Month: April 2019

“This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

– Donald Trump, quoted after hearing about the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller

So: it’s been a little less than a month since Robert Mueller submitted his investigation on the Trump team to Attorney General William Barr, at which point Barr presented a suspect summary that immediately drew attention to itself. Since then Barr appeared at an April 9 Congressional hearing where he said “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign.

And then on Thursday he felt the need to preface the official release of the actual report with a press conference where he invoked the calming mantra of “No Collusion” and actually said Trump’s actions were understandable in that he felt “frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency” – prompting even Chris Wallace at Fox News to say that “the attorney general seemed almost to be acting as the counselor for the defense, the counselor for the president rather than the attorney general”.

Why is Barr going to such lengths to stand up for Trump in the face of the Mueller Report? Well, Trump needs all the help he can get.

As promised by Barr’s summary, the Mueller Report is over 400 pages and consists of two parts, the first being the subject of whether candidate Trump conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. On that score, while even Barr asserts that Russia did work to influence the election, and the Mueller Report goes into great detail on exactly what methods they used, they conclude that no direct coordination took place. So, Russian ops (a group called the IRA) “represented themselves as U.S. persons to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign” and that isn’t coordination because the Trump team could claim deniability. “Trump Campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts and other political content created by the IRA” and that isn’t coordination. “Less than an hour after the (Access Hollywood) video’s publication, WikiLeaks released the first set of emails stolen by the GRU (Russian military intelligence) from the account of Clinton Campaign chairman John Podesta” but that’s just a coincidence.

Legally prosecutors might not have met a beyond-reasonable-doubt standard, but to say that all the various efforts of the Trump campaign to get help from the Russian government were not deliberate or intentional is to stretch coincidence to the point that a Storyteller in Mage: The Ascension would slap Trump with an automatic Paradox Backlash and at least one Flaw.

(OK. Most of you didn’t get that. But the two or three people who did thought it was really funny.)

The second section is the kicker. The second subject of the report concerns whether Trump as president obstructed justice in the investigation of the first matter, Russian efforts to tilt the election.

Because if Trump simply happened to benefit from the fact that Vladimir Putin preferred him as president to Hillary Clinton, and that was the extent of their alignment, he could have left it at that. But once president, he continued to change foreign policy towards Russia even as Cabinet members, notably National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, turned out to have Russian ties. The fact that existing FBI investigations on the 2016 campaign continued into the Trump Administration concerned Trump, and he demanded that the serving FBI chief, James Comey, “lift the cloud” that he felt was interfering with his ability to act on foreign policy. When Comey refused to explicitly do so, Trump got Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to write an opinion firing Comey specifying that the termination had nothing to do with the Russia investigation, only for them to see Trump tell NBC’s Lester Holt (on May 11, 2017) that the reason for the firing was over the Russia investigation. (Five days after being played by Trump, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel on the investigation, which is probably just another coincidence.) Among other things, Mueller cites Trump’s remarks and actions concerning Comey’s firing as having “the potential to affect a successor director’s conduct of the investigation.” The report cites Trump’s efforts to remove the special counsel from the investigation, telling Jeff Sessions “you were supposed to protect me” and when Sessions gave him a resignation letter, Trump did not accept the resignation at the time but kept the letter for several days, which then-Chief of Staff Reince Preibus told investigators was like having a “shock collar” on the Attorney General. When Flynn decided to cooperate with the investigation, Trump’s personal counsel asked Flynn to provide a “heads up” in case “there’s information that implicates the President”. At least one case of conduct towards a witness is redacted as “Harm to Ongoing Matter.” Trump’s first campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted on several charges, including witness tampering, after he broke the terms of his plea deal with the investigation.

During the investigation, Trump submitted to only written interview responses to questions on Russia-related topics. He refused to interview at all on the subject of obstruction or his actions during the presidential transition.

In the introductory portions of Section II, Mueller’s report is clear: “Under applicable Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize a President for obstructing justice through the use of his Article II powers” and: “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

And in the Conclusion, we get the full context of the quote that Barr’s summary made unnecessarily mysterious. Barr quoted Mueller as saying, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Many readers, including me, thought that this snippet revealed much by what it did not reveal. Under the presumption of innocence, why is there a need to specify whether an individual is exonerated? This is the actual paragraph, emphasis mine:

“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Again: it was not Robert Mueller’s job to indict Trump. It wasn’t even the Attorney General’s job. The job of the Justice Department was to present the evidence of Trump’s activities so that Congress could make a proper judgment on whether to impeach the president, which is their responsibility. Contra some liberals, my problem with William Barr is not that he didn’t indict the president. It’s that he has done everything in his power to muddy the waters and stop Congress from making a proper judgment, not least by taking a Mueller conclusion of “we can’t prove that the president obstructed justice because his team eliminated trails of evidence” and presenting it to the public as “he’s totally clean, guys, No Collusion (TM), nothing to see here.”

