush money was filled with money from Russia and American businesses, like AT&T, who had business before the president.  While there is no direct evidence yet in the report that the president was using illegal contributions to pay off mistresses, the dots are very close together.  The fact that a Russian oligarch funneled money into the slush fund certainly suggests that Russian state security did know about Trump's affairs, and perhaps helped him cover it up.  Regardless, companies giving money to slush funds in contradiction to campaign finance laws....Dude.

Meanwhile, we had a slate of primaries.  Notable among them was West Virginia's senate primary.  Odious troll and convicted felon, Don Blankenship, was denied the GOP nomination.  What is interesting is that Joe Manchin and his primary challenger received 159,000 votes, whereas the hotly contested GOP primary only drew  139,000 votes.  That bodes well for Manchin's ability to hold this seat in a state Trump won handily. In both parties, it was a good night for the "establishment," which could hold a key to understanding a brewing backlash against the chaos of Trumpism.

An American spy gave up America's entire spy network in China.  You might have missed that.

Flint still doesn't have clean drinking water and Puerto Rico still doesn't have full power restored.

Trump's America.  Thanks, Republicans.

Here We Go...

Israel is attacking Syrian forces around Damascus under the pretense of a "preventive war."

How long before Bolton has America helping Israel with its dirty work?

Collosal Stupiddumb

So,  Trump didn't pass his opportunity to make the worst decision.  Again.  He has pulled out of the toughest verification measures any nuclear deal has implemented.  He did it more or less because it's the opposite of what Obama did.  Because Trump is a toddler.  Iran could shut out IAEA inspectors and gear back up, which would could lead to a bomb, or more likely US and/or Israeli strikes.  Which would be a catastropic destabilizing of the Persian Gulf.  Get ready for $5.00/gal gasoline.  Trump got played by Netanyahu's bullshit presentation about the fact that Iran was lying back when we knew they were lying.  Like the toddler that he is, Trump was distracted by his own peevish animosity and Netanyahu and Bolton's shiny powerpoint (WITH PICTURES!!) and has pulled America out of a substantive and impressive regime that kept Iran from getting a bomb.

The ball is now soundly in Iran's court, and Europe's, too.  It will be interesting to see if Iran attempts to seize the high ground by staying in the deal.  This would require Europe to not only reaffirm the deal but provide economic incentives for Iran to stay in.  Iran has been rocked by protests surrounding the economy since December.  If the US snaps a bunch of sanctions that destroy the Iranian economy even further, it could lead to even more unrest.  My guess this is what Netanyahu and Bolton are hoping for.  If this unrest topples Rouhani's government, it could lead to another Ahmadinejhad, which would justify the military action that Israel craves.  If it topples the whole government: that would be the ultimate victory.

To some degree, leaving aside Trump's toddler-esque tantrums about hating anything Obama did, Netanyahu and Bolton are engaging in the sort of impulsive, leap before you look foreign policy is awfully reminiscent of the lead up to Iraq in 2003.  Chaos works for Israel, because it distracts its Arab enemies from the issues in Gaza. 

In America, it leads to dead American soldiers.  Prove to me that Bolton, Netanyahu and Trump give a shit about that.

The Two Parties Today

If you want an accurate picture of where both parties stand today here are two stories that help.

Republicans are worried that convicted felon Don Blankenship might win the WV Senate primary today.  Democrats are also worried that convicted felon Don Blankenship might win the WV Senate primary today.  Republicans are worried he will lose a winnable race, and Democrats are worried that one of the world's worst humans will join the Senate.

The second story is the rapid fall of sexual predator Eric Schneiderman as NY Attorney General.  Within about an 8 hour span, four women came forward with pretty shocking stories, and Scheiderman resigned.  He had been an active force in taking on Trump, so the Trump people wanted to dunk on him, leading Kellyanne Conway to tweet: "Gotcha."  Meanwhile Trump has not resigned 18 months after he was caught bragging into a hot mic about sexually assaulting women.

Genius

I've watched this four times, and I'm not even sure what I'm watching from a strictly narrative perspective.  Yet, I'm also entirely sure what I'm watching from a strictly emotional perspective.

Donald Glover, y'all.

I'm Broken

How can you summarize this week?

