Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them

As the damage to this countries political institutions comes fast and heavy, we should step back a moment to consider that perhaps the single greatest damage Trump is doing to our institutions is normalizing brazen, baldface lying.

Matthew Yglesias has a pretty thorough piece where he runs through the various lies that the GOP has embraced to sell the American Shitburger Act of 2017.  The important point is that these are not just Trump's lies.  I think we have become somewhat numb to the complete disregard for the truth that Trump has demonstrated throughout his life.  What is disturbing is that the GOP has no embraced this tactic of simply lying their asses off whenever it suits them.

I mean, why not?  As Trump observed, he could shoot a man in the face on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support.  That pretty much seems to go for the entire GOP.  Odious ambulatory cream cheese sculpture, Mitch McConnell, came forward and basically said, "Hey, no biggee.  I'm sure the House Oversight Committee is totally on this."  Anyone even half paying attention knows that there is almost no circumstance that one can reasonably imagine that would cause the GOP to break with Trump.  He's going to let them deregulate business, strip health care from the poor, appoint reactionary judges and pass tax cuts for the super rich.

What's not to like?  And besides, what's a little treason and obstruction of justice among friends.

For whatever reason the Right has proven much more vulnerable to the demonstrably false statements coming from Fox and Friends, which is to say Fox and the GOP.  There are people on the Left who will fall for SPIN, but spin is different from lies.

I had a discussion with someone over the "rape is a preexisting condition" story.  That's spin.  It's not that you won't be treated for rape.  But it is true that if you have psychological issues or a persistent STD from that rape, that IS a preexisting condition.  That's spin, and spin is an old political form of speech.

What we have here is new and profoundly disturbing.  Without a common frame of reference, it is literally impossible to see how we can survive as a democratic nation.

It's THAT bad.

Trump's Gonna Trump

So why and how did the Comey firing happen?  That's the question everyone seems to be asking.  The official rationale for his firing has the irony of being absolutely true and absolutely irrelevant.  It is "world class trolling."  Trump was apparently taken aback by the blowback he's getting from Democrats.  He assumed that because Democrats were and are pissed about Comey's unprofessional meddling in the election a week before the vote that Democrats would be pleased that Comey was fired.

Think about what this reveals about Trump.

Trump is a narcissist.  That can't be in doubt anymore.  He's also a naif.  In his mind, anyone who slights or upsets him, anyone who angers him is by definition an enemy, a bad person.  He projected this petulance onto Democrats (and much of the public).  He seems incapable of understanding why someone would both hate Comey's job performance and yet not want to see him fired.

As a historical illiterate, he probably can't remember the outrage of the Saturday Night Massacre or why the appearance of meddling in an on-going investigation would stink to high heaven.  He has responded to this criticism exactly as one might expect with an unhinged Tweetrum that casts blame everywhere but where it belongs.

All of this - of course - is the most favorable explanation for the firing of James Comey.  Trump didn't like the Russian investigation, because anything that is bad for Trump is, ipso facto, bad.  Comey is a sanctimonious tool who has no friends on either side of the aisle.  Trump wanted him gone, because he's objectively pretty bad at his job.

Trump's inability to see the context of the firing - the recent subpoenas the FBI have filed, the Yates testimony, the possible testimony of Michael Flynn, the possible squealing by Roger Stone - is not terribly surprising.  Again, he's a narcissist and a naif.  He has zero perspective beyond his own blinkered sense of self.  Comey=bad; Comey=gone.

Trump has been under some form of investigation for years.  He was a scummy, scummy business man.  All of these investigations are "fake news" in Trumpistan.

Of course, these is not fake news.  The timing, the circumstances...this screams cover-up.  From a man who still hasn't released his tax returns, from a man who only fired Flynn because someone leaked the damaging evidence of Flynn's compromised state, from a man whose every move has been to silence dissent and disloyalty to Trump the Man, all of this behavior suggests that there is a major fire at the center of the Russian scandal.