Needless to say, “We Don’t Want The DOJ To Indict the President Over Shady Stuff That Would Get Anyone Else, Including Bill Clinton, In Front of a Grand Jury” isn’t as snappy as “No Collusion.”

But that isn’t the worst of it.

It doesn’t matter how corrupt or conscientious the Attorney General is when the real problem is that you have a full half of the political system, which represents somewhat less than half the population, openly declaring war against not only the Democratic Party but anybody who doesn’t agree with them all the time. This is of course, not just a matter of Trump, however noxious he is an an individual. It was a matter of Mitch McConnell refusing to even allow a vote on Merrick Garland’s appointment to the Supreme Court, effectively creating an extra-Constitutional precedent that stretches “advise and consent” to the width of a subatomic particle. It has to do with the attempts of various “conservatives” to get around established legal precedent. It has to do with them using their lame-duck time in state government passing last-minute legislation to neuter citizen initiatives and stop Democrats from passing laws when the Republicans in said states were thrown out precisely because voters wanted someone else in charge. And even the Republicans who are not moronic, racist and fascist are still willing to go along with all this, which only serves the actual morons, racists and fascists.

And yet, the Democrats’ House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, told reporters after the release of the Mueller report that impeaching Trump was “not worthwhile” especially since there is going to be an election on Trump next year. And realistically, what it comes down to is that pretty much every Republican in the Senate will vote against removing the president, so the House may as well not try. But THAT’s the issue that needs to be addressed. It never was about Trump. It was about a party that is so power-hungry and desperate that it will even accept a Trump as leader and do anything they can to keep him in charge.

And Democrats will not confront that issue because that would require them to abandon this fantasy that once they win another presidential election, American politics will get back to “normal.” Right. Because once Barack Obama defeated John McCain, the Republicans all sobered up.

Why are these guys not ratcheting up the fight? It’s not just because they’re afraid of losing impeachment in the Senate. It’s because the best and worst tradition of Washington is the bipartisan professional camraderie of the political class, and even though the “bipartisan” part is something of a joke now, Democrats still want to believe in the old sense of courtesy even if Republicans have effectively abandoned it. (This is another reason the old-time Democrats are cool towards Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the other ‘democratic socialists’, because they ran for office after growing up and watching the results of Washington in action, and they didn’t come to be nice and play around.)

There’s also the very relevant point that expecting the president to follow “the rule of law” rather than the precedent of an ever-more-powerful executive would put limits on the president’s power, regardless of which party he or she is in. Both parties crave the powers of the executive more than they fear what the other party would do with them.

But again, Democrats are still under the illusion that there’s a cycle of power-sharing in which they’ll get to turn things around if they wait their turn. These guys have partnered for so long with Republicans in killing any competition for the duopoly racket that they still aren’t willing to grasp that the Republicans are effectively turning them into a “third” party.

And one of the reasons Democrats can’t correct course is because their mindset has mostly worked for them. The strength of Democrats up to this point has been their ability to present their position as not only the “normal” position, but as the only respectable one. And they say, “let’s be sane. Let’s be sensible. Let’s all play by the rules and be normal.” And whatever you might think of Republicans, at least they had the guts to walk up to Democrats and go, “you know, we don’t like your rules, and we don’t think your position is ‘normal.’ So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re just gonna throw all your rules in the air and ignore them like they didn’t exist, cause on paper, they really don’t. And we’re gonna make up our own rules as we go along. And we’re gonna call that the new ‘normal.’ So, how d’ya like them apples?”

Cause the response from the political establishment so far has been, “well, okay, as long as there’s a normal.”

Anybody who’s ever had to deal with a toxic relationship or a professional sociopath knows how this works. The aggressor basically tries to Stockholm-Syndrome you into accepting their predations as not only “normal” but good, and since they know how much you crave stability and calm, they stir things up and make a mess and terrorize you into succumbing to their demands. “Just give me what I want and everything goes back to normal. Just do what I tell you and then I’ll leave you alone.” (Until the next time they want you to enable them.)

I mean, if you’re not an illegal alien, a trans person in the military, or living in Yemen, none of this stuff Trump does affects YOU, right?
Unless of course it does. But if you’re not a Republican, you don’t count.

