What Will The FBI Be Allowed To Investigate?

There are all sorts of conflicting reports about how many people the FBI can interview or what they can do to track down leads.  This is shaping up to be a worst case scenario, where the FBI does "an investigation" that really doesn't look into much, but it's enough to let Flake and Murkowski give it a thumb's up, leaving Democrats to sputter about process.

There's a coming crisis of legitimacy in this country.

Days Of Rage

I am perfectly unqualified to discuss how many women are experiencing the Kavanaugh situation, so I will let Alexandra Petri do it.  What I find disturbing is that a not insignificant number of women say "No big deal."  I was disgusted to see that 54% of Republicans believe Kavanaugh should be approved for the High Court even if the allegations are true.  That disgusts me.  The women who say it's no big deal to be groped or assaulted are almost certainly Republicans.  The party line has been set, so they toe it.  If there is a better example of self-interst colliding with partisan loyalty, I don't know what it might be.

The hypocrisy of being on Kenneth Starr's team in 1998 and then angrily dismissing Blassy Ford's testimony is of course apparent, and I guess irrelevant.  Kavanaugh's sense of self will not allow him to admit to it, even if helped him weather this storm.  But for complete strangers who are women, to basically go with, "No big deal," over allegations of sexual assault...I don't even know what to do with that.

I've wondered if we should welcome a moment when Trump finally lets loose with the N-Word.  Let's just smoke the racism even further out into the open.  What we are learning is that if you identify as a Republican, you will accept whatever the party hierarchy says to accept.  That's terrifying for a democracy.  We need to win elections, sure.  But we also need to have fewer Republicans.

Disgusted

I just feel hammered flat right now.  Yesterday, I saw a completely credible accusation from Dr. Blassey Ford.  I then saw Judge Kavanaugh meltdown and yell at the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  I saw repeated calls for an FBI investigation of the events dismissed by both Kavanaugh and the Republicans on the Committee.

The idea that you wouldn't want an FBI investigation to clear your name is a massive red flag.  The second red flag is that Kavanaugh transparently lied about many small, easily disprovable things: his drinking, his yearbook page... Yes, I'm convinced he did it.  Or at the very least, he's lying about some aspects of it.  He was a drunken lout, a beer soaked bully, and while he may not be doing keg stands anymore, that aspect of his testimony was on full display yesterday.

And it won't make a difference.

The rural, Red State tilt of the Senate means that Republicans enjoy a razor thin margin, and they will leverage that margin - as they did against Merrick Garland - to force an undemocratic result on an undemocratic body.

We shall see how we survive Trumpistan in terms of the wild, moronic narcissist ensconced in the Oval Office, but the broader damage to democratic legitimacy in this country is very troubling.  The skewed nature of our representation in the Senate and House give an undemocratic advantage to the rural, white, high school educated base of the Republican Party.  There is no easy fix for this, beyond the unlikely emergence of different voting patterns among Democratic and Independent constituencies that could somehow overwhelm the natural and partisan gerrymanders in our Congress. 

This isn't just about Brett Kavanaugh or #MeToo.  It's about whether our institutions still represent the will of the majority.  They do not.  If November doesn't change things, I fear for the very fabric of the country.

Apocalyptic Thursday

What a year this week has been.  The non-stop puke funnel of Trumpistan reaches a fever pitch today.  Rod Rosenstein goes to the White House to try and preserve even a meager commitment to the rule of law.  If Trump fires him, the Mueller Investigation falls under the eye of a Trump lackey.  Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Republicans have outsourced their questioning of Kavanaugh and Ford to a prosecutor who used to work with Joe Arpaio. 

Best case scenario has Rosenstein flattering Trump into letting him stay on the job and Kavanaugh stepping on his own stories in a way that conclusively proves what we already know: He's a liar.  Alternatively, Rosenstein fires (or worse yet, quits) and the GOP unites around Bart O'Kavanaugh. 

That's where we are.  That's what we've done to our Republic.

Thanks, Republicans.

Unfunny Joke

Dana Milbank points out what we knew: Donald Trump is a joke that is hard to laugh at.  He ran on the ridiculous Fox News talking point that the world laughed at Barack Obama's leadership.  The world literally laughed at the Blowhard in Chief as he addressed the UN yesterday. Trump has insulated himself inside a cocoon of purest bullshit.  He has a coterie of sycophants telling him what he hears, Fox pumps up his vanity and he avoids anyone but his Deplorables at the Volken Rallies around the country.

