MSNBC, get your priorities straight

Although I pledged a while back not to watch news, especially pundit-driven news like that of the cable so-called news networks, I broke that promise to indulge in Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. On her best nights she pulls together disparate facts in a non-conspiracy-mongering way to paint a hitherto unrealized picture. (That's on her best nights. She doesn't live up to her potential every night.)

Tonight Maddow focused her whole show on the new coronavirus and our federal government's inept response so far. Some might consider her tone unnecessarily alarming but I think she and her guests made their case that the federal government simply is not sufficiently staffed up to cope with the crisis, and the staffing (and funding) shortfall is squarely Donald Trump's fault. (Perhaps needless to say, that doesn't surprise me: if I expected anything from the Ignoramus-in-Chief, it was a total inability either to cope with scientific fact or to take expert advice.)

Her show segued into The Last Word, guest-hosted by Ali Velshi. Velshi had Anthony Fauci, a noted public-health expert, as one of his two guests. Fauci had baarely completed his opening remarks when Velshi jumped in to mention that the Democratic primary debate had ended and that programming would now switch to post-debate coverage.

What the fuck?

It's bad enough that MSNBC, like its two major competitors, is fixated on the horse-race aspect of the presidential primaries. That's asinine but in general that's not too harmful. It even has one positive consequence: it frees up time I otherwise might spend watching Maddow.

However, when a substantial chunk of the network's audience has just spent an hour absorbing the gravity of an incipient public-health crisis, jumping back to the horse race isn't just jarring, it's journalistically irresponsible.

To the geniuses making editorial decisions at MSNBC I have one request:

Get your heads out of your asses!

Nobody will remember or care about the horse race a month from now.

However, we will remember the night you idiots decided to place your moronic horse race above a worsening public health crisis.

What is wrong with you?

Get your fucking priorities straight, for Christ's sake.

Quid pro quo, or not?

William Taylor's opening statement in his deposition as part of the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry included a description of a 7 September 2019 phone call between Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland, as relayed to Taylor by NSC Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs Tim Morrison.

According to Mr. Morrison, President Trump told Ambassador Sondland that he was not asking for a “quid pro quo.” But President Trump did insist that President Zelenskyy go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference, and that President Zelenskyy should want to do this himself.

Donald Trump may have insisted he was not asking for a quid pro quo, but does his assertion fit the facts? Here's Taylor's description of Sondland's conversation with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy subsequent to Sondland's 7 September call with Trump.

The following day, on September 8, Ambassador Sondland and I spoke on the phone. He said he had talked to President Trump as I had suggested a week earlier, but that President Trump was adamant that President Zelenskyy, himself, had to “clear things up and do it in public.” President Trump said it was not a “quid pro quo.” Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelenskyy and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelenskyy did not “clear things up” in public, we would be at a “stalemate.” I understood a “stalemate” to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance.

"Stalemate" only makes sense if there's some kind of interaction. In business and diplomacy, negotiations stalemate when neither side is willing to change its bargaining position.

Trump knew Ukraine needed the military assistance Congress had approved but that he was refusing to disburse. If Trump had a different reason for holding up that aid, a reason that would stand public scrutiny, he would have told Zelenskyy.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Trump was holding up the assistance in order to extort a public announcement that President Zelenskyy would "investigate" Joe Biden in order to dig up "dirt" that Trump's campaign could use in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. (Trump also wants whatever flimsy vindication can be conjured up for the nonsensical conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.)

"Give me dirt on Biden and I'll give you your military aid." That's the message Trump was sending Zelenskyy.

In the truth-telling world, we call that a quid pro quo — literally, this for that.

Whether Trump was lying or being an imbecile, his insistence that he wasn't asking for a quid pro quo is simply false.

Trump's defenders will repeat until the end of time that he never asked for a quid pro quo. Sondland himself tried to parrot that line, not just in the 8 September phone call with Taylor but in subsequent text messages to Taylor. Taylor, not being a fool, saw through that bullshit.

So do the rest of us.

Yes, it was a quid pro quo. And no amount of bullshit from Trump or his defenders can change that.

Is it an impeachable offense? Different question but as long as I'm writing — yes, it goddamned well is impeachable, too.

Trump leveraged the power of the presidency to extort a foreign head of state for personal gain. He wasn't acting in the interests of the United States. That's a violation of his oath of office, which requires him to act in the nation's interests, not his own.

You may love Trump, you may think he has gotten a raw deal from those of us who didn't vote for him, but you goddamned well ought to see what a terrible precedent his extortion sets for future presidents — including those you might loathe.