I’m just saying, that if liberals are going to keep chanting, “this is not normal,” then maybe they should ACT like it.

That doesn’t mean they should scream and cry and riot, or do anything un-Constitutional. It means they act according to the law, but they also act according to the stakes. If Capone puts one of yours in the hospital, you put two of his in the morgue. And rhetorically speaking, the next year or so leading up to the election presents a great opportunity to do that.

After all, if Mueller and his Crazy Democrat Trump Haters got nothing on Trump, if Trump had nothing to hide, and if the last time the opposition party impeached a president, they got shellacked at their next midterm election, why NOT push for impeachment, just to get it over with? Why was Barr trying so hard to spin this as being less than it was, if it was really nothing at all? If Trump’s got nothing to worry about, because all the Senate Republicans will take his side and put a cloud on the Democrats by giving Trump the win, why not call the Democrats’ bluff?

Because it’s really the Republicans who are bluffing.

Whereas in the 2018 midterms, Democrats had to defend 23 Senate seats and the Republicans only had to defend 9, in 2020, Republicans will be defending 22 seats and Democrats 12. Even though the Republicans had a net gain of Senate seats in 2018, the factors that favored them in 2018 – the staggered schedule of elections and the much tighter margin in a chamber of 100 versus the 435 in the House – now work against them. In the unlikely event that Democrats win seats while Trump wins election, Democrats will need a net gain of four seats to get the majority. If a Democrat is elected Vice President (and their Vice President is able to break ties) their party will only need three more seats for a majority.

And Republicans – certainly Mitch McConnell – know that they need the Senate as much as they need the White House, if not more so. That’s pretty much how they kept their party alive and kicking when Obama was president. They’ve been this shameless this long because as long as Trump is more asset than liability, they have no reason to abandon him. So he has to be made a liability. If, as strict evidence suggests, Trump merely benefited from Russian election interference without directing it, but he did and continues to work against any investigations of Russian activity in the US and elsewhere, past and present, then whatever one thinks about the 2016 election, Trump’s current conduct is a national security issue. And if Republicans are going to wrap themselves in the flag and defend “our” president against impeachment, it has to be emphasized that they are doing so in the face of that national security threat. If they want to make impeachment an issue against Democrats – and they will whether Democrats want to impeach or not – then Democrats need to make the Republican posture an issue against them. Make it clear: If you vote for a Republican for the Senate (or any other office) you are choosing Trump over your country. Make it clear that all the crazy evil that is happening to this country is only because the Republican Party – very specifically, the Republicans in the Senate – want Donald Trump to stay where he is. And make it clear to politicians and voters that the very same people who defend Trump now are the very same people who said, correctly, 20 years ago that a womanizing pathological liar and real estate cheat was morally unfit to be the president, and it is now time for those people to either live by their words or eat them.

If Republicans want Donald Trump so damn bad, make them OWN him.

No more of the Good Christians fretting and posturing that of course they want a godly president, but they’ll give King Cyrus a “mulligan.” Make them admit that Trump IS what they want because he is what they wanted years before he actually ran for office. Make them take responsibility for their mindset, of which Trump is merely the most obvious example. Of course, neither he nor they want to take responsibility for anything, so Republicans in the Senate will have to make a choice: Do they love Trump more than their own jobs?

I think we all know how they’ll answer that question, but forcing them to actually answer it in public will force them, and the Democrats, to acknowledge the stakes.

But, I could be wrong. Maybe Trump knows more than I do. He’s gotten away with everything so far. So given that the discussion of impeachment is inevitable, and he seemed to think that making himself the focus was how he saved the Senate (even as he lost the House) maybe forcing impeachment is how Republicans achieve victory. In fact, I’ve even got a re-election slogan picked out for him:

Trump 2020: Because You Can’t Spell “Impeachment” Without ‘Peach’

Among the over a dozen folks who have announced themselves as candidates for president in the Democratic Party race, one who’s been getting a lot of attention is centrist Pete Buttigieg, the well-regarded “Mayor Pete” of South Bend, Indiana. Having launched an exploratory committee in January, Buttigieg announced a fundraising total of 7 million dollars by April. This was followed up by a CNN town hall event in which Buttigieg’s performance impressed a lot of people, leading to greater press coverage and favorable attention.

