Trump is not the country

It would be too exhausting to go through every incoherent burble, distortion of the truth and outright falsehood in Dear Leader's remarks Monday (the ones that were supposed to focus on the administration's contemplated response to the reported chemical-warfare attack against Syrian civilians), but one demands close attention.

Among many other claims by our Dear Leader in his lengthy rant against the FBI (and his own Justice Department, and special prosecutor Robert Mueller, and yes, Hillary Clinton, too) for its unannounced raids on his personal lawyer Michael Cohen's office and home, he said the raids were "an attack":

It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.

No.

It.

Is.

Not.

If you nod approvingly at Trump's argument, you either

• buy into the "deep-state" conspiracy against him, or
• have as little understanding of our Constitution and our laws as he.

Conspiracy theories are seductive little beasts but they generally suggest a lot more than they actually prove. That's why I treat them with great skepticism, often shading into suspicion. If you don't, I think you're showing more credulity than wisdom.

Now, a raid on an attorney's office and the seizing of his files is a very big deal. We all know about attorney-client privilege. (You don't? Well, attorney-client privilege means that your attorney can't reveal what the two of you discussed — at least, not when she was acting as your attorney.)

Even so, the FBI got a warrant to raid Cohen's office and living quarters. The warrant allowed the bureau to seize his files, which ordinarily would be off-limits due to privilege.

That was extraordinary. However, it wasn't illegal.

If a lawyer is suspected of working with her client to commit a crime, or to cover one up, a judge can decide that the attorney-client privilege is moot — that is, that communications between the attorney and client are not protected.

Defeating attorney-client privilege requires compelling evidence. Most attorneys have the knowledge, connections and financial means to counterattack if it turns out the suspicions of criminal behavior were unfounded. Plus, most judges were attorneys themselves, and as the morbid joke goes, sharks don't bite lawyers out of professional courtesy. So no judge is going to grant a warrant to seize client files without damned good reason.

In spite of plenty of lawsuits to his name, Dear Leader doesn't know the principles of our legal system: he only knows the grubby details that he has personally encountered. More to the point, he doesn't give a damn about those principles. He has no clue that the legal system is supposed to treat everyone equally. To the contrary, his self-obsessed little mind is convinced that since he's THE PRESIDENT, the Justice Department is supposed to be his personal attack dog and legal shield.

The Justice Department exists to uphold federal law. It's not the president's stormtroops.

Has DoJ misbehaved in the past, sometimes egregiously? Yes. J. Edgar Hoover treated the FBI much the way Dear Leader would like to, and the result was decades of misconduct and decades more of mistrust by elements of the public. Note, however, that those with the greatest reason to mistrust DoJ or the FBI are black and brown people — just like those Jeff Sessions is going after with today's DoJ, in fact. Rich white men like Trump simply have never been a priority for DoJ. (A lot of them got off scot-free after the 2008 financial collapse, remember?)

No, the FBI and DoJ came after Michael Cohen because they strongly suspect he has committed major crimes — and the evidence they have convinced a judge to sign a no-knock warrant that permitted them to seize his files (and his phone, apparently).

That's not an attack on our country. It's a vindication of our laws. It's a demonstration that the system, at least for now, and in spite of Dear Leader's corrosive attacks on the rule of law, still works.

From the standpoint of the rule of law, the raids on Dear Leader's lawyer's office and home were deeply disturbing — but not because they were an "attack" on anyone, but because they suggest something quite foul is going on with Mr. Cohen. If Dear Leader is feeling attacked, perhaps it's evidence of a guilty conscience. Or, well, no, not conscience, a mental faculty our Dear Leader has convincingly demonstrated he lacks. More like consciousness of guilt.

"L'etat, c'est moi" ("I am the state") is a long-discredited sentiment attributed to one of the more despotic rulers of France. Modern democratic states don't allow their executives to hold such autocratic powers. Yet that's what Dear Leader is claiming when he calls the raids "an attack on our country". News flash, Donnie: you're not the country. Your ego is that big, but you aren't.

Nor were the raids "an attack on all we stand for". What they were was evidence that the rule of law still holds, however tenuously. That's what we stand for. What about you, Mr. President?

Curtis Rhodes, are you really that thickheaded?

Courtesy of Vice, a piece about a Houston, TX school district superintendent, Curtis Rhodes, who is threatening to punish any of the district's students who participate in the walkouts proposed by high school students in the wake of the Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School massacre.

Piously Rhodes proclaimed that "every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative". The richest line, though, has to be this: "A school is a place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally and morally."

Perhaps it has escaped your notice, Mr. Rhodes, but life also is a place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally and morally. Everyday life is a great place to observe authority figures with blinders on, for instance — authority figures who are so invested in their own fiefdoms that they can't see past the ends of their own noses.

You're so bent out of shape by a "disruption" to your precious district that you can't see that the reason for the disruption is to protest the deaths of young people — just like the young people in your schools.

