Heads in the sand

If there's a theme, a kind of leitmotif, running through right-wing attitudes today, I'd call it "denial".

Consider just the last few days' emissions from our domestic Dear Leader. He summarily ordered the removal of U.S. forces from Syria — via tweet, no less, instead of a formal announcement. (If tweets are to be treated as official policy pronouncements by this administration, I foresee an awkward time for it in the many lawsuits against it winding their way through the courts.) He also said he wants to deport convicted criminals of Vietnamese descent to Vietnam despite those persons having lived in the U.S. for decades (not to mention that most fled here in the wake of South Vietnam's defeat, justly fearing for their lives). And our domestic DL did a whiplash-inducing about-face on the budget deal negotiated earlier in the week, moving from an expressed willingness to sign the continuing resolution that would have kept the government funded into the new year to declaring that he would veto any budget that did not include $5 billion of funding for his border wall.

In Syria, the U.S. and its allies have relied heavily on Kurdish forces to conduct ground operations against ISIS. Turkey's autocrat, Erdogan, regards the Kurds as terrorists for their stubborn demands for autonomy. He wishes to extirpate them. Only the U.S. military presence has kept him from acting on that desire.

The U.S. propped up the South Vietnamese government for years. It was simple fairness to allow South Vietnamese who feared for their lives under the invading Communists to emigrate to the U.S. Now those same former allies are under threat from Trump's latest xenophobic impulses.

The inescapable takeaway for anybody contemplating asking the U.S. for help is, don't. The U.S. under Trump is not to be trusted to live up to past commitments, or to give even the slightest damn about friendship and alliance.

Meanwhile, the Trumpian crusade to build the border wall has renewed energy because enough right-wing pundits and politicos made enough of a stink to threaten our domestic Dear Leader in the only way that counts: they said that failing to fund the wall would cost him a second term. How does this relate to the prior two crises? It's another example of the simplistic thinking that marks so much of right-wing attitudes toward the world today.

Simply put, the right would like to pretend that the rest of the world can be walled off — hidden from our sight and excluded from our consideration. We can pull our troops out from other countries and withdraw into Fortress America if only we build that southern wall high enough and put enough Border Patrol guards there. (No wall for the northern border? Could that be because Canada is regarded as largely a white country, in sharp contrast to Mexico and points south? Perish the racist thought.)

In the short term, the insistence on funding the wall will shut down part of the government. That, I suspect, doesn't bother a lot of our domestic Dear Leader's supporters because they tend to have bought into the Reaganesque formulation that government is the problem. In the long run, though, I hope they'll someday have to confront a few facts on the ground:

• Most of the folks who actually live near the border aren't enthusiastic about a wall. They disapprove of illegal immigration but they understand, in a way a lot of wall-boosters don't, that a hard border will create hardships for real and innocent people. Some of those people, incidentally, will be American citizens whose land will be seized to build the wall. This also happened during Bush 43's administration, though it got little attention.
• A wall will block only the least sophisticated and least dangerous intruders. The truly motivated and well-financed — in other words, organized crime — will find ways around it.
• Illegal immigrants do a lot of crucial work, especially in the agricultural sector. If their numbers are significantly and suddenly reduced, the knock-on effects will be significant and likely include unexpected fallout, much as Trump's haphazard use of tariffs has.

This country has flirted with isolationism before. Until the twentieth century it was pretty much the default orientation of the average citizen, in fact, and although it was deeply hypocritical (virtually every white American can trace his or her ancestry to a once-despised immigrant group), it didn't much matter because the oceans were terrific natural defenses against a lot of troubles. In the last century, though, isolationism has proven a misguided attitude at best. We've had enough reminders — Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, the 11 December 2001 attacks — of our vulnerability to the world's travails that nobody should think that we can ignore the rest of the planet.

And yet that's what the right wing would have us do. Wall ourselves off and disentangle ourselves from our honorable obligations, they say, and the nation will be fine.

No. No, we won't be fine.

Only a half-wit could imagine that we can dictate our relationship, or lack thereof, to the rest of the world. Well, only a half-wit or a liar. In our domestic Dear Leader, we have both.

Elections have consequences. A lot of us hoped we could contain the ones from 2016 via sheer bureaucratic inertia and the courts, and to a large extent both have worked. However, in foreign affairs the president has virtually unfettered authority short of war. We're just now seeing how far our domestic Dear Leader will use that authority to throw red meat to his supporters.

If a significant number of those supporters understand the dangers of sticking our heads in the sand, I haven't seen it.

Someday, maybe even sooner than we imagine, another president will attempt to undo the damage of this presidency, to repair the frayed links between the U.S. and its allies. But it will be too late for the Kurds slaughtered by the Turkish military, or the Vietnamese-Americans deported to a homeland they don't remember and that doesn't want them back. A rapprochement with Mexico and Latin America will be difficult with a forbidding wall rising out of the desert Southwest reminding everyone of the xenophobic streak that runs through the American body politic.

What we will not be able to recapture for decades, if not generations, is the trust of those who would like to be our allies. They will not soon forget how quickly we turned our backs on them by electing our domestic Dear Leader. They will not forget how readily we discarded allies like the Kurds and the onetime South Vietnamese when it suited our xenophobic impulses.

The understandable mistrust of the U.S. will haunt us for a long, long time to come. Yet our domestic Dear Leader's supporters have preemptively stuck their heads in the sand, refusing to see the consequences of his reckless pandering to their basest impulses.

I only hope they — or more likely, their children — come to see their foolishness and simplemindedness someday.

When Trump passes

All the hagiography surrounding George H. W. Bush made me wonder: how will Don Trumpone be eulogized by the public when he dies?

During their terms of office Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 infuriated me most of the time. I remained dry-eyed when Reagan passed, and I'm dry-eyed in the wake of Bush 41's death. I doubt I'll shed any tears for Bush 43 if he goes before I do.

However, Reagan and both Bushes, by all accounts, were (are) decent men, even if their policies belied their personal decency. I haven't celebrated (or, in Bush 43's case, won't celebrate) their departures from the world.

Don Trumpone is a moral cesspool and a black hole of narcissism. He harbors ugly prejudices and revels in sharing them with the world. He lies incessantly. Like every bully, he's also a coward. And he will never, ever take responsibility for any of his failures because he is too cowardly to face them.