But then again, there is another plausible story where Trump's behavior is simply a product of his narcissism and ignorance.  Certainly his surprise that people would be upset by this transparently self-serving move suggests that he's not looking at this as a cover-up.

Nevertheless, even with the best possible spin on this - Trump is an idiot and a narcissist who doesn't understand basic norms of accountability in government - still requires an independent prosecutor.

Whether the sycophantic, craven lickspittles of the Republican caucus can see their duty to the country rather than their party remains very much in doubt.  Very much in doubt.

This Is...Bad

I believe with a near certainty that James Comey's terrible and unprofessional decision to insert himself into the presidential race in late October is why we currently have a kleptocratic narcissist in the White House.  The race was too close and the math is too sound to suggest anything different.  Maybe it shouldn't have been close enough for it to matter, but Clinton had close to a 6 point lead before the letter, she finished with just under a 3 point win in the popular vote and lost three critical states by a combined vote total of less that 100,000 votes.

Comey gave us Trump.

However, his firing means that the last marginally independent investigation - outside of the press - into Trump's Russian connections and the various venal and self-serving enterprises of the gang of grifters currently running this country is now kaput.

Republicans have repeated time and time again that when faced with a choice between party loyalty or the good of the country, they will choose party loyalty.  Unless John Cassidy, Susan Murkowski and Susan Collins can hang tough, the Senate will pass the American Shitburger Act of 2017 and strip health insurance from 24,000,000+ Americans.  And now, the last best defender of any investigation into Trump's web of lies and nefarious connections to Russia is gone.  Trump will appoint some clownishly evil mandarin - my money's on Rudy Giuliani - to run the FBI and shield Trump from further scrutiny.  As Charlie Pierce notes, it's not even subtle what they are doing here.

In a functioning America, Comey should have been fired months ago.  For those who hate him for saddling us with Trump, I fear we are going to miss him in a few months, when the FBI and DOJ decides to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her emails, while the Washington Post's reports of graft and foreign influence go Scot free.

Sorry, this really has me freaked out a little.  This is clumsy tinpot dictator territory.

Social Anxiety vs Status Anxiety

The "latest survey" shows that Trump voters were most motivated by cultural anxiety, not economic anxiety.  This contradicts the idea that Bernie Sanders' message could have won these voters, though I think we have to acknowledge that he probably would have won some votes that Clinton lost, while also losing some votes she did win.

However, as with all things 2016, we need to keep two big things in sight: Trump won because of a quirk in the Electoral College that allowed a clear minority president to win and the Trump Coalition is old.

So the idea that Trump could somehow use these same votes to win in 2020 seems a stretch.  If he garners 46% of the vote again - no guarantees that he will - it is tough to see him (in Roger Cohen's words) draw three consecutive inside straights again.

The idea that "racism" drove Trump voters is as incomplete as the "economic factors" argument.  Yes, the cultural anxiety referenced in the piece is sort of coded for race, but that doesn't make all these voters "racist."  Some certainly are, and this isn't even scratching the surface of the Alt-Right. No one is suggesting that Democrats can return to power by winning the vote of Milo Yianolinhkjbdfkjbkjhs or whatever his name is.

The question is, can they lose WWC voters by a small enough margin.  This article suggests that could be difficult, absent a recession.  Their identification with being part of a "beleaguered majority" is atavistic.  It's not going to be mollified by a position paper or careful messaging.  As the article above notes: Republicans voted for the Republican.  And this milieu of white grievance is a critical part of Republican politics.

The GOP self-inflicted wound of the Shitburger Act of 2017 could unmoor some of Trump's softer support, and the actuarial table will remove a little bit more every year, especially in the Rust Belt.

However, these rural WWC voters aren't wrong that their relative status in America is declining.  Both the Obama years and the current virulent backlash against Trump among the "creative classes" is reinforcing.  This would suggest that the current strategy of trying to win college educated suburban voters might actually be the best way forward.  Ed Burmila says this is group is unreachable.  They have been the backbone of Reaganite Republicanism since Nixon.

