Month: May 2020

There are two serious problems in this country that might not seem to be related, but they are.

On May 25 in Minneapolis, a black person, George Floyd, was arrested – apparently for trying to pass a $20 counterfeit bill – and during the arrest, officer Derek Chauvin, guarded by three other police, restrained Floyd by putting his knee to Floyd’s neck, a maneuver that most police departments disavow precisely because it is likely to cause breathing problems. The incident was caught on video and the officers were yelled out at the time. As a result of his restraint, Floyd was pronounced dead by paramedics after they got him to the hospital.

The Minneapolis Police Department did immediately fire the four officers involved in the arrest, but outrage in the city continued to build as Chauvin was not arrested, even after the Mayor said that should happen, and the FBI had a Thursday press conference to announce an investigation. It got worse when it turned out that Chauvin in his time as a police officer has had at least 12 complaints against him, including use of excessive force.

(It turned out that in at least one of these incidents, Amy Klobuchar was the state prosecutor who declined to press charges on Chauvin, and this revelation has made it a bit less likely that she will be Joe Biden’s running mate, which would be a crying shame.)

The public outrage might seem to be an overreaction, IF one believes this is an isolated incident.

Thursday on Facebook I saw a clip from 2019 about a case that actually occurred in 2016. The Dallas Morning News posted it in 2019 because it took them three years to get the records in court. In the incident, a disturbed man – a white man – named Tony Timpa called the police himself in an adult store and told them he was off his meds and couldn’t control himself. By the time the cops got there the site security had already handcuffed Timpa and got him on the ground. However rather than simply wait for the paramedics, the cops first pushed Timpa down, keeping him in a “controversial” hold and lying on his chest. Paramedics then gave him a sedative. After a few minutes they realized Timpa was unconscious. A few minutes later they got him in the ambulance, but he died afterward.

Which is ultimately proof that the cops don’t JUST fuck with black people. They fuck over whomever they can get away with fucking over.

Most free speech advocates – and other people who study how democracies become authoritarian – have observed that if we do not think of rights as universal, if we can say that “certain people” don’t deserve them, then certain people become test cases and legal precedents for what the authorities can get away with. This is why anybody who thinks that all lives matter – or that their lives matter – ought to think that black lives matter, because if the authorities don’t have to care about black lives, there is no reason, other than social conditioning, why they have to care about yours either. And on a political level, such authoritarians often start with an unpopular target whose punishment would have some level of popularity, in order to make an example of them and show that they can do so.

Which leads to the second serious problem: Donald Trump.

The Heather-in-Chief, as part of his snitfit feud with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski on MSDNC, continued to make sleazy insinuations on Twitter that Scarborough was behind the death of an aide, even as Brezinski claimed she was talking with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the subject of Trump’s tweets. And so, possibly because letting the issue go on might end up in legal liability for either Twitter or Trump, Twitter announced this week that it was going to post fact checks in questionable tweets. This outraged Trump, which is perfectly understandable, cause it’s not like Dorsey had EVER imposed Twitter’s own standards on him before. And yet, after Trump twitted out another misleading statement that vote-by-mail leads to voter fraud (since after all, it would not be subject to hacked ballot machines or coronavirus health orders), Twitter did in fact post links, not censoring Trump’s words, but saying in so many words that this position was incorrect. In response, Trump cried like Lucille Ball and said that Twitter was violating his “FREE SPEECH!”

So, in order to (ahem) protect free speech, Trump excreted an Executive Order declaring the authority to review and revise protections given to social media, attacking Twitter specifically because social media outlets have “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences.”

Which is to say: “Not treating Your President, Donald Trump, as an omniscient, omnipotent GOD whose every word is objective Truth and whose every desire is an unbreakable law of Nature, at least until I change my mind again.”

By at least January, Trump knew from government contacts in China that the Chinese hadn’t contained the Wuhan virus. He didn’t stop travel from China until the virus was already a pandemic in Europe, so when he closed travel there, it was like closing the barn door after the horses had run out. We have never had federal containment orders. We have (officially) 100,000 dead and counting from coronavirus. We STILL don’t have a national testing regime.

But Twitter puts a fact check link on just two of Trump’s tweets, and they get an executive order in 48 hours.

I ask again: How DID this man sire five kids with that mosquito dick?

Pretty much every news article is saying that Trump’s premenstrual political maneuver is not going to get anywhere in the courts, but most of them are saying that’s not the point. Jack Shafer said in the centrist Politico: “Even if a state attorney general assures a governor that Trump can’t legally punish his defiance, what governor wants to force the test match? No less a liberal luminary than Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, who has been savaged by Trump, just admitted she censors herself when talking about him publicly.

“Trump doesn’t pay a political price for his threatmanship for a couple of reasons. First, even though we act like we think Trump means all of the wild things he says, 3½ years of his presidency have conditioned us to understand that much of what he says is bluster and that we should wait for action before we scramble the jets. Second, we tend to let many of the outlandish things Trump says slide because the last thing Democrats want to do is hold his feet to the fire and force him to make good on his threats. In a weird sort of gentleman’s agreement, Trump gets to say wild things and the Democrats get to shout back their displeasure until the portable outrage generator runs out of fuel and a peaceful silence returns. Except for when it doesn’t.”

