Category: Politics

Well, if there was a Blue Wave in the midterm elections, it crashed right up against a red wave, as it turned out that the huge increase in midterm votes, including early voting, accrued to both major parties. So while at one point before Republicans got themselves all hot and bothered over Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats thought they might get the Senate back in addition to the House, they ended up losing seats there, even though at least two races in Arizona and Florida are still up for grabs, but late returns are also projecting that Democrats will pick up at least 38 seats.  Still, despite things going largely their way, Democrats complain about the Senate results because the states where the contests occurred had roughly 12.5 million more Democratic than Republican votes.

I mean, not long ago, Democrats were complaining that they couldn’t win a majority due to the Electoral College, and they were complaining they couldn’t win House seats because of gerrymandering, and now they’ve gotten a better win percentage with House seats than with Senate seats (where neither gerrymandering nor the Electoral College come into play) and they complain that’s un-democratic too.

If you’re a Democrat, you look for excuses for why you can’t win elections. It’s what you do.

The thing is, I don’t really think the Democrats did anything wrong.

They were told not to make everything about Trump, and to focus on the kitchen-table issues. And that’s what they did. Most of the Democrats who won talked about how they emphasized health care and how Republicans had tried to undermine it. Andrew Gillum (Florida governor candidate) and Beto O’Rourke (Texas candidate for US Senate) made much of the media attention they were given and emphasized running positive, substance-based campaigns.

Trump is the one who made the election All About Trump. Partially because that’s what he does, and also because with that mostly empty gumball machine he calls a brain, he knows it works. But the end result just confirms the conventional wisdom about the results: He exacerbated the process by which Democrats regained the House and lost more seats in the Senate. And the reason for that dynamic is that you have local House races where the constituencies are more cosmopolitan (i.e. Not Trumpnik) whereas statewide Senate contests where rural counties are in play are more prone to the Trumpnik rhetoric of “We’re the Cowboys and They’re the Redskins” (choice of team metaphor is completely intentional).

There’s also the point that where one house has 435 seats and the other has only 100, maybe a third of which are in contest during any election, each individual Senate contest is more consequential and small numbers of losses are harder to recover from.

So the fact that results ended up as most experts predicted means that any pundit (either left-wing or right-wing) who wants to draw some moral lesson from all of this is confounded by the workings of a federal system that doesn’t correspond to the way most people think politics works. “We shoulda won the Senate cause we got more votes! We have a fascist moron as president when Hillary got more votes!” Well then, you need to look at how things work and do something about that. Indeed, the very fact that most midterm elections don’t have anything like this year’s level of turnout implies that a lot of voters weren’t aware of these factors.

In observation of results, I do think some things need to be done on various levels. First, the process of voting itself needs a severe overhaul. And unfortunately, I believe that the only way that can happen is to federalize the process in the same way that the Post Office and various other “local” institutions are actually federal. And the most obvious reason for this is that the various state bureaucracies that are in charge of delivering sample ballots, compiling ballots, making sure that electronic voting machines are plugged in, et cetera, are the same bureaucracies that are themselves under election, and in one case, one of the candidates who benefits from a dysfunctional voting system is not only running for higher office but is the official in charge of running the election system. Given that we’ve already had several constitutional amendments and legal precedents establishing that there IS a right to vote, and that the federal government can step in to protect it, we need to address the point that there is not an equal right to vote when one constituency has state of the art voting machines in an easily available polling place and the other one has old-time machines run out of Uncle Zeke’s General Store and Town Hall.

But if your real complaint with the election is that it doesn’t do enough to reverse the dominance of Donald Trump, that requires a broader approach, dare I say a meta-political approach. This is a matter I’d been discussing with people on social media.

To address the subject of Trump’s success, I theorized: Why is Trump winning? Partially because he has the initiative. Why does he have the initiative? Because he sets the agenda. Why is he able to set the agenda? Because he doesn’t just accept the political given. For example, with the recent immigration/caravan/birthright citizenship controversy (which of course has evaporated now that he confirmed the Senate), do you think it matters to Trump that he can’t just wave a magic wand and say “I have repealed the 14^th Amendment because I am the President and only I get double scoops of ice cream”? No. The point is to make it a subject of discussion. The point is to make the unthinkable thinkable. Because we have seen a pattern where Trump will spew some Dadaist nonsense and his various Republican enablers will feel obliged to translate it into real legislation. Because that is, after all, what a legislature does: It exists to translate political initiatives into working legislation.

This Thursday, conservative Ramesh Ponnuru was on one of the talking-head shows on MSDNC, and he pointed out that Trump and the Republicans have engaged in a fairly successful media strategy to demonize and delegitimize the Mueller investigation, because with the actual process of any House impeachment and Senate trial being a matter of political consensus and collective will, they have to put the matter in the court of public opinion in order to shrink even the concept of impeachment. Similar to how the “Dream Team” did with OJ Simpson, they put the prosecution on trial instead of the defendant. Well, maybe we should put the actual defendant on trial. That doesn’t mean you have any legislators initiate an impeachment, at first. You’ll notice that apart from the likes of Devin Nunes, there wasn’t an organized Republican push to kill the Mueller investigation even though there were some trial balloon opinions on the subject. The point was that the various whisper campaigns in friendly media were undermining the legitimacy of the investigation in the public’s eyes, at least with that substantial plurality that is loyal to Trump, such that people who would otherwise support a lawful investigation feel compelled to oppose it out of team loyalty.

Several scholars have pointed out that impeachment is really more of a political process than a legal process. There has to be a real consensus behind it, and that consensus is what neds to be built up before the work is done. Currently any Democrats and non-Republicans who push impeachment have the burden against the Republican Senate consensus that will surely block them. The goal, before any actual impeachment is drawn up, is to put the burden on those senators and make their defense of Trump politically unfeasible. The fact that it can’t happen now is irrelevant. Do you think that Republicans cared that all the repeals of Obamacare they passed were going to be vetoed by Obama? No. The point was to keep the issue out there until they got the president they wanted. Of course the problem in that case was that once the Republicans got the president they wanted they couldn’t even pass an Obamacare replacement that they could agree on, but that’s because they’re incompetent morons. Whereas Democrats are often politically incompetent, but they’re not morons.

But part of what I mean when I say that Democrats are politically incompetent is precisely that they don’t understand this principle. They only operate in terms of the existing political landscape where Republicans seek to change the terrain. Democrats wait for a consensus for action instead of forming the consensus and then taking action. If you’re going to say, “well, there’s no point in talking impeachment because we’ll never get enough votes in the Senate” then it will never get done. That doesn’t mean you barrel through without a consensus. You get the consensus and THEN get it done.

In that regard, there’s another idea that I’d like the press to try. I know they won’t, for the same reason that TV networks won’t stop playing Christmas ads WHEN IT’S STILL MORE THAN A WEEK FROM THANKSGIVING. But the idea is: Boycott Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean that they don’t cover the various scandals that he and his crew have created for themselves. On the contrary. Focus on those scandals but refuse to talk to him.

None of these press scrums where the reporters and Sister Mary Elephant Sarah Sanders play “you pretend to tell us the truth and we pretend to believe you.” Nobody interviewing Trump on the lawn on the way to the helicopter. Nobody at Trump’s rallies roped off for him to point at, so the redcap audience can jeer at them like a staff of Court Jews.

Seriously, from their perspective, most administrations (not just Trump’s) are in an adversarial relationship with press corps “gatekeepers”, and Trump took to Twitter early, so he’s already got a means of communicating directly without their medium.

Supposedly, in the wake of Trump yanking Jim Acosta’s press credentials, this has already been debated by some but networks are afraid of making themselves the issue. “Don’t give him ammunition?”  Like he isn’t going to make an issue of it anyway.  That’s why he baits the press in the first place. If, as some concern trolls insist, “(Jim Acosta) and Trump almost need each other to sustain a mutual narcissism”, then the more responsible party needs to break the cycle.

Go ahead. Go ahead and let the little baby whine and stamp his feet. Go ahead and let him piss in the corner and cry. It’s not an election year any more, what’s he gonna do?

I’m pretty sure Fox News wouldn’t go along with it, but then the purpose of Fox News is to appeal to those whose minds are already made up.

(Side joke: What’s the difference between Fox News Channel and Pornhub? Pornhub has fewer blowjobs.)

This is part of the larger goal in reversing what Trump has done. What Trump has done is to legitimize his approach to the world. And the press was enabling him all the way. At first because he was a reality TV star. Then because he was the Republican nominee. Now because he’s the president. In any case, if we were dealing with somebody who didn’t have Trump’s reputation and fame, if he announced a presidential campaign by stating that Mexicans were rapists and drug smugglers, the press would have treated him like a mutant retard unworthy of their attention. You know, what they do to Libertarians. What we need to do is treat him like that. Not withstanding the fact that he actually is the most important man in the world now, the point is to make it clear that he does not hold his position legitimately. In my opinion, Trump won the election fairly (by the terms of the Electoral College) but since then has done everything he could to invalidate his status, and the only reason he hasn’t been impeached is because no other president (including Nixon) has abused the privilege this much.

And when you’re dealing with someone who’s that much of a solipsist, removing media attention takes away his validation. In a certain respect, it may make Trump doubt his own existence. Trump doesn’t mind being in an adversarial relationship with the media, it’s what he lives for. But to have no relationship with them at all? How long could he go cold turkey?

Shift the terrain. Gaslight the gaslighter. Take his mic. That’s how you start fighting back.