But I wonder if perhaps that overstates the monolithic nature of the suburbs.  Again, what will Georgia 6 and Montana-at-large tell us?

Russian To Judgment

Like many have noted, the Russian story isn't going away.  Sally Yates basically showed what the competent members of the federal state have been saying: Russia has had its fingers in Trump's pie in substantial and troubling ways.

Yates didn't necessarily drop a bombshell, even if she did blast some of the sanctimonious hypocrisy of ambulatory shitbags like Ted Cruz.  Seriously Texas, we know you hate anything to the left of Lindsay Graham, but is he really the best you can do?  Take a quick look at this gif that I can't embed.  Yates pretty much represents any competent, thinking human being who is confronted by the idiocracy currently manifesting in Republican governance.

The fact that Republicans SENATORS (as opposed to the partisan mercenaries of the House) spent much of their question time pressing her on the travel ban and the nature of leaks rather than on the fact that Trump seemed perfectly content to have his National Security Adviser being at best compromised by the Russians, if not an outright Russian mole, is the scariest expression yet of just how far the GOP will go to hang on to power.

Speaking of Lindsay Graham, he is burnishing his maverick credentials by taking on the Trump team in this.  I guess I should be encouraged, but I keep coming back to Josh Marshall's Law of GOP Governance: the Moderates Always Cave.  Graham pretty much hates Trump, but Ted Cruz should hate Trump, too.  Trump went after his father and his wife, for crying out loud.  And yet there was Tailgunner Ted attacking Yates and protecting a Trump Administration that couldn't be bothered that its NSA was carrying on nefarious plotting with the Russian ambassador.

What the everloving hell, people?

Critics of Trump and advocates for, you know, democracy are worried that Trump's ability to generate outrage outpaces our ability to assimilate it into our new world.  There is little doubt that the Trump White House is engaged in something political scientists call rent seeking.  Basically in this case, the Trump extended family is trying to enrich itself because of its connection to the US government.  Look at this unbridled act of overt corruption by the Kushner family.

The problem is that the Trump administration is liable to be the most overtly corrupt in our nation's history.  Warren Harding was personally honest.  Nixon didn't enrich himself off the state.  Meanwhile, as Trump engorges his family fortune, the government turns a blind eye to bad actors like Michael Flynn.

I'll say it again.  What the everloving hell, people?

Anglo-Saxons...

The recent results of elections in Europe - the Dutch and French elections - demonstrate that while right wing populism has legs, those legs are very short.

Some of this was due to the nature of elections.  If we had a majority vote system like the French, we likely avoid Trumpelthinskin.  If we had a parliamentary system like the Netherlands, we likely avoid Trumpelthinskin.  We shall see what the June Parliament elections in Britain bring, but the hopeless and hapless nature of today's Labour party suggest we will see large numbers of Conservative MPs.  What we won't see are large number of UKIP MPs.

Brexit and Trump share a calendar year (Someone suggested that Wilders and Le Pen would have won if the calendar said 2016.  That someone might have been my son.) but they also share the genetic link of Anglo-Saxonism.  Both Britain and America, as island and continental nations respectively, have always looked at the rest of the world with side-eyed suspicion.  The sense of exceptionalism that they share as being the pre-eminent world powers of the 19th and 20th centuries - again respectively - means that they see themselves above and apart from much of the rest of the world.

The people of France and Holland are not a people apart, the way Britains and Americans are - or at least the British and American country folk who revel in their history of empire without having been any further afield than that one trip to the Big City to see Cats in the '80s.

It is perhaps not wrong to see the current moment being less a conflict between the Christian/secular West and the Islamic East as it is between the Global "We" and the Tribal "I."  Between - as Barber put it 25 years ago - McWorld and Jihad, not the jihad of Islam, but the struggle of a tribal, particular group against the global whole.  Trump and Le Pen draw strength from Russia, because Putin hates the Global "We."  In this way, the Tribal "I" of Putin, Trump and Le Pen has more in common with ISIS than with the cosmopolitan French victims of an ISIS killer.

