Category: Politics

“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.

Hey kids! This week let’s do something educational, and learn Russian! After all, it might be a lot more necessary in the next few months.

Here’s your first word: bitch

In Russia, the word for bitch is: suka

That’s su-ka.

Suka.

Bitch.

Let’s test your knowledge. If you live in Brighton Beach, or some other place with a Russian community, go up to the waitress at a restaurant and call her “suka.”

Did she slap you? Then you got it right!

Now let’s use it in a sentence. Russian does not use articles, so to apply a possessive, you simply use the person’s name with “ya.” So, Trump = Trump, bitch = suka, Putin’s = Putinya, equals:

Trump suka Putinya, meaning

“Trump is Putin’s bitch.”

Look up a translate program and you can even print it in Cyrillic, like this:

Трамп – сука Путина

After a Monday meeting in Helsinki, requested by Russian President Vladimir Putin of his Viceroy Donald Trump, Trump stood side by side with his Master handler counterpart, and the two talked to the press about several issues, including whether Russia had interfered with the 2016 American election, as the latest indictments from the Mueller probe seem to prove. Trump told reporters “I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Sounds like a man who’s easily impressed. Or intimidated. He went on and said,  “What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone — just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily.”

Donnie, whaddya mean, what happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? On July 27, 2016, you yelled, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” And that very day, the 12 Russian intelligence agents indicted by Mueller last week approached a US reporter under the Guccifer 2.0 hacker alias to release emails that they had already stolen.

Why don’t you ask your boy where the emails are when he’s standing right there, Donnie?
“Hey boss, you know what happened t’them emails?”
“Why yes, Donny, they are right here. Don’t ask how…”

The spectacle was such that even Trump’s own party couldn’t believe it. No, not the Republican Congress. Fox News. Abby Huntsman, daughter of Trump’s own Ambassador to Russia, tweeted: “No negotiation is worth throwing your own people and country under the bus.” Neil Cavuto called Trump’s display “disgusting.” A Trump Administration official, speaking confidentially to the Daily Beast, said: “Trump looked incredibly weak up there. Putin looks like a champion – I’d like to say I’m shocked, but this is the world in which we live now.” Of course, nobody else in the Administration except Trump wanted a public meeting with Putin. And now we all know why. As Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine put it, “In the brightest international spotlight side by side with the foreign leader he has most admired for his toughness, Donald Trump looked weak and submissive, incapable of expressing any sort of righteous indignation at even the most blatant bad behavior by Russia. His soon-to-be-infamous suggestion that he thought Putin might be more credible than U.S. intelligence agencies on the subject of Russia’s election interference is obviously disturbing in itself. But delivered in Putin’s own presence it came across as the act of a toady or at least someone who is extremely conflict-averse — which is exactly 180 degrees away from the persona Trump has worked so hard to present.”

But really, not like it matters.

On MSNBC today, Republican Senator from Arizona Jeff Flake was asked if this aroused suspicion from Trump’s own party was going to lead to a block in judicial nominations, and while he said that Republicans should “support the intelligence community” he also said that he was only holding up previous judicial appointments because of Trump’s tariff policy, and now that that issue had been resolved to his satisfaction, there was no need for such measures. When pressed, repeatedly, by Katy Tur, whether tariffs were a higher priority than the sanctity of our elections, Flake responded, “well, I got what I wanted.”

And once again, Flake has earned his name.

But this in itself is pretty telling. Republicans have been just fine with Trump warping their “free trade” party into its statist opposite, all the while earning the hatred of the rest of the country with the administration’s socially regressive positions, because they’re getting what they want. Specifically, at least one Supreme Court justice, which they may need to be a doorstop on Democratic initiatives depending on how things play out. If Trump goes against their dogma on tariffs or something else, he’ll just tell them the lies that they want to hear – like he always does – and they’ll goosestep back in line. Because what it really comes down to is: they’ve got nothing else. As unpopular as Trump is, he’s at least 40 percent in most polls, and how many other national Republicans are doing even that good? They’re dying with him, but they’re dead without him.

Thus the real evil reveals itself. Republicans will do whatever they can to pretend they didn’t see what they just saw, but the rest of us know better. The cult was able to delude itself as long as they could believe that Trump was a strongman who took no guff. But here the provocateur who traded in fake machismo and transgressive behavior kneeled and bared his throat to the stronger (and shorter) male.