The implication that Shafer doesn’t spell out is that even when the “portable outrage generator” doesn’t do anything concrete, Trump’s caterwauling sets a precedent that allows him to do what he wants, even if legally he can’t. Part of this is simply because he’s the president, and we are all technically obliged to treat him as the president, which means that his job (ostensibly) is to protect the government and the country, as opposed to screaming like a retarded ape-boy that he is the Most Exalted Potentate while acting as though he were the paid stooge of a hostile power whose real job is to fuck this country in every manner possible. And part of that means that the government officials underneath him are obliged to take his Jackson Pollock-meets-Dada art and translate it into geometric forms. So even if legal experts tell us that Trump’s whim has no more enforceability than the hormone shifts of a teenager, it’s kind of the government’s job to make what the president wants enforceable. There’s a good piece on Trump’s Executive Order in Reason’s website: “Somehow, out of Trump’s several paragraphs of paraphrasing Section 230 with random erroneous asides, federal officials are supposed to intuit a new paradigm and “apply section 230(c) according to the interpretation set out in this section.”

“The FCC is also tasked with defining this bit of Trumpian gobbledygook: the conditions under which content moderation will be considered “the result of inadequate notice, the product of unreasoned explanation, or having been undertaking without a meaningful opportunity to be heard.”

@jess_miers

If you’ve ever wondered why Internet companies don’t follow their own rules, this is it. The one time Twitter attempts to elevate social discourse by experimenting with moderation that goes outside the binary leave up/takedown scheme, it’s met with an #executiveorder.

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6:23 PM – May 27, 2020

Which gets to the point that Trump is gaming the system just as much as Twitter is. He can say that none of his twits are an official presidential statement (ex cathedra, so to speak), because they’re on his personal Twitter account. But Jack Dorsey will never enforce the same Code of Conduct on Trump that applies to other users, cause he’s the president, so what he says is newsworthy!

Well, in this brain-dead celebrity culture, Kylie Jenner is newsworthy. Does she get to quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact without being called on it?

Of course, as Jello Biafra might say, we’ve got a bigger problem now. On Thursday, after 8 pm local time, the police protests in Minneapolis turned violent. There is no report on if anyone has died, but there is a tremendous level of property damage and the 3^rd Precinct police building was put to flames. And if Mayor Jacob Frey seemed to be a bit deer-in-the-headlights at his press conference and unwilling to use the National Guard, certain other authorities seem a little TOO willing to use force.

Libertarians like me are often criticized – usually by the Left – because we don’t give enough deference to government. But at times when people lash out in reaction to something that is the fault of government, and in their nihilism destroy their own neighborhoods, it’s the “conservatives” and “liberty lovers” who complain that libertarians are anti-police because we don’t give enough deference to government. If anything, Americans on the whole give too much deference to government. And actually, that’s because in order for government to even work, there needs to be a certain level of deference to it. We understand that the police have a tough job. You never know who’s got a gun. And we know how important the national government is, even if we might want it to be smaller. A national disaster, like the spread of a pandemic to this country, is something beyond the power of a state government to handle, and you would want to assume in such case that the federal government is run by competent and conscientious people, as opposed to a tweezer-dick Putinya suka who literally doesn’t care about anything but himself.

People like me are cynical because as much as we want and need government to be run by competent and conscientious people, they are likely to be run by the worst of us: People who see public responsibility as a means of using the public to their will. And they prey on the herd need for order and stability by holding us hostage to their malice and incompetence. They game the social contract in order to expand the range of what they can get away with.

But the political bargain assumes that those with a monopoly on force are better than us. When it becomes clear that they are not, and that they will not follow the rules they enforce on the rest of us, people start to realize that there is no reason for the public to follow the rules either. You can only game the system for so long before there is no longer a system to game.

In 2014, it was Ferguson. In May, it is Minneapolis. In November, it may be Washington DC.

I’m just tryin’ to protect my stacks

Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax

-Kanye West, “To The World”

If the current occupant of the White House wishes to see himself as a “wartime president,” the results help explain why libertarians and some liberals are so leery of the government’s attempts to phrase every major government endeavor as a “war.” Not just because “war is the health of the state”, but because as with the Energy Crisis, the War On (some) Drugs and the less-rhetorical War On Terror, the main results of our war on coronavirus seem to be spending gigantic amounts of money that mostly goes to people and companies that already have money and government influence while the population at large get crumbs at best, and our personal liberties and standard of living all continue to erode… for the sake of “freedom.”

It’s been mentioned by quite a few people that we can’t keep up coronavirus shutdown, or quarantine, or whatever you want to call it, forever. And so after two months of a haphazard, half-assed, containment regime that is more state-by-state than federal, more governors are starting to open their states, greatly aided by Russian Viceroy Donald Trump riling up his redcaps to “liberate” their states from the majority who wanted to keep things locked down. Of course, just because we call America a democracy doesn’t mean that the majority rules. This week the same Wisconsin Supreme Court that mandated a physical state election in the face of the coronavirus and poll shutdowns also decided that they would approve a Republican legislative challenge against Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ stay-at-home orders.

Not that other countries have been able to keep up a containment regime indefinitely, but they were doing a better job of it than we were, and even they are experiencing their own virus resurgence as they start to relax controls. But the mostly (not entirely) Republican leaders in state government, following their Leader, don’t even have that level of patience, and knowing we haven’t gotten anywhere close to beating this virus, have decided that America is going to declare victory and go home.

Except we already are home. If we had achieved victory, we could leave.