Another Brick In The Wall

A story that seems to have disappeared from the news is the Trump-Russia connection.  There is the possible Michael Flynn testimony to Congress, but aside from that, the story has moved very far to the back burner.

But it's not dead.

Here is something being reported out of Boston.  Back in 2014, a golf writer queried the Trumps about where they were getting money to build golf courses.  No American banks would loan to Trump - only Deutschebank would among major banks - and no one was making loans for golf courses in the post-2008 financial landscape.

Where did they get their money?  Russia.  They are pretty up front about it in the article, as they have been in other places before Donald started running for president.  In case you were wondering what was in those tax returns, one thing you would likely see is that Trump was leveraged up to his ass to Russian oligarchs.

Of course, none of this proves a quid pro quo, though you could understand why Trump would be opposed to the sanctions Obama put in place shortly after this interview was given.  And you could understand why Trump has been reflexively pro-Russian and pro-Putin.  You can also understand why the Russians would want to do what they could to get Trump in the White House.

The question ultimately is whether there is a smoking gun out there to tie all the threads of this story together.

Coinky Dinky

Isn't it amazing that the hacks of political campaigns all seem to benefit the right wing populists preferred by Moscow?  What a coincidence!

If this is another example of Russia mucking about the the Western world's political processes, at what point does this require a vigorous response? There may not be any shooting,  but this is aggression plain and simple.

How Broken Are We?

Ed Burmila asks a good question: Have our politics disappeared completely down the rabbit hole of false facts and alternative realities?

His argument is that we operate on certain assumptions about human behavior, one of which is that humans will - all things being taken into consideration - act on their best interests.  But that evaluation of what is in our best interests is subjective and bound by the limits of the information available in any given moment.

The vote the House took yesterday is being met generally with disbelief by those who operate within a knowledge ecosystem that prizes facts and evidence.  The AHCA is an objectively horrible bill that violates every promise Trump made about health care.  Of course, given that he is a complete ignoramus, Trump may not know that the bill he feted with a kegger violates every single promise he made.  Or he knows and doesn't care.

Given that the MORE GENEROUS version of this shitburger polled about as well as syphilis or cockroaches, the more punitive and restrictive version is unlikely to improve on that number.

Unless...

If Trump and the GOP and Fox News all say what a great bill it is, some people will simply accept that it is a great bill.  No amount of evidence, presumably, will alter the view proffered to them by Dear Leader.  Partisan loyalty, in this case, will triumph over basic facts.  Add in that health care is "hard" and "complicated" and opinions differ and "both sides are to blame" and you wind up with a situation where a GOP Congressman would see voting for the shitburger to be in his best interest.  And of course, he's been made to reflexively fear a primary challenge to his right, and not passing the shitburger presumably increases the odds that a David Brat will come along and unseat him.

There is of course another possibility, which is that the American people become outraged by the heartlessness of the shitburger and create a wave election that sweeps the GOP out of the House.

So a lot of things are on the ballot in 2018.  Our understanding of objective reality might be one of them,

Perspective

"And then we said, let's fuck over MORE people!"

There is some general wailing and rending of garments about what the House GOP did today with their repeal bill.  OK, it's an objectively awful piece of legislation.  I get that it brings us closer to a very bad outcome for tens of millions of Americans.

But I felt this was always going to pass the House.  I was gobsmacked that it didn't pass within the first month.

Anyway, the Senate has always been the battleground.  As it is, the House GOP just voted for a shitburger of a bill that will only become less popular once someone actually reads and scores the damned thing. Josh Marshall has something called the Iron Law of Republican Politics, which is "the moderates always cave."  His benchmark was impeachment, which was an objectively dumb idea at the time and seen as such.  The moderates in the House did, indeed, cave.  But quite a few Senate Republicans balked at removal, because the Senate isn't the House.