The rest of the world has to look at us with fear and wonder.  Somehow, we have twice elected incurious men without a majority or even plurality of the popular vote.  One launched an illegal war that has still roiled the Middle East, the other is an international punchline. 

One consistent truth about the GOP has been their imperviousness to negative feedback.  Let's give them some in early November.

Is Kavanaugh In Trouble?

I've presumed that - in the end - Kavanaugh would be approved.  The proper Democratic strategy was to try and lay the groundwork for making Gorsuch/Kavanaugh illegitimate, considering the treatment of Merrick Garland.  However, Kavanaugh's personal life has eclipsed the profound secrecy of his professional life.  The man who would not release reams of documents from his time as a GOP operative is now being taken apart by accusations from decades ago.

What is fascinating is that it appears, for once, that Democrats are playing this right.  Despite whining from Republicans about how Feinstein sat on this (neglecting to note that she was following Prof. Blassey Ford's wishes), the timing was propitious.  Especially the delays by Prof. Blassey Ford that allowed for the Ramirez allegations to come forward.

Now, we have media creature Michael Avenetti coming forward with a third accuser.  Democrats are doing the right thing by not rushing to this shiny object.  Avenetti's track record suggests he has the goods, but his personality suggests he's simply grabbing the spotlight.  Let it play out.  Because the Republicans are vowing to "plow through" this, they are demonstrating a disregard for the accusations that Kavanaugh might have attempted to rape someone, anyone.  And they are doing this weeks before an election that promises to have a historic gender gap already. Even if Avenetti comes through with a third, credible accusation and that sinks Kavanaugh once and for all, the GOP has already committed to their defense of him.  They will attach themselves to his moral stink and the stink of his failure.

When even John Yoo says you might be wading into a minefield, you should take note.  We can finally abandon the pretense that the Supreme Court is not political.  Republican actions - with Merrick Garland and now with Brett Kavanaugh - have cemented that fact into our minds.  They used to be good at this sort of politics.  It seems to be crumbling before their eyes.

UPDATE: I really need to keep up with Albert Burneko.  This is golden.

The Knife's Edge

News is that Rod Rosenstein might be quitting.  Or getting fired.  Or both.  Or neither.  (It's confusing.)  Presuming that there is some truth to the reporting, the departure of Rosenstein under any conditions puts a bullseye on the Mueller investigation. To this point, Mueller has been free to conduct his investigation without interference.  He has leaked absolutely nothing to the press, so we don't know how much he knows about Trump's criminal misdeeds over the past 30 years. 

There are - allegedly - Republicans who care about the Republic more than the Republican Party.  The timing of Rosenstein's departure is interesting.  It would take a single member of the Senate Judiciary Committee or two Senate Republicans to require that Trump name a neutral, career professional to replace Rosenstein.  That requirement is linked to any movement on Trump's Supreme Court picks.  Now, it could be (should be) that Kavanaugh is toast.  That would mean that the Federalist Society would need to crank out another Alito clone ASAP, before the Republicans possibly lose the gavel in November (actually January when the new Senate would be seated).  To do this, they will need a unified caucus.

Replacing Rosenstein while trying to get a Supreme Court nominee approved gives the "Anti-Trump" faction (is it two people now?) leverage to protect Mueller's investigation. 

Every indication we have so far is that they will fail to exploit their leverage.

Woke Bill Kristol

One of the most disorienting aspects of Trumpistan is finding yourself agreeing with people like Bill Kristol.  Kristol - for those of you who aren't familiar with his body of work - earned the sobriquet "the world's wrongest pundit" back in the Bush Era.  The joke/truth was that you could do pretty well in life by assuming everything Kristol said was wrong and doing the opposite.  Much of this had to do with Bush Era foreign policy, but still...seeing him make really cogent, relevant and accurate points about Trump is odd.

Kristol's first brush with fame was likely back in 1993 when he warned the GOP that allowing Clinton and the Democrats to create a universal health care system would create a new generation of Democratic voters, similar to the way the New Deal did.  The lockstep polarization of the subsequent 25 years in some ways proceeds from that moment.

The thing is: Kristol was probably right about the politics of health care.  As Jon Chait points out, the ACA has become more popular over time, not less.  And the overall health care landscape has shifted to accommodate this.  Any GOP hope of killing Obamacare was lost in 2012 when Romney lost.  The truly "conservative" position is to make Obamacare work, not continually working to sabotage it.  Health care voters are exactly that combination of working class and suburban voters that Republicans rely on.  Losing them is simply electoral suicide. 