Overall, it occurs to me that Trump and the alternative-to-being-right are doing a much better job of asymmetrical social warfare than the media leftists who are supposed to be good at it. In fact, I find a lot of parallels to what’s happening in a certain bit of radical text. I’ll get to this in my next post.

The early voting ballots for Nevada finally came in the mail this week.

Thank goodness. Now we can finally start getting this over with.

In my previous ballot analysis for 2016, I’d gone over reasons why I ended up voting for Gary Johnson for President but Democrats for most of the other races. In this election I’m just going to go ahead and vote Democrat for all the races. Even though Libertarians are actually in some of them. This is a tough decision.

I have already stated that in the short term it may be necessary to vote in Democrats strictly to tip the balance back, but in the long term that won’t be enough. I had also said during the 2016 elections that the main goal in voting third-party is not so much to make Democrats lose as to make the Republican candidate come in third. In Electoral College terms, if you’re going to be a “spoiler” then you want to aim to spoiling the greater of two evils, whichever you perceive that to be. Liberals will never forgive Libertarians who voted for Gary Johnson, since third-party votes in 2016 were enough to swing the election in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and even conservative North Carolina. By the same token, if the Electoral College means that the president is elected on a state-by-state basis, I could only vote for president with regard for how my state would go rather than the national vote total, and as it turned out, the number of people in Nevada who voted for Johnson was enough to keep Donald Trump from getting that state, and it was also enough to keep him from getting Colorado, New Mexico and even Minnesota. This is why I refuse to apologize for voting Johnson in the first place.  But at the same time, I did vote nearly all Democrats down ballot in 2016, because I did know that the vote in those cases had a direct effect on the result that it didn’t have in the Electoral College system, and I knew that the margins were close enough to matter. I can still support going Libertarian in the current circumstances if the result for a non-presidential election will end up causing the Republican to come in third. According to the most recent polls in FiveThirtyEight, that may be the case in New Mexico, but then Gary Johnson has name recognition in his home state. I don’t know how things play elsewhere, but as a rule, the polls are too close to let Republicans have a chance.

What it really comes down to is that the Republican Party needs to die.

What we have seen in the last few months, especially with Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, simply demonstrates why “conservatism” is a barren label, not just because the nominal conservative party once defined by Christian traditionalism, “economic libertarianism” and muscular patriotism is willing to twist itself to please a womanizing tariff addict and Putin bitch, but because when the premises of modern government have more to do with FDR and LBJ than Jefferson and Hamilton, the real conservatives are the mainstream liberals trying to preserve that system.

In her dissent to Janus, Elena Kagan actually said that the court were “black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.”  Now, I remember when that was the conservative position on the Supreme Court. Before they were in charge, of course.

But still, here we are. And with the Supreme Court back in focus, it actually starts to clear up why Trump has such cultish loyalty among Republicans, and why even the so-called “NeverTrump” Republicans are not really willing to stick their necks out against him. It isn’t cowardice. It’s priorities. Some of this is because there are “conservatives” who really don’t have a sense of morality. But at core, the fact is that we are dealing with two totally different views on what constitutes morality.

Knowing that, how does a liberal expect to persuade a conservative to vote Democrat this year?

Well, that’s the thing, I’m not sure any liberals have asked conservatives face-to-face to switch allegiance. But let me imagine if a “NeverTrump” conservative came up to one.

Conservative: Why should I vote for Democrats in November?
Liberal: To put a check on Donald Trump.
Conservative: Let me ask: Do you think that life begins at conception and that therefore abortion is always murder?
Liberal: NO.
Conservative: Do you think the Second Amendment should be defended?
Liberal: Not really.
Conservative: Do you think the government should force every citizen to pay for private medical insurance that they may not need or want?
Liberal: If that’s what it takes to get everyone insured.

Conservative: Then why should I vote to strengthen your party at my party’s expense? What do we have in common?
Liberal: We both want to stop Trump.
Conservative: Yeah, I don’t like Trump much at all. But from what I’ve seen, he’s more willing to deal with me than you are.

Of course, that is my imagination. When one position is that abortion is always murder, there is no negotiation or “meeting halfway.” But otherwise, it used to be possible for politicians to negotiate in the abstract and on practical levels. Now negotiation is entirely internal.

There seems to be a Devil’s bargain (almost literally) on the part of right-wingers with the current Administration, where they go along with its various abuses in exchange for the pro-business policies (and pro-business judges) they want. Of course these are the same people who accurately point out that Democrats ignored the creeping powers of government and the executive branch as long as the executive promoted the “progressive” policies that they wanted. Right-wingers point out that the same people tagging “metoo” now were praising Harvey Weinstein for contributing to Democrats in 2016. And the Right were pointing out in 1998 that Democrats would defend the indefensible just for the sake of keeping Bill Clinton in power. Which is why they ought to know better. The fact that they don’t (or act like they don’t) is a big part of the problem.

And it needs to be stressed that this goes beyond Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama’s last Supreme Court pick before the 2016 Republican presidential nomination was confirmed. The Affordable Care Act got absolutely no Republican votes. It would be one thing for Republicans to be obstructionist if Republicans had something better to replace Democratic “progressive” politics with, but as we saw when they got the majority, obstruction is all they have, and it was all they could do to pass the tax cut that they did, promising that it would be paid for by growth, and blanking out the point that growth depends on the average consumer having more money, which isn’t going to happen when most of the monetary gains go to the upper percentile and the average guy with a paycheck gets maybe $20 extra.

That in itself betrays the bad-faith premise of the Republican Party, because they wouldn’t have to resort to force and deception if their programs actually benefited the majority. Were that the case, they would be trying to get more voters, rather than appealing only to the most hard-core Republicans mostly on cultural grievances. In the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan won 49 of 50 states. In 2016, Donald Trump won Democratic “firewall” states only by a few thousand votes. This is the difference between actually having a popular mandate and running only on hate.

Put another way, if the only way you can get pro-business or culturally conservative policy is to thwart the majority in a democratic republic, you’ve already lost. Rather than trying to convert more people to your side, like Reagan did or even George W. Bush sometimes did, modern Republicans, especially since Obama, are only trying to force things through their own clique because that’s all they have and they won’t try for anything better.

That’s why Jeff Flake will hem and haw about principles and “conscience” and vote with Republicans anyway. That’s why “pro-choice” Susan Collins made a big production about weighing her options on Brett Kavanaugh and voted for him anyway, knowing that he will vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, except maybe if she shares the suspicion of cynical conservatives that Kavanaugh will vote to uphold Roe precisely because his reputation would cause too much blowback if he did otherwise. Again, on strictly pragmatic terms this may make sense. Why would you go against Republicans if the alternative is to let Democrats win?

Well, what doth it profit a man to gain the world yet lose his own soul?

Over the last two weeks, as the nauseating details of Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance are revealed, it becomes more clear that the government of Saudi Arabia assassinated a dissident with the approval of the Trump Administration. This only highlights atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and elsewhere that were allowed to occur even before Trump got in office. Now, for all the Republicans protesting Saudi actions, what makes anybody think that a Republican Congress will actually call Trump to account on this?

And how much longer will Republicans be able to keep up the stonewalling, and what will the results be for their brand when, NOT if, they lose the majority? At this point, the only way to stop that is to counter changing demographics with attempts to demoralize the electorate, or actually grow the government for the specific purpose of preventing people from voting, or using existing agencies to stop people from getting to the polls.

So much for freedom and small government.

This is what it comes down to for me. If right-wingers are afraid of what the Left will do with power, or “conscientious” conservatives are leery of supporting Trump (yet tacitly do so anyway) they should consider that not only does the Party of Trump magnify all the vices and corruption of the Democrats, they do so with no redeeming factors. Such benefits that Republicans create not only accrue to the already well-heeled, even those people are endangered by Trump’s erratic policies on trade, which will only be exacerbated if he fumbles foreign policy. And the only way the current state of affairs to continue is for Republicans to pursue policies that are not only counter-majoritarian but anti-majoritarian. And while counter-majoritarian policies can often protect freedom, deliberately acting against the majority in all cases makes it that much less possible to correct an erroneous course, and endangers the freedom that libertarians and conservatives seek to preserve.

And in the long run, if Democrats do once again become dominant, it will be because Republicans present themselves as the guardians of traditional American government and capitalism, but their actions undermine both. If “free market” capitalism means using government force to gin the rules to benefit the already rich and powerful while killing upward mobility, that does more to promote socialism than anything the timid Democratic establishment is doing. If Republicans destroy the comity, traditions and rules of Congress, they will have no protections when Democrats have the upper hand. They by their actions are creating the very situation they claim to fear. As I keep saying, the worst case scenario is that the Party of Trump really will turn America into a one-party state – that one party being the Democrats.

If one wants to preserve freedom, there are two choices. You can do what Republicans did in the early 60s with Goldwater, Reagan and Buckley and build up an intellectual tradition that can sustain itself and grow from a minority (and anybody who thinks that the political environment is hostile to the Right now doesn’t know much about the 60s). Or you can focus on a demographic that is only motivated by grievance and try to enforce a situation where only their votes matter. The Republican party made its choice after 2012 when they rejected the “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s campaign telling them to acknowledge women and the non-white demographics of America and build common ground to grow the party. That choice is becoming increasingly untenable. I went Libertarian because for one thing, it has no choice but to appeal beyond its current confines if it wants to go anywhere, and again, the Right has actually gone through worse. However, the Republic as a whole has not. I need to support a party that actually can promote an alternative to “progressive” Democrat thinking. The Libertarians can still do this. The Republicans are far too stained for that. And ultimately they are the short-term reason that the government is a threat to freedom now.