If he had remained a private citizen I could have pitied him, for so flawed a man is pitiable. However, he became president. The job afforded his cruelty and greed and boundless ignorance too much scope to indulge themselves.

So when he dies, I won't just be dry-eyed, I will be jubilant. I will toast with my friends to a world no longer afflicted by a useless man-child.

Our domestic Dear Leader will make the nation happiest when he's dead and gone.

A question for the chief justice

On Wednesday the 21st, Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked our domestic Dear Leader for claiming a federal judge who issued a decision Don Trumpone didn't like was "an Obama judge". Roberts hewed to the standard line about federal judges being impartial arbiters of the law.

I don't dsiagree with Roberts' vision of the judiciary and the ideals it should uphold. Who could?

Even so, the Supreme Court, the very apex of the judicial branch, is perhaps the most prominent exemplar of a biased judiciary. Everybody speaks of "conservative" and "liberal" justices whose votes on most cases are all but preordained. If it's a hot-button cultural issue, nobody wonders how Samuel Alito or Elena Kagan will vote on the case.

Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings were a national disgrace. The majority of the public did not believe he should have been confirmed. This was not a problem the Court could solve, but the negative consequences will fall on the Court anyway. Those of us who consider Kavanaugh unfit to be a Justice have any number of reasons — provided by the nominee himself — not to trust him. If his temperament as a Justice resembles that on display during his confirmation hearings, we will have ample ammunition for impeachment hearings.

So the question for you, Mr. Chief Justice, is how you will restore faith in your Court.

Mr. Chief Justice, Kavanaugh expressed such outrageously and unapologetically partisan views during his confirmation hearing that millions of Americans rightly wonder how they can possibly receive a fair hearing at his hands. Kavanaugh called the serious allegations of sexual assault leveled against him the handiwork of "liberal" activists and "Clinton" (Bill and Hillary) supporters.

If the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee should find itself a plaintiff or respondent before the Court, how could it expect a fair hearing? Will Justice Kavanaugh recuse himself from the case? If he will not recuse himself on his own, will you use whatever authority you have to compel him?

The Court's reputation is no longer as a nonpartisan institution. If that is the ideal to which you want the Court to aspire, what will you do to bring about that state of affairs?

Most of the nation's problems are not yours to solve. However, we're looking to see how you will address those problems that are yours.

So again, Mr. Chief Justice, how will you restore confidence in the Court?

Take far-right radicalism more seriously

So runs the argument by Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Treating far-right violence as a purely domestic issue deprioritizes these crimes on the national security agenda. It also ignores the international reach of militant white supremacist groups, and obscures the greater threat posed when governments become enthralled with exclusionary nationalism, which mobilizes popular support by stigmatizing groups of "others" -- often identified by race, religion or ethnicity -- as national enemies.

German calls on the federal Justice Department and intelligence agencies "to start taking far-right violence more seriously -- in order to avoid another century of brutal conflict".

That's all well and good, but as the history of the civil rights movement shows, you can't legislate or jail your way to utopia. At some point somebody will have to figure out a way to end the cycle of propagation of the many twisted, toxic ideas embedded in white nationalism, anti-Semitism and all the other odious bigotries now proudly asserting themselves under our deeply prejudiced domestic Dear Leader.

How, in other words, do we keep such bigotry and hatred from claiming hearts and minds?

We must adapt to wildfires

Prof. Crystal Kolden persuasively argues that the western U.S. must adapt to wildfires rather than trying to prevent them. Her opening paragraphs, in fact, are a direct rebuke to our domestic Dear Leader's uninformed drivelling: "there is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.”

Rather than indulging our knee-jerk impulse to ban human habitation in fire-prone areas, which Kolden accurately notes penalizes those who have been priced out of other areas in California, Kolden suggests, "we should take a cue from the Dutch":

Much of the Netherlands sits below sea level and is therefore prone to flooding, but the Dutch can’t exactly move en masse next door to Germany. So they have learned over the centuries that the solution is to stop fighting the sea, and build their cities and towns to maximize saving lives through smarter planning and infrastructure. We could do the same with wildfire.

Kolden notes that a few communities already have undertaken such measures as mandating fire breaks around homes and requiring fire-resistant building materials. Best practices will vary according to local conditions and resources.

We also shouldn't blindly follow the vision Trump clearly embraces, though he didn't come right out and say it, the vision of rapacious logging and clear-cutting. I would bet he has the cartoonish idea that if you only rid yourself of trees, you rid yourself of wildfires, too. That idea is idiotic (which is why I suspect Trump holds it: he has never met an idiotic idea he didn't love). Logging may be a component of future wildfire mitigation but that's far from certain. As with so many other things, it would be best for our domestic Dear Leader to keep his trap shut and let people who study and understand such problems come up with ideas and recommendations.

Another bit of adaptation that Kolden didn't mention, but that millions of Californians are all too painfully aware is needed, is to the threat of smoke and soot. Because of unusually gentle winds, the Camp Fire in northern California has bathed the populous Bay Area and much of the nearby San Joaquin Valley in unhealthful levels of smoke. There is no escape from the bad air for millions; even the "N95" masks designed to filter out dangerous particulate matter carry their own risks, according to the Sacramento County Department of Health Services, whether the masks are used correctly or not. Granting that the stagnant air is unusual for this area, now that the possibility for this confluence of bad conditions has been made manifest, we need to think about how to respond to it.

Turn away from rage

French president Emmanuel Macron spoke at the Arc de Triomphe today, explicitly rejecting the brand of "America First"-ism embraced by Trump.

There's nothing wrong with being a hard bargainer, with trying to win the best advantage for your side in a negotiation. If that were all Trump was doing by turning the country's back on treaties and agreements — NAFTA, NATO (sometimes), the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty — his actions would be defensible, if still regrettable.

However, that's not what Trump is about.

He wants to ride the populist wave he rode into office for as long and as far as he can because that's how he keeps his power base. As long as he holds the Republican Party in his grip, he keeps his own grip on the White House. If Republican lawmakers in Congress were to find that they could defy him and keep their seats, Trump would be out of office faster than you could say "impeachment". Those lawmakers would much rather put the drama behind them under a Pence presidency.