The next Democratic administration combined with a Democratic Congress (capable of passing legislation) will move us one step closer to a universal single player system.  Of course, that was always the goal of Obamacare, and it's what the Clintons missed in 1994 and Ted Kennedy missed back in the Nixon Administration. 

As frustrating as it is to watch GOP misgovernance and sabotage, they are laying the groundwork for an electoral coalition to make a better, fairer America.

Read In Full

Matthew Yglesias says what I tried to say, but much better than me.

What The Everloving...

Josh Marshall can lead you through the bizarre Twitter theory advanced by Ed Whelan last night.  Basically, he puts forward a theory - based on the merest conjecture - that Prof. Blassey-Ford's attacked was not Brett Kavanaugh, but a classmate named Chris Garrett.  Whelan lays out the elaborate theory in a way that he must have been very proud of, but the Twitterati was less than impressed. 

First, Whelan's theory is full of holes and logical fallacies.  Second, it's almost certainly libelous, as he suggests that Chris Garrett is a rapist without a shred of proof, beyond his desire to exonerate Kavanaugh.

Most importantly - as Marshall points out - Whelan isn't Alex Jones or some dirty blogger.  He's a very plugged in member of the Conservative Legal Apparatus that includes the Federalist Soceity.  He's a friend of Kavanaugh's, too. This isn't out of left field.  This is the plan.  Rather than attack Blassey-Ford the way Anita Hill was attacked, they will simply say that she was attacked by someone else.  Almost certainly, Kavanaugh approved of this - or at least knew about it in advance and refused to stop it.

Brett Kavanaugh is at least tacitly OK with smearing Chris Garrett as a rapist, if it allows him to get onto the Supreme Court. 

There is nothing that we have learned about his character - regardless of the truth of the allegations against him - that suggests this man deserves a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. 

Elites

Read this post surrounding the "Tiger Mom" and Brett Kavanaugh.

It's hard not to wonder about how strongly a pervasive rot is taking hold at elite levels.  "Not all elites.." I guess, because there is no reason why going to Yale Law would make you a sociopath.  In fact, I had an advisee - a brilliant young man - who went to Yale Law.  I heard his voice on an NPR report where he was working pro bono for workers at a sushi restaurant who were forced to work inhuman hours and denied wages. 

No, it's not "Yale" or "Harvard" that's the problem.  Sure, it's a problem that both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh went to Georgetown Prep.  That's a small, elite school that caters to an elite clientele.  So are we.  But we make an effort to expand beyond the narrow enclaves of the rich - so do the Ivies.  My main wish for my school is that our financial aid budget were much larger.  We have to take a certain segment of wealth, full-pay kids in order to make ends meet.  We probably do our best work, however, with those first-generation college students and students of color from disadvantaged economic backgrounds. 

What's striking about a segment of our nation's "elites" is how much they seem more and more like Versailles in 1788.  Like or hate the Bush family, there was a strong sense of national service at work in that family.  Dubya was a dumpster fire of a president, but one got the sense that he did care about the American people on some level.  That was the key to his "likability."  I really think he believed in the concept of "compassionate conservatism," he was just too much of a dope to realize he was getting played by brighter, more cynical operators.

This next wave of conservatives and elites...well, think Ted Cruz.  There really is something sociopathic about their disdain for other people.  Paul Ryan would at least try to fake concern for poor people.  But the new wave of "Conservatives" really seem to hate large swaths of people, AND they act on it. 

Watching the reactions to the Blassy-Ford/Kavanaugh dispute is in some ways no more than the predictable result of political sorting and tribalism.  Being a Republican is more important than being a woman or an ally of sexual assault victims.  You pick your political tribe before your common humanity.

But the Modern GOP has taken such extreme positions, they are increasingly forcing their adherents to adopt more and more deviant positions.  And that - hopefully, hopefully - is reducing the numbers of Republicans.  And what's more, it's reducing them to people like Donald Trump, the Man With The Golden Toilet. 

This can't possibly be sustainable.  If the GOP becomes solely the party of Elites and Racists, then our political system will be due for an even greater upheaval. 

This is where revolutions come from.

None Of This Is OK

I overheard an NPR story today, where they interviewed women in the Detroit suburbs about the swirling sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.  The Republican female politician took the usual odious positions of "times were different, they were just kids."  But several other women seemed troubled by the timing.  Why didn't she come forward sooner?