This has led to consternation in some quarters. Paste Magazine writer Jacob Weindling, a self-declared socialist, wrote an article last week on the subject that “Pete Buttigieg Is Not a Progressive.” In the lead paragraph, Weindling lays out his thesis: “The word “progressive,” means something. It’s not just the basic definition of moving progress forward, but it is a political ideology that stands opposed to the tenets of the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism approaches politics from the standpoint that the capitalism-based status quo is worth preserving, and policy focus should be on fixing its deficiencies around the edges. Progressivism takes the attitude that the status quo is the problem, and the only solution is to get rid of the system perpetuating the unsustainable status quo. “

But that just gets to the point. I am NOT a “progressive.” I am not a Socialist. I am a conservative in the sense that I want to preserve the American system of government. I am a libertarian in the sense that I believe in The Law of Unintended Consequences, and in the sense of Thomas Jefferson: “That government is best which governs least” and what someone else believes “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words I am what Jefferson and F.A. Hayek would call a liberal.

But if “conservatism” has degenerated into the power-worship of wannabe fascists, the term liberalism has been co-opted by what would properly be regarded as social democracy in Western Europe. And really, it has even less to do with that than what Weindling describes as “the attitude that the status quo is the problem” because when American leftists talk about how (say) national health care is a radical leftist position here but a mainstream position in Europe, they elide the point that a social safety net IS a mainstream position in Europe – which in some cases has conservative roots. This model is certainly more redistributionist than how things are done in America, and thus problematic to the Right, but it is not “socialist” in the Leninist or even anarchist sense, because it does not result in the workers seizing the means of production – at best, workers’ parties seize control of the government and it redistributes the profits of business. The point is, you can’t redistribute capital if there is no capital to redistribute. European systems preserve the “status quo” that actual socialists wish to destroy because you can’t have all the things they say are good about socialism without a capitalist system to finance them.

To say nothing of the other issue with “progressivism”, a term I normally use only in quotes. The progressive movement is so devoted to its own analytic concept of “justice as fairness” that it disregards the context of things, such as, that not everybody regards the leftist position as self-evidently good, that not everybody agrees with the current fashions of gender theory, the demand for reparations, socialist economics, and so forth, and that even those who are moderate and tolerant will eventually be alienated by a movement that demands everything go its way. The words of Hayek are relevant here: “To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits. I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion. This may also explain why it seems to be so much easier for the repentant socialist to find a new spiritual home in the conservative fold than in the liberal.”

Because the Left has that illiberal, fundamentally anti-American dark side – however sublimated it appears in comparison with right-wing lunacy – Republicans can still try to make hay out of how “socialist” the new generation of Democrats are. It’s just that that party has staked its future, and the world’s future, on the risk that their precious little boy will literally shit himself on national TV, which he figuratively did this week.

By contrast to Weidling, Andrew Sullivan had a Friday column in nymag.com that presented Buttigieg in a more positive light. Sullivan being Sullivan, he frets that any candidate who cannot address the immigration issue will lose to Trump, but he thinks that Buttigieg seems to be the most likely to support e-verification and a path to citizenship as opposed to effectively open borders. He also appreciates his demographics (‘my gay hack for pronouncing his name is to think of him as a ‘booty judge.’) and sees his political career so far as proof, like Obama’s, that “in America, we can still unite in a more humane consensus.” This is perhaps better explained in an earlier New York article by Ed Kilgore, “Without a Plausible ‘Theory of Change,’ Progressive Ideas Are Just Fantasies.” This piece in turn analyzed the interview that Buttigieg did with Ezra Klein at Vox, quoting Buttigieg as saying that the central lesson of Barack Obama’s presidency is that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.”

This just gets to the point that the two-party process has reached its limit of absurdity as Republicans in particular campaign only on negative terms and in office can only act to stymie Democratic initiatives. Even if some Republicans knew better, they don’t want to be part of a process where a Democrat president could take credit for the results, and they certainly don’t want to be primaried out of office by people who think that Rush Limbaugh is a pinko. Now, I didn’t always agree with Obama, but I think he was temperamentally the sort of president I could get behind. It’s just that the Republican Party had already decided on its radical course by the time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and they were going to oppose Obama for being a Democrat even if he wasn’t young and black (though obviously that didn’t help). I argued that Obama’s (generically) conservative temperament was good on the whole but left him unable to challenge his enemies even when it was clear that they wanted to destroy everything he supported. In his article, Kilgore says that the most important matter for the next president is not so much what a candidate wants to do as how they plan to do it, pointing out that Buttigieg, for one, would endorse “process” changes like eliminating the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster so that the results of the popular vote are better expressed in action, whereas the “radical progressive” Bernie Sanders would keep both institutions as they are, and thus be less likely to succeed in a country where Republicans have any support at all. The articles on Buttigieg aren’t very clear on exactly how he would enact these changes, since they would require both houses of Congress, but he is at least trying to size up the issue when Obama didn’t even seem to recognize it.