They will of course, press on regardless. They’ve got no choice. Even now that they know the choice is between their little boy and America. And they will have to admit that if they liked America, they wouldn’t have gone for this guy in the first place. To save their need for a Daddy, they will, at least subconsciously, transfer their allegiance to the real motivating force of their movement, as the “leader of the Free World” meekly declares America to be the first satellite of the new Warsaw Pact. And so a Republican Party that already accepted the bargain to turn into the Party of Trump has to accept that their master has his own master. Today, the Party of Trump is confirmed as the Party of Putin.

If nothing else, Trump’s already got his re-election slogan picked out:

Трамп 2020 – пролетарии всех стран, объединяйтесь!

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it. “

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

I had intended to address a certain article a couple of weeks ago, but it is amazing that in that time, it has actually become more relevant. On June 8, Andrew Sullivan had his weekly column in New York Magazine, discussing the Trump Administration policy of separating migrant families at the border, which he actually referred to as “state terror”, just before Samantha Bee blew things up with her comments on the subject, which was just before the whole thing metastasized this week.

Because while the first part of the column addressed the evil psychology of the Trump Administration, the second part of the column moved to a different subject that Sullivan didn’t seem to think was related. The same week, the Supreme Court rendered a decision in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, where the Court under Anthony Kennedy ruled for the plaintiff against Colorado, on the grounds that the opinion of the Civil Rights Commission in the original case constituted prejudice towards the baker. Sullivan referred to this quote by Kennedy:
“To describe a man’s faith as ‘one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use’ is to disparage his religion in at least two distinct ways: by describing it as despicable, and also by characterizing it as merely rhetorical — something insubstantial and even insincere.” Sullivan says, “a growing number of people, many of them exactly kind of person who sits on a civil-rights commission in a blue state, do actually and sincerely feel contempt for religion and religious belief. … When it comes to full-on fundamentalists, the capacity for some scrap of mutual understanding is increasingly remote. The more distant you are — socially, geographically, generationally, culturally — from anyone who practices religion in any serious way, the harder it is to empathize, and to see these cases as a conflict at all. It simply seems incredible that someone would hold these views faithfully. ”

The thing is, while a lot of coast people in blue states might not live next door to folks who practice religion “in a serious way”, their main exposure to fundamentalists and other “serious” believers is through their increasing attempts to influence the political sphere, which have become that much more obvious as the Evangelical community and Donald Trump have embraced each other. Such politicized religion may or may not be insincere or insubstantial, but it is definitely wielded with rhetorical purpose, and the results are often despicable.

For example, it was a bit of a surprise when evangelist Franklin Graham spoke out last week against the government’s child caging policy.  I say it’s a surprise given his past history. In 2015, Graham got on Facebook to say:  “Listen up–Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and everybody else. Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience.” This got a negative response from many, including liberal Christians.  Previously, Graham had broadly endorsed the Trump Administration, agreeing that Muslims should be “vetted” before being allowed to enter the United States. In 2010, Graham talked about Barack Obama, telling CNN “”I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim; his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.”

With regard to “respect for authority and obedience,” this sentiment was reflected recently in the position of the Trump Administration, in a statement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who approved the official family separation policy at the border. As part of a public statement, Sessions told the press, “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” he said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

The text in question is (King James Version):

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:

For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”

It’s sort of like the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, where the existence of a dynasty was proof that it was favored by God (or the celestial hierarchy) and if a government fell, that was proof that the Emperor had lost his Mandate. Of course, the problem with such a theory in either case is that it is only “proven” after the fact.

But it’s one thing to go back to the context of an evangelist in Rome, speaking to Christians in Rome and counseling them how to live as a minority under a hostile government. But for a high government official to quote this passage to say we should obey the government is a too-convenient support of ulterior motives, much as it would be if the new Surgeon General told us that smoking is good for you even though he’s simultaneously the CEO of RJ Reynolds. This being the Trump Administration, I expect that scenario to play out over the next three months.

