Month: September 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

What?

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

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

[bddum-TIING!]

Yeah, like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which reminds me-

Y’all sick of winning yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need more people like him, frankly.

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

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