I am not terribly happy about only voting for Democrats, but I am becoming convinced that if Republicans stay in charge, I may not get to vote for anyone besides the government party again.

Next time, I want to go over the various Nevada ballot initiatives for 2018.

The remarks of Donald J. Trump to the United Nations, September 25, 2018

Madam President, Mr. Secretary-General, world leaders, ambassadors, and distinguished delegates: One year ago, I stood before you for the first time in this grand hall. I addressed the threats facing our world, and I presented a vision to achieve a brighter future for all of humanity.

Today, I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress we’ve made.  In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.

Hey c’mon folks, it wasn’t THAT funny.

The United States is stronger, safer, and a richer country than it was when I assumed office less than two years ago.  We are standing up for America and for the American people. And we are also standing up for the world.

I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions.

What?

The ongoing tragedy in Syria is heartbreaking.  I commend the people of Jordan and other neighboring countries for hosting refugees from this very brutal civil war.

Look folks, just imagine that there’s a drummer hitting the rimshot every time I finish a sentence, okay?

[bddum-TIING!]

Yeah, like that.

And what’s the thing with Brett Kavanaugh, huh?  I got this Supreme Court justice, and the Democrats don’t wanna confirm him, cause they’re bringing up all these girls from 30 years ago saying he assaulted them!  What is this?  Everybody’s so politically correct!  It’s getting to where a frat guy can’t feel a girl up anymore.  Not that I, or Brett Kavanaugh, would ever do such a thing.  Cause we’re not in a frat.  Anymore.

OK, that wasn’t a joke.  I’m sorry, where was I?

But while I’m here, I wanted to ask everybody: What’s the difference between Paul Ryan and a spineless amoeba?  No, I’m asking you cause I really don’t know.

I wanted to give a shout out to the delegations from Turkey and China, but I’ve noticed they walked out of the hall.  Was it something I said?

I have done more to bring about peace than any other president.  Before me we were headed to war with North Korea.  Now I have made peace with Kim Jong Un.  Do you mind if I call you Un?  We had a historic summit, and once we talked, I found out we had so much in common.  Like, we both want to feed political dissidents to attack panthers.  That was a joke.  But that’s the other thing, we bonded over our sense of humor.  At one point, Un was talking with me, and he said, “you know, Donald, dark humor is like food.  Not everyone gets it.”

[taps the mic] Hey, is this thing on?

But to reimmerate- retitereate – say again, our priority is Peace.  Peace and quiet.  We believe in diplomacy.  Just on our terms.  America is the defender of freedom and human rights in the world.  Just ask those Yemeni kids the Saudis killed with our drones.  HEY!

Thanks, folks!  You’ve been a great audience!  I’ll be here til Thursday, try the veal!

“The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.”
-Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

On paper, Republicans have enough votes in the Senate to confirm Donald Trump’s second nominee to the Supreme Court, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Despite a whole host of reasons raised by liberal Democrats, Republican solidarity, and the more uncertain status of “red state” Democrats, seemed to make Kavanaugh’s confirmation a done deal. But on September 12, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office revealed the existence of a complaint from a woman who said that Kavanaugh had tried to force himself on her at a party when they were both in high school.

This news resulted in a great deal of anger on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and even among Democrats, due to the impression that this was intended as a surprise tactic. Which was a fair point, up to the fact that Feinstein was asked to keep the account secret, and asking for an outside investigation would have required informing Republican (and Democrat) members of the committee of the matter and thus breaking that confidentiality.

The matter escalated for two reasons. On Sunday September 16, the Washington Post published the account from Professor Christine Blasey, who identified herself as the woman in question. And while Blasey says she wants to testify to the Judiciary Committee, she refuses to do so unless the FBI conducts an investigation of Kavanaugh. The existence of a named complainant had caused some “moderate” Republicans to request a delay in the confirmation hearings, but once both Glasey and Kavanaugh were asked to testify to the Committee on Monday the 24^th, some of them, like Susan Collins (R.-Maine) took the party position that Glasey was expected to appear regardless of the conditions she raised.  But then, expecting Susan Collins to buck the Republicans is like being in traffic behind the 80 year old man with his turn signal on: Maybe he’s gonna hurry up and actually make that turn, just not in the next ten miles.

Trump’s party, the same party that (correctly) decided that a president lying about a consensual affair deserved to be impeached are now at pains to excuse what may or may not be a consensual encounter. Judiciary Committee member Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) said on Hugh Hewitt’s show, “I’d hate to have somebody ask me what I did 35 years ago.” It turns out that in 2015, Judge Kavanaugh had joked to law students,  “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.” Apparently Georgetown Prep is like Las Vegas, only with more sex and booze.

According to Blasey’s own account, the only other person involved in the assault, who inadvertently put a stop to it, was Mark Judge, who has described himself in those days as a blackout drinker, so he might not be in position to confirm one way or another, and in any case is not a great character witness. Conservative columnist Rod Dreher points out, “I was in college from 1985-89, and the general cultural sensibility was far more like “Animal House” than it is like today. High school and college kids who got loaded did it mostly to get rid of our inhibitions and have sex. You’d better believe that my memories of drinking culture back then has strongly affected the way I am raising my kids.”

Which only confirms that of all the mistakes I made in my youth, deciding to live sober was not one of them. Cause if I am supposed to believe that getting drunk specifically in order to kill inhibitions was that common then… then that really explains a LOT of what’s going on now, doesn’t it?

Republicans are of course up against a wall. Not only do they have the midterms, the Supreme Court begins its next term of sessions on the traditional first Monday in October. Dragging this out another week would mean the Court has only eight Justices. Of course, Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans were fine with the Court having only eight Justices after Antonin Scalia died cause Barack Obama had cooties or something, so… fuck ’em.

The liberal position in this case seems to be the opposite of mine. The liberals are fixated on protecting Roe v. Wade and know that this appointee, like any Republican appointee, would want to strike down that case, and so because they disagree with that particular, they want to cast about for reasons why he would be a bad nominee in general. Whereas in examining Kavanaugh’s record, he is not simply a conservative jurist, which any Republican would be expected to nominate. Specifically, the Republicans have generally been averse to providing any information on Kavanaugh to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to the point of timing a “data dump” the day before committee hearings so that such information could not be processed though it was technically provided. Then in hearings, Kavanaugh’s history as a member of the Bush Administration was reviewed, along with his confirmation hearings for the DC court, and he contradicted himself at several points. While legal experts do not think this necessarily amounts to perjury,  Kavanaugh is cementing a reputation of evasiveness. Then there’s the statements he has made. Kavanaugh in hearing refused to confirm to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) that U.S. v. Nixon was rightly decided and that he would follow that precedent in a future case (on the odd chance that a president might put himself in a situation where he could be under subpoena). He did this by saying: “So, that’s a hypothetical question about what would be an elaboration or a difference from US v. Nixon’s precise holding. And I think, going with the Justice Ginsburg principle, which is really not the Justice Ginsburg alone principle. It’s everyone’s principle on the current Supreme Court, and as a matter of the canons of judicial independence, I can’t give you an answer on that hypothetical question.” (This despite the fact that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was questioned on the issue of abortion during her confirmation hearing, she stated,  ‘It is essential to woman’s equality with man that she be the decisionmaker, that her choice be controlling ‘) And in regard to abortion itself, very recently Judge Kavanaugh was central to a three-judge panel decision in a case brought by a 17-year-old “Jane Doe” unauthorized immigrant, preventing her from receiving an abortion until such decision was reversed on emergency appeal. This is important because not only does precedent on Roe establish that there is a right to abortion even for female minors but also for non-citizens in this country. Kavanaugh’s decision not only attempted to override the right to abortion but to establish a precedent in which rights that had previously been deemed to apply to non-citizens can be taken by the government.

So while liberals start from a particular concern (abortion rights) and then look for reasons to justify their antipathy to Kavanaugh on general grounds, the real issue – when judicial conservative antipathy to abortion is a given – is that there is already enough general evidence to conclude that Kavanaugh is an ethically unfit nominee and would thus be likely to make an individual decision that is unethical. Not necessarily including manhandling a girl 35 years ago, but perhaps including unequivocally lying about it now.

(As one of Rod Dreher’s commenters put it, ‘I’m afraid that once [Kavanaugh] issued a categorical denial the only important ethical question left is “did he do it?” If not, than all of the above is not applicable. If so, the issue is should we confirm a 53 year old liar, not a 17 year old drunk.’)

Donald Trump, recognizing his lack of conservative bona fides, took the step of getting an approved list of judicial nominees (including Neil Gorsuch). Brett Kavanaugh did not make the first two drafts of that list.  Since 2016, Kavanaugh had given a set of speeches intended to signal allegiance to Heritage Foundation legal positions. In October 2016, Kavanaugh wrote an opinion for the D.C. Circuit court that the President had the capacity to fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a decision that was reversed in that court in January 2018. The “Jane Doe” abortion case was in October 2017. And when Kavanaugh was nominated to the Court in July of 2018, he praised Trump, saying, somewhat improbably, “I’ve witnessed firsthand your appreciation for the vital role of the American judiciary. No President has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.”  Brett Kavanaugh clearly subscribes to the philosophy, “reality is what helps you pass the exam.”