That you would go out of your way to view the walkouts as "a political protest" and not as a cry of anguish by young people who see themselves in the dead students from Parkland, FL is solid evidence that you have no aptitude for your job as a district superintendent. You don't understand the students in your charge, not one little bit.

What the hell is wrong with you, Curtis Rhodes?

If you don't support more gun control ...

In the wake of shootings like the one two days ago at a Florida high school, the standard response of Republican lawmakers to calls for stricter gun control is to assert that (1) mental health is really the issue, (2) the gun control laws on the books are enough but they aren't being enforced vigorously enough, and/or (3) such shootings are the price of a meaningful Second Amendment.

If you embrace #3 in spite of the possibility of your own or other loved ones' kids dying, I don't know what to say.

Reasons #1 and #2, though, are possible to answer objectively. Or at least, we could answer them objectively if Congress didn't forbid the government to do research into gun violence!

Yes, that little provision got tucked into legislation a while back at the behest of, who else, the National Rifle Association. It's a restriction that makes abso-fucking-lutely no sense unless you are the nuttiest of gun nuts, and it's way, way, way past time for us to stop letting those nuts dictate the terms of our gun laws.

So how about we stop threatening the Centers for Disease Control with loss of funding for merely investigating gun violence as a public health issue?

It's nothing short of abject cowardice to forbid this research.

Enough with abject cowardice. Tell your Congressional representative to end this stupidity.

Setting fires

Dear Leader called Congressional Democrats treasonous.

Not because they were "levying War" against the U.S., as the Constitution defines treason.

Not because they were working with an enemy foreign power, which is also how the Constitution defines treason.

No, he accused Congressional Democrats of treason for failing to applaud his State of the Union address.

It's tempting to focus on his unbelievable childishness. He comes off like a five-year-old whining that Mommy and Daddy weren't paying attention.

However, that's the merest distraction. The issue, of course, is that he accused fellow Americans of treason.

Their actual "crime"?

Failing to adore him.

Let that sink in for a moment.

His defenders will paint his remarks, at a putatively official presidential visit to Ohio that looked a lot like a campaign stop, as mere bluster. They will say that he was riffing on a remark from the crowd, just playing to the audience for laughs.

They are wrong. He was smiling, yes, but at the thought of jailing his political enemies. For Dear Leader, being his political enemy is treasonous.

But suppose for a moment they're right, that it was all a joke. Here's the problem: you don't joke about treason.

Repeat: you do not joke about treason.

Not when you're the president of the United States.

The president does not have the same license to joke on such matters as ordinary citizens. From the man in charge of the Department of Justice, such remarks read less as jokes than as threats. Especially when that same mouth has repeatedly pronounced his belief that the only loyalty he honors is to him — not the Constitution, or the nation.

If Dear Leader wants to make such jokes, let him leave office. He can then make all the jokes he wants.

"Just a conversation" — not

Dear Leader, in a one-on-one meeting with then-acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, asked McCabe whom he had voted for in the 2016 presidential election.

That's a highly disturbing revelation, though a lot of us might have lost our capacity to be disturbed by anything Dear Leader does any more. His question was a not terribly deft way of probing McCabe's loyalty, which Dear Leader insists must be to him.

It's worth remembering that McCabe's oath of office requires him to pledge his loyalty to the Constitution, not a person.

Dear Leader, of course, cannot be expected to know or to care about such niceties as the rule of law and love of country before personal loyalty: he is an ignoramus whose self-absorption is as all-consuming as a black hole. However, we can and must insist that other, less abnormally egotistical and less egregiously ignorant people are held to account for enabling his megalomania.

This would include Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, who dismissed Dear Leader's question:

"I think it's just a conversation," Ronna McDaniel told CNN's "New Day." "I don't think it intends, you know, all of these terrible things that people are trying to put forward."

There is only one response to McDaniel: bullshit.

She knows good and goddamned well exactly what Dear Leader meant and how utterly wrong it was to ask that question.

Ronna, you are enabling Trump's grotesque abuse of his office by defending him in this instance. How far are you willing to go? How much antidemocratic, authoritarian conduct will you tolerate from him? How much will you help him corrode not just his administration but the public's confidence in our government?

This wasn't conversation. This was another step on the path to authoritarianism. And you, Ronna Romney McDaniel, are smoothing that path.

Can you look yourself in the mirror, Ronna?

Why Republicans have brought us here

We're on the brink of a government shutdown. If it happens, it will take place literally as the clock ticks over to the one-year anniversary of Dear Leader becoming president.

This is kind of a weird situation when you consider that Republicans control both houses of Congress and the presidency. You'd think that they could do better legislatively. When they finally passed a major overhaul of the tax code in late 2017, that ended up being their only major legislative achievement for the year, and happened only after embarrassing debacles involving their repeated attempts to repeal the Obama-era Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The process by which the tax code overhaul was finally passed was exceedingly ugly: no hearings, no debate, absolutely zero consultation with Democrats, virtually no input from the Congressional Budget Office (whose eventual analysis, provided long after the point when any real Congressional debate could have occurred, proclaimed the bill would increase the deficit by some $1.5 trillion) and no public input. It underwent multiple hasty drafts and had sweeteners tossed in ad lib to bring individual Republican Senators on board, all at warp speed compared to the normal pace at which massive legislation is typically drafted.