In his latest column, Sullivan actually says that the only way to end what two weeks ago he referred to as “state terror” is to just give Trump his border wall, which strikes me as giving in to the hostage taker after he’s lowered his gun. Not only is the wall (and the child caging) a wasteful boondoggle by fiscal conservative standards,  by Sullivan’s own admission, neither of the two parties is organized enough to pass any bill on the subject. Recall that earlier this year, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi endorsed a plan to have a DACA bill that included funding for a wall, and Trump shot it down. And Sullivan says “what I’m proposing here is something bigger.” You never negotiate with a terrorist, particularly one who is less mentally stable than Heath Ledger’s Joker.
In Sullivan’s take, “Democrats need to accept that they lost the last presidential election for a reason, and that their opponent’s main campaign pledge was to tackle illegal immigration, with a wall at the southern border as the centerpiece. ” Uh, no. Granted, being anti-immigrant was a big part of the Trump appeal, but we know that the Republicans were no less nativist when a half-African president was running for re-election. To say that Trump had a central campaign pledge is to say that the campaign had a central premise besides Fuck Hillary and Make Liberals Cry. The Democrats lost because when they nominated Hillary Clinton, they sent a clear signal that they didn’t care about flyover country, or people “of color” or even women. But let us not forget (as if liberals will let you) that Clinton still won more votes than Trump. That implies that her voter base would have been that much stronger if she’d been, y’know, competent.

Because while the long-term problem is that neither of the two “real” parties has serious leadership or ideas, the short-term problem and immediate threat is that the “conservative” party is actively destructive to ideas, and to the political system, and to social norms. And it’s the social norms that conservatives are supposed to care about.
Earlier this year, there was a Politico article where the author compared Franklin Graham’s ministry to that of his famous father Billy Graham, and said that in comparison to his father,

“Franklin Graham seems blissfully unaware of the possibility that there might be even the slimmest of gaps between the words that come out of his mouth and the words written down in scripture. More damningly, he demonstrates no awareness of the ways in which his political pronouncements are breaking down the evangelical witness his father devoted so much energy to building up. … The most significant development in American religion in recent years is the shocking rise of the religiously unaffiliated (otherwise known as “nones”), who now account for roughly one quarter of all Americans. This increasing distance from religious institutions is accompanied by increasing distance from religious beliefs and practices. Today 27 percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” and another 18 percent as “neither religious nor spiritual.” There are many reasons for this decline in religious believing and belonging. But the most important in my view is the increasing identification of the Christian churches with right-wing politics. If you are among the 26 percent of eligible voters who voted for Trump, you likely applaud this development. But what about the other 74 percent? “

And I bring up Graham because, in his willingness to break with Trump in even one particular, he’s one of the better preachers. As opposed to the other prominent evangelicals who’ve said that Trump deserves a “mulligan” over his adulterous history.

And then there’s this:

PAHRUMP, Nev. (Reuters) – He styles himself as America’s best-known pimp, a strip-club owner who runs multiple brothels and looks set to win a seat as a Republican in the Nevada legislature with the blessing of many conservative Christian voters.
Meet Dennis Hof, whose political rise reflects fundamental changes in electoral norms that have roiled the Republican Party and upended American politics during the era of President Donald Trump.

“This really is the Trump movement,” Hof, 71, told Reuters in an interview at Moonlite BunnyRanch, his brothel near Carson City in northern Nevada that was featured on the HBO reality television series “Cathouse.”
“People will set aside for a moment their moral beliefs, their religious beliefs, to get somebody that is honest in office,” he said. “Trump is the trailblazer, he is the Christopher Columbus of honest politics.”

Because if you can’t trust a Nevada pimp and a four-time bankrupt Jersey casino boss, who can you trust?

If you’re a Republican and you actually care about immigration – and I may be presumptuous in assuming that – you have at least two choices. Do you want to create a serious guest worker program to handle those people whose reasons for emigrating are purely economic, do what Ted Cruz says and expand the court system to handle asylum cases and then toughen admission requirements once the bureaucracy actually has the manpower and facilities to handle the workload? OR, do you want to demonize migrants, change the goalposts on admission, tell them that they can only apply at official points of entry and then have the POEs say they’re too full to process, wait for the migrants to show up on the border to get arrested, make a big deal of separating the families and then put little cups in front of liberals so you can drink their tears?

Well, one course might be a long-term solution to the problem, but I know which course will make Trump and the little Trumpniks feel better about themselves.

I saw somebody on Facebook comment about this: “It is much worse than that. They’re doing it with the full knowledge of how vile it is, because they know that they can stomach it better than their political opponents can and so they think if they do it and tell them that they won’t stop unless they get their way that they’ll win.”