It might be that the Trump Organization thinks they can live with this because unlike some people, they could actually live with this. They have a regular coronavirus testing regime in the White House and for Vice President Pence, even as they have refused to standardize testing for the nation, since, as Trump put it, “by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad“. But Trump said that last Thursday, and this was a day after one of the presidential valets, a military man not identified, was confirmed as positive for coronavirus. Trump was reportedly “lava level mad” when he heard about this, and you know what? I would be TOO! The whole purpose of presidential security is so that the President and Vice President are protected from immediate danger. And yet less than 24 hours after this, Mike Pence’s aide, Katie Miller, tested positive for coronavirus just before his plane was about to take off, delaying his schedule by an hour. Miller is the wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller. It is not yet determined if Stephen Miller himself got the coronavirus, because that would require a second jump between species. In response to this, Trump said, “She’s a wonderful young woman, Katie, she tested very good for a long period of time, and then all of the sudden today she tested positive. She hasn’t come into contact with me. She’s spent some time with the vice president. This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.” So because a prophylatic measure isn’t necessarily perfect, better not to use it at all. I think Stormy Daniels said this was pretty much Trump’s approach to condoms.

But if this is the level of security that the elites can expect in their ivory house… how safe is anybody?

Memo to Donnie: Sanitary measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, in addition to washing hands and surfaces, wearing masks in public and practicing social distancing, also include not walking around with your thumb up your ass for over two months.

But here’s the thing, whatever sense of Schadenfreude I might feel at Trump’s suffering is counterbalanced by the fact that it wouldn’t do any good. I mean really, he’s already wheezy, coughy, discolored and suffering obvious circulation problems, so if he got coronavirus, who would know? If he got it – which at this rate might be inevitable – he would either continue in oblivious denial or do what he usually does and make his position the standard that all the other Republicans have to follow if they want to stay in the Real American Patriot He-Man Woman Haters Club.

“Oh yeah, I’ve got a doozy of a virus. Nobody’s sicker than me. You see that lung I just coughed out. Ooh, that’s a beautiful lung. That I can tell you.”

Again, if even governments that don’t have their thumbs up their asses can’t contain the virus under normal conditions, we need to get serious about treating it rather than declaring victory or wishing it away. Let’s look at another issue that’s got everybody’s undies in a wad. There’s supposed to be an impending meat shortage that has already affected prices in most markets – and thus the business chances of those restaurants that are re-opening. Why is that? “It’s actually not a supply problem. It’s really more of a production issue,’ said Katherine Jacobi, President of the Nevada Restaurant Association.” Last month, Smithfield Foods had to close a major meat-processing plant in South Dakota because nearly 300 employees tested positive for COVID-19. This isn’t because the industry is getting shut down. The governor of South Dakota is a Trump supporter. Viceroy Trump, no vegetarian he, actually bothered to use the Defense Production Act to mandate that meat plants stay open, when he was reluctant to do so to boost the manufacture of testing supplies. (Or as I like to say: ‘Priorities.’) The production issue isn’t that the industry was shut down. The meat industry is essential. It’s still running. There is no evidence that the virus can be spread through packaged meat. The problem is that as plants have continued to run at the same or higher pace, more people have been getting the virus and spreading it, and plants have been shut because it is no longer feasible for those people to work. This is exactly what you would expect to happen at the current rates of infection if we do nothing, which we basically are. And that means that what happens at meat processors will happen in other industries. So rather than “recover” the economy and then deal with the virus, we need to deal with the virus and then re-open the economy. If the virus wasn’t already undermining the economy, we wouldn’t have shut it down in the first place.

In the immortal word of Billie Eilish: “Duh.”

Which leads to another private industry that a lot of people think should be public. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, hospitals were closing across the country, especially in the rural areas where Trump has usually been strongest. And part of that is because hospitals are private businesses that operate on profit motive like everything else. Part of this is that the public system is state funded and a lot of states are not funding Medicaid services. By contrast, urban hospitals rely largely on “elective” procedures to cover their margins and most of their patients are covered by employer plans, whom they can charge more than Medicare/Medicaid services. But now those hospitals are swamped with COVID-19 cases. It doesn’t help that health coverage is also a for-profit business, which for practical reasons is tied to employment for most people, and the economic shutdown means tens of millions have lost their health insurance along with their jobs.

When liberals disparage the concept of libertarian government or public services, they usually say something like “let’s privatize the fire department.” And actually, we can see from the current clusterfuck that we would be better off with a stronger, more organized federal approach to medical care and redistribution of resources. The problem is that the real reason why we would be better off also reveals why a lot of libertarians would rather privatize the fire department. The point of having less national control over everything is not that things wouldn’t be more organized under a stronger government, it’s that that would only work depending on who’s doing the organizing. A privatized fire department would in theory be worse than a public one that is not built around profit incentives. But even if the public institution were acting on profit incentives, it would make a difference if the company is run by Bill Gates versus Donald Trump. And the fact is that Trump is not a president who just happens to be a businessman, he is a businessman who just happens to have the world’s largest government in his portfolio. Because that’s the way he runs it. And putting a public resource under such a businessman means that rather than socializing our resources, you’ve taken the worst-case scenario of privatization and applied it to the entire country.

The liberal conceit is that we not only can socialize resources, but must do so, and it’s a conceit because it assumes that everyone in government is going to be civic-minded. The premise of libertarianism and (former) conservatism is that we cannot and should not socialize everything because we CAN’T trust that everyone would be civic-minded, and since there is nothing inherently different between humans in the private and public sectors, any person who would be corrupt and vicious in the private sector would be corrupt and vicious in the public sector, only in their case they would have the government’s monopoly on force and authority.

For instance, this week the Supreme Court has been hearing a case between prosecutors in the state of New York and Mr. Trump (using the Justice Department basically as his defense team) in which the prosecutors are asking for the defendant’s financial records and the defendant saying he should be immune to subpoena simply because he’s the president. A legal question which Trump’s old buddy and predecessor has already decided.