He has grossly abused the power of his office in exactly the way some of the Founders worried a president might. He must be impeached. I would also urge Senate Republicans to give serious consideration not just to convicting him but to removing him from office. There are a ton of reasons he is unfit to be president (and Congressional Republicans will privately concede most of them) but this incident alone is sufficient to justify that extreme step,

Of "executive power"

The United States Constitution, in Article II, Section, 1, states:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Curiously, nowhere in the Constitution is "The executive Power" defined.

Prof. Julian Davis Mortenson took a stab at figuring out what "executive power" actually meant to the generation that wrote the Constitution. His piece begins, somewhat provocatively, "Is the president a king?" Put so baldly the question sounds "absurd", as Mortenson admits, but "[a] great many lawyers, politicians, judges, and policy experts think the U.S. Constitution builds from exactly that starting point". One of those judges is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and one of those lawyers is Attorney General William Barr. In short, imperial-presidency advocates carry a lot of weight in our current government.

As for Mortenson (spoiler alert!):

After years of research into an enormous array of colonial, revolutionary, and founding-era sources, I’m here to tell you that—as a historical matter—this president-as-king claim is utterly and totally wrong.

Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Revolutionary War: Britain's George III is no hero in any American telling of that tale. The astonishing thing, then, is that so many otherwise intelligent people think the Constitution would grant the president such royal power.

(Lest you think this is an anti-Trump hit piece, by the way, Prof. Mortenson notes that both Obama and W also argued for arguably over-broad interpretations of presidential power when it suited them.)

This is an important piece to read if you want to understand what the founding generation actually intended the president to do in our government. It wasn't much, at least at the beginning of the republic.

Prof. Mortenson has a warning for textual originalists, as so many conservatives today are:

You can advocate originalism in constitutional interpretation. You can support the imperial presidency. But you can’t do both at the same time.

However you feel about presidential power, you owe it to yourself to read this relatively short but cogent piece.

The rot in our democracy

In a piece in The Atlantic, Prof. Marty Lederman and Ben Wittes (editor in chief of the respected blog Lawfare) carefully review the impeachment inquiry being conducted by the House of Representatives into Donald Trump's 25 July 2019 phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Of greater importance, though, are their insights into the context of the call — specifically, what the call says about Trump and his world view, and what the reaction to the call says about us.

Trump defenders want us to believe that impeachment is only appropriate for a violation of the law. Lederman and Wittes know better.

The president’s derelictions are far more profound and more fundamental to the constitutional order than a mere violation of the criminal code. To use the scholar Charles Black’s canonical test for whether impeachment is warranted, Trump engaged in (1) extremely serious conduct that (2) corrupts or subverts the political and governmental process and “tend[s] seriously to undermine and corrupt the political order,” and (3) is “plainly wrong in [itself] to a person of honor, or to a good citizen, regardless of words on the statute books.”

Lederman and Wittes note that while both Nixon and Bill Clinton had their defenders, those defenders argued that the wrongdoing didn't constitute an impeachable offense. No one argued that no wrongdoing had occurred.

Yet that’s effectively where we find ourselves now—confronted with a president, and some of his defenders, who would insist that abuses of presidential authority are unexceptional or, worse still, consistent with the president’s constitutional oath and duty.

In the long run, this defense of Trump’s Ukraine machinations may well prove more corrosive than what occurred in the July 25 conversation itself. ... [W]e’re perilously close to the point at which there may no longer be a national consensus that there’s anything constitutionally problematic about using governmental powers to advance one’s own pecuniary and electoral interests.

The fact is, Trump followers' identification with Trump has gotten so problematic that they can no longer see an attempt to hold him accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors as not merely sanctioned, but required, by the rule of law. To those followers, any attempt to hold Trump accountable is nothing less than an attack on them, singly and collectively. Because Trump loyalists make up the largest constituency in the Republican Party, that party's lawmakers have refused to condemn what they know — or at least knew, before Trump came along — is Trump's copious track record of degrading the office of President.

The time of reckoning is at hand. Congressional Republicans now must ask themselves if their desire to stay in office is worth killing their consciences and bidding farewell to their morals. Their souls are at stake.

If Congressional Republicans continue to honor the demands of those of their supporters whose moral compasses have been deranged by Trump, all in hope of remaining in office, those lawmakers will have betrayed their oath and their country. They know what they're witnessing in Trump is abhorrent to the nation. They know he debases his office with his shameless greed and corruption. They know he is more sympathetic and attentive to the needs of Vladimir Putin than to ordinary Americans.

The damage Trump has done goes way beyond his own misdeeds. He has debased the country's sense of right and wrong. Impeaching him for a phone call seems like a ridiculously small amount of punishment for such grave harm — but it might be all we can do. Let's at least not blow it.

Our integrity and honor are at stake.

Dems, do you want to succeed?

Democrats and their sympathetic allies like me are anxious to end not just Don Trumpone's corrupt and corrosive presidency, but the reactionary and toxic hold of Republicans at the national (and often, the state) level.