I recommend that you read this extraodinary story by Elizabeth Bruenig.  It's long, but worth it.  This wasn't 30 years ago, it was 12 year past.  This wasn't "boys will be boys" (WTF does that mean?), it was rape. 

Once again, Brett Kavanaugh does not "deserve" a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.  There are other conservative judges that could take that seat.  He will not be impeached from his current lifetime appointment on the bench. 

Republicans are forcing this through as quickly as possible, because they simply don't give a shit if Professor Ford was raped.

Isms

There's an interesting interview with a Yale Philosopher about the nature of fascism.  Jason Stanley identifies fascism as a form of politics more than a belief system.  When I teach fascism, I teach it as a belief system.  In the poli sci definitions, liberal democracy prizes freedom above all else, communism prizes equality and social democracy attempts to balance both.  Fascism stands outside this dialogue, saying freedom and equality are both irrelevant.  The individual is irrelevant.  Only the People (the Volk) and the State matter.  You exist to serve the State, which serves the People. 

Fascism works - and Prof. Stanley and I agree on this - by creating in-groups and out-groups and exploiting fears.  But ideologies, by definition, have an end result that they prefer.  Belief systems have something they are trying to reach and a way to get there.  In this way, fascism is programmatic.  But so is communism and liberalism and social democracy. (Anarchy is over in the corner, playing with itself and muttering.)

By divorcing fascism from its programmatic aspects, the word can simply be thrown about to describe divisive politics.  I think that's unhelpful.  By his definition, Trump is definitely a fascist politician.  But fascism almost always comes with military mobilization.  All Trump does is want to have a parade (which gets cancelled) and use the troops as props. 

We need to differentiate different forms of authoritarianism.  We spent a great deal of effort delineating liberal democracy from social democracy from democratic socialism; we separate out parliamentary, presidential and semi-presidential systems.  But we've tended to lump dictatorships into types with really integrating what Prof. Stanley has examined: the politics of authoritarianism in the 20th century.  Calling it fascism just muddies the waters.

The Fig Leaf Is Gone

Jon Chait lays out how Ted Cruz's troubled re-election campaign demonstrates the increasing unpopularity of the Republican policy agenda.  Republicans thought they could run on their tax cuts, only to find out that cutting taxes for billionaires doesn't win you that many votes.  Hunh!

Of course, Republican ideas have been unpopular for years.  People, generally, want the government to do things for them.  They want veterans taken care of.  They want Social Security and Medicare strengthened.  More and more, they want the government to take over health insurance.  They want their roads fixed, their schools improved and big business watched.

Republicans have run and won on Dog Whistle politics.  Since the Age of Trump turned the dog whistle into an air horn, Republicans are losing their voters.  Of course, the worry is that as their policies become more toxic they will have to rely more on Trump-style ethno-nationalism. 

It will get worse before it gets better.

A Sane Party

We cannot know with 100% certainty that Christine Blasey Ford is telling the truth, because we were not there.  But, if she gives credible testimony before the Senate Judicary, then we have to wonder how far Republicans will go with Kavanaugh.

As it is, the GOP is facing a massive gender gap heading into the November election.  Could they assume that their numbers with women are about as low as they can get, so YOLO?  Or will they face a rising backlash that they fear could carry over to 2020 when they have a lot more Senate seats at play?

Brett Kavanaugh is not "owed" a seat on the Supreme Court. There are plenty of other credible, reactionary judges that will vote to vote to overturn Roe v Wade.  Of course, that will bleed into the fall campaign, for better or worse.  But the GOP is no longer a sane party.  They are led by a man who refuses to admit defeat, so they may lash themselves to the mast of the SS Kavanaugh regardless.

The Constitution says that Justices are confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate.  Apparently, it is now only the advice and consent of the majority party.  That is fundamentally messed up.

Willie Nelson

It's going to screw up my whole week, but when an old friend calls out of the blue to go see Willie Nelson and Sturgill Simpson...you say, yes.

Here We Go Again

I cannot say that the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her in high school is telling or recalling the absolute truth.  The past is mirky.  There are reasons why she might want to take Kavanaugh down by lying. Of course, her tortured relationship with coming forward suggests she is either still damaged by what happened and now the media shitshot will make things worse, or again, maybe she doesn't want her story scruntinized.