If the business sector is corrupt and out of control, there’s a balance against that: the government. But what if the government is corrupt and out of control, and is in fact taken over by corrupt businessmen? Vote them out! But what if the majority vote against the (more) corrupt party doesn’t matter due to the Electoral College? “It’s a republic, not a democracy!” And if what’s left of our checks-and-balances try to hold the corrupt Administration accountable to existing laws and standards? “They’re thwarting the will of the people who elected Our President!!”

Not like it’s going to matter, because the screaming incompetence of government under Trump is going to lead to an even bigger government under Joe Biden, in the increasingly more likely event that he’s elected. A recent New York Magazine focus takes excerpts from Biden’s brainstorming while sitting in quarantine, such as “he said he would forgive federal student-loan debt – $10,000 per person, minimum – and add $200 a month to Social Security checks.” Author Gabriel Benedetti: “And while 2009 shows that spending unprecedented amounts of money alone doesn’t necessarily make a presidency transformational, the pandemic and the economic collapse it has produced have expanded Biden’s sense of not just how much relief will be required but what will be possible to accomplish as part of that recovery. … While it’s impossible to tell where the country is headed, Biden’s camp is in the disorienting position of scaling up its laundry list of proposals to match the ambition, and the political appetite, he thinks the American people – desperate for relief – will have in January.”

And any Republican wails against all this will be taken as just more bad faith from the same people who wail about Tara Reade after over four years of worshiping Monsieur Coup de la Pousse’. These same people will look at the new New Deal, or Great Society, or whatever it’s going to be called, and they will invoke “checks and balances” and the “rule of law”, and all the Democrats will have to do is play the tapes of Adam Schiff at the impeachment trial invoking “the rule of law” to Republican Senators while they sneered and played with fidget spinners.

Thanks to “conservatives” who would rather identify with Russian autocrats than American liberals, most non-Trumpniks see any calls for “freedom” and “states’ rights” as meaning only some people’s freedom to do what they want regardless of who gets hurt.

All the Trumpniks, even the former conservatives whom I know have good brains, have rationalized their worship of the gold-plated calf as a “lesser evil” because he’s supposed to be the only thing protecting American capitalism from a takeover by socialism. Yet as we’ve seen, the capitalist economy, which Trump can only take credit for insofar as he passively chose to not interfere with what he inherited from Obama, is now ruined because of Trump’s active policy of confusion and incompetence. And his ultimate legacy, in creating a need for government assistance, government healthcare, and organized government policy, is that Donald Trump will end up doing more to create socialism in America than any president since FDR.

And that’s if he loses in 2020.

If he wins re-election, of course Trump will do that much more to turn America into a socialist country. Of course, since Trump is a self-described nationalist, his Socialism would be more of the National type.

“Do not think that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of these answers. They know that their statements are empty and contestable, but it amuses them to make such statements; it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much, they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed. Not that they are afraid of being convinced: Their only fear is that they will look ridiculous or that their embarrassment will make a bad impression on a third party whom they want to get on their side. Thus if the anti-Semite is impervious, as everyone has been able to observe, to reason and experience, it is not because his conviction is so strong, but rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen to be impervious.”

• Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”, 1944

A few weeks ago the frequent accounts of Joe Biden’s “handsy” behavior parted way for a more serious accusation. In April 2019, a former staffer for Senator Biden, Tara Reade, accused him of inappropriate touching while she was on his staff in the 1990s but did not describe anything graphic. But in March of this year she approached a journalist and escalated the complaint, saying that in 1993, Joe Biden had pressed her against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers. Only after this did she file a report with Washington, D.C. Police. Reade says she did file a written complaint at the time with the Senate personnel office, but she says she does not have a copy and it has not been found in the Senate records.

The latest developments are that (after cancelling an interview with Fox News) Reade did secure an interview with Megan Kelly on Kelly’s own social media pages, where Reade declared she would take a polygraph if Joe Biden takes one, and escalated further by calling on Biden to suspend his campaign. Not only that, on May 7 Douglas Wigdor, whose firm has represented six victims of convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, has announced he is representing Reade.

While it seems (to ‘conservatives’) that the liberal media were trying to sweep this whole thing under the rug, that is less and less the case.

The goal here is not any old-school journalist sense of both-sides fairness and objectivity, but the media’s need for sensationalism and ratings, and if that means making Discount Caligula more feasible than he would be otherwise, then they’ll do it. Trump has said more than once that the media will save him because he’s great for their numbers. And more than once, I’ve said he may be right.

Because as I’d mentioned a few weeks ago, it’s a bit suspicious that this particular accusation came up at exactly the point that Trump is beset by unfriendly news on all sides and it looks like all Biden has to do to win in November is show up and not die of old age. The same people who fret about balancing “#metoo” with the need to support a liberal over Trump aren’t going to stress how Reade made a story already damaging to Biden that much more of a criminal accusation, or how her anti-Biden efforts increased as she supported Bernie Sanders politically, or how she wrote a 2018 article (since deleted) on the left-wing Medium site waxing rhapsodic about “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” and talking about her political evolution “after reading authors like Noam Chomsky, (and) my eyes opened to the great extent of our nation’s hypocrisy and imperialism.” But this is the money quote: “President Putin’s genius is his judo ability to conserve his own energy and let the opponents flail, using up their energy, while he gains position. Currently, President Putin has a higher approval rating in America then the American President, particularly with women. [‘Citation needed‘ – Wikipedia] President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity. It is evident that he loves his country, his people and his job. Although his job may seem like in the words of writer, Elizabeth Gilbert on genius, ‘trying to swallow the sun.’ This is a whole lot to deal with for one mere mortal… President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women. Especially since the bloated, American President is so negative, denigrating and dismissive of anyone but himself as he stumbles even playing golf (which is not a real sport anyway but a past time, sorry golfers). “

(It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone could support Putin while denigrating Trump; after all, most open Trumpniks are more fond of Putin’s approach to government than our nation’s hypocrisy and imperialism.)