Again we see the classic psychology of the bully: using your own morality as a weapon against you so that they can gleefully defile it.

Of course this only applies to the extent that force and fear actually work. At a certain point, people become so sick of evil that they no longer fear reprisal. And with enough numbers on their side, even force may not be enough to stop them. The end result is that the thugs’ philosophy is completely discredited once force (government) is no longer on their side.

In regard to the immigration issue, it’s worth looking at a little clip from the days of Saint Reagan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok where in 1980 during a primary debate someone raised the question to George H.W. Bush (later Reagan’s vice president) as to whether illegal immigrants should get to attend the University of Texas. Note that while Bush is not exactly articulate, he is still more so than pretty much anybody in the 2016 campaign, including the Democrats. Note also that while he doesn’t want illegal immigration to continue he thinks that immigrants have the same rights as everyone else. He actually calls them “honorable, decent people” who just happen to be in violation of a law that can be changed. Then note that Ronald Reagan, whom liberals loved to ridicule as an anti-intellectual, actually uses words like “we haven’t been sensitive enough to our size and our power” in relation to Mexico. And he is also able to articulate a practical, long-term value in creating a long-term work program as a “safety valve” for Mexico that would work better than “building a fence”.

I remember when Republicans talked like that. Do modern Republicans? I guess not. That’s one reason I’m not one anymore.

See, back in the old days, I remember when Republicans didn’t need gerrymandering and voter ID laws to win elections. Instead they found well-spoken, morally forthright candidates who could present reasonable ideas to the majority and get their party elected. But I guess that’s just too hard now. When you see that clip in relation to the Republican Party now, even tied as it was to “the Moral Majority,” it’s a difference of night and day. The decline in political standards – ultimately a decline in intellectual standards – reflects the decline of moral standards.

Nowadays Jerry Falwell Jr. and the other heirs of the Moral Majority tie themselves ever more tightly to the Republican Party even as its secular politics and their religious positions both become isolated from the mainstream of American thought. And the Good Christians tell themselves that they tie themselves to the Republicans because their morality is under siege from the secular Left. And they never consider that the reason for their isolation is because of the deal they made for political power. The dynamic is a vicious cycle in which each side of the political-religious complex festers in persecution complex and revenge fantasy, reacting not with Reagan’s “Morning in America” but Trump’s “American Carnage.” They claim to speak for the “real” America as Nixon spoke for the Silent Majority, when even a lot of white and right-wing people are not really on board. Their declaration of their own correctness is betrayed by their insistence on having everything their way and having the whole process of legislation controlled by them with no Democratic input whatsoever. If you can only get your way by chicanery and force you are projecting your own sense that your ideas would not survive debate. In the old days, Reagan, Goldwater and William F. Buckley knew that they were starting from an unpopular position, so they thought the goal was to make their ideas popular. Not anymore. Nowadays there isn’t even an intention of appealing to a majority of voters, but since the first-past-the-post election system doesn’t work like basic cable niche programming, Republicans have to engineer the voter base they want through their primary system. And now that the incentive of the Republican Party is to nominate the most ridiculous idiot, doing anything that the rest of the country would agree with is just a sign that you’re a “cuck” or a sellout. The more something offends the liberal media, the more Republicans love it, even if liberals aren’t the only ones who find the Republicans evil. And the downward spiral continues until the Republican Party becomes the political equivalent of Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious or G.G. Allin, dying in its own shit just for the sake of being “authentic.”

What so-called conservatives and Good Christians don’t realize is that their vicious cycle is only bringing about the very result they claim to fear. The result of identifying morality with force and fear is to discredit what you call morality and to empower what you call its opposite.

The more that religious conservatives feel threatened by sexual minorities, the more they insist on laws against trans and gay people, and the more likely it is that the law will respond by treating them as threats to trans and gay people. The more that “free market” conservatives let the already wealthy loot the public treasury, the more people think that socialism might be a good idea. And the longer the Trump Administration insists that the only course on immigration is state terrorism towards brown people, the harder it will be politically to find an alternative that isn’t just straight amnesty for all illegal immigrants now and in the future.

The “conservative” political-religious complex insists that they act as they do to stop the Cultural Marxists from stomping all over them, but they’re the ones who are forcing the culture war with their terrible infant mentality, stomping all over the rest of us. And when somebody else forces a war on you, you don’t care if it is over a Noble Cause, you just want to defend your own and put a stop to it.