At this point, the real story is that Chuck Grassley had a list of 65 women who attested that Brett Kavanaugh did not try to rape them in high school.  He had that list ready to go.  That means he knew about the allegations, too, and tried to bury them.  Why Feinstein sat on this story is complicated.  I imagine she thought she was trying to protect the requested anonymity of the alleged victim. 

But all of this reeks of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings from so many years ago.  Anita Hill, however, came forward and made specifc allegations under oath.  That's the difference.  The similarity is that there was ANOTHER woman who alleged workplace harassment by Thomas and she did not testify.  And for almost 30 years now, Thomas has been handing down troglodyte legal opinions, because the allegations of abusive behavior were either excused or not believed. 

There are other judges that I'm sure the Federalist Society would be willing to put on the Supreme Court, who would overturn Roe v Wade and destroy the regulatory state.  But the GOP is going to force an accused sexual assailant and possible perjurer onto the Court because they can.

No Platform

Fareed Zakaria is an intellectual I frequently admire.  He's an old school liberal with all of the faults and strengths that come with that.

His recent piece suggests that democracy is under assault from the Left - a position fellow liberal Jon Chait has engaged in frequently.  This assault comes from the idea of "no platform," whereby colleges refuse to allow certain speakers on campus.   Zakaria's point is that the free exchange of ideas is important both to education and democracy.  Once you start limiting the opinions that people are exposed to, you erode democracy. 

So, let's look at the sort of people who Zakaria says have been silenced.  Let's take three as a group: Steve Bannon, Milo Yannopolous and Charles Murray.  First, Zakaria artfully leaves off Milo, because he's simply a troll.  His entire schtick is to say inflammatory things so that people react and then he can point and laugh at them.  He is not engaged in a debate about ideas, but rather he is simply trying to outrage people.  Of course, wouldn't that be covered in an absolute commitment to free exchange?  Murray and Bannon are racists.  Murray's work on IQ and other issues (The Bell Curve is the most obvious example) suggests that African Americans are inferior to whites.  Steve Bannon is trying to create a political movement around this idea.

Most schools - and I swear, I just left a faculty meeting where we discussed this - have explicit statements whereby they commit to diverse communities.  As our statement says, this is a moral and pragmatic commitment.  There is no place in our community for those who would try and do exactly what Steve Bannon hopes to do: divide people on the basis of race in order to gain power.  Why - if we won't accept that sort of behavior from students - should we pay a hefty fee to bring Steve Bannon on campus to promulgate exactly the sort of ideas that we are trying to weed out of our students? Educational pluralism does require that we grapple with different opinions, but does that include white supremacy?

There was another example that Zakaria cites, and I will admit it's more troubling: Condoleeza Rice.  Rice is problematic for her role in starting a war that destabilized the Middle East and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.  Condoleeza Rice could plausibly be accused of being a war criminal.  However, her ideas are not entirely toxic to educational values.  Rice's problem was incompetence and ideological blindness.  The idea of overthrowing a tyrant and implanting democracy in Iraq isn't an evil idea - naive, half-baked and dangerous when done wrong - but it isn't white supremacy.

Classrooms should be places where students grapple with difficult and challenging ideas.  But do we really need to "grapple" with racism?  Is that a value system we need to assess for merit?  Do science classes need to wrestle with the creation myth in Genesis? 

Missing The Problem

I'm generally a fan of Pope Francis' theology.  Reorienting the Catholic Church away from finger wagging about divorce and birth control towards a more compassionate ministry is long overdue.

However, it remains clear that the Church is not able to and should be allowed to police itself.  Yet that remains the default position.  Because the Church is - on a theological level - infallible, it cannot allow outside investigators to poke about in its business.  The problem, obviously, is that it was precisely this exemption from scrutiny that led to centuries of sexual abuse. 

There are obvious correlations between a "celibate" priesthood and sexual dysfunction.  There's just a massive potential for problems, when you shut off a critical aspect of human life from people who are then given authority over others.  All because St. Augustine was a crank and Pope Gregory didn't want priests to hand down their parishes to their children.  It's theologically indefensible and had created a crisis in the Catholic Church.  Yes, Protestant ministers have commited similar acts, but most of those seem to be lumped in the same sort of patriarchal power structures of the evangelical movement.

The Church could address this issue by allowing priests to marry or ordaining women.  It won't.  It could clean house by allowing outside, neutral arbiters to examine the crimes of the clergy. It won't.  It could turn over church officials hiding in the Vatican.  It hasn't.

Until then, it's all bullshit, and however much I admire Francis' profession of a new ethics, he's a failure.