A Vox journalist who is personally sympathetic to Reade said, “If Reade had told a consistent story and shared all of her corroborating sources with reporters, if those sources had told a consistent story, if the Union piece had shaken loose other cases like hers, or if there were “smoking gun” evidence in Biden’s papers, her account might have been reported on differently in mainstream media a year ago. It is not fair to an individual survivor that their claims require an extraordinary level of confirmation, but it’s what reporters have found is necessary for their stories to hold up to public scrutiny and successfully hold powerful men accountable. So we are here.”

Which is another reason that news outlets have been leery of getting more involved, because this could all blow up in their faces. But with the involvement of Wigdor, the stakes have been raised, and this campaign is at least less amateur hour than the Party of Pizzagate attempt to smear Anthony Fauci as a sexual assaulter.

The problem being that escalating the stakes to the level of “suspend your campaign or we have a rape investigation” means that someone’s bluff is gonna be called. And lest we assume that having a hot lawyer means that your case is solid, I’m old enough to remember when Michael Avenatti was a hot lawyer. That would make me at least two.

Until this actually does get investigated, this is just the rationalization for some people to say (with a straight face) “I won’t vote for a creepy senile rapist who used his office to get his kid a cushy job.”
Well. Good thing we’ve got TWO parties, so there’s a real CHOICE.

Let us go straight to the worst-case scenario, because let’s face it, this is Trumpworld, and in Trumpworld, the worst-case scenario is the most likely one. The worst-case scenario of course is that Joe Biden actually did rape Tara Reade. That would of course require a serious investigation actually proving the charges, which at this point are no more substantiated – or capable of substantiation – than E. Jean Carroll’s recent charge against Trump, or 22 other separate allegations from individual women over the years, before he ran for president, and are certainly no more grounded than Trump actually confessing on tape that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” or telling Howard Stern that as owner of the Miss Universe pageants he could walk into contestants’ dressing rooms. (The Miss Universe franchise includes Miss Teen USA.)

So for this to get beyond where the Trump accusations have already gone, there would have to be a more developed investigation of Reade’s charges. There’s a recent piece in The Daily Beast, succinctly titled, “Hell No, Joe Biden Shouldn’t Play By Rules That Donald Trump Never Has.”
Yes, I know, it’s Michael Tomasky. But he’s not wrong. In particular, I point out the following:

“I’d like to live in a world where Biden could do the clearly honorable and above-board thing here. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where the level of morality is defined by the least moral actor. That’s Trump. “

Let me re-emphasize: We live in a world where the level of morality is defined by the least moral actor.

That’s Trump.

When Democrats in 2020 had an amazing surfeit of candidates, and a very strong Bernie Sanders run, and yet Joe Biden attained a strategic victory even before the virus shutdown, that indicates that voters in his party wanted Joe Biden. They may have been thinking strategically, but ultimately, they wanted Joe Biden. When Republicans in 2016 had a surfeit of candidates, most of whom did not have Trump’s vices, his pettiness, his disrespect, and they nominated him anyway, that indicates to me that Republicans, and the others who voted with them that election, wanted Trump, not despite his pettiness and disrespect but actively because of these vices. For Democrats, supporting a potential rapist is a contradiction. For Republicans, it’s the whole point.

If you’re going to say rape is the disqualifier… you’re going to give TRUMP a pass?? You’re so desperate to win that you’ve completely thrown away your Christian ™ morality, but you assume Those People aren’t so desperate to win that they wouldn’t throw away their feminist morality? Why should NotTrumpniks care about their guy committing rape when YOU DON’T??

This is the standard YOU’RE operating on. You don’t get to cry foul when the enemy plays by your rules.

And yes, Trumpniks, I DID tell Clintonoids this four years ago.

If your position is that They’re All Crooked, and They All Suck, you haven’t actually abandoned the responsibility of judgment. You have merely changed the standard of judgment to They’re All Crooked, and They All Suck. In which case, Trump is clearly the superior to both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but then what is the point of acting like their vices are disqualifying?

This is the problem. Not just that tu quoque works both ways, which was Clinton’s problem facing Trump. The key is the Trumpnik desire to have it both ways. Saying They’re All Crooked and They All Suck is their rationalization for worshiping the most crooked and sucktastic politician of all time, precisely because of his flaws. But it’s also a means of disarming anybody who actually believes in morals and standards. After all, hypocrisy is disloyalty to a standard that one actually believes in, and one cannot be a hypocrite if he has abandoned all standards. The Trumpnik’s only standard is Trump, and if Trump changes his mind whenever he feels like it, so does the Trumpnik.

(This, incidentally, is why Trumpism can’t be considered ‘conservatism’ because conservatism was always based on the idea that there are human standards that should be more durable than one dysfunctional person’s whim. But then, the problems with conservatism in practice help explain how these guys went for Trump.)