Of course no matter how embarrassing this whole thing gets for Republicans, they’re going to bull through all objections, because that’s been their philosophy since at least the Merrick Garland nomination, and well before Donald Trump was elected. It’s that much more their philosophy since Trump has taught them that they can get away with public disgrace as long as they get just enough votes in just the right places. So despite all the rancor, Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Court, because all the Good Christians, covered in their own drool at the prospect of killing Roe v. Wade, will let Trump get what he wants, oblivious to the point that Trump only wants this guy because he’s the only prospect who’s signaled that he will go Trump’s way in the event of a legal confrontation with the government – a possibility that is far stronger than a “hypothetical”.

But I could be wrong. It could be that Trump can be made to back down, as he did in his defenses of Vladimir Putin after sucking up to him in Helsinki. Or perhaps Brett Kavanaugh might have less stomach for sleaze than his boss, and withdraw himself. That would require the Administration to start over again. This would please lots of conservatives who thought that Trump made the wrong choice to begin with, like Catholic columnist Matthew Walther in The Week: “Why not the apparent runner-up, Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals? It is difficult to imagine her being implicated in anything like the present scandal. She was in every imaginable sense a better candidate in the first place. I for one do not relish the prospect of the fifth vote to uphold Roe v. Wade being cast by a would-be rapist appointed by our twice-divorced serial philanderer-in-chief. My sense of humor just isn’t that bleak.”

Well, mine is. Because, “conservatives”, this is what you get when you tether your hopes and dreams and what pass for your ideas to a cult of personality led by a fruitfly-brain who can’t think of anything above himself.

Which reminds me-

Y’all sick of winning yet?

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From a Birmingham County Jail

In the wake of Trump cronies Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort getting convicted on tax charges, Donald Trump’s issues continue to escalate. Veteran journalist Bob Woodward released excerpts from his upcoming book on the Trump Administration, Fear: Trump in the White House, that only served to confirm that various named officials loathe Trump, including Chief of Staff John Kelly, who Woodward quotes as saying “we’re in Crazytown… this is the worst job I’ve ever had.” And Kelly was in combat. But then in combat, the people shooting you are usually to your front.

Somehow even this news didn’t get the same attention as the now-famous September 5 piece in The New York Times, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“,  where the Times Op-Ed staff stated first that the author was “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. ” (This incidentally rules out Mike Pence, because Vice President is an elected position.) While stressing their conservative bona fides, the author states “the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic” and “the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” Of course the surprise is that anyone is surprised that the quadruple-bankrupt Jersey casino boss and comic relief on The Apprentice is not entirely truthful or ethical. And yet this maneuver raised more hackles than Woodward’s attributed accounts. The piece has of course been pored over by numerous people already. One of the common themes – especially among Trump defenders – is that such insubordination and subversion of policy is an attempt to thwart democracy. Well, first, there’s the practical question of whether Trump has a policy in any given area. But there’s also the point that the only reason Trump is even president is because America is NOT a majoritarian democracy, but a federal republic. Even in that context, voters – or the Electors of their states – chose Donald Trump, not John Kelly or one of the people he hired. But that point just returns the question to where it belongs.

The anonymous Times author tells the readers: “It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t. The result is a two-track presidency.” But by the author’s own admission, this “two-track presidency” is attempting to enforce sanctions on Russia that Congress demanded and Trump will barely even acknowledge. The author doesn’t even bring up Trump’s violations of human rights on the border, including test run cases to see if the government can take the rights of non-citizens in order to remove them from the rest of us. Assuming that there are adults in the room – which is really debatable – what’s the point of having responsible adults in the room if they can be pushed around by a bratty child? The problem is not the people Trump hired. The problem is that the guy who was elected is NOT a responsible adult.

But still, this sort of thing hurts Trump where he lives, because this account on top of the Woodward expose simply confirms that Trump is not at war with an establishment “deep state” but rather his own people, who may not know much but are either ethical enough to balk at some things or pragmatic enough to realize that their boy is threatening the gravy train.

At various points, liberals have warned that the Administration and its sympathizers are engaging in “gaslighting,” pushing a secret agenda in such a way that they can deny doing so and make their opponents look delusional. Like, how supposedly there’s a white-supremacist plot to use the “OK” gesture as a secret gang sign so that when one of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s former employees flashed it at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing,  we had to have a serious debate as to whether using the OK sign makes you a racist. But I’ve stated for quite some time that when Donald Trump believes his own hype, lies even when he doesn’t have to (or when it would backfire on him) and doesn’t want facts about him to come out, he ultimately doesn’t believe in objective reality and prefers the notion that changing the consensus means you can change the facts. In other words, he is far more vulnerable to gaslighting than even liberals, who for all their post-modernism, still have the ingrained assumption that outside reality is a thing that exists.

Especially, if Woodward’s account is true, former Economic Advisor Gary Cohn saw an order on Trump’s desk to withdraw from an important trade agreement with South Korea and countered it by simply taking the document off his desk, which indicates not only that Trump is disconnected with reality, he may have no sense of object permanence.

Prior to the release of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump might not have been aware that he was held in such low esteem by his own people, because Trump’s picture is in the dictionary next to “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” But now he knows. And the gaslighting is, he knows but he can’t say exactly WHO said these mean things about him. It could be anybody on his staff. Maybe ALL of them.

But that gets to a question that a lot of commentators have pondered: If the only thing that allows sanity to prevail at court is that the Emperor doesn’t know that his worst impulses are being thwarted, what is the point of letting him know it? It could be that given what we already know about the knife-fighting atmosphere inside the White House, that this piece was actually written by one of the true believers who wanted to raise Trump’s ire for the purpose of getting him to purge anybody who wasn’t sufficiently devoted to goodthink. Which would be the tactic of a truly spiteful, conniving, needledicked bugfucker. In other words, Stephen Miller.

Or, it could be that after Senator Bob Corker’s comment about all the Republicans looking at Trump’s unfitness and quailing, “we don’t want to confront him, we don’t wanna poke the bear!” Anonymous decided, “poke the fucking bear, already.” If Trump really is that unfit, and sensible people can only do so much to conceal that – especially since they can’t conceal Trump’s behavior with other heads of government – then the only way out is through.

Last week I was on Facebook, where someone had posted the line, “I hope there’s never a president who makes us look at Trump the way Trump is making us look at George W. Bush.” Which caused me to bring up my axiom, “every new president somehow lowers the bar.” And some asked how I could apply that to Barack Obama, who was generally a good guy. The point I made was: “The reason I include Obama is because of what he didn’t do. By not prosecuting Bush-Cheney officials for war crimes and not prosecuting the Wall Street culprits of the Great Recession, Obama allowed their bad behavior to stand as precedent. And that lowers the bar. All the liberals who (correctly) condemn Trumpublicans for degrading civic norms need to consider that the other party didn’t enforce them either. ” And one of my liberal Facebook friends went, “Oh brother. Obama was supposed to prosecute for war crimes etc.? Bullshit. The Repugnants would have loved that shit show. Really? How would Obama pull that off? Democrats are not the ‘Benghazi the shit out of it party’. Regardless of war crimes then the reality of trying to prosecute. Did you forget this is the same nation with a monkey in charge? And then you think a black president, Democrat no less can prosecute the previous administration for war crimes? Did you forget this (is) the US of A? “

In the immortal words of Yoda, “that is why you fail.”

I like Obama, but overall, he was kind of passive. In fact, I could argue – and have – that the refusal of Obama and other Democrats to confront the Republican subversion of norms was a huge part of how those norms deteriorated even before Trump. If anything, the rise of Trump should make it clear that there is a recipe for success in bucking the establishment process and not being politically correct. You’re not supposed to bash Mexicans. You’re not supposed to mock disabled people on stage. You’re not supposed to bring up pussies or bleeding. But he did, and he won. Now imagine if such a power was used for Good instead of Evil.

This leads me to something else that happened this week. During the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Republicans only released most of their data on Kavanaugh the day before the start of hearings, so that Democrats wouldn’t have time to go over it. Not only that, the Trump Administration, in an unprecedented step, used “presidential privilege” to withhold access to documents from Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush Administration. Such documents that the Senate has access to were marked “committee confidential” even though the Senate Judiciary Committee was in open session. Well, Senator Cory Booker (D.-New Jersey) decided that rather than having the committee-confidential documents from the Bush era withheld from discussion, he would release them to the public through his office, even though Senator John Cornyn (R.-Texas) reminded him that penalties for violating Senate committee confidentiality included possible expulsion from the Senate. Senator Booker did it anyway.

Cory Booker is everybody who’s ever had to put up with the stifling correctness on a leftist (OR right-wing) Internet forum and its pissy, control-freak moderators and who eventually tells them, “Go ahead and BAN me, motherfucker.”

The difference is, it actually worked, because while Booker might still get censured, kicking him out of the Senate would just force a special election – in Democrat-friendly New Jersey – in which his ouster would necessarily be a central issue. In other words, Booker raised a bluff that he knew the Republicans couldn’t call.

We need more people like him, frankly.

Otherwise the “sane” party of Democrats are just the flip side of “sane” Republicans who enable erosions of the rule of law and the most pungent perversions of justice because they’re more scared of disruptions to regular order. There is no point in playing by the rules when the Republicans threw the rules out years ago. This is exactly why things got to this state: Because everyone in Washington is a fucking marshmallow who goes along to get along.

Anyone who wonders why I’m a “third” party voter, this is a big part of it. Because you “responsible adults in the room” let us all down, and now the republic is endangered because of it.