SNL gives it a shot, but honestly, it's too bizarre even for them.  We have Rudy Giuliani basically admitting election finance law violations, Trump's doctor admitting that Trump's letter saying he was the fittest president ever was dictated by Trump - and alleging that Trump sent goons over to the Doc's office to steal files.  We have...something...going on in Korea.  Trump wants to withdraw from the JCPOA in prelude to military action against Iran.  John McCain doesn't want Trump to come to his funeral.  There is a continuing standoff on whether we are about to have a trade war.  Without checking, I'm reasonably sure that Scott Pruitt did something shady AF. 

We are careening from one crisis and scandal to the next.  And Trump still doesn't sink below 40% approval rating.

MITTENS!

I remain impressed with how deeply weird a human being Mitt Romney is.

Swing Bloc

An interesting story that once again disappears into the never-ending stream of piss that flows from the Trump Administration is the saga of the House Chaplain.  Paul Ryan fired him, then unfired him.  Within the context of this story is the idea that Fr. Conroy was fired for being Catholic. Ryan is, presumably, Catholic, as are quite a few House members. 

Then, of course, there is the Pope.  Francis is not a man likely to be sympathetic to Trump and Trumpism.  He has been an advocate for the poor and marginalized his whole life and has carried that into his papacy.  He has tried, in effect, to reshape the Catholic church as an institution less concerned with reproductive issues and more concerned with poverty and injustice.  I wish him well with that effort.

If he succeeds, even a little bit, in changing that focus of the Church, then it could have dramatic implications for American political blocs.  The so-called Reagan Democrats who swung away from the Democratic Party did so largely because of the abortion issue.  These while working class voters, especially those without college degrees, became a bulwark of Republican victories in places like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. 

The GOP has increasingly become a party of white, evangelical Protestants.  Tied deeply to that movement is a strong anti-Catholic component, going back to anti-immigrant, anti-Irish nativists in the mid-19th century.  It continued through opposition to the New Immigrants and into the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.  The new KKK was staunchly Protestant, staunchly anti-immigrant.

And, of course, Hispanics are overwhelmingly Catholic.  If Evangelicals and Catholics rupture over obligations for the poor, it would decisively swing the Rust Belt back to the Democrats  and cement Hispanics even closer to the Democratic Party.  It should be a goal of Democratic strategists to make this happen.

"The Best People..."

It's not that the Trump administration is corrupt...though they are.

It's not that the Trump administration is incompetent...though they are.

It's not that the Trump administration is stupid...though they are.

It's how they seamlessly manage to execute all three at once.

Modern Conservatism In A Nut(shell)

This ad by a Republican in Georgia really sums up modern conservatism.  It's is reckless, stupid, entitled, misogynistic and ammosexual.

But it's all cool, because it "triggers libtards."

A proud and ancient philosophical heritage.

Profoundly Stupid, Dishonest And Dangerous

Bibi Netanyahu has released...something...about Iran.  Basically, Mossad swiped a bunch of Iranian nuclear documents from a decade or more ago that proves that Iran was lying about building a nuclear weapon back around 2005.  Which...we knew.  We knew Iran was lying about building a nuclear weapon, and that is exactly why we crafted the JCPOA.  To stop them.  Which it has.

The problem is that Cleek's Law slammed down immediately on the deal. Every single objective arms control expert I've ever heard interviewed about this deal says it is surprisingly robust.  Even the Trump Hawks can't plausibly point to a violation of the agreement, beyond the fact that  somethingsomething Obama Iran something.  The rationale for abandoning the agreement is that "we don't like Iran."

I was "arguing" with a Likudnik on Facebook yesterday, and his position was that Iran is a Bad Actor who means Israel harm.  OK, that's undoubtably true.  And that's irrelevant to whether the JCPOA is working or not.  Iran's meddling in Syria, its missile program...that's a separate issue.  The JCPOA was about nuclear weapons, and I haven't heard a single shred of evidence that it is not working.

Netanyahu released this steaming hot nothingburger yesterday, because he wants Trump to withdraw from JCPOA, because Netanyahu wants to strike at Iran.  As long as JCPOA is in place, that's hard.  The Israeli military doesn't want to do this, but Netanyahu is under investigation for corruption and changing the subject has to feel pretty good right now.

Invading Iran would be a catastrophe of the first order.  We would have zero support beyond Israel and Saudi Arabia.  Europe would abandon us; not even Britain is interested in the shitshow that would follow.  Iranians have a poor opinion of their government right now, but a US invasion would legitimize a crumbling, corrupt regime. 

There is a sentiment that Trump is making Dubya Bush look good by comparison.  Maybe.  Dubya was a complete disaster.  However, if Trump leads us back into some half-assed military adventure in the Middle East again...Yeah, that would seal the deal.