Now, as a climate-change worrier (though I'm transitioning to resignation), I'm first and foremost concerned with mitigating our nation's catastrophically bad impact on our air, water, and soil. However, in terms of practical politics, I recognize a giant blind spot in Democratic policy discussions that is of far greater moment than climate change.

How will Democrats address the economic left-behinds?

I know, this is not exactly a new topic, and to some degree it has been part of many 2020 Democratic presidential candidates' talking points. However, it hasn't been central to anyone's, not even Elizabeth Warren's.

The reason we're talking a little more, and even contemplating doing a little more, about climate change is that Gov. Jay Inslee made that the singular focus of his campaign. Inslee, of course, ended his presidential bid after failing to attract enough support to participate in recent debates. However, his campaign's message lives on, and thank goodness for that.

Unlike climate change, which has a too-esoteric, too-distant relationship to everyday life for most people to care (though their children and grandchildren do and will vilify us for being so damned shortsighted and stupid as they suffer the consequences of our inaction), economic dislocation is an issue everyone cares about. Livelihoods being eliminated by technological and political changes hit as close to home as you can get.

Here's one canary in this coal mine, which just happens to be about coal mines in Wyoming.

A decade ago, about half of U.S. electricity came from coal-fired power. Now it’s below 30%, a shift that heavy equipment operator Rory Wallet saw as utilities became less willing to lock in multiyear contracts for Belle Ayr mine’s coal.

“The market’s changed,” Wallet said. “The bankruptcies all tie into that.”

The market's changed. Don Trumpone tapped into a lot of voters' anxiety that "the market's changed" when he promised to resurrect coal's role in the national economy. I doubt many in coal country believed he could turn back the clock that far — but at least he told them he gave a damn and he was willing to go to bat for them, however futilely.

I assume Hillary Clinton was concerned about those out-of-work coal miners, too, but she didn't send much of a message on that score.

Wallet, 40, followed his father, an equipment mechanic, into the Belle Ayr mine in 2008. He said the recent mine closures and loss of his $80,000-a-year job took him by surprise.

He has four children, ages 11 to 16, and his wife’s job at the Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant in Gillette is their main income while they await news about the mines.

Wallet didn't do anything wrong. He took a high-paying job that allowed him to support a growing family. Through no fault of his own, that job disappeared. A similar one might come along but there's no guarantee, and odds are he wouldn't be the only one competing for it if it did.

That story is one that both parties have been happy to ignore for decades, since at least the 1970s. The reckoning for Democrats came in 2016 when the unthinkably awful Don Trumpone squeaked into office by talking to the nearly economically dispossessed. (As many have observed, those already dispossessed tended to favor Democrats; Trump picked up those who were desperate not to fall off the economic ladder.)

What he told those fearful of losing everything was the sheerest bullshit and he is emotionally and intellectually incapable of actually helping them, but did anyone on the Democratic side compete with him?

Well yes, Bernie Sanders did. However, Democrats didn't nominate him.

I'm not a Sanders fan but his message that the system is rotten and needs major overhauling, not little tweaks, resonates. The original sin of our headlong embrace of globalization half a century ago has not yet been addressed: no politician cared what happened to the ones who lost their jobs.

Democratic Party, if you want to be relevant outside cities and tech hubs, you can't give the same tired answers to the same tired question, "What happens if I lose my job?" You must tackle the much scarier question, What do I do if my livelihood disappears? — and in your answer(s) you have to bring the same energy, focus, and depth of thought that Jay Inslee brought to his climate-change plans.

The problem with Shane Gillis

Saturday Night Live recently announced three new cast additions. One of them was a comic named Shane Gillis.

Unfortunately for SNL, Gillis has an extensive history of making ugly, derogatory remarks about Asian Americans, among others. Vulture's Megh Wright goes into more detail about that history and includes links to some of the material.

I only had the stomach to listen to the first of the items Wright cited, an excerpt from a podcast Gillis co-hosted. It's ugly. What is worse news for Gillis is that it's not funny. That's not a rebuke, that's an observation.

Gillis and his co-host obviously got their rocks off mocking a culture different from their own. That's the kind of humor that appeals to young boys, and by "young" I mean under the age of twelve. The rest of us outgrew it when we learned to be decent human beings.

Gillis and his ilk will dismiss my complaint as "political correctness". I've written about that twice before. Once was in a request to Rep. Mike Bost not to use the term "Orientals". In that request I noted, "... 'political correctness' is a term seemingly used only by those uninterested in the principle at its heart: civility — common courtesy".

The other mention was in a discussion of the racist massacre at a South Caroline church in June 2015. I digressed slightly from that topic to rebuke comedians who were then complaining that political correctness was shackling them, making them afraid to rake risks.