This is in response to Robert W. Merry’s column at The American Conservative on August 29, “Why Trump’s Approval Numbers Won’t Budge.”

To Mr. Merry:

In your August 29 piece, you wrote about how the Monday polls from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News showed that Donald Trump’s poll numbers were 44% approval, as opposed to 46% before Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen were convicted of tax crimes. (Your piece was of course written before the Washington Post-ABC News poll.) And you asked the reader, “Why?”

“Because this isn’t about the fate of Trump so much as the future of America. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump opened up a series of fresh fault lines in American politics by advocating new directions for the country that no other politician would discuss. They included a clamp-down on illegal immigration and a serious reduction in overall immigration after a decades-long influx of unprecedented proportions; an effort to address the hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity through trade policies; an end to our nation-building zeal and the wars of choice spawned by it; and a promise to curtail the power of elites who gave us unfettered immigration, an industrial decline, endless wars, years of lukewarm economic growth, and an era of globalism that slighted old-fashioned American nationalism. “

Uh, no.

This is just my theory, but I believe what we are seeing is analogous to 2016, when liberals would wail that the election of Donald Trump would mean the end of Western Civilization, even as they fake-acknowledged their candidate’s issues by saying things like “Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal Politician. Why Can’t America See That?” And yet, for all the Chicken Littles saying the sky would fall, not that many of them could be arsed to go out and vote for Clinton. And who could blame them? At least she was actually on the ballot, though.

Continued support for Trump in the polls is a performative, risk-free declaration of allegiance, just as the entire “conservative” movement is now a performative, risk-free declaration of allegiance, a mindset in which pronouncing “Mexico will pay for the wall” or “we repealed the Johnson Amendment” magically makes it so. But what of the rest of us still living in the real world?

In that world, Republicans have been threatened in special elections, many of which were only necessary because of the number of incumbents who decided to (or had to) retire early. In Ohio’s 12^th Congressional District, Troy Balderson was only this week declared the winner of the August 7 special election, in a district that was “R+14” for Trump in 2016. Most general election races are in districts where the margin was not that favorable to Republicans. This is why I think such base that Trump has is not as tough as it appears, and later in your column, you seem to admit this.

“For those committed to the new world envisioned by the coalition of the ascendant, it is easy to see Trump, with all of his crudeness and vulgarity, as evil. After all, he’s personally distasteful and he wants to destroy the America of their dreams. But for Trump supporters, he represents their last hope for preserving the old America. These people view the stakes as so high that the president’s personal indecency and civic brutishness simply don’t register as problems. They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause. “

That’s dodging the point. Indeed, for much of Trump’s audience (as opposed to the respectable cloth-coat Republicans he pushed aside in the primaries) Trump’s crudeness and vulgarity are features. And if you’re liberal or libertarian, or at least libertine, crudeness and vulgarity are not themselves evil. Rather, the crudeness and vulgarity are incidental to actual evil, which the rest of us are focusing on and Trumpniks are desperately seeking to rationalize. What is it, Mr. Perry, that you think conservatives are getting from this Administration?

In your own website this week, one of your authors points out that the Trump Administration policy of unilaterally siding with Israel on the Palestine issue denies what little right to self-determination Palestinians have, forcing the burden of Palestinian refugees on neighboring Arab states even as the Administration refuses to let Syrian refugees into this country.

And your most prolific blogger, Christian conservative Rod Dreher, has been doggedly focused on the corruption of the Catholic Church, which is not entirely sexual, and may even be at its core financial. In a column written the same day as your piece, Dreher mentioned his attempts years ago to unearth the earlier pedophilia scandal: “I am reminded of the conservative Catholic men who, I was told, was part of a group of laity who flew to Rome in or around 2000, to warn officials at the Vatican not to name McCarrick to Washington, because he was a sexual predator. When I phoned in 2002 to ask one of the men, he told me he indeed went on that trip, but refused to talk about it. When I phoned the second man on my list to ask about it, he answered, ‘If that were true, I wouldn’t tell you for the same reason Noah’s sons covered their father in his drunkenness.’  Well, it’s all out in the open now, and McCarrick’s foulness has tainted two more popes. If those men had cared more about the truth in 2002 than about protecting the image of the Church by covering up for a wicked cardinal, perhaps the McCarrick boil would have been lanced, and Church wouldn’t be facing such a grave crisis today. There is a lesson here for everyone, not just Catholics, and not just Christians. ‘Live not by lies,’ said Solzhenitsyn.”

But never mind that stuff, because obviously it has no analogy to the political situation.

Right now you have Trump telling Evangelicals that Democrats are a threat to “your religion” (not his) at the same time it’s been revealed that the government is refusing to acknowledge the passports of Hispanic citizens. In that regard, do you want people to focus on the lurid immorality that doesn’t affect them, or do you want them to focus on the lurid immorality that affects public policy?

It’s one thing for leftist propagandists to call right-wingers racist, authoritarian theocrats, but it’s another thing for “conservatives” to actively justify such opinion and spread it even among those who were neutral to or hostile to the Left. And you’re on track to lose a historic number of House seats because your only real achievement was a tax cut that doesn’t benefit most voters and actually kills deductions for people in a lot of crucial states. On policy, you were still going down the spiral, but you at least had the image of morality to pull you back up to public esteem eventually. Now that’s gone. Your moral capital is at a net negative. As Dreher said in another column this week, “People will not take you seriously as a proclaimer of Truth if their aesthetic and moral senses tell them otherwise.” Which is why it does no good to make pronouncements on “evil” or cast the culture war in apocalyptic terms when you are eagerly racing to become the very thing you swore to destroy.

As for “They may wish for a more wholesome leader, but no such person has emerged to take up their cause” – dare I suggest, maybe you’ve become too repellent for your pick of candidates? Heck, Condoleeza Rice would be a more wholesome leader for the conservative movement than your precious little boy, and I can think of at least two reasons why y’all wouldn’t want her.

“All of this supports the view, which I have posited in the past, that while Trump may have been brilliant in crafting a successful electoral coalition in 2016, he hasn’t managed to turn that into a governing coalition. This can be seen in part by his lack of any apparent inclination to talk to Americans who aren’t already part of his base. “

Well… yeah.

Trump was brilliant at identifying Americans’ grievances, but since his only concern was self-aggrandizement, he had no plan to address them. Nevertheless, people were so fed up with the status quo under Democrats and establishment Republicans that Trump won just enough votes for the Electoral College. Likewise, if people are mad enough at the status quo, it doesn’t matter whether or not Democrats have any constructive ideas, what matters is flushing out the status quo.

This is what happens when you hitch your star to somebody who doesn’t share your long-term goals or even have any long-term goals at all besides staying one step ahead of investigators and lawyers.

Even you guys in the Pat Buchanan camp, and the various corporate sponsors, the kind of people who could in theory craft a competent version of American authoritarianism, are in practice acting emotionally and reactively and refusing to admit that your Great Helmsman has all the concentration and direction sense of a squirrel on meth.

But if you actually had an idea how to accomplish all those “new directions” like re-assessing immigration priorities (as opposed to simply targeting brown people) or rebuilding our manufacturing base (as opposed to simply pandering to coal country while jobs continue to go overseas), then you would have been able to sell those ideas without Trump. You need him for the same reason that you obey him: because you’ve got nothing else to sell.

There is no greater purpose than Donald Trump to defend, because the “conservative movement” has nothing to offer even the people who should be attracted to it. The modern Republican Party is a beast that can no longer exist in the wild. It is a fantastic chimera, with two squabbling heads, one Christian fundamentalist and one fiscal libertarian, trying to pull a body composed of working class populists who could care less about either of them but just want to save their jobs. Those are the people who actually vote for the Republicans, as opposed to the people who fund them or write the policy agendas, and after Trump, the folks have figured out that they don’t need those guys anymore. Of course, the joke is on them, sort of. They don’t care about free markets, and Trump doesn’t either, and they don’t care about Jesus, and Trump doesn’t either. They do care about coal and steel – and Trump doesn’t. But he acts like he does, and that’s more than “flyover country” had gotten from the two parties before.

Now even in optimal circumstances, Democrats will never get 67 Senators to vote for an impeachment. So we’re all stuck with Trump for two more years. And in those two years, you will all be saying to yourselves, over and over and over and over and over and over again, “Neil Gorsuch was SO TOTALLY WORTH IT.” Because I predict that things will get a lot worse for your party in the next two years. And I bet that you think so too.

The now born-again Christian Blackie Lawless likes to tell a story about his time with the shock rock band W.A.S.P., most famous for the song “F*ck Like A Beast.” Blackie would pose on posters with a spandex costume and a codpiece with a buzzsaw blade coming out of it, and on stage, he would frequently arm the codpiece with various explosive rockets so that they would fire off of his groin during the set. Well, one show, the explosive charges misfired and exploded inside the codpiece, leaving Blackie with screaming pain and a seriously burned crotch, as happens in these situations. And his bandmates came to visit him in the hospital, with the bandages on his crotch, and his guitarist told him, “y’know, Blackie, we wouldn’t have to do these gimmicks if we could just write better songs.”

That’s kind of how I feel about the Republican Party.