All this is why anybody on the Right who does care about the long-term concerns – culture, liberty, capitalism – can only watch in horror as our self-proclaimed defenders disgrace the cause they claim to defend. Because of them, it will be that much harder to revive that cause once they have dragged it to defeat.

This all ties into why religion is not a guarantor of morality. It comes down to the fact that “good conservative Christians” have fused their religious identity with their political identity, and their political identity has in turn been fused with the most petty, profane, spiteful and stupid creature in American political history.

Now, if you are a Good Christian, you might resent this declaration. You might resent being swept up in this broad stereotype category. But let’s face it. When Republicans send us their candidates… they’re not sending their best. They’ve got a lot of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.  They’re racists.  And some, I assume, are good people.

What you’re going to have to figure out is that you’re not the Body of Christ. Trump is Dorian Gray, and you’re his picture.

Trump can go from scandal to scandal completely unmarred, largely because the Republican Party covers for him, and that’s entirely because you, the Good Christians, love him more than any other Republican politician. But the more you enable him, the less it becomes a matter of his depravity and more a matter of yours. After all, most Americans had already seen The Apprentice and knew why it wasn’t a good idea to make Gary Busey’s dumber sidekick the guy with the nuclear launch codes. The only reason Trump is still where he is is because you want him there.

Of course, there’s a difference. In the fantasy story, Dorian Gray remained youthful and clean-looking as his picture became more and more soiled. Eventually, the truth of the portrait offended him so much he took a knife to it and he died of a heart attack. When his staff found him, his corpse was old and corrupted, but the picture was restored to its original appearance.
When Trump is gone, the corruption that you display will not go away. Because it was your corruption all along. He just made you feel comfortable in expressing it.

So maybe you think that description doesn’t apply to you. And maybe it doesn’t. Why then do you associate with those that it does apply to? Was it because Hillary was worse? Do you really think so now? In any case, she’s not running this year. Many “conservatives” tell us that the problem with liberals (‘liberal’ apparently meaning anyone who doesn’t kiss Trump’s ass) is that they hate Trump more than they love America. The accusation should be reversed: Do conservatives hate liberals more than they love America? Does the cult love Trump more than they love America? Do they love Trump more than they love God?

Because they’re going to have to make a choice soon.

The conventional wisdom (an oxymoron not quite as good as ‘military intelligence’) on Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un is that by even acknowledging Kim in the first place, Trump gave the North Korean dictator a win and a diplomatic advantage that he didn’t deserve.

I actually give Trump credit for thinking outside the box here. It is true we should not be giving thug regimes enhanced credibility, but we do not have relations with North Korea, we do not have relations with the Islamic Republic in Iran, and we do not have relations with the Castro-built regime in Cuba, and none of those countries became liberal democracies just because Uncle Sam decided to hold his breath until they did. And the withholding of America’s favor on the premise that reform will bring diplomatic benefits is not a coin that holds much value anymore. Especially these days. So if Trump’s maneuver can bring about an actual peace treaty with North Korea, when we have never had one since 1953, that would be a truly great achievement. It would deserve to be the centerpiece exhibit at the future Donald Trump Presidential Library and Adult Bookstore.

See, I’m not a liberal. My problem with Donald Trump isn’t that he’s a conservative (whatever the hell that means anymore) but that he’s an incompetent. The problem with taking the initiative to reach out to the North Korean dictatorship is not the idea itself, but the fact that this is Donald Trump, and he’s going to find SOME way to fuck it up. Just like his diplomacy with our (former) allies. Before and during the G-7, Trump claimed (with partial but exaggerated accuracy) that Canada had its own trade discrepancies with the US, and citing them, tried to bully Justin Trudeau into accepting all his demands to stop Trump’s tariff threats, and when Trudeau refused him, Trump and his toadies decided to scream and cry and carry on, and now the official position of State is that Justin Trudeau is the meanest ogre in the world. And if you’re not already a Trumpnik, that is very difficult to believe. I mean, Justin Trudeau is basically Mr. Rogers as played by Matthew McConaughey.