So Trump upends the status quo and vilifies anybody he doesn't like because that all delights his supporters. They like that he's manifestly enraging his opponents with his every word and deed. They also like that he's giving them plenty of people to hate and despise: Democrats, liberals, illegal immigrants, Latin Americans fleeing violence in their homelands, women who object to being treated as second-class citizens, non-heterosexuals, African Americans ... frankly, the list is too long to enumerate. His opponents, meanwhile, have tried to turn the popular discomfort with him — and yes, the rage at him — to their own advantage: thus the midterms.

All this rage, though, isn't good for us.

We can reject policies without vilifying one another.

We can disagree without despising one another.

In the end, living in rage and fear (fear is another emotion Trump has great success fostering) isn't just bad for our health, it's contrary to who we are as a nation. As a nation we're about looking forward.

Trump is all about looking backwards. For him, making America great again means resurrecting an America of an indeterminate past age, back when everything was just fine — for men like Trump. That everything wasn't "just fine" for a lot of others doesn't matter to him. And he has convinced more than forty percent of the voting population that it doesn't matter to them, either.

No matter what he says, though, Trump can't turn the clock back. He can't change the actual state of the world, or even of the country.

He can, however, repeat the mistake made by those who let him become president.

That mistake: ignoring those who disagreed with them in favor of rhetoric that sounded good.

That was the mistake made by two generations of D.C. politicians in both parties. They sang paeans to the free market, all while ignoring the costs to working people. The job market became a crapshoot, with all the ugly consequences that come with betting against the house. And make no mistake, employers are the house, and the rest of us are the gamblers.

White nationalists are Trump's most loyal supporters but it was economic uncertainty and fear that motivated everybody else who voted for him in 2016.

Stoking rage and fear among his own supporters gives them (and him) a temporary emotional high, but it doesn't do anything to fix the broken economic system that prompted the fear. Those among his supporters who aren't virulent white nationalists, then, will see no help from him.

Meanwhile, as long as his opponents drum up support by vilifying him and/or his supporters, they, too, offer no help to fix the broken economic system that got us into this polarized mess.

Trump will be defeated (electorally) by someone who offers an alternative vision of our national future — one that appeals to our desire to look forward. That's especially true right now because so many of us want to look anywhere but right here, because right here and right now are so ugly thanks to Trump.

Until that person comes along, we can lay the groundwork by rejecting Trump's all too sure talent for fomenting rage. Whether you support or oppose him, just stop letting him wind you up. It'll be better for you, and better for the country.

What we've lost sight of in the Kavanaugh mess

Rich Lowry in Politico and Bret Stephens in the New York Times have penned pieces defending Brett Kavanaugh. Lowry's piece takes issue with the portrayal of Kavanaugh as a liar — but specifically and only about Kavanaugh's purported lies about his alcohol abuse as a young man and about his controversial remarks in his high-school yearbook. Stephens takes on the "bullying" by liberals, focusing heavily on the devastating effects an attempted-rape allegation can have on a man's reputation. Both pundits portray Kavanaugh's accusers and their accusations — and whatever testimony they have been permitted to give — as not credible.

Stephens' outrage prompts him to wonder:

Will a full-bore investigation of adolescent behavior now become a standard part of the “job interview” for all senior office holders? I’m for it — provided we can start with your adolescent behavior, as it relates to your next job.

Without ever saying so, Stephens accuses everyone who opposes Kavanaugh of bad faith. That's essentially the same argument every Kavanaugh supporter has made since Lindsey Graham went on his querulous rant last Thursday. The accusations have no shred of supporting evidence, the witnesses are inconsistent, the accusers are inconsistent, etc., etc.

In all this, the body politic has lost sight of a couple of things.

First, in attempting to defend himself, Kavanaugh went on his own querulous tirade last Thursday. In doing so he manifested a volatile, angry temperament I wouldn't want in a DMV clerk, much less a man who wants to be on the Supreme Court. He also ranted about the accusations of sexual assault against him being a political hit by the left and went so far as to accuse supporters of Bill Clinton of being behind the accusations. How could anyone who isn't manifestly conservative or right-wing possibly expect a fair hearing from a man with such unabashedly partisan bias?

This is something that Kavanaugh himself has had to address in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece today. I haven't read it but it's worth noting that his most partisan remarks were contained in his written statement, prepared prior to the hearing. He didn't blurt out anything spontaneously. He planned his worst remarks!

Second, we seem to have forgotten that Kavanaugh was nominated by Don Trumpone because of the judge's fringe belief that the president of the United States must not be compelled to respond to lawsuits or other judicial proceedings while in office. Kavanaugh is ready to defend our domestic Dear Leader by shielding him from any subpoenas, including but not limited to any that Robert Mueller might serve. Again, this is a fringe view that Kavanaugh has never disavowed, and he shows no discomfort about having been nominated for the Court precisely because he holds this fringe view. He has demonstrated full willingness to be Don Trumpone's lap dog on the Court, having not just met with the president nominating him (every nominee does that, of course) but having huddled in the Oval Office to strategize his confirmation.

Neither Lowry nor Stephens goes within a hundred miles of either of these fundamentally disqualifying points. Both of them know they have no answers to these weighty objections. So both of them, like every other Kavanaugh supporter, is hoping we won't remember them.

None of this is to suggest that we shouldn't perform a real investigation of the sexual-assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh himself would benefit if the allegations can be disproved.

However, whether the allegations can be proved is irrelevant to his fitness to serve on the Court. He has already demonstrated that he is not fit.

His supporters are crossing their fingers that we in the body politic have lost sight of why.

Consigliere Mitch earns his keep

Mitch McConnell is steamrolling ahead with the Kavanaugh nomination.

Late Wednesday evening, McConnell filed cloture, an action that moves the Senate closer to a confirmation vote, though a final vote would not take place until Saturday at the earliest.

...

McConnell repeatedly vowed to hold a vote on the nomination this week and has said the results of the FBI investigation should not be a reason for delay, even as Senate Democrats have questioned the credibility of the investigation and called for more people to be interviewed as part of the probe.

"[T]he results of the FBI investigation should not be a reason for delay."

Really, Mitch? Even if the investigation turns up compelling evidence that Kavanaugh doesn't belong on the Supreme Court, or maybe even in the federal judgeship he currently holds?