And before your anodyne conclusion, “This has been a resilient nation over its 230-year history. It will need all the resiliency it can muster as we move forward”, you theorize: “The country is split down the seams, and some kind of Hegelian synthesis will eventually have to emerge that incorporates elements of the two competing visions of America that today are roiling national politics—and which seem irreconcilable. “

Oh, so an integration of America’s generically liberal political idealism with the practical considerations of culture, economics and national security. Yeah, Robert, I remember when such a synthesis still existed. It was called conservatism. You mind telling me what happened to it?

Today, Reuters reported that tributes were given to John McCain at the monument in Vietnam depicting his capture as a Naval pilot in 1967. The communist government announced that it would sponsor a study tour for Vietnamese students in the United States, to be named in honor of both McCain and fellow veteran Senator John Kerry, in respect to their attempts to rebuild America’s relationship with Vietnam after the war.

It remains to be seen if the McCain family will receive a similar peace gesture from the Republican Party.

After his release from Vietnam, McCain was appointed the Navy’s liaison to the US Senate from 1977 to 1981, when he retired from service. He took this experience as a transition to the world of politics. He was elected an Arizona Congressman in 1982 and in 1986 succeeded Barry Goldwater as Senator from Arizona. At the time, McCain, as a pro-military, anti-abortion Senator, was a strong figure in the Republican Party. McCain went his own way as a Senator, at least at first, and in doing so became a target for Rush Limbaugh and other conservative trend-setters. He agreed to confirm Bill Clinton’s choices for the Supreme Court, liberal centrists Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. His signature legislation after Clinton was co-sponsoring a campaign finance reform act with liberal Senator Russ Feingold, which was only signed in 2002 by President Bush after a great deal of opposition from McCain’s fellow Republicans.

And while McCain decried the current tone in politics, he is largely responsible for creating it. When he was running against (then) Senator Barack Obama in 2008, he decided to pick as his running mate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whose know-nothing resentment made her the John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s Cheeto Jesus. When McCain died, Vox did an article showing exactly how McCain’s choice of running mate set the stage for “reality TV politics.”  Of course while Vox put a proper degree of blame on McCain for his choice, they buried the underlying reason for that choice: “McCain was prepared to put Palin a ‘heartbeat away from the presidency’ without even checking if she could do the job. Instead, he picked her because she seemed like a good play to the base.”

Rather than McCain setting the tone for the GOP, the rot had already set in by 2008, and McCain chose Palin because he chose to go with the trend of his Party. So despite his “maverick” reputation, McCain ultimately pleased neither the moderates who saw him as a standard against the new Right nor the new Right who saw him as a RINO.

This is the problem with presenting oneself simultaneously as a “straight talk” character and a politician who strives for “civility.” The common thread between the two postures would be a desire to stand up for the right thing regardless of politics. But the end result with McCain was quite often the worst of both worlds: a centrist position that alienated both the progressive Left and conservatives, especially on foreign policy, where McCain’s hawkish position was in opposition to both the Left and right-wing factions (libertarians and paleoconservatives) who were opposed to America’s continued military adventures. McCain’s civility also served as cover for uncivil conservatives like Palin, and however much he attacked Donald Trump indirectly, he and fellow “good” conservatives like his junior Senator Jeff Flake did not take specific actions in the Senate to shut down procedures of the Trump agenda. For example, both men voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. McCain also supported Trump’s controversial arms deal to Saudi Arabia. Considering that McCain’s last act in the Senate was to vote against Republicans’ last attempt to repeal Obamacare, it is hard to say why he would take that act of defiance in the face of a larger pattern of Republican orthodoxy, and hard to say how things would have been different if he had been half the maverick that his reputation suggested.

John McCain was famously humble for a politician… and often for good reason. But even then his humility and ability to take stock of himself seem to be lacking in public figures today. It also meant that, after a life of physical hardship and two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, his continued career meant he understood that “public service” meant serving the public even if the public did not reward his desire for prestige. Again, a rare trait. And of course, John McCain was well known for his sense of humor. McCain was the guy who said, “the nice thing about Alzheimer’s is that you can hide your own Easter eggs.”

That’s what I liked about him.

The death of John McCain is not literally the death of the Republican Party, but it is certainly the death of McCain’s brand of politics. In the wake of his loss, anyone who cares about this country is going to have to consider how to stand outside the political divide to consider what is actually the best policy for this country. That was a standard that he set but often failed to uphold, and that few have bothered to follow.

I hadn’t been writing too much about Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump, because there’s not too much more that needs to be said. After the Helsinki Humiliation, it should be obvious even to the cult that Trump, who trades on an image of macho aggression, is a meek, submissive servant of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, whether due to blackmail, financial leverage, or a simple case of being kindred spirits. And to the extent that Trump’s Republican Party refuses to hold him in check, whether because they fear his base, they want their agenda passed, or they realize that Trump is actually the most popular and competent politician they have, then they are effectively servants of Putin too. And the only thing we can do about that is simply to vote out any Republican incumbents to create a Democratic majority. I have no problem in saying that if I’m a Libertarian, since power abhors a vacuum, and there is going to be an opposition to the Democrats, and realistically it can no longer be the Republicans, now that they’ve turned the Party of Lincoln into the party of Jefferson Davis.

However I want to address some of the recent developments, in particular Trump’s continual flailing about for new enemies to bitch over, including not only the press corps in general but former employee Omarosa Manigault-Newman and former CIA head John Brennan.

This Friday, Trump had an impromptu press conference outside the White House after he revoked Brennan’s security clearance, saying “security clearances are very important to me.” Oh yes. That’s why he wants loyal people in the White House. People he can trust. This is why he had Omarosa in the White House, to do… something or other. And when she made herself unwelcome around everyone else with her reality TV power games, nominal chief of staff John Kelly took her to the Situation Room to fire her, a place where you’re not supposed to have recording devices. And yet, they didn’t search her for such a device, and wouldn’t you know, she took one to the meeting.

As NeverTrump conservative David Frum tweeted, “If Omarosa carried for example a cellphone into the Situation Room, then not only did she record conversations there, but so potentially has any country or criminal organization that thought to hack her phone”. Well, it’s a good thing that Trump cares so much about security clearances, then.

This is the ultimate limitation of the bully. The bully is a parasite who games the social milieu in order to take advantage of the same courtesies that he will not honor himself. Someone like Trump wants the benefits of courtesy without having to live with its restrictions. This means that he is ultimately dependent on the social system he wishes to undermine. He wants to assume that other people won’t treat him the way he treats them. So when you have a Washington culture where even security procedures are largely dependent on the “honor system” and none of the participants have any honor, because the standard is set at the top, the results are predictable. Except apparently, if you’re Trump.

Omarosa’s manuever simply proves two things: One, John Kelly was eminently justified in firing her. And two, whatever dumbfuck hired her in the first place needs to be kicked out of the White House himself.

Of course, Trump seems to have underestimated his protege. It could be that she was this underhanded because she knew who she was dealing with. For one thing, everyone who works with the Trump Administration is expected to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and in addition to this being likely illegal to enforce on a public employee, apparently Trump hires weren’t allowed to keep a copy of the NDA after they signed it.  Since Omarosa started promoting her new book (that I’m not going to promote here), Trump’s associates have tried to dismiss Omarosa’s accusations against him. Katrina Pierson, one of Trump’s campaign spokespeople, denied knowing anything about Omarosa’s claim that Trump had used “the N word” while taping The Apprentice. Then on Tuesday, Manigault-Newman got on CBS News with a tape where Pierson was discussing the subject with her and saying “No, he said it. He is embarrassed by it.” Just recently, Omarosa came up with another tape on MSNBC where Lara Trump (Eric’s wife) came to her with an offer to pay around $15,000 month as a severance package to take a media position saying “positive” things about Trump, which Omarosa declared was an attempt to silence her. And this Friday it turns out that Omarosa may have a whole bunch of other documentation as to what she saw on the inside as opposed to what the Trump team is saying. You’ll notice I haven’t gone over why Trump actually revoked John Brennan’s security clearance. That’s because I don’t have a good reason why he did, since he doesn’t either.

The acclaimed literary critic Michiko Kikutani had an article in The Guardian in July, and had a very in-depth and detailed analysis of the culture we’re dealing with, going straight back to the 1960s, when reality itself had become so warped that trying to assert an objective truth seemed to miss the point. “American reality had become so confounding, Philip Roth wrote in a 1961 essay, that it felt like ‘a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination’ … Personal testimony also became fashionable on college campuses, as the concept of objective truth fell out of favour and empirical evidence gathered by traditional research came to be regarded with suspicion. Academic writers began prefacing scholarly papers with disquisitions on their own ‘positioning’ – their race, religion, gender, background, personal experiences that might inform or skew or ratify their analysis. In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the filmmaker Adam Curtis created an expressionistic, montage-driven meditation on life in the post-truth era; the title was taken from a term coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union, when people both understood the absurdity of the propaganda the government had been selling them for decades and had difficulty envisioning any alternative. In HyperNormalisation, which was released shortly before the 2016 US election, Curtis says in voiceover narration that people in the west had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realised that ‘in the face of that, you could play with reality’ and in the process ‘further undermine and weaken the old forms of power’. Some Trump allies on the far right also seek to redefine reality on their own terms. Invoking the iconography of the movie The Matrix – in which the hero is given a choice between two pills, a red one (representing knowledge and the harsh truths of reality) and a blue one (representing soporific illusion and denial) – members of the ‘alt-right’ and some aggrieved men’s rights groups talk about ‘red-pilling the normies’, which means converting people to their cause.”