The fact that Buttigieg is gay and married to a man is by now incidential to most people, and obviously doesn’t give him extra weight with “progressives,” even as it would drive most “conservatives” up a wall. In that, Buttigieg resembles Obama, since most people didn’t care about his race, “progressives” still found reason to criticize him even though he was the first black president, but the conservative faction was driven literally insane by his very existence. What this really comes down to is not that the country is becoming “polarized” or skewing to the Left. Again, liberals: most of the country doesn’t agree with you, either. If you’ve now come to believe that a financially corrupt poon hound is unfit to be president, and that his presence in the office coarsens the culture, maybe you now realize that the conservatives were right about Clinton then. It’s just that since 1998, conservatives took the wrong lesson from that. Now they’ve come to believe that since power justifies everything, everything is justified for the sake of power. And if the rest of the country seems to be going more Left, it’s only because the Right is already radicalized and cannot be dealt with in good faith.

The other thing is that the setting is different than the 2016 election. Whereas the Democrats’ position in 2016 was “you’ll get meatloaf again, and like it” now you have the opposite problem where voters have a surfeit of choices. And in this case, every Democrat currently running in 2016, possibly including Joe Biden, could be nitpicked to death by “progressive” purists. But every one of them, including Biden, has a more actually progressive policy record than Hillary Clinton, and any one of them arguably has a better resume.

So Pete Buttigieg isn’t a progressive. Who cares? And why should anyone care if Joe Biden apologizes for being handsy? When the orange toadstool in the White House actually brags about how awful he is? Most of my social media friends don’t talk about Biden’s reputation with women, or Cory Booker’s history with Big Pharma, or Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of staff. They ask, “is this person better than Trump? And could they beat Trump?” The first goes without saying, the second has to be determined.

To reiterate: I’m not a Democrat. I am not a liberal in the American sense of the term, because I am not a “progressive.” So I don’t think I am going to change my Libertarian registration to vote in the Democratic caucus/primary round, because any one of these people not only would be better than Trump, more to the point they would be a better president than Hillary Clinton, and would be more likely to run a better campaign than Hillary Clinton. Ironically that’s why I gave up my principles and temporarily joined the Democratic Party in 2016, specifically to vote for Bernie Sanders, because if the binary thinkers are right in assuming that a third-party candidate can’t win, and the non-Democratic candidate was A, Republican, and B, Trump, that made it imperative that the Democrats nominated someone who could deal with Trump, and Hillary wasn’t it. If anything my resentment of Hillary was based on the suspicion in the back of my mind that Bill and Hillary’s old friend Trump was coached to be an anti-Hillary “straight out of Central Casting” to rally her feminist base and discredit the Republicans once and for all. What she didn’t anticipate is that Trump got more attention and praise than he deserved precisely because he was the anti-Hillary and could present himself as the opposite of what everyone hated about her. If Sanders had been nominated, that wouldn’t have guaranteed he’d win, but he would have had the populist credentials to compete with Trump on that level and would not have had the baggage that Hillary had and that Trump took so much advantage of. The other point in this coming election is that Trump no longer has the advantage of asking “what have you got to lose?” After two years of seeing what he’s actually like with power, a lot of people know exactly what they have to lose, and if all Trump had to do was present himself as the opposite of Hillary, it doesn’t matter how “socialist” or leftist or moderate the Democratic nominee is, since Republicans will present that person as the Commie Antichrist anyway. All said Democrat needs is to be the opposite of Trump.

In this regard, I don’t know if I’d put all my chips on Pete Buttigieg. He is still obscure, but unless we’re talking about Biden, or Bernie Sanders (or unless you watch a lot of MSNBC) most of these guys are obscure. He is not a progressive (at least if you’re one of those folks who defines ‘fascist’ as anything to the right of Che Guevara) but this whole year of pre-primary politics is about Democrats deciding if that’s the direction they want to go. But Buttigieg seems to have the qualities that I (and much of the country) liked about Barack Obama, along with an understanding of the current political situation that Obama didn’t have, and that the next president will need. That’s why I would keep an eye on him.

But I must confess, the real reason I’d like Pete Buttigieg to get the Democratic nomination is so that Donald Trump would have to spend the second half of 2020 trying to pronounce “butty geeg.”