Oh, right: Don Trumpone's White House, probably via Don "let's finish this, I gotta split" McGahn, never intended to let the FBI anywhere near anyone who could provide such evidence.

The fix is in. Consigliere Mitch has been completely consistent in signaling this from the beginning. And now, having indulged the three unruly children in his caucus (Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins) in their insistence on at least a token look at the serious allegations of sexual misconduct (including attempted rape) leveled against Kavanaugh, he is signaling that his patience is ended.

The very last obstacle to Kavanaugh's confirmation is his own performance at his session before the Judiciary Committee to rebut the attempted-rape allegations. Whether he committed the abhorrent acts thirty-plus years ago, he definitely displayed poor anger management, political bias and susceptibility to conspiracy theories. All of these things would cause us to doubt his fitness for an ordinary judgeship such as he currently holds, much less a Supreme Court seat.

McConnell and McGahn know this. That's why Republican talking points, including Don Trumpone's, all concentrate exclusively on the lack of evidence that Kavanaugh committed attempted rape. Not one single Republican will touch Kavanaugh's embarrassing performance of just last week. They'd like you to forget it ever happened.

The problem is that his performance during those hearings is just as relevant, if not far more relevant, than the allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford. (Sorry, Dr. Ford. For what it's worth, your credibility is infinitely greater than your attackers'.) That performance shows what Kavanaugh is like right now. And he's anything but judge-like, even by his own standards: see tonight's Rachel Maddow show for an exquisite piece on that score.

But his unfitness to be a judge, much less a Justice, is irrelevant to that old white patriarch McConnell and his old white male cronies. It is, in fact, offensive to them for Kavanaugh to be held accountable for his past actions. They're scared silly that if it happens to him, it might happen to them. As it probably should.

So Consigliere Mitch, seeing the goal of cementing a reactionary, far-right majority on the Court for decades in sight, is damning the torpedoes. And he may even take comfort in his nakedly unethical exercise of power because according to one poll this farce of a confirmation is firing up Republican voters to participate in the midterms. That could be disastrous not just for Democrats but for the country.

If Consigliere Mitch can shepherd Don Trumpone's boy Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court, he will be able to smile that creepy, disingenuous smile of his in the mirror, knowing that even though his Don has been totally useless as a conventional president, he, the consigliere, made everything work for his precious Republicans.

If you hate Don Trumpone and Consigliere Mitch as much as I do, you have one responsibility: vote Democratic in the midterms. No matter the obstacles.

The exercise of brute power

Matt Thompson in The Atlantic boiled down Kavanaugh's testimony to the Senate in these simple and precisely accurate terms:

Let us fully dispense with the polite fiction that last week’s Senate hearings on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh were intended to bring us closer to a common understanding of the truth. This entire affair is not about truth, but power—who will wield it, and at whose expense.

Judith Donath, also in The Atlantic, is more scathing:

What is hard to see, unless you see the world through the lens of a certain type of powerful man—like Trump, like McConnell—is that the picture that has emerged about Kavanaugh’s past, far from marking him as unfit, signals that he is trustworthy. It shows that Kavanaugh is there for the guys. Most of all, he knows how the world works: Ordinary rules are for ordinary people. They do not apply to the entitled elite—and he will fight to keep it that way.

Donath notes that not only has Kavanaugh demonstrated a willingness and ability to keep the secrets of his own elite circles — his Georgetown Prep male classmates, for instance — but a willingness and ability to uncover the secrets of others, such as Bill Clinton's. "Keep the secrets of the in-group; raid and reveal those of the out-group", as Donath puts it, adding, "Kavanaugh, up for an ostensibly non-partisan position, has hinted that Trump is part of his in-group these days".

The public doesn't currently know if Kavanaugh will be confirmed. My guess is that Don Trumpone and his senatorial consigliere, Mitch "fuck fairness, I'll do what I damned well please" McConnell, have put the fix in: no matter what the FBI investigation turns up, McConnell has the leverage to secure every Senate Republican's vote to confirm.

But however things turn out, those of us who aren't in the old boys' club have got to make our long-term goal the dismantling of that club, one old boy at a time. White men have got to have their stranglehold over this country's leadership broken.

Don Trumpone and Consigliere Mitch would be good first starts.

White man derangement syndrome

After hearing a clearly traumatized woman make credible accusations of attempted rape against a Supreme Court nominee, a white man who very likely will help eliminate a woman's right to have an abortion, Senator Lindsey Graham launched into an uncontrolled tirade against the injustice of the accusations. He seemed to inspire the nominee himself to engage in his own uncontrolled tirade of self-pity, decrying the public humiliation he has suffered and the death threats made against him and his family.

Lacking in either man's outburst was any hint he had processed even a tiny part of the trauma suffered by the woman who was attacked, trauma which included not just having to relive the incident before many skeptical senators and a nationwide TV audience, but both public humiliation and death threats that forced her and her family to go into seclusion prior to the hearing.

These two white men — one a United States senator, the other a federal judge under consideration for a Supreme Court seat — could only find room for indignation about the white male nominee's suffering. They could only lament their own powerlessness against the enormous "injustice" being done to them.

I call it White Man Derangement Syndrome.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox calls it "white male backlash". As Beauchamp puts it:

“I will not shut up” is a perfect mantra for Trumpian backlash politics. There is no risk that white men are, en masse, going to be silenced: They occupy the commanding heights of power in every walk of American life. The demands that they be quiet at times are a response to the overrepresentation of their voices, that they understand what life is like for more vulnerable people and then change the way they act accordingly.

But Graham is not willing to give even that little ground.

Sen. Graham shamed both himself and the Senate. Let this be his political epitaph.

Any lingering inclination to give Judge Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt vanished after his petulant whining and unabashed evasion of awkward questions. Whether he can be proven Christine Blasey Ford's attacker, he has proven beyond any doubt that he lacks the self-control, sense of responsibility and moral sense that a Supreme Court Justice must have.

Both of these white men demonstrated with stunning clarity the unhinged paranoia and blinding self-pity lurking at the heart of modern conservatism.

No reason to rush on Kavanaugh

Senate Republicans, I've heard, are suspicious that their Democratic colleagues are trying to delay filling Anthony Kennedy's seat until after the midterm elections.

What if Democrats are?

So what?