There was a recent journalistic effort through the New York Times called The 1619 Project, which was about how the slave economy of colonial America was in fact at the foundation of colonial culture and thus at the foundation of the American republic. Right-wingers (with some reason) have critiqued the articles as an attack on the generally positive message of the American Dream and the premise of freedom. There are in fact a lot of leftists who act as though the whole American project is invalidated “because slavery”, not withstanding the inspiration of the United States as a colonial revolt to people in Haiti, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. But in February, on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah hosted the main writer of 1619, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and among other things she talked about was how her black father was the only person in her Missisippi neighborhood who flew the American flag. And Noah asked her Jones about her thesis that “black people have the job of making it a truth.” And her response (3:39) is, “When Thomas Jefferson writes those famous English words, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’, he owns 130 human beings, even some of his own family members. And he understands that one-fifth of the population will enjoy none of these rights and liberties. We are founded on a hypocrisy, a paradox. But black people read those words and said, ‘oh we believe that those words are true and apply to us, and fight.”

As I say: It is possible for two things to be true at the same time. It is a fact that Jefferson was both a slaveowner and a founder of classical liberalism. You can look at the hypocrisy of that and throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater in rejecting the American project over its contradictions, or you can see what is good in the project and work to make it more consistent and apply its rewards to everybody. It is in fact the anti-liberals (not conservatives, but people who hearken back to the age before Jefferson) who insist that freedom is zero-sum and that only some people can have it.

If you’re going to say the two factions of duopoly are both hypocrites, the difference is between the one that might reform towards actual progress and consistency and the one that wants to go in the other direction. If that’s not good enough for you, liberals, well again: THAT’s why I’m a Libertarian. Rationalizing that the corrupt party that might clean up it’s act is actually going to do so is not good enough in the short run, and it’s a large part of why people didn’t trust you guys enough to carry Hillary Clinton in the states where she needed it. Which is why even more than minimum wage or national health care, what this country really needs are election reforms like mail voting and automatic registration (as opposed to making people jump through flaming hoops just to exercise a civil ‘right’) and especially ranked choice voting so there’s MORE than two people to vote for. That might hurt Democrats, which is why they haven’t done it yet. But at this point, it’s a matter of their survival, not just ours.

In point of fact, both major parties ARE crooked, and they DO all suck, but this is my comparison. Democrats are the Mob. Republicans are that scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker sees the mountain of money that the Mob has compiled for him, lights one side on fire, and says “I’m only burning MY half.”

It might be one thing to play “I’m rubber, you’re glue” in a world where the economy is good, and politics is just a game and people take it on the same level as rooting for the Cowboys over the Redskins. (NFL team metaphor being completely intentional.) But now there’s coronavirus, and while Trump is not the direct cause of the actual virus, his policies, or lack of such, have made him the proximate cause of the problem in this country. And for a lot of people, especially those who were already in compromised health, the choice in November is a bet on whether they will be alive next year – assuming that they survive long enough to vote this year.

Not to mention that even Trump, with that walnut between his ears, seems to understand how a truly serious investigation of Biden could backfire on him, just as an investigation of Brett Kavanaugh would have caused real problems if it hadn’t been carefully manicured from beginning to end by the Republicans in control of the confirmation process. Republicans will not be in control of this process. After all, it’s not like someone on the Left couldn’t make a strategically timed accusation against Trump. And if “the liberal media” takes an investigation of Biden seriously without doing a serious investigation of Trump’s “playboy” history, it won’t just be the Right questioning their credibility.

No, however likely it is that Tara Reade is not lying, it is far more likely that the charges she makes against Biden will go the way of all the other charges against Trump: stoked for sensationalism and ratings, but nothing will ever come of them, because taking them seriously would turn over the wrong stones.

So Democrats (and hopefully other non-Trumpniks) will go back to supporting Biden even knowing he had problems with women, which they already did. And Trump will go back to his otherwise successful Karl Rove approach of always accusing the enemy of the thing he’s been doing all along.

So next month, he’s probably going to blame Joe Biden for bankrupting Atlantic City.

“This is the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”

– Network

On Thursday April 23, Viceroy Donald Trump had his daily press briefing/propaganda rally/Airing of the Grievances and brought out Bill Bryan at the science and technology division at the Department of Homeland Security, and Mr. Bryan told the press,

“If I may have the first slide please. And while that’s coming up, our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the (corona) virus, both surfaces and in the air. We’ve seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well, where increasing the temperature and humidity or both is generally less favorable to the virus. … If you look at the fourth line, you inject the sunlight into that, you inject UV rays into that, the same effects on line two as 70 to 75 degrees with 80% humidity on the surface and look at line four but now you inject the sun, the half-life goes from six hours to two minutes. That’s how much of an impact UV rays has on the virus.” He went on to say, “We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing. Just bring it on and leaving it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster. We’re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the COVID-19 virus in saliva. This is not the end of our work. “

In response, this is what Donald Trump actually said in his April 23 press briefing:

“A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”

This made a lot of people very angry and was widely considered a bad move.

I bring up the original context for all the cultists in the Church of Jesus Trump Latter-Day Suckers who think that their Messiah was “taken out of context” as though we can’t just replay the video tape or get the transcript (like I did) and as if the people who wank off three typos in one sentence are going to judge anyone else’s command of English. This was also the excuse of White House Press Secretary For Now Kayleigh McEnany last Friday when she said, “President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing. Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.” Article: “But Trump undercut that defense and others pretty quickly Friday, telling reporters he was just kidding around when he suggested injecting disinfectants: “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” he told reporters in the White House, according to a pool report.”

Was hoser being “sarcastic” about a half an hour after posing that idea when he lit into Philip Rucker from the Post, when Rucker said, “You’re the president and people tuning in to these briefings they want to get information and guidance and want to know what to do. They’re not looking for rumors” and Trump responded, “Hey, Phil. I’m the President and you’re fake news. And you know what I’ll say to you, I’ll say very nicely… I know you well. I know you well because I know the guy, I see what he writes. He’s a total faker”? See, that’s the problem. If ANYTHING you say can be taken as sarcasm, how do we know when you’re being serious? Donnie, are you going to say that you were just being “sarcastic” when you ran for President and this whole thing was just an elaborate practical joke that you and the Clintons set up to show what a bunch of gullible power-lusting goons the Republicans were? It would be nice to get the grownups back now that everyone’s gotten the punchline.