There's Something Happening Here

What it is, ain't exactly clear.

This Q-Poll generic ballot is on the high side for this cycle, but not the high side for post-Labor Day.  Perhaps Trump's egregious nastiness surrounding the John McCain funeral cost him and his party some support.  The key indicator will be those stupid "independents" who haven't yet made up their mind.  Many won't vote, but Democrats lead among independents 50-35.  Given the declining number of Republicans as a whole, the ability of Republicans to win 93% of their co-partisans is not especially relevant.  This poll has Republicans winning white men (there have been some polls that had them only getting 50% of white men, which would be the end of their party).  They lose white women by 5 points.  That's a lot.  They are also losing whites with college degrees 52-43.  That is the suburban vote that will swing the House. 

If late breakers break against Trump and the GOP, there is simply no way for the GOP to retain the House and they likely lose the Senate, too.

No, Please, No

Donald Trump is the worst person in a world that includes Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Steven Seagall.

(That photo was taken on his way to a memorial service for Flight 93.  Fucker.)

Yes, Please

House Democrats have a good message.

Candidates should and likely will run this and Medicare For All.  News organizations will not cover this.  Sandernistas and Sensible Centrists will complain that Democrats don't have a message (that they approve of).

Lather.  Rinse. Repeat.

Worth Noting

North Carolina is about to flood.

The Rio Grande is disappearing.

When we catalog the crimes of this era, perhaps Trump's rampant self-dealing and corruption will be but a footnote to the crime of inaction in the face of climate change.  More accurately, that crime will be laid at the feet not simply of Trump, but the whole rotting corpse of the GOP.

Boomers

I saw a chart somewhere on Twitter that I think is an important corrective to how we view the 1960s and the backlash to it.  The common perception is that the 1960s saw a group of young people radicalized by the civil rights movement and Vietnam War proteststo fundamentally shift America leftward, which created a rightward backlash.

The chart shows that in fact the Greatest Generation was the most opposed to the war, with the young Boomers most in favor.  That's...odd.

Or maybe it isn't.  I would guess that you would have to tease out those numbers along educational lines, with college educated Boomers opposed to the war and WWC Boomers supporting it.  Montgomery notes this in the comments. And it would seem natural that those WWC Boomers remain the bulwark of American "Conservatism."  We know that Trump's support trends older and whiter, and that's precisely the Boomer Cohort.  Those white Americans who grew up seeing their position challenged by People of Color, Feminism and a growing sub-cohort of college educated peers they felt looked down on them.

As a Gen Xer, I've never been very fond of the Boomers.  To me, the quintessential Boomer presidents were Bill Clinton and Dubya Bush.  One represented the tremendous promise sacrificed in the name of appetite and expediency.  The other the easy, unexamined privilege of a generation that was catered to their whole life.  Trump shares the same birth year as Clinton, and he combines the worst of Clinton and the worst of Dubya (plus the worst of a lot of other stuff). 

Generational thinking is of limited use, but it is not unhelpful.  Two more things.  Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation is largely credited for both changing America and losing WWC voters from the Democratic party.  However, his education and immigration bills seem to be creating a new group for them to grow from.

Cruz Control

There is a very real chance, apparently, that Ted Cruz could lose to Beto O'Rourke.  The election of a Democratic Senator in Texas will likely be written off (should it happen) to Cruz's incredibly loathsome personality.  However, which Republican politicians currently boast a winning and winsome personality?  Ben Sasse seems to be auditioning for the part, but most of these people are granny-starvers going way back.  Their basic governmental philosophy is "screw you, I got mine."  As loathsome as Ted Cruz is, how is he less repellent than Mitch McConnell?  James Inhofe?

Maybe Trump's own bloated moral stink has awoken people to how awful they all are.  They shall know ye by ye works.

The Party of Responsibility

President Obama spoke yesterday, saying that Trump represents not an absurd, one off event, but a logical conclusion to years of the Republican Party losing its mooring with reality.  He noted the retreat of the GOP from things like math, science and history.  No one would expect Republicans to agree with this - at least not on record.

Ben Shapiro - alleged rising star within the "conservative" movement - responded with a tweet that read: "Obama lecturing us is LITERALLY how you got Trump."  Ezra Klein takes it apart here.

I would stress one thing: We got Trump because a plurality of Republicans supported him.  They supported him because he represents "owning teh libs."  Is he qualified by experience or temperament to be president?  No, but he upsets the people I hate, so cool.