Mitch McConnell held open Antonin Scalia's seat for over 400 days. Although that record-setting vacancy was totally unnecessary, the country didn't grind to a halt.

The precedent has been set. Supreme Court seats can be held open while nominees for those seats are properly vetted (or, as in Merrick Garland's case, aren't given any consideration at all).

So you know what? Republican senators, shut the fuck up.

You have no reasonable grounds on which to object to a delay in Kavanaugh's confirmation. None.

And heaven knows, the mounting allegations against Kavanaugh make Republicans' refusal (specifically, Don Trumpone's White House's refusal) to permit an FBI investigation absolutely indefensible.

Kavanaugh behaved like a pig as a young man. Many young men do, to be sure. But the only ones who should make it onto the bench, and certainly the only ones who should be given a Supreme Court seat, are the ones who own up to their youthful misdeeds.

Kavanaugh has done exactly the opposite. He has demonstrated absolutely no remorse, or even any recognition that he did anything wrong.

If you Republicans think ramming Kavanaugh onto the bench won't start hundreds of thousands of motivated lawyers researching impeachment of Supreme Court Justices, you will discover your error very soon.

Pro Publica's voting guide

A couple of weeks ago, I discussed what the 2018 midterm elections are really about.

The bottom line was — and is — that you goddamned well have to vote in these midterms, and vote for Democrats.

The thing is, that's easier said than done for a lot of us. Thankfully, Pro Publica, the nonprofit investigative-journalism outfit, has a guide to what you can do right now to ensure you're able to vote in those midterms.

Verify that your name is on the voting rolls.

If your schedule will keep you from voting in person, then ask to vote by mail.

This is boring, administrative drudgery. Get over that.

Some states place serious obstacles in the way of doing these things. Grit your teeth and surmount them.

As I observed in the earlier entry, a lot of innocent people have been jailed, brutalized or killed trying to bring democracy to their countries. These midterms are about salvaging democracy in this country.

So consult Pro Publica's guide and make sure you can vote. Now.

The bum's rush to confirm Kavanaugh

The bum's rush is what you give an unwelcome guest at your party. In this case, though, Republicans are trying to rush an unwelcome nominee for the Supreme Court through his confirmation. It's a bum's rush into a lifetime appointment that will protect their party's standard bearer if — or rather, when — he is called to account for his official misconduct, as seems exceedingly likely.

Republican senators insist the Kavanaugh nomination, already moving faster than any previous Congress would have countenanced, must be voted on before the midterms. They're hoping you don't ask them why.

That's what you need to do. Ask your Republican senator why it's so goddamned important to confirm him that quickly.

It's a lifetime appointment, for crying out loud. What difference will an extra month or so make?

Why shouldn't the FBI investigate the attempted rape allegation against Kavanaugh before the Judiciary Committee, much less the full Senate, resumes consideration of Kavanaugh?

What reason is there for retired Justice Kennedy's seat to be filled with such haste? Mitch McConnell held open Antonin Scalia's former seat for a freaking year! If that was acceptable to Republicans, then a little more time to consider Kavanaugh is completely acceptable. In fact, I would argue more time is essential considering that Senate Republicans have been at pains to conceal much of Kavanaugh's record (as a Bush 43 administration lawyer) not just from the public but from the rest of the Senate.

What the hell are Senate Republicans (and the White House) afraid of?

My guess?

The truth. And justice. (And for all I know, the American way, too.)

Neither Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley nor any other Republican senator has the courage to come out and admit that their unseemly haste is down to their partisan need to protect our domestic Dear Leader from having to testify to Robert Mueller — or possibly even having to face criminal indictment for official misconduct. Heaven knows there's enough evidence of such misconduct just from what the public has seen.

To my mind, this rush to confirm Kavanaugh is yet another instance of Congressional Republicans' complicity in Don Trumpone's high crimes and misdemeanors. They are his enablers, aiding and abetting his attacks on our governmental institutions. If there's any justice in the world, Congressional Republicans will be held criminally responsible for obstruction of justice at the very least.

No surprise: Trump on Kavanaugh

Color me shocked by our domestic Dear Leader's stance on the delay in getting Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court:

President Trump on Tuesday charged that Democrats had sought to use a sexual assault allegation against his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, to obstruct his confirmation, calling for a swift process for airing the accusation on Capitol Hill.

Don Trumpone accused Democrats of deliberately not airing the allegation until near the end of the confirmation process. I don't have the timeline of events at my fingertips but even a serial and reflexive liar accidentally blurts out the truth once in a while, and it seems that's the case here. So I'll give him that. Dianne Feinstein's behavior in this situation is worth questioning.

That said, flash back to early 2016 and one Merrick Garland, nominated to the Supreme Court by then-President Obama. That ever-pious institutionalist Mitch McConnell declared that an appointment by a lame-duck president in his last year (!) of office, some nine months prior to the election that would determine his successor, would violate the sacred right of the people to weigh in on the matter. McConnell refused to let the Senate advise or consent on Garland's nomination, holding Antonin Scalia's former seat open until Don Trumpone squeaked into office. Thus Neil Gorsuch, whose conscience does not appear to be bothered by the naked abuse of power the majority leader committed to make him a justice.

Kavanaugh was nominated to fill Anthony Kennedy's seat much nearer to the 2018 midterms than Garland's nomination was to the 2016 presidential election. It seems to me, and to a lot of other pissed-off citizens, that both McConnell's and Trump's hypocrisy is showing.

After all, Mitch, it ain't just the presidential elections that matter to the citizenry. If you aren't the amoral, unprincipled hack that your career to date suggests you are, you'll remember 2016 McConnell's fealty to elections and their consequences for the Supreme Court.

Oh, and Don Trumpone? Nobody's buying your effusive praise for your boy Brett. Everybody but your willfully blind supporters knows you need him on the bench because Mueller's subpoena is sitting in a locked safe, just waiting for the right moment to be served on you. You need a Supreme Court that's packed with just enough Republican-leaning hacks to issue a manifestly unjust decision in your favor, granting you permission to ignore that subpoena — and maybe forbidding anybody but Congress from imposing legal consequences on you for abuse of power and gross corruption, among other charges. (The jury's still out on conspiracy with foreign agents to subvert the 2016 election.)