With all the dumbass things Donnie has said, and WILL say for the rest of his life, this “injection” musing may just pass in the wind like every other mental fart that comes out of his upper asshole. But it’s kind of telling that it hasn’t yet. Maybe because the one thing that Trump was good at by right-wing standards was getting out of the way of the economy, and as long as that was good, nobody cared if the president acted like a wannabe Mussolini. But it was Trump’s interference with our disease monitoring systems, his refusal to respond to the initial reports from China, and his not being straight with the public because he didn’t want Wall Street to crash that caused Wall Street to crash, because he created uncertainty that didn’t need to exist. And now that this country has far more coronavirus cases than any other Western nation, we would like real leadership and not a “reality” TV clown boy.

I can actually believe that some part of Trump was being sarcastic, or only musing, because this crisis has already revealed that he doesn’t take the whole issue seriously. Like where he justified the shutdown protestors as having “cabin fever,” which apparently is supposed to justify risking actual fever. Or when he said “we can’t let the cure be worse than the problem,” when the phrase is actually “can’t let the cure be worse than the disease.” But then when he had his injection idea, he said, “I’m not a doctor, but I have a very good (pointed to his head) you-know-what.” The word is “brain.” But given how Trump’s brain is rapidly withering from willful neglect, maybe “brain” and “disease” are the two words that dropped out of his vocabulary last week.

The criticism over April 23 – some of it apparently internal – caused Trump to announce later Friday that the Administration might “scale back” the daily briefings, and over the weekend, in one of his decreasing moments of lucidity, tweeted, “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”

But be that as it may, homeboy went back to press briefings on Monday April 27, this time whining about how we had such a wonderful best economy ever before the China Virus ruined it. But again, at the time China was failing to contain the virus from global spread, Trump was tweeting, “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!“

In his defense, Trump might have forgotten about this position for the same reason that he forgot the words “disease” and “brain.”

Who knows what Trump will do next? Will he make Ivanka the Senate pro tem? Will he replace Dr. Fauci with Dr. Oz? Will he declare the official language of the United States to be Swedish? Nobody knows! Not even him! Tune in tomorrow at 5:45 (or whenever he feels like walking out) for The Trump Show! ™

But this week I want to go back to a hidden truth in Trump’s Sunday tweet, where (to repeat) he said “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”

Like much of what Trump says, this piece is inadvertently confessional. On several levels. First: it’s his decision to have these press briefings in the first place. Secondly, whether you think the press “asks nothing but hostile questions” it isn’t true that they refuse “to report the truth or facts accurately” or that the result is “Fake News.” Leaving aside the point that in Trumpspeak, “Fake News” is not fake news but any information that contradicts The Leader or makes him look bad or feel bad. When news networks cover these events they usually just let the camera roll. They are reporting the facts accurately. The event itself is the news.

But then there’s the kicker: “They get record ratings”. And they do. In late March, the events were marked as having ratings of around 8.5 million viewers, which caused Trump to brag that even Teh Failing New York Times was showing he had better ratings than the “Bachelor” finale.

In large respect, this whole foofaraw illustrates the love-hate (or rather, co-dependent) relationship Trump has with the media. He picks on them almost the way Hitler picked on the Jews. (No, Trumpniks, I’m not saying your innocent little boy is Hitler. Hitler actually ran a successful economy for MORE than three years before starting a major catastrophe that killed everybody.) And yet, one could argue that if it weren’t for the media, Trump would not be president. These guys gave Trump all sorts of free media, and you know Trump loves nothing more than not having to pay for something. And it was all because everyone, especially the media, knew that Hillary Clinton had all the appeal of shredded wheat, and they dreaded the prospect of covering her coast to the coronation and subsequent four years with nothing more than the business-as-usual scandals to look forward to. Trump was their godsend. His job was to be dumb for public consumption, and despite being more “extreme” in his platform than the third-party candidates, news networks latched on to him because he was an entertaining buffoon who was great for ratings.

Trump is much more their creation than he is that of Vladimir Putin or even Mark Burnett, and that has to create a certain tension, even in the doubtful event that he is aware of it. The fact that he needs attention like a lawn needs manure, the fact that even now he needs the media more than they need him, just reinforces the point that Trump isn’t the invincible Sun King and is not a self-made man. Everything he has is from someone else’s largesse, and being made aware of this makes Trump realize he’s a fraud. The real tension is that his only recourse to confirm his importance is to go out and hog the spotlight and talk about what he’s supposedly doing, and the more he does this, the more obvious it is that he’s a fraud.

The few times I’ve seen Morning Joe on MSDNC recently, Joe Scarborough and to a lesser extent Mika Brezinski have been pushing the idea that Trump is going senile, which as I’ve already implied is very easy to believe. But I think the reason these two in particular are pushing the insinuation so hard is because they used to be friends with Trump in his pre-Caudillo days, there’s been a certain amount of bad blood between them as his behavior in politics has alienated them personally, and most importantly, they know for these reasons that Trump is watching their show.

I’ve said more than once that “gaslighting” only works if your target already has little sense of objective reality, and since Trump’s only sense of outside reality is “the shows”, he is far more vulnerable to gaslighting than the liberals who complain about it.