But in the midst of this, especially Trump’s disturbing affinity with lil’ Kim’s authoritarian regime, it raises the argument among Trump’s critics as to whether he is a fascist. And whenever I consider the matter, I always respond that Trump isn’t intellectual enough to be a fascist. That isn’t to say that he doesn’t have that temperament or that ultimately he doesn’t want to be a fascist, but Trump doesn’t even have the regard for ideas that a would-be Svengali like Steve Bannon has, and none of the big idea men who have tried to sway him have been able to control him for long, because their systematic thinking is totally opposed to his attitude.
Fascism as a discrete philosophy was developed by the Italian Marxist journalist Benito Mussolini in the wake of World War I, when he switched his political position from antiwar socialism to pro-Italian, pro-war nationalism to seize Italian-speaking territories in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Given Mussolini’s roots, and his knowledge of thinkers like Nietszche and Sorel, leftists tend to discount his intellectual background and deny that Fascism has any roots in or similarity to socialism. Yet, Fascism does have distinct characteristics. Whereas socialists frame their goals in altrustic or even utopian terms, and rationalize even violent actions along those lines, fascists define violence and domination as good in and of themselves.

Another trait of fascism (where Mussolini borrowed from Georges Sorel) is the deliberate invocation of myth and the irrational over the Marxists’ insistence that their philosophy was “scientific” socialism. This is mainly the case where fascism emphasized the nation over an international class struggle (and where the Nazis later embraced a racial myth). A myth is different from a lie, because while a myth cannot be proven, it cannot exactly be disproven, either. It doesn’t matter if the myth is “true”, what matters is what it represents. For instance, Christianity is a myth. We can’t prove Jesus was real, or that Jesus is God, but we can’t exactly disprove it, and the fact that Jesus is not here only seems to confirm the myth. “Mexico will pay for the wall” is just a cheap lie that Trump tells because he knows what the rubes want to hear. Even if they KNOW he’s lying and just want to believe, it’s still not a myth, because they also know for a fact that it’s bullshit.
In this regard, there are three things to remember about lying. First and foremost: Never tell the same lie twice.  Second, never tell the mark a lie that he can (and will) immediately disprove. And third, don’t tell your mark that you like lying, and that you lie all the time.

In a 2015 Vox article, Dylan Matthews interviewed various scholarly experts on fascism and came to the conclusion that Trump was not a fascist for various reasons, such as that fascists emphasize violence as a virtue whereas Trump sees threats as a tool. (He rarely carries out major threats, and however incoherent he has been with regard to North Korea, he seems to think it would be a good idea to pursue peace with them.) But one point that is made in the article is that fascism is specifically anti-individualist, and Trump is the arch-individualist. “Whatever else can be said about Donald Trump, he is fiercely individualistic. Indeed, a major part of his appeal comes from the fact that he’s untethered to any movement or party or even financial interests besides himself. The Republican establishment hates him. He has no affiliated politicians at other levels of government. He runs no party organization or really any political organization with any goal other than promoting himself, personally. And his arguments about how to make America great generally rely on his own skills — his prowess at making deals, his personal strength, etc.” It’s also mentioned that fascism really doesn’t have too much regard for economics: “In fact, most experts think that it’s hard to identify a characteristically ‘fascist’ economic policy. It was all secondary to other goals, notably preparation for war.” Both of these points get to a critical difference between fascism and “Trumpism”: fascism is a systematic philosophy that holds that the state is greater than oneself.

This was all encapsulated in a Tweetstorm by liberal political writer Matthew Chapman,  which starts with “Believe it or not, Trump’s insane proclamation that he will keep tariffs in place until there are no more Mercedes on Fifth Avenue gave me a moment of clarity. I think I finally understand Trump’s economic philosophy now. And we are absolutely screwed.” He continues: “The one thing that you need to understand about Trump is that he is, at his core, a con man with no empathy. Therefore, he assumes that all other people are also con men with no empathy, and every exchange of goods and services that exists in the world is, on some level, a con. Trump assumes every transaction in the world — between people, businesses, nation-states, even between two different agencies of the same government — has a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. He believes if you’re not ripping someone off, you’re getting ripped off. … It’s not simply that Trump *doesn’t* think the Paris Climate Agreement, Iran nuclear deal, TPP, NAFTA, or luxury cars from Germany are a good deal for America. It’s that he *can’t* think that. It’s an alien concept to him that a deal other people want with us could also help us. … This is why Trump will never, ever, be able to negotiate with the rest of the world. He doesn’t believe in mutual benefit. The second anyone tells him ‘this is your end of the deal’ he’ll rip it up. He believes only one party can have an end of the deal, and it shouldn’t be him.”