We know our domestic Dear Leader is corrupt and a liar. The question is whether McConnell has any trace of a conscience left in his withered soul. If he doesn't — if he pushes Kavanaugh through on the accelerated schedule Don Trumpone demands — then he'll prove his complicity in whatever high crimes and misdemeanors history eventually finds our domestic Dear Leader has committed.

Don Trumpone's view of the state of play of the Kavanaugh nomination doesn't surprise me. I'm not expecting Mitch McConnell's to, either. I expect both to go down in history as co-conspirators in a corrupt bargain to entrench the status quo: white supremacy, protection of big business at the expense of the ordinary citizen, privilege of men over women, promotion of a certain brand of Christian fundamentalism over all other beliefs (and certainly over non-belief), preservation of the fundamentally unjust distribution of wealth and income (by recognizing capital but not labor as worth defending).

I have never been a radical. Yet see what the unbelievably blatant corruption and abuse of power of both our domestic Dear Leader and his enablers/co-conspirators in this Republican Congress have done to me? I'm veering close to Marxist territory. That's how nakedly ambitious and bereft of fundamental morality and decency I think those despicable pols are.

What the midterms are really about

The punditry has been proclaiming for months that the 2018 midterm elections are a referendum on our domestic Dear Leader, Don Trumpone. (Whether you pronounce "-one" like "Capone" or "Corleone" is up to you.)

And so they are a referendum. We've lived through over eighteen months of his actual presidency, and we slogged through an additional year (or was it more?) of his candidacy. Figuratively speaking, he's on the ballot for every House and Senate seat.

However, Trump isn't just the president. He's a symbol — and a symptom — of our body politic.

Don Trumpone has a lot of enablers, most notably the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate. However, our domestic Dear Leader's enablers start and end with the people who voted him into office, the ones who continue to show up at his campaign rallies.

Most if not all of these supporters are die-hards who cannot be persuaded to abandon their support. So the question for 2018 now becomes, will those who oppose Don Trumpone come out in sufficient numbers to create the Democratic-dominated House that is the only hope of beginning to contain our domestic Dear Leader?

In other words, will the body politic of 2018 look like that of 2016, or not?

That's up to us.

If you're sickened by the stench of corruption in the executive branch ...

If you have had more than you can stand of the continuous, shameless, even prideful lying by this administration, driven by the liar-in-chief at its head ...

If you loathe the cruelty and viciousness rained down by our exceptionally thin-skinned domestic Dear Leader on anyone who dares criticize him ...

If you hate Don Trumpone's embrace of white supremacy and his full-throated race-baiting ...

If you despise the craven fealty our domestic Dear Leader shows to autocrats, dictators and the very wealthy ...

If you weep for the environmental damage our ignoramus-in-chief and his cronies are encouraging in the name of an imaginary rejuvenation of polluting industries ...

If you want to reclaim our nation from the backwards-looking troglodytes who claim that patriotism is theirs alone, and show them that a truly great nation finds strength in its ideals, not in emptyheaded boasting and posturing ...

... then you have one civic responsibility this year.

You must vote for Democrats.

The heroes of the civil rights movement endured water cannons and police batons. Journalists in other countries are imprisoned and killed for telling the truth about their repressive regimes.

Your job is trivially easy by comparison. Whatever obstacles are placed in your way, you must vote, and cast that vote for a Democrat.

Only those of us in the true Silent Majority can make a Democratic Congress happen.

That's what the midterms are really about. They're a test of our patriotism.

Don't blow it.

The drowning leader

We've heard it before: our domestic Dear Leader is hopelessly incompetent. His penchant for demonstrating that on a daily, sometimes hourly basis tends to numb us to that unsettling truth.

So every once in a while I need to be reminded of how staggeringly bad he is at management, a task that the first modern so-called businessman-president had bragged he could do far better than any of his predecessors.

Thank you, Matt Yglesias at Vox, for today's reminder: a sorrowful look at how Trump completely botched the federal government's reaction to Hurricane Maria, dooming Puerto Rico's residents to a year (and counting) of misery.

... something anyone in the media could tell you is that cable producers’ news judgment is not an infallible guide to the substantive importance of various stories....

This is why presidents have traditionally relied upon staff and the massive information-gathering capabilities of the American government for information rather than letting television set the agenda. Trump has a different philosophy, however, and spent the post-storm Saturday glued to his television and letting the hosts of Fox & Friends drag him into an ill-advised Twitter spat with NBA star Steph Curry and various NFL players.

...

Because Trump wasn’t paying attention, the [Maria] situation evolved into a catastrophe. And because the situation evolved into a catastrophe, it eventually ended up on television.

The Washington Post reports that by Monday, Trump “was becoming frustrated by the coverage he was seeing on TV.”

Yglesias notes that Puerto Rico already was more vulnerable to the disruption of a major natural disaster than it should have been. That wasn't Trump's fault. However, his administration's failure to focus on and to respond to the knowable facts on the ground was nothing less than an abdication of its responsibilities. Putting it more succinctly, the administration flatly failed to provide the aid Puerto Rico needed in a timely fashion.

The administration claimed that its response was "fantastic". Well, you can claim anything when you don't give a shit about the truth.

The administration didn't care that the official death toll of 64, issued by the Puerto Rican governor's office in the hurricane's immediate aftermath, was farcically low. Anybody with two functioning brain cells knew that that number could not be squared with the devastation on the ground and the dire calls for more aid that could not be entirely ignored by the media.

Of course, that official death toll was, a year later, finally revised — upward. It now far exceeds the death toll from Katrina, Bush 43's most damaging domestic crisis, and rivals the total count from the 11 September 2001 attacks.

That's staggering. It's also extremely embarrassing, to view it in terms of cold politics for a moment.

And yet our domestic Dear Leader denies any mistakes.

The tragedy of 2,975 American citizens (yes, Puerto Ricans are American citizens and have been for a century) dying as a result of a natural disaster cannot be minimized.

Yet it's merely a particularly grotesque and appalling example of the larger truth about this administration: it is incompetent. And the incompetence starts at the very top.

Trump likes to pretend that his executive orders are effective governance, but the truth is that the government only functions because a handful of his senior appointees know what they're doing and can keep the lights on. Trump himself does not comprehend his own responsibilities, much less what all his Cabinet members are supposed to be doing.