There has been a minor fuss raised by some comedians of late, railing against so-called "political correctness" and its supposedly deleterious effects on their standup routines. I almost blogged about it, but I thought Jerry Seinfeld's idiotic whining didn't deserve any more attention than it had already gotten. My feeling was and is, if you as a comedian can't figure out how to make people laugh without visiting tired stereotypes, maybe it's time to find a new job.

The impulse that keeps an audience from laughing when a comic makes an easy joke based on a dumb stereotype is the same impulse that keeps us from succumbing to the mindless contempt for somebody else based on irrelevant characteristics like race. It's a sense that tells us, "This ain't right". It's a moral compass. It's a conscience.

Gillis falls squarely into the camp of comedians who ought to find other work.

I say that because he pretended to apologize:

“I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said.”

Bullshit, Shane. You're not happy to apologize to anybody and you sure as hell haven't apologized to anybody. You're pissed that your old material — some of which is only as "old" as 2018 — has resurfaced with such a vengeance, and you're worried that the blowback could cost you your new gig.

I don't know how to reach someone as defiantly close-minded as Gillis. I only know that his wide-ranging and simpleminded contempt for others, including gays and women as well as Asian Americans (and likely Asians generally), can't be written off as a necessary rough edge for comedy. That's a lazy excuse put forward by people who don't give a shit about denigrating people who are already targets of bigotry.

SNL, I don't give a shit if you fire Gillis. I really don't: I don't watch. What would give me a little hope would be if executive producer Lorne Michaels promised to take Gillis in hand and teach him to be a better person.

Not your job, Mr. Michaels? Perhaps not. In that case, then, you'll be judged by the company you keep and hire. We'll just have to accept that you don't mind, perhaps even endorse, Gillis' deep contempt for others and his penchant for punching down.

Honestly, I don't want to turn Gillis into a pariah who can't get work because of his crummy past behavior. I want Gillis to become a better human being who understands exactly why the rest of us condemn what he currently thinks, or pretends to think, is just "edgy" comedy. I want him to turn his life around and help to undo the harm he has done.

[UPDATE: I guess Lorne Michaels wasn't interested in taking on the challenge. Gillis is out.]

Illegality vs. danger

The CIA pulled one of its most important intelligence sources from Moscow in early 2017.

CNN initially reported the story. In its report, CNN claimed:

The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel.

The disclosure to the Russians by the President, though not about the Russian spy specifically, prompted intelligence officials to renew earlier discussions about the potential risk of exposure, according to the source directly involved in the matter.

The clear implication is that the CIA was spooked by Trump's big mouth and feared that sources would be inadvertently outed because he doesn't know how to keep his trap shut.

In its own reporting on the story, the New York Times clarified that the CIA's concern predated the new administration:

As American officials began to realize that Russia was trying to sabotage the 2016 presidential election, the informant became one of the C.I.A.’s most important — and highly protected — assets. But when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia’s election interference with unusual detail later that year, the news media picked up on details about the C.I.A.’s Kremlin sources.

C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia.

So Trump wasn't solely, or even primarily, responsible for the CIA's decision to extract this Russian source.

But can there be any doubt that other sources are nervous about the Blabbermouth-in-Chief?

As noted in the above quotation from CNN, Trump blew an Israeli intelligence source. He has had multiple private conversations with Putin, conversations whose contents he refuses to discuss and which he took deliberate care were not witnessed by any other U.S. person. If he were motivated solely by patriotism, he wouldn't have objected to the presence of others who could have attested to those conversations' contents.

In short, Trump has contempt not just for national secrets (as opposed to personal ones, i.e., his own) but for the national interest.

The usual defense of Trump's imbecilic handling of sensitive data is, "He's President. He can declassify anything he wants." And so he can, under the law.

And as every honest observer knows, THAT TOTALLY MISSES THE POINT.

Legal actions are not always wise ones.

If the president who blabbered the Israeli intelligence data to the Russians had been named "Obama", every Republican in the country would have screamed that Obama was a secret Muslim selling the country out. (A lot of them said that anyway.)

If the president who held private discussions with Putin, unwitnessed by any other American, had been named "Obama", every Republican in the country would have taken to the streets, torch and pitchfork in hand, screaming, "TRAITOR!!!".

But because the president who did these things is named "Trump", Republicans have pretended that "legality" is the only concern.

Bullshit.

Legality is not the issue, judgement is. And Trump's judgement is appalling. One could argue that it's nonexistent. He is a feckless, thoughtless moron incapable of comprehending the gravity of the national secrets with which his office is entrusted. Worse, he is devoid of the empathy needed to feel the weight of his responsibilities and to exercise his office's authority with commensurate discretion.

Spare me the "it's legal" argument. That's bullshit and we all know it.

Trump's a threat to everyone who puts his or her life on the line to acquire intelligence for this country.