In other words, the same sort of identitarian bad-faith “logic” that you see on the Left, where opponents’ positions are to be dismissed because they are all biased by perspective, eliding the question of why the speaker should be trusted if their position is necessarily biased.

It gets to something I’ve been thinking about especially as Omarosa again inflicts herself on the public scene.

Trump of course is not only a product of reality TV but an acolyte of a particular pre-reality TV medium: pro wrestling.  The pro wrestling business, especially since it’s domination by WWE owner Vince “Mr.” McMahon, has become incredibly “meta” in its creation of narratives and complicated plotlines, which is why fans call it “soap opera for guys.” There is an in-house term for this psychology: Kayfabe, which is basically Pig Latin for “fake.” In fact, pro wrestling has to be scripted, because for athletes to be performing the kind of stunts seen on the TV shows and on tour, week after week with no “off-season”, if they were attempting to beat each other up for real, they would suffer that many more permanent injuries than they actually do. But whereas traditional wrestling tried to present itself as akin to real sports matches, McMahon ended up developing the fakeness as an angle in itself. If you’re a fan, you’ve seen several plot lines involving real family members along with star wrestler Triple H (who married McMahon’s daughter) and other figures like Paul Heyman who ran rival promotion ECW before McMahon bought it out. And you never know who’s on who’s side, until somebody turns on the others, and a few weeks later, everyone switches sides again. And everyone watching knows that there are real backstage relationships involved, and that “inside” knowledge contrasts with the apparent reality, and vice versa. The drama is partly that reality itself is in flux.

Given that Trump is a smorgasbord of psychological issues, it figures that he has been involving himself in a part-fictional but partly real rivalry with McMahon for over a decade, especially since they present contrasts to each other that do not flatter Trump. For instance, Vince McMahon plays a fake billionaire (‘Mr. McMahon’) on TV but is an actual billionaire and wildly successful businessman. Trump is not a successful businessman and not really a billionaire, but he plays one on TV. He has however conclusively topped McMahon at his own game, where style IS the substance, or is at least more rewarding. Devotion to the show over prosaic reality is what it takes to be a Trumpnik. And that doesn’t just apply to the sad, semi-literate rednecks that a lot of us look down on. You could be a libertarian, a populist or a conservative. You could be a Koch, a Mercer, a Bannon or a McConnell. The common factor is that every one of them believes that everyone else is a dupe but THEY’RE the smart mark. They each believe that Trump isn’t going to stab them in the back they way he has everyone else. That’s what happens when you love the show too much to care if it’s real – or what it means if it isn’t.

Now, from what I saw of Omarosa on her media publicity tour, she strikes me as being attractive, classy and well-spoken, whereas most people in the Trump Administration (especially Trump) are the exact opposite. And given that most of those people are white while Omarosa is black, that ought to be a refutation of racism right there. It is also true that she developed an epic reputation for queen-bitch tactics in her reality TV tenure and has cemented that reputation with her latest stunt. After The Election, she was notorious for saying that all of Trump’s critics would have to “bow down” to him. And she certainly didn’t speak out this harshly during Charlottesville and various other incidents of racism or apologism from Trump, but as he himself said, she had nothing but great things to say about him until she was fired.

So when Omarosa was on MSNBC and The Daily Show and all that, I was waiting for someone to ask: How do we know this isn’t just part of the long con? How do we know that Trump isn’t deliberately bad-mouthing her with her knowledge and consent in order to gin up sales of her book and maximize publicity, which is all either of these two really care about? Otherwise we could conclude that she really is on the outs with Trump – in the same way that Steve Bannon is technically on the outs with Trump but still working to promote him. If Trump actually is against her, maybe Omarosa is on the side of the angels by circumstance, but she has to consider how things got to this point. And that’s because she and a whole bunch of other people chose to trust somebody that they knew couldn’t be trusted. And just as Trump with his low character has no right to cry when he gets done the way he would do others, low characters who look up to such a man have no right to cry after he treated them badly. “You knew I was a snake when you took me in.”

Of course the reason Omarosa has an audience for her publicity tour is because the media wants to play it up. Which leads to the other part of the political-media unreality complex. This week, as Trump made his imperial (or at least imperious) proclamation against Brennan, the press wailed that such a revocation of privilege was unprecdented. And in the face of Trump’s escalating hostility towards the press in particular, several newspapers on Thursday jointly published editorials declaring the importance of a free press. The most prominent paper to refuse to do so was The Los Angeles Times. On August 16, the editorial board wrote,  “The president himself already treats the media as a cabal — ‘enemies of the people,’ he has called us, suggesting over and over that we’re in cahoots to do damage to the country. The idea of joining together to protest him seems almost to encourage that kind of conspiracy thinking by the president and his loyalists. Why give them ammunition to scream about ‘collusion’?” Of course, given that Trump was going to do that anyway, the press shouldn’t be concerned about casting their policy simply in terms of his reaction. But that also means that in acting en masse, there seems to be actual evidence that the journalist culture as a whole is against the president, and it does play into the impression that in general the press is against a president not for individual reasons (because he’s Trump) but because he’s a Republican who’s against their agenda. And this isn’t an impression that comes out of nowhere.

For instance, Dan Rather was once a highly regarded journalist, who has had some very insightful things to say about this Administration. I do not post anything he says on Facebook or elsewhere. Because he’s a big reason why things got to this point. When working at 60 Minutes for CBS in 2004, during the re-election campaign of President George W. Bush, Rather anchored a story purporting to expose the state government in Texas in its attempts to secure the young George W. Bush with a safe position in the Texas Air National Guard so he wouldn’t be drafted for Vietnam. Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes, obtained relevant documents from a former Army National Guard officer that she knew was reported to be an ‘anti-Bush zealot’. The right-wing reaction to this piece was an early example of the power of online media and blogging. Some commentators noticed discrepancies in the documents presented on TV, with Drudge Report and other sites continuing to develop the story. On September 9 2004, CBS released a statement standing by Rather’s piece, but by then the Washington Post and other mainstream media were following the investigation. Analysts concluded that the National Guard documents supposedly typed in 1972 and 1973 were created on a modern computer. Rather defended his article by interviewing a Guard secretary who said that the content of the memos was “exactly as we reported” but the secretary also said that no actual memo was ever written with that information since she was the person who had responsibility of typing her officer’s memos. This caused the New York Times to label the story “Fake But Accurate.”  When the Times reporter asked David Van Os, the lawyer for CBS’ source, what role his client had, Van Os said, “”If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 — which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done … what difference would even that make (to the) factual reality of where was George W. Bush at the times in question and what was he doing?” CBS ended up terminating both Dan Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes. Rather has continued to stand by the story on the grounds that “even if the documents are false, the underlying story is true.” The best one can say is that he wanted it to be true, but couldn’t prove it.

The irony being that this epistemic closure and desire to manufacture reality on the part of a largely liberal media outlet helped conservatives justify their own epistemic closure over the course of the following decade, culminating in their refusal to believe anything in the mainstream media simply because it is the mainstream media. Of course media bias isn’t the same thing as outright denial of facts. The Right are responsible for their own reaction to the Left. But their impression of an antagonist agenda, at least at first, was not fantasy.

At the same time, one of the reasons that the enemies of the press can score points on them is that there was a certain amount of kayfabe, or at least accepted etiquette, in the relationship between the government and the press corps before Trump showed up. In The American Conservative, James Bovard reviews journalist Seymour Hersh’s memoir, Reporter and goes over the point that Hersh often struggled with publishers as much as the government: “Any journalist who has been hung out to dry will relish Hersh’s revelations of editors who flinched. After Hersh joined the Washington bureau of the New York Times, he hustled approval for an article going to the heart of foreign policy perfidy. Bureau chief Max Frankel finally approved a truncated version of Hersh’s pitch with the caveat that he should run the story by ‘Henry [Kissinger] and [CIA chief] Dick [Helms].’ Hersh was horrified: ‘They were the architects of the idiocy and criminality I was desperate to write about.’ A subsequent Washington bureau chief noted that the Times ‘was scared to death of being first on a controversial story that challenged the credibility of the government.”

If this hostility and servility seem contradictory, it is because while there might be a liberal cultural bias among individual reporters, there is a corporate bias among the owners of mass media, who want to protect their institutions and their profits, (not to mention access to sources who can cut off reporters if they are too hostile) and while these motivations clash, they co-exist.

And let’s not forget that the same media people who realize all too late that Trump threatens them as much as he threatens women, gays and migrants were all too happy to give him free publicity when he ran for president because they wanted to add some drama to Hillary Clinton’s coronation and the Annoying Orange was “great for ratings.” Trump himself has often tweeted that the press wouldn’t let him get defeated for re-election because it would kill their business. He may be right. The problem now is that the Trump Organization took over the promotion and wrote a script that the press had no part in composing.

It is indeed the case that Trump is often acting with precedent, and when the press fails to point this out, it just so happens to coincide with the point that the press was not sufficiently critical of “how things are done” in Washington when more normal people were in charge, and would rather not emphasize their actions at the time. As nymag.com put it in reference to Trump’s recent signing of a defense bill with add-on statements asserting a privilege to ignore Congress’ directives:  “When Bush began regularly appending signing statements to legislation as an alternative to the line-item veto the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional (most notoriously to override a ban on torture enacted in 2005), constitutional scholars warned that this represented a dangerous expansion of executive powers. When Obama continued to employ them in this manner, his progressive critics rightly lambasted him for doing so, pointing out that even if he was using this power to good ends, the next guy wouldn’t. Sure enough, the next guy turned out to be Donald Trump.”