Until recently he didn't care, either, because as long as he was able to enrich himself and his family and friends, all was right in the world. Now, however, it's dawning on him that his casual corruption — which I suspect he doesn't even comprehend is corruption — will have legal consequences that could harm him and his family and friends.

He still doesn't know how far short he falls of his job's requirements. He will never understand that. (Indeed, it would be difficult to find another American as wrong for the job because very few people combine pathological self-absorption, obliviousness to their own shortcomings, and enough wealth to buy their way out of trouble.) But it's becoming clearer to him that he doesn't have a team he can trust to help him weather the storms on the horizon.

He's drowning: he just doesn't know it yet.

As always, he will be the last to know.

"American white people really hate being called 'white people' ", David Roberts

David Roberts' piece appears in Vox. It jumps off from the reaction to a poll in which Americans were asked whether becoming a so-called "majority-minority" nation will be net good or bad for the nation, with Roberts noting that the very question is premised on an assumption that is almost never stated in this country: that being white and male (and heterosexual) is the norm by which everything else is judged.

This is one of the more striking observations I've read in a while:

In most situations in the US, a woman is a female person. Someone part of a racial minority is a black person or a Latino person, etc. Gay people. Trans people. Immigrant people. All these groups are [adjective] people, people with an asterisk, while a white, heterosexual male is simply a person, as generic as he chooses. His presence is taken for granted; it rarely occurs to anyone to question it. A white man in khakis and a polo shirt can walk into almost any milieu in the US and, even if he’s greeted with hostility, be taken seriously. His legitimacy is assumed.

The power and privilege that come along with that — being the base model, a person with no asterisk — are invisible to many white men. Simply calling them “white people,” much less questioning the behavior or beliefs of white people, drags that power and privilege into the open.

This is indeed an eye-opening observation for those white (heterosexual) men who have never thought about the assumption that underlies everything in this country.

Nearly every country struggling with its self-identity right now seems to be majority-white, so it would be tempting to regard this as a "white person problem" if one was anxious to demonize. However, there's the instructive exception of India, which has been riven by divisions between Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists for generations. One wonders how a similar poll conducted there would play out.

My guess: what Roberts observes is not a "white people problem", it's a declining-majority problem.

That said, the fear among those who have it cannot be ignored. They will act on that fear. In the person of our domestic Dear Leader, they already have.

Anthony Bourdain

Writer, TV host and onetime chef Anthony Bourdain committed suicide in France on 8 June.

I was a fan. I enjoyed his often sardonic take on travel and TV, and I appreciated the glimpses he gave of cultures I will never see for myself. I preferred his older show, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, with its greater focus on food, but I think that if you buy into Bourdain's style at all, any of his work is entertaining.

His death has been treated as a tragedy by the media, which is all well and good except that a certain amount of hagiography is occurring. Yes, he had a significant impact on Americans' perception of other cultures, especially in his CNN series Parts Unknown. Yes, his brashness was occasionally bracing and, as his support for his girlfriend Asia Argento when she publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of rape shows, often admirable.

Yet Bourdain, it should be remembered, was not above cruelty. If he disdained a fellow chef or celebrity, he often didn't just say he didn't respect that person: he committed character assassination. I find Paula Deen despicable (and have said so four times) but to call her "the worst, most dangerous person in America" took gall only Bourdain had. Bourdain was arguably even crueler about TV food celebrity Sandra Lee, about whom he said, "I hate her works on this planet".

The media seems to be treading very lightly around the issue of his suicide: it has been reported but nobody has dwelt on the subject, except to emphasize seeking help for suicidal thoughts.

Should we condemn his suicide? I don't believe there's a right answer. Having been in the grip of severe depression I recognize suicide's seductive logic at that point. You're so bereft of happiness that you can't think straight. Or perhaps you are thinking straight, and you're simply marking time or making excuses in living your "normal" life. You probably don't agree but you can't say I'm wrong: you're not in my head — and neither of us was in Bourdain's. I won't condemn him. I don't understand his decision any more than I understood Robin Williams', but being famous and successful by others' standards doesn't mean one lives up to one's own.

I only hope his daughter isn't too badly hurt by his loss. She's the only one whom I could reproach Bourdain for not considering before he made his decision. Not knowing their relationship, though, I'm not inclined to reproach him even for that.

I'll miss his insights, especially in an age which doesn't value thoughtfulness. He was a rare public figure who seemed to be able to espouse the value of knowledge and understanding (not the same things) without being dismissed by the portion of the population that typically discounts intellectualism. And he exposed a lot of us to some really good food, too.

Abuse of power

Our domestic Dear Leader and his Congressional henchmen put pressure on the Justice Department to disclose evidence related to the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This is the investigation, you might remember, in which our domestic Dear Leader is a subject and a potential target — that is, our domestic Dear Leader could face criminal charges as a result of the investigation.

One of our domestic Dear Leader's own attorneys attended at least part of the meeting, as did Congressional Republicans who are known to be friendly to the administration. Any or all of these men could brief our domestic Dear Leader on everything the Justice Department disclosed in that meeting.

But this is all too polite and indirect. Let's stop pretending to give anybody in or allied to this administration the benefit of the doubt, because they don't deserve it.

Congressional Republicans will share everything they learn with Trump. They will do everything in their power to obstruct and to compromise Robert Mueller's investigation. They will resort to criminal measures if they think such measures are needed. I don't know why. They may be running scared of Trump, whose stranglehold over the Republican base is undisputed. They may be so deluded that they genuinely think they need to do these things to preserve our republic. (I weep if that's the case.) Why they will do these things is irrelevant: the point is, they've shown their colors. They've sided with corruption and criminality. They've abetted corruption and criminality.

In private life Trump used his money and his lawyers to screw everyone he could, whether to save money or to indulge his petty insecurities. He has tried to use his legal authority as president to screw those he calls his enemies. He has used his legal authority as president to protect himself and those on whom he depends as best he can. And he has now used his authority as president to peek into what he can of the Mueller investigation.

So in addition to open bigotry, compulsive lying, shameless profiteering, sexual predation and serial philanderering, and contemptible bullying, Trump can add "abuse of power" to his resumé.