There's a reason Congress usually takes its time with massive legislation: such legislation tends to have a lot of unexpected fallout if it isn't carefully drafted. You'd think Congressional Republicans would be concerned about unintended consequences, as those consequences are nearly always bad and can be costly at the next election.

But Congressional Republicans mostly inhabit safe seats. That means that they don't have to care about adverse consequences for the country, only about adverse consequences for their constituents — and not even for their constituents, as long as their donors aren't riled.

Yet you'd think that Congressional Republicans would want to craft legislation carefully anyway. After all, legislation is how a party furthers its agenda.

Except in the case of Congressional Republicans, it isn't. Because Congressional Republicans have no real agenda.

What do Republicans nationwide want? Smaller government (except for the military and police). That has been the party's mantra for nearly four decades now. Other issues sometimes come to the fore, like curtailing abortion or cracking down on crime, but the issue with the broadest appeal is always smaller government.

Yet what does that actually mean?

I defy any Republican elected official or voter to say in any detail what he or she means by shrinking the federal government. (For simplicity's sake we'll ignore states.) Occasionally they make noises about killing whole segments of the executive branch, like the Department of Education or the Department of Energy or the Department of Health and Human Services or the E.P.A., but when it comes time to look at what that would entail ... well, they get cold feet. Like Rick Perry at the Energy Department, they suddenly find that, gee, the department actually does useful things.

That's the problem with what Republicans call their "agenda". It's not an agenda at all. It's not a statement of things they want to accomplish. It's a statement of inchoate, inarticulate frustration that the government is complex and far bigger than they think it should be.

That's an emotion, not an agenda. What unites Republicans is anger and frustration, not policy.

It's no wonder that, with the reins of government in their hands, they find themselves incapable of charting a positive path forward. They knew that they wanted to reduce taxes but when it came time to decide how, they flailed. They could not articulate a vision that even all their elected representatives could support, and it took backroom deals out of the public eye to get to a bare majority. Same thing happened with their repeated attempts to kill Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) — it turned out that the only thing uniting them was the broad desire to claim that they had repealed it. When it came down to the dirty work of actually deciding how, they had no freaking idea — at least, none that could command a majority of their members. Remember that even though Paul Ryan managed to get repeal passed in the House multiple times, he totally punted on the foreseeable need to craft legislation that would pass the Senate. He could argue, and he did argue, that he managed his end, but a House leader who ignores the math in the Senate is, at the end of the day, no help to getting legislation passed.

Note, too, that the Obamacare repeal effort failed after seven years of whining and literally dozens of votes on bills to kill it. It's telling that all of that whining didn't lead to a winning path, legislatively speaking, once Obama no longer stood in the way and Republicans had their bicameral majority. They weren't ready to commit to any of their dozens of repeal bills.

Surprised? You shouldn't be. Those bills were empty gestures, not genuine legislation.

The inescapable conclusion is that Congressional Republicans, and the national party generally, not only don't know how to govern, but aren't interested in doing so.

That's staggering.

It's also dangerous. When all you have is contempt for government, you aren't interested in making it work well. Or, as we see with the impending shutdown, making it work at all.

Because while Paul Ryan set the tone for the predictable Republican spin by putting the blame squarely on Senate Democrats, Congress is only voting on a continuing resolution to keep the government running because Congressional Republicans are uninterested in, and/or incapable of, drafting a budget that would cover a whole fiscal year. A majority of them cannot be corralled into carrying out what any normal person would say is their absolute minimum job requirement.

We got to where we are because one of our two major political parties no longer knows how to make government work — because it long ago stopped caring about making it work.

The ugly truth about Donald Trump

First of all, Dear Leader did call Haiti and African nations "shithole" countries.

How do I know?

First, because he's a bigot. He's an entrenched bigot against black, brown and yellow people. (Yeah: he asked that intelligence analyst where she was from and he wouldn't be satisfied with the answer "New York [City]" because all he could see was that she had Asian features.)

How do I know he's a bigot? Because in answering reporters asking about the "shithole" incident he called himself the "least racist person" we could meet. Nobody who's actually not racist ever makes such an asinine claim. Look up "overcompensation", Don.

The other reason I know he slandered Haiti and all of Africa? Because he denied it to reporters. For his entire political career he has proved himself a hardened, shameless liar. The examples are legion and everybody knows them. So when he denies saying horrible things, we assume he did say them because he lies the way fish swim — effortlessly.

Most politicians get the benefit of the doubt in their first couple of scandals. Trump exhausted that benefit before he was nominated.

Donald Trump, bigot and liar.

(Also an untrustworthy businessman whose corruptness we can only guess at but which we very likely cannot underestimate, and an ignoramus with zero intellectual curiosity. But I digress.)

That's how a solid majority of the nation views him. That's how history will remember him.

Because that's the ugly truth.