Obama and Trump are obviously about as different as two people can be. Obama is thoughtful to a fault, Trump impulsive to a fault.  Obama reflexively sees the best in others, Trump the worst.  Obama looked 25 years in the future, Trump 25 minutes. Obama is an exemplary family man, Trump's marital history is a dumpster fire.

But as Klein notes, it was Obama's "otherness" - his blackness, his name, his urbane demeanor - that alienated large swaths of white America.  Their fears and paranoia were stoked by years of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

But in the world of Ben Shapiro, "conservatives" are not to blame for embracing those fears and fanning their own paranoia.  It isn't THEIR fault they picked a raving narcissist, a racist and an intellectual dwarf.  How could it be?  Conservatism is never wrong.  It never fails.  The op-ed by Anonymous was simply setting the stage for the electoral calamity most are predicting.  It wasn't CONSERVATISM that was the problem, only Trump. Of course, GOP tax cuts, immigration policy, abortion positions and spending priorities are all very unpopular and have been for years.  The GOP survives precisely because it mobilizes large numbers of white people angry at the cultural transformation of the country.

There was a joke a few years ago that if Obama came out in favor of breathing 27% of the country would asphyxiate itself.  Not as funny right now.

Kavanaugh

In any normal political time, Kavanaugh would have withdrawn his nomination by now.  While it is doubtful that Kavanaugh perjured himself, that has to come with the caveat "so far."  Kamala Harris, in particular, seemed to be honing in a specific case.  Of course, the vast bulk of Kavanaugh's documents have been withheld, so we don't know if somewhere else there is some smoking gun document that proves he willfully lied.  Did he lie more than Clarence Thomas lied?  Who knows?

But Kavanaugh is also an extrememly unpopular  nominee; he has not been forthcoming; his known paper trail is disturbing as hell...but in the end, he will be forced through the Senate.  It is possible that Heidi Heitkamp votes for him out of an attempt to save her seat.  Joe Manchin could, just because he's Joe Manchin.  Hopefully, Doug Jones, Joe Donnelly and Claire McCaskill show some spine. 

Ideally, from a political point of view, you could keep the Democratic caucus united and maybe Lisa Murkowski jumps over, forcing a tie-breaking vote from Mike Pence.  I doubt Susan Collins, Tim Scott or anyone else grows a backbone.  I doubt Ben Sasse or Bob Corker do jack-shit to leverage this moment to get accountability from the Trump White House.

There are other Conservative Republican judges that could be nominated, but Trump picked an especially troubling one.  Republicans could win this battle in September, but lose the war in November.

Anonymous

So, anyone read anything interesting the Times recently?

A lot has already been said about the op-ed written by an anonymous Trump administration member.  I want to add just one thing.

Presumably this person is a reasonably well placed within the Administration and Republican political circles.  This is not a Trump Creature.  (My money is on Mick Mulvaney.)  This is someone whose primary loyalty is to the Republican Party not Donald Trump.

It is therefore reasonable to believe that the "knowledge" expressed in that op-ed is well known among Republicans in Washington.  Several people have pointed out that it is wrong to call these allegations a "bombshell."  For Trump critics, none of this is new.  It confirms everything that those of us who aren't loyal to the Republican Party have been saying since he came down the Golden Escalator.

What this op-ed does make clear is that everything Filthy Bloggers have been saying is well known to the Republican Establishment.  Trump is mentally and psychologically unfit to be President.

And they don't care.

What's more, they are actively abetting Trump's continued reign as President.  They could easily remove Trump from office under  the 25th Amendment.  The author admits that they've discussed this.  However, they have demonstrated that they are fine imperiling the Republic in pursuit of tax cuts and deregulation.

Trump will leave office sooner or later. The complicity of the Republican Party - and that includes St. McCain - must remain part of the collective memory of the nation.

Left Vs Liberal, Part The Millionth

Ed Burmila linked to an article in The Baffler that I'm not even going to try to track down to link to.  It starts with an overly generalized discussion of an American Myth of distortion that has little to any basis in my understanding of American history.

It then goes on to argue that Liberal governance as typified by Obama was a failure because it tried to reach out for bipartisan compromise.

The problem with this analysis is that the reason Obama reached out to the GOP was because after 2010, the GOP controlled the House.  Without Republican help, Obama couldn't pass any legislation.  Why did the GOP win the House in 2010?  Because there was a massive economic crisis in 2008 (it was in all the papers).  The tail of that crisis lasted for years, and some of it can still be seen in the persistently stagnant wages we see today.