A similar point was made in Pajiba, no less. There seems to be a deliberate effort to lionize virus specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci, not just because he’s genuinely competent, but because that perception antagonizes Trump. (Remember, Trump pushed Alex Azar out of the coronavirus czar role and gave it to Mike Pence as a publicity stunt, then took over the coronavirus briefings cause he didn’t like Pence getting the attention.) Dustin Rowles: “This is all coming to a head, because we have a feckless, thin-skinned idiot for a President, and also because the media has been dying to see this play out. Everyone in the media knows exactly what Anthony Fauci thinks of Donald Trump. The entire world knows what Anthony Fauci thinks of Donald Trump. Anthony Fauci rang the bell on this pandemic early on, and the President didn’t listen to him. If the President had listened, thousands of lives would be saved. But Fauci is honest to God trying to do what’s best for the country, which is to give us the truth while also trying to remain on the President’s good side by [pretending to give] him the benefit of the doubt. Fauci wants to keep his job, because his job is so important to our health.

“But the press? They’re pushing Fauci, basically daring him to sh*t on the President, because we all need the clicks, because the ad rates are gone. And so, the media wants more than just another NYTimes investigation showing without any doubt whatsoever that Trump’s slow response to the pandemic led to the massive loss of life, the media wants the most trusted man in America right now to weigh in on that investigation and indict Trump for his failures.” His conclusion: “The political media is more interested in pitting a hero (Fauci) against a villain (Trump), which may provide a few more (mostly worthless) clicks, but it is decidedly not in the interest of our collective public health. Baiting Trump into firing Fauci, which seems almost inevitable at this point, will not make us safer. “

All this ties into a debate that is often held within the media itself as MSDNC stars like Rachel Maddow vocally question the worth of these little shindigs and others (like Ari Melber) flat-out cut away from the press briefings once they drift away from any public-information purpose. One of the few reporters who deliberately takes the traditional “sunlight is the best disinfectant” position is Olivia Nuzzi, now writing for New York Magazine, who did a piece on April 28 saying among other things, “Just like the reality-TV contestants who have walked the corridors of Trump’s West Wing, I’m not here to make friends. If members of the press endeavor to do so, I believe we’d more likely be protecting the president from himself, while helping him prove that the press condescends to the public it claims to serve.

“What a lot of Trump critics miss is that the biggest threat to his presidency isn’t the pandemic and the collapse of the global economy. It’s Trump. The more we see him — rambling, ranting, casually spitballing about bleach and sunlight — the clearer that becomes. But that’s not the media’s problem, and taking the spotlight off of him as he displays the full extent of his inadequacies would only serve to help him and to make the public less informed about what the federal government is doing — or not doing.

“Watching Trump dangerously improvise is, in itself, information. It’s pure access to his thoughts and ideas and emotional state, presented to the world in real time.”

This is itself a confessional statement. If you’re a right-winger convinced that Teh Librul Media are out to get Our President, or a left-winger convinced that they’re not doing enough, the fact is that nothing Teh Librul Media could do to slant the news will set the American people against Trump more than just keeping the camera on him to show what he really is.

But if anything that is an even bigger reason to put a stop to all this.

If Trump is being too cute by half in acting as though his press briefings are more public information than self-promotion, then so are the media. We are certainly not taking the spotlight off Trump to make the public more informed about what the federal government is doing or not doing. We are not putting nearly as much attention on the fact that at least one Governor felt the need to procure personal protective equipment from South Korea and have the state National Guard secure it at an undisclosed location to make sure Trump’s federal government wouldn’t hoard it. We are not emphasizing how much of this bailout went to the people who already have money and influence while most taxpayers got a one-time check of $1200. And some didn’t even get that.

No, the press would rather cover The Trump Show.

In her article, Nuzzi says that the other approach to presenting Trump unfiltered is the observation of an Australian journalist who said it was a “shock” to endure 30 minutes of “unfiltered meanderings” because when Trump’s words are processed through the media, the effect is that Trump sounds more coherent than he is. “I realized how much of the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.” (In other words, translating Trumpspeak into coherent English, and assuming that there is substance to translate.)

This is a good point, but it avoids the other reality: The medium is the message, and the message is the medium. What Trump counts on is the air of authority that comes from being President, and his lust for power and the trappings of office are a means of justifying the self-image that had always been contradicted by his grubby reality. The fact that homeboy is on TV matters to him more than whether what he says is helping him. Because he knows that certain people will go along with anything he says because he’s the one saying it. This is why liberals and mainstream gatekeepers were wailing about Trump offering quack medical advice in stream-of-consciousness observations, while others said, “Oh, it was just musing out loud, it’s not like anyone was taking it seriously.” Well, no less than Fox News said that poison control centers have reported an increase in calls regarding exposure to cleaners and disinfectants, and that was on April 20, before the press conference in question.

Trump is in all ways unfit for office, is too emotionally incontinent to handle the stresses of the office, and his uninformed opinion is at least a factor in getting people killed. It is in fact, not good for him to be out there engaged in a mutual baiting game with the press. It increases the likelihood that he is going to act out and do something really dangerous. And if the press realizes this and continues playing the game anyway, then they too care more about self-promotion than informing the public.

The same press keeps telling us to practice sanitation and social distancing because when there is a virus you have to prevent it from having a vector. In the absence of a serious treatment which may be months away, we have to do everything to prevent the disease from being communicated. And some people would flaunt common-sense guidelines because they have a short-term conception of freedom. Yet the same press, rather than protecting the president from himself, or protecting us from him, would rather maintain themselves as a medium for political contagion than abandon their short-term business priorities.

The only treatment is social distancing.