At the same time, such critique of the president, while arguably not sufficient, was previously considered normal and proper. The innovation of the Trump Administration is to proclaim that any critique marks one as “the enemy of the people” – “the people” in Trump’s mind being equivalent to Louis XIV’s phrase, “L’etat, c’est moi.” Previously, the press corps’ relationship to the White House Press Secretary was a case of “you pretend to be honest, and we pretend to believe you.” But when Sean Spicer came out the day after Trump’s inauguration and proclaimed that the ceremony had the largest inauguration crowd ever, in direct contradiction of both boots on the ground and photographic evidence, every journalist in America had to regard it as an attack on both his and their professional standards, if not a direct insult. Since his firing, Sarah Sanders has been that much more surly and combative in asserting Opposite Day as the position of state. So while the press’ relationship to the White House (this White House or any other) is not really innocent, one side has clearly done more to degrade the standards.

As I say: It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. It is true that Trump is the natural result of a long-fermenting political dysfunction rather than a rogue element in an otherwise healthy republic. It is also true that even in that regard, Trump is dangerous and disruptive to the system, and not in a good way. It is true that the press takes an adversarial stance towards Trump more for commercial, ulterior motives than out of professed virtues. But even acting on ulterior motives means that the press is serving as a check in the system against executive power, a role that should properly be played by the (Republican-dominated) Congress and Supreme Court, a role they refuse to assert. And in examining what is known about Trump, and what is reported against him even in often-friendly sources like National Review and The American Conservative, the overall picture does not lend to any reason to trust this guy and creates an overall imperative to oppose him. And given that there is an observable interest on the part of the press to puff up Trump for the sake of sales while ignoring real problems that started under other presidents and are exacerbated by this one, it is possible to oppose Trump not because of the position of the press, but even in spite of it.

Of course one can only reach such a conclusion if one is capable of reviewing various sources of information, thinking critically, and reaching an independent judgment. And if there’s any one reason that we’re at this point, I think it’s because such traits have never been prized by society and these days seem to be actively discouraged.

It’s now being called “the walkback.” After Donald Trump, Viceroy for Russian North America, got his first performance review from Russian President Vladimir Putin, even members of the Republican Party seemed a bit taken aback to hear Trump say, in regard to findings that Russia interfered with the 2016 election, “I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be…” So back home, Trump had a meeting with members of Congress, where he unenthusiastically read that “I have on numerous occasions noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections.”

It didn’t go as well as Republicans wanted. Trump was clearly reading a memo that was noted in big marker, “NO COLUSION”, and then just as Trump was saying through gritted teeth that he believed the position of our intelligence agencies, the lights went out in the room. Funny that a party that is so prone to see God’s signs in everything won’t notice when a fucking anvil drops. Unfortunately, not literally.

So after a day that was so shocking that even many Republican politicians and Fox News people rediscovered their gag reflex, there was a certain amount of walkback on their part, too.

Libertarianish FOX News columnist Liz Peek, who is usually properly cynical, said, “really, did anyone really expect him to declare the Russian leader a liar on global TV? What would have been the point of traveling to Helsinki and arranging a summit between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, only to scuttle the chance at a new and improved relationship? It wasn’t going to happen, and in fact Trump hinted at that beforehand, when he told reporters not to expect a ‘Perry Mason’ moment.” No, the “Perry Mason” moment was when the Mueller investigation indicted twelve Russian military intelligence agents for leaking DNC data in 2016, days before the “new and improved relationship” summit, thereby making Trump look like that much more of a chump.

Peek also employs the usual apologist tactic: “Democrats and never-Trumpers cannot help themselves; over the past two years, the public has grown weary of the non-stop, five-alarm fires, and they have tuned out.”

If people were tuning out, Roy Moore would be Senator from Alabama right now. I do think people are often sick of the partisan Left in this country, but they also remember from the Obama days that the Democrats weren’t the ones inflicting legal idiocy on the body politic every single day, whereas that’s all Republicans can do. Perhaps as a result, Democrats are (so far) outraising Republicans in the 2018 midterms. The Open Secrets website is currently showing Democrats raising more money than Republicans (as of July 17, $606,727,603 versus $463,948,453). Granted, part of this is that there are more Democrats running in primaries, which in itself is saying something. By contrast, a lot of Republicans – like House Speaker Paul Ryan – are retiring, and other districts are considered so uncompetitive that the only Republicans running for state and national races are actual Nazis. There definitely looks like Trump fatigue here, but it seems to be mostly on the Republican side. And that was before Trump’s “Finlandization.”

You have similar whistling in the graveyard from a couple of National Review Online pieces. Ben Shapiro, another conservative who ought to know better but seems contractually obligated to pretend otherwise, reacted to the Helsinki summit thus: “(this) doesn’t mean, as Democrats have suggested, that Trump is in bed with the Russians. Far more likely, it means that Trump’s ego is one giant gaping wound, constantly draining rage over the suggestion that his 2016 election victory was somehow ill-won … None of that acts as justification for Trump’s behavior, of course. But it does explain why when Trump says stuff, it often doesn’t matter.”

Another conservative, Michael Brendan Dougherty, wrote in NRO that while “President Donald Trump damaged his administration and harmed his own foreign-policy objectives” in Helsinki, his press conference with Putin “is further deranging America’s political life.”
Ah, yes, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Some definition is in order. Bush Derangement Syndrome was when liberals only thought the worst of George W. Bush. Obama Derangement Syndrome was when conservatives only thought the worst of Barack Obama. Trump Derangement Syndrome is when anyone believes anything that sack of shit says.

While Dougherty admits that his president displayed “bottomless credulity” in his summits with both Putin and Kim Jong-un, and that “Trump’s gifts are little more than rhetorical,” he also says that “it isn’t just the operating of the government that is deranged, but American politics at large.” Money quote: “The most obvious explanation for Trump’s behavior is not that he is enacting a 30-year-long plot against American democracy. It is that his vanity utterly forbids him to acknowledge that Russian meddling in the 2016 election contributed in any way to his victory. And it is true that if he admits it — especially if he admits it under pressure to do so — the next wave of pressure will come from those asking him to resign.”

This is the argument as to why Trump is NOT a traitor. Dougherty goes on: “On a more personal note, I am in the minority of conservative writers who agreed with President Trump that the US should be trying to achieve more peaceful relations with the world’s second-largest nuclear power. I agreed with Trump that the US has made mistakes and contributed to the deterioration of relations with Russia since the end of the Cold War. But Trump is incapable of advancing these views into wise strategy, much less reality.”

Well, I agree that there ought to have been more peaceful relations between the US and Russia. I would even agree, given the Russian majority in Crimea, that the territory should ultimately go to Russia. But that ought to be a decision made between Russia and Ukraine on a legal and diplomatic level, with the implied consent of the populations through their elected governments, and not simply an Anschluss presented to the world as a fait accompli. Saying that President Obama (and by extension Secretary Clinton) didn’t do enough to conciliate Putin, or that post-Cold War governments allowed the NATO alliance to extend to Russia’s borders, is blanking out the fact that the Baltic States and Poland pleaded to be allowed in the defensive alliance because they didn’t feel safe with Russia, given not only Russia’s past history but Putin’s numerous aggressions towards Ukraine in particular. Putin is the aggressor and the initiator of tensions. That would be the issue whether Trump were a compromised asset or simply “incapable of advancing” even pro-Russia views into wise strategy, let alone reality.

Certainly we cannot just throw “treason” and “traitor” around just cause some people don’t like the results of the last election. You can’t just do stuff like, shout “you lie!” at the president during the State of the Union address. You can’t just grind the entire process of government to a halt on the implication that the president is inherently illegitimate. Although from 2009 to 2016, the Republicans did as well at that as anybody could. But if Dougherty thinks that that means we should still trust the nuclear codes to the guy who stares at the can of orange juice for three minutes cause it says “CONCENTRATE”, he elides the point that this is hardly the first time that Trump has gone against reality and evidence, that as a result, he has no credibility left outside his own party, and even in their own ranks, people are openly balking.

Consider also that Trump is thought by many to agree with (or at least go along with) the last person who talked to him. In Helsinki, he wasn’t going to disagree with Putin when he was standing right by his side. Now consider that back at home on Tuesday, he wasn’t going to disagree with his staff and stick up for the things he said on Putin’s behalf. In both cases we see a fundamental weakness of will. And if “conservatives” gravitate to Trump because he’s a leader, they really ought to think of who’s leading him at the moment.

Perhaps what we just saw in Helsinki does not reach the technical definition of treason. Perhaps Republicans still think they can get enough out of this president that they need to hold on to him. But it’s telling that the strongest arguments that Republican partisans can offer in defense of the Leader are that he is too vain to admit Russian election interference, too attention-deficit to be a good spy, and in any case it doesn’t matter because the EU and Russia know not to take Trump very seriously.

One doesn’t need to assume that Trump is the Antichrist. Incidentally, he’s not. Lucifer actually IS a man of wealth and taste. But if you were not already inclined to assume the worst of him – indeed, if you actually ARE more objective than the rest of us – you would have to wonder why Trump acts subordinate to Putin if he isn’t. You have to wonder why he has something to hide if he doesn’t. You have to ask why he acts like Putin has something on him if he doesn’t. And you have to go back in time and ask what you, or the “liberal” press would say if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were acting like this. And if you’re planning to vote Republican this year… you really need to ask yourself which side that party is on.