Neither Trump nor Congress had a right to interrogate the Justice Department on Mueller's investigation at this time, while it's still under way. This meeting only took place because Trump and Congressional Republicans have been and continue to be complicit in obstruction of justice and abuse of power.

Complicit. As in equally guilty. As in legally liable if, as seems likely, we someday find that actual crimes took place.

If today's meeting had never happened and Mueller eventually concluded that Trump did not commit a crime during the campaign, Trump could have made a case that he was "totally innocent". But that meeting did happen. As a result, no matter what Mueller concludes, the majority of the country that doesn't support Trump will always believe that he is guilty of something.

And that majority will be right. Trump's provably guilty of abuse of power.

Again with the White House Correspondents' Dinner?

Michelle Wolf came in for criticism for her swipes at press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The criticism is leading to speculation that the dinner in its current form is over.

Maybe that's not a bad idea. Not because the administration and its allies are pissed, but because the White House Correspondents' Association is too cowardly to defend its principles.

Leaving aside the shameless hypocrisy of this White House's anger, Wolf's zingers weren't the attacks on physical appearance that they've been claimed to be. They were attacks on Sanders' mendacity, which is not just fair game but absolutely crucial in these troubled times.

The association has disavowed Wolf. Why they're quaking in fear of this administration I don't know, but I despise them for doing so. Individually and as a group, they should be ashamed of their contemptible spinelessness.

So to the association I say, if you won't stand up for those telling truth to power, stop patting yourselves on the back every year.

Trump and honesty

The Atlantic piece's title is "The Dangerous Confusion of Trump's Celebrity Fans". The headline is not promising if, like me, you're irritated by clickbait and you're especially irritated when you fall for it. However, the first paragraph included a howler:

Shania Twain, the Canadian country-pop pioneer, told The Guardian that if she could have participated in the U.S. election, she would have voted for Trump because “even though he was offensive, he seemed honest.”

Left unsaid, at least in the piece, is whether she still thinks so.

I assume Twain did mean "honest", but I think she did not recognize to what she really was responding. What I suspect she liked about Donnie was not his honesty, but his willingness not to edit himself.

Because even the fiercest supporter of our domestic Dear Leader cannot call him "honest" in the sense of "faithful to the truth". He is only "honest" in that he blurts out whatever's currently on his mind, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.

It's one thing to blurt out uncomfortable truths for other people's good. If you have a body-odor problem, it might take an uncomfortably frank conversation with a close friend or family member to effect a change.

It's another thing entirely simply to be offensive for the sake of being offensive. That is most often — nearly all the time, really — what Dear Leader is. It's an effective way to achieve a couple of his perpetual goals: focusing everyone's attention on him, and taking people's minds off of situations that are triggering uncomfortable questions for him.

Dear Leader is blunt, indifferent to civility, and uninterested in truth. In other words, he's anything but honest.

Congressional leaders are now complicit with Trump

As of right now, neither Mitch McConnell nor Paul Ryan is willing to protect special counsel Robert Mueller.

The effort to pass legislation to protect Robert Mueller’s job as special counsel appeared to hit a dead end Tuesday as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would not allow the bill to come to the floor for a full Senate vote.

...

Earlier in the day, Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said again that legislation to protect Mueller's position was “unnecessary” because, based on “the kinds of conversations we have had," he believes that the president will not take steps to dismiss the special counsel.

McConnell was referring to a bipartisan bill that was being considered in committee. Similar legislation, also bipartisan, was pending in the House.

Both bills had bipartisan support, though whether they actually could have passed either chamber is not clear. Politico reports that McConnell's arguments for not bringing the Senate bill to the floor were that it was "not necessary" and that anyway, Trump wouldn't sign it.

Nobody has ever accused Mitch McConnell of being a stupid politician. Unprincipled and contemptible, perhaps, but not stupid. I haven't paid as much attention to Paul Ryan but I don't think you can have a twenty-year Congressional career if you're a moron.

So we can dispense with any supposition that these two men genuinely believe Dear Leader won't fire Mueller. They have seen enough of Dear Leader's behavior to know that he damned well could go off half-cocked, and if nobody in the Oval Office can talk him down when he does, Mueller (and anybody in the way, like Rod Rosenstein) would be out of a job lickety-split.

We must therefore assume that McConnell and Ryan have no objection to Mueller being fired and his team's investigation stopped in its tracks.

In short, McConnell and Ryan are complicit in Dear Leader's ongoing attempts to obstruct justice. I hope there's a law somewhere that will make them accountable when the crimes and corruption of this administration are finally revealed.

Credibility means something

Lots of people are now castigating fired FBI director James Comey for the way he handled (or mishandled) the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email use while she was Secretary of State. I frankly can't parse his explanation of why he revealed the reopening of the investigation shortly before the 2016 election, and all I can do is to echo those who say he should have followed Justice Department procedure and kept his trap shut.

Of course, the reason people are castigating Comey anew is that he's on a high-profile publicity tour in advance of his new book's publication (it goes on sale Tuesday the 17th). In his interviews he has not been kind to our Dear Leader, calling him all the nasty names the rest of us have been using for over a year. The difference, of course, is that the rest of us haven't had a chance to say these things on ABC, where Comey gave his first interview since being fired.

Some of the people criticizing Comey aren't fans of Dear Leader, either, but many of the critics are acting on behalf of the embattled current president. The latter are hoping that enough people will be confused by who the good guy is that they'll throw up their hands and cry, "A pox on both your houses!"

The thing is, a lot of people are going to notice something: while Comey has admitted publicly to screwing up, our domestic Dear Leader never has. The Donald never, ever admits he made a mistake. He taunts, he jeers, he rants, but he never, ever apologizes for anything.

And while he taunts, jeers, rants, etc., above all, our domestic Dear Leader lies. Every day. About absolutely stupid stuff and in utterly absurd ways.

So a lot of people are going to ask themselves, "Hmm ... one guy admits to screwing up sometimes, like everybody does. The other can't stop lying, and is desperate for everybody to believe he doesn't lie. Which one sounds more credible? Which one should I believe?"

Well, which one does sound more credible?

Here's where three years of attention on the national stage is going to come back to haunt our domestic Dear Leader. You can sneer at the reporters and anchors, but you can't wish away the actual footage of Trump lying.

Credibility is earned. Comey's is tarnished. But Trump's is nonexistent.

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.