Now, there is something called Murc's Law coined by Scott Lemieux that says the "only Democrats have agency, and therefore everything is there fault."  The reality is that our elections are basically determined by 20% of the population who make their voting decisions based on "TEH FEELS."  Things are going great?  Reward the party in power.  Things suck?  Punish the party in power.  This is why, since 1980, Unified control of the White House, the Senate and the House has occured very rarely.  It is obviously in place now, in 2009-2010, 2002-2007 and 1993-1995.  The preference for divided government isn't about policy, it's about how people feel about government.  Democrats do a poor job of telling a story about policy, whereas Republicans are good at that.  But as we are seeing now, Republicans can't outrun bad policy. This is leaving aside the 2010 GOP gerrymander entirely.

The fact remains that Democrats - mushy, liberal centrist Democrats - won the popular vote for President in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012 and 2016.  Bush won the popular vote in 2004 by a million votes, in the narrowest re-election margin in nearly a century.  The fact remains that votes for Democratic members of Congress exceed those votes cast for Republican members of Congress is almost every election.  Using just the House vote, more Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans in 2012, 2008, 2006 and it was effectively tied in 2000.  In two of those elections, they won the popular vote, but did not gain control of the House.  In 2016, only 1% separated the two parties in the House, neither of which won a majority of the popular vote.  Despite winning 49.1% of the popular vote, the GOP won 55% of the seats.

The article - and others of its ilk - suggest that it is Democratic timidity and perverse insistence on bipartisanship that hamstrings Democratic voter turnout.  Last night saw another young, female person of color knock off an older, white, male Democratic warhorse.  Both Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represent the changing demographics of Democratic bastions in the cities.  They do not represent a groundswell for Bernie Sanders, yet this is inevitably the lens through which the Left percieves it.  Clinton's unpardonable crime in 2016 of getting millions more votes than Sanders remains a sore spot.  Andrew Gillum's win in Florida is being ascribed to Sanders, even though Gillum was a Clinton surrogate.

Winning primaries and safe seats is not the way back to a House and Senate majority.  If Trump proved anything, it was that the power of white voters - while waning - remains the most potent force in American politics.  Running up the vote totals in Ocasio-Cortez's district by moving left will not win a suburban Long Island district. 

But again, all of this presumes that campaigns - especially midterm campaigns - are fought and won on issues.  They aren't.  If you really care about issues, you've already made up your mind whom you are voting for.  In fact, we know for a fact - via polling - that Democratic solutions to problems are more populat than Republican solutions.  Background checks have been overwhelmingly popular for years, but it hasn't led to a Democratic House.  Increasing taxes on the wealthy has been popular for years, but it hasn't led to a Democratic House. 

Luckily, widespread disgust with Trump SHOULD lead to a Democratic House this November, but it will have to overcome the 2010 gerrymander.  And should Democrats gain the upper hand throughout the 2020 re-districting cycle, they should play hardball, too. 

But, to use a current example, calling the Democrats feckless because they can't stop Brett Kavanaugh from getting confirmed is just moronic.  There are almost certainly 51 votes to confirm him.  Everything else is theater.

Chuck Todd (CHUCK TODD?!?!) Lays The Truth

Chuck Todd has perhaps the premier post in television journalism, as host of Meet the Press.  As such, he has been an easy target for those on the left and right to attack the flaws of the mainstream media.

Today, in The Atlantic, he writes a comprehensive explanation and history of how Right Wing media has destroyed or tried to destroy what the press should be in a functioning democracy.  He admits his own tendency to fall into "both sides," but notes that this is insufficient to the historical moment.

Most importantly, he notes the premier villain in our descent into Trumpistan: Roger Ailes.  There is no greater source of the division, anger and hatred in America today than Ailes.  I used to lay it at Newt Gingrich's feet, but I think that overstates the influence of a single politician.  What Ailes did was re-shape the media landscape by taking the voices from the fever swamps of AM radio and broadcasting them over cable television.  He took John Birch mainstream.  Ailes realized how to stoke and feed off anger and hate, and how conducive television was at stoking it. 

That loathsome sack of flesh and bile spoke at our school, but that was before Donald Trump exposed just how much Ailes had reshaped American politics.  One might even say that Fox News was "an enemy" of democracy.

Happy Labor Day

Enjoying it?  Thank a union that likely no longer exists.

Tough Weekend

Here is a scathing movie review to lighten it up.