So, yes, maybe the Senate moderates do cave.  But I have a feeling the coverage of this bill is going to get worse, not better.  I know Susan Collins wants to be governor of Maine, so she's not going to vote for it.  Rob Portman is already a "no".  I think Lisa Murkowski's a pretty strong "no".  Tom Cotton seemed like a "no" earlier.

In fact, the Senate has decided to "start from scratch."  That can't make the Freedumb Caucus happy.

Anyway, they voted for the shitburger.  They own it whether it passes the Senate or not.

They would strip health care from millions of Americans just to satisfy this smug prick that he fulfilled his Randian duty to starve some grannies.

Zombie Trumpcare

Third time is the charm, apparently, for the GOP's long held goal of stripping health insurance from Americans and making even existing health care programs dysfunctional.

There is a strong possibility that this shitburger of a bill passes the House.  There is a much, much stronger possibility that if it does, it dies or is completely re-written in the Senate.  I can think of three Senate Republicans who will vote against this bill.  My guess is that number could go up.

Of course, as bad as the GOP is at math, maybe it dies in the House today.  But if it does pass, this is a gift for Democrats.  There is gathering evidence that 2018 could be a wave election, the kind strong enough to deliver the House to Democrats.  What will be necessary is a strong message to nationalize the campaign.  The GOP voting on a bill that - when the CBO is finally allowed to score it - will show that tens of millions of Americans will lose their coverage and tens of millions more will see what coverage they DO have hollowed out.

Yet, for ideological reasons, the GOP appears intent on recreating the Charge of the Light Brigade into the chattering guns of public opinion.

There is a scenario where the Senate actually passes the bill, but if that happens, the GOP is on the hook even more for the catastrophe that follows.  Even more comical is a situation where the Senate rewrites the House bill so substantially that it fails to pass when it's returned to the House.  Basically, we can watch while the GOP spends a calendar year working as hard as possible to fail to pass a bill that will kill Jimmy Kimmel's son.

Great job, guys.

Agree To Disagree

Long time readers know that I am especially fond of the analysis of Martin Longman, aka Booman.  However, his latest piece left me puzzled and a tad upset at his reasoning, because it seems to fly in the face of his usual pragmatic liberalism.

He has consistently been saying - rightly - that Democrats cannot afford to lose rural Rust Belt districts 20-80, like they did in 2016.  We need to go back to losing them 40-60.  He frets that Democratic outreach and inroads among suburban voters threatens to further alienate those WWC voters that we have been endlessly told to genuflect before, because they gave us the Cheetoh colored fart-sack currently occupying the Oval Office.

OK.  I get the logic if your desire is to form a coalition of working class whites and black to upend the plutocracy.  You want those WWC voters to vote their pocketbooks and ally with minorities to upend Wall Street's stranglehold on the country's economy and politics.  The problem with reaching out to wealthier suburban voters if that you risk further alienating those WWC as being the party of minorities and the suburban professional class.  That seems to be Longman's argument.

Here's my counterargument.  No successful reform movement has left out the middle and professional classes.  None.  The American Revolution was a revolution of merchants and landowners.  Abolitionists were the comfortable.  The Progressives were eminently respectable.  The Civil Rights movement mobilized middle class blacks and animated white middle class outrage.

If the old saw "Programs for the poor are poor programs" is true, then "Reform movements led by the poor are poor reform movements" is also true.  If you want to create the equivalent of the British Labour party, just take a look at how the Labour party is falling apart.

Shaun King has a laugh/cry line where he challenges his audience to say what the Democratic party stands for.  To me, the Democrats have - since the Age of Reagan - stood for good governance above all else.  Democrats use evidence-based decision making to bring the most good to the most people.  Want an example? Watch Jimmy Kimmel's incredibly moving story about the birth of his son and his son's heart defect.  His son is protected from discrimination by the ACA, and Kimmel is obviously not economically disadvantaged.

Being the party of good government - or to put it another way, the party that brings the most good to the most people - means creating a coalition that embraces that.  Minorities, immigrants and certain groups of poor people have a natural affinity for a strong, competent state that can protect them from the majority and the malefactors of great wealth.