And that is not only why Trump is going to find some way to fuck things up with Kim Jong-un (the way he pulled out of the Iran deal, and the Paris climate accords, and the G7), it’s why he can’t be can’t really be considered a fascist, because he has no ideology beyond what he wants at the moment, and no value greater than himself. How is a future American authoritarian going to count himself as a “Trumpist” when even Trump doesn’t know what that means?

There was an interview in Reason Magazine with libertarian(ish) Congressman Thomas Massie that’s been making the rounds recently.  Matt Welch interviewed him last year as Massie came to grips with the reality that once Republicans were in control, they weren’t the conservative-to-libertarian party they claimed to be. (Of course, I figured that out at least one Republican-majority government ago.) What really got Massie was the 2016 primary campaign as his candidate, Rand Paul, got taken down and Donald Trump dominated.
“But then when I went to Iowa I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren’t voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron (Paul) earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”

It’s of a piece with the people who project the attitude that Trump and the “alt-right” display the real motives of libertarians and conservatives when most people who actually know anything about those philosophies know why Trump is the opposite. The fact that Trump has hewed so closely to Republican orthodoxy in office (when he deviated so much from it in the campaign) actually confirms this point. Trump doesn’t care enough about political philosophy to impose an agenda on Congress, and when he does get involved just fucks up what they want to do.  But they go along with him because just as they wouldn’t vote for anything Barack Obama wanted, a Democratic president wasn’t going to go along with anything they wanted, and a Republican one will. This just happens to be the only Republican who could get elected. Do you think Republicans would have won 2016 on the policy agenda and moxie of Jeb Bush? For that matter, IS there really a Republican Party that stands for liberty and a smaller, more accountable government? Because as we’ve seen, those guys aren’t getting elected. As much as some of us think that policy and philosophy matter, a lot of voters just don’t.

The real issue (especially for Democrats who wish they could just win an election and set things back to where they ‘should’ be) is that this isn’t just a Republican problem. George W. Bush defeated dull policy wonk Al Gore in 2000 (technically) and another dull functionary, John Kerry, in 2004. So Democrats were eight years in the wilderness before they came back in 2008 with Barack Obama, a genuinely engaging and visionary personality. But he didn’t really push much beyond the passage of the ACA, and while that probably was worth it in the long run, it burned up not only Obama’s political capital, but that of Democrats in general. Obama did win re-election against Mitt Romney – with some difficulty – but Democrats lost the House majority in 2010 and the Senate majority in 2014. Moreover, Democrats have less seats in state legislatures than ever. Even as Obama and his vision of progressive government gained in appeal, Democrats as a party failed to reach out to the country at large, because they could never figure out their priorities and how to connect with the public.

When policy is not merely secondary to politics but actively discarded, and personality is the only thing that matters, of course Trump is going to have an edge over a dour wonk like Hillary Clinton, because however obnoxiously evil he is, he’s at least got pizzazz. Sort of like a pro wrestling heel. Which of course, Trump actually is.

To return to the question, there are real differences between fascism and state socialism. One reason that Leninist governments lasted longer than fascist ones is that communist governments had a central committee structure that could survive the death of a strongman. (Of course, another factor is that most communist governments did not start wars when they were outnumbered.) But while communist governments were themselves frequently run by strongmen, they had a government structure that fascist regimes lacked. By comparison however, fascist governments still had more structure than what this administration has now.

I mean, I can see why fundamentalists love Trump. Their concept of morality has always been transactional, so of course they don’t care that Trump acts like King Herod on coke as long as they get the Supreme Court justices they want and he picks on the people they hate. But if you’re a fiscal conservative/”economic libertarian”, your bargain is more problematic, since whatever you gained with the tax cut is threatened by the trade wars. And if you’re one of the middle-to-working-class people who voted for Trump, you’re expected to cover that tax cut with a reduction in your own benefits, not to mention that you’re obliged to pay for Trump’s Wall.

There is no policy or philosophy that can justify supporting Trump other than sheer attitude. In foreign policy, that attitude is best expressed as “we’re America, bitch.”  But domestically, it comes down to “we can screw anybody we want, because we’re the biggest gang.” But as I’ve told conservatives at least once, there’s just one problem with that attitude: Republicans aren’t the biggest gang.