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Wednesday, January 24, 2018

"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?

Friday, January 19, 2018

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.

Monday, January 15, 2018

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.