But I believe that those comfortable suburban upper middle class voters ALSO want good governance.  They are ALSO upset that the 1% effectively pay no taxes.  They are ALSO sensitive to environmental and LGBT issues.  Yes, there will be issues where migrant Hispanic laborers and suburban lawyers don't see eye-to-eye, but that's the nature of coalition politics.

The GOP coalition is being torn apart, precisely because they are an ideological rather than pragmatic party.  And they are being led by a mentally unbalanced charlatan.  But also the ideological purity of the Tea Party is ripping the party apart in Congress.  Democrats will not return to a majority party by being "pure."  They will do it by winning a majority in the coming House elections and then the Presidency in 2020.

Being the party of good government, government that does the most good for the most people, is a hard sell in a country historically antithetical to a powerful state.  But we can also be certain that those rural WWC voters didn't vote for Trump solely out of the sense that he was going to "make their lives better."  They voted their resentments at the city folk (and the suburban folk) who they feel have left them behind and sneer at them.

We aren't winning them back.

Instead, the raging dumpster fire of Trumpism puts the suburbs in play.  We are seeing that in the Georgia special election.

Democrats need to put themselves forward as the party of competence and compassion, even as they need to find someone who can make that message sing.  Hillary Clinton never mastered the poetry of that message.  Her husband did.  Obama did. Gore and Kerry did not.  This is a problem, in that few technocrats are poets.  But Democrats won power in 2006 and 2008 because the Bush Administration was a series of colossal fuck ups.  That time looks like an Eden compared to now.

Don't be afraid of the tensions between well-off suburban voters and the existing Democratic base.  Work to create a new Progressive coalition that welds them into a governing force.

We Are So Screwed; An Ongoing Series

Read this piece by Politico, cataloging Trump's recent interviews.  It is so full of batshit crazy, it's difficult to know where to start.  As Prof. David Blight notes accurately, "You can be too ignorant to know your ignorant."  Trump's stunning lack of knowledge about anything important is breathtaking in its scope and comprehensiveness.  Reading the text of his public statements is like reading the stream of conscious answers from the worst student in school who didn't do the homework and is trying to fake his way through the test.

Trump's ignorance collides dangerously with his overwhelming overconfidence in his own abilities.  It may be that on some level, Trump knows he's completely out of his depth.  He recently expressed surprise at how hard presidenting is, and how easier his old life was.  However, Trump is also a raging narcissist, and he's unlikely to admit any flaws or faults within his own abilities or decisions.  Hell, he doubled down on the Civil War nonsense.

There was an episode of The West Wing, when Jed Bartlett was running against a moron, played by James Brolin.  Some character said something along the lines of, "It's not necessary for the President to be a genius, but it's nice to know he has a full toolbox."  Trump's toolbox consists entirely of a hammer, which he pounds into his own head every day.

Needless to say, Trump raging incompetence, ignorance and vanity won't make a lick of difference to the people who supported him.  Wrapped as they are in their own cocoons of ignorance and self-centeredness, they are unlikely to see what the rest of the world sees with clarity: Trump is an erratic moron who shouldn't be trusted to run a school board, much less the United States of America.  He is supported by the people who populate Yahoo! comment threads.  The angry old crank who sends emails about the number of people the Clintons have had killed or how Obama is secretly a Muslim is now president and has the support of his fellow cranks.

To some degree this is the rise of the Internet and Fox News in action.  Without informational gatekeepers to differentiate between the real and the false, the important and the trivial, we spend months yammering about Ebola or "her emails."  This has created an idiot-feedback loop that has given us Trump.

Thanks, Republicans.

Thanks a lot.

#winning

Democrats just cleaned house.  Anyone see that coming?

TL;DR

Republicans have no freaking clue how to do law stuff.

Here is another typically excellent piece of reporting by Sarah Kliff on how a poorly constructed insurance market can fall apart.