NO WAY TO DELAY THE TROUBLE COMING EVERY DAY

Donald Trump’s pardon of Arizona’s resident evil, Joe Arpaio, is widely assumed to have been a signal to people like Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, and other targets of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian election hack:  Protect my secrets and I’ll make sure you don’t go to jail. 

But yesterday, Mueller popped that balloon, letting it be known (Politico was the first mainstream outlet to cover the story) that he’s working with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.  Schneiderman is waiting eagerly for anyone involved in the Russia scandal who accepts a Trump pardon.  They’re better off cutting the best deal they can with Mueller than admitting guilt via the pardon process and finding themselves in a jurisdiction where asset forfeiture is one of the possible outcomes.  Mueller is playing chess, while Trump is playing tic-tac-toe.  And Trump is currently in check.

In the meantime, there is other information that spells bad news for Donald Trump.  First, the Financial Times reports that a certain Rinat Akhmetshin, one of the many Russian agents who attended the now infamous meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., last year, has already testified before one of Mueller's grand juries.  That meeting was arranged by yet another Russian, an attorney for the Agaralov family.  The Agaralovs played a role in another important story that broke a few days ago – the saga of Trump Tower Moscow.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times published stories confirming that Donald Trump, while denying financial connections with Russia, was actively pursuing a major real estate deal in Moscow, via his minions Felix Sater and Michael Cohen.  Sater is a career criminal who worked with Trump on and off for years.  Cohen is Trump’s personal attorney and executive vice president of the Trump Organization.  The two men grew up together in Brooklyn, and during the early part of Trump’s campaign, they collaborated on negotiations with the Agaralov family to build Trump Tower Moscow. 

Depending on who you believe, that deal either fell through or is simply on hold.  But there was more on Sater’s and Cohen’s minds than real estate.  The newspaper stories included leaked emails containing some remarkable boasts that Sater made to Cohen. 

·         “Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?” 

·         "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this, I will manage this process." 

·         “We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done.”

·         "I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected." 

And so they did.  The real estate deal may be on hold, but Sater and Cohen did in fact get Putin on their side, and two guys from Brooklyn, plus one from Leningrad, elected a president.  Donald Trump claims he barely knows Sater, despite their lengthy ties.  That’s to be expected, since Trump often suffers convenient memory lapses when news of his shady business dealings surfaces. 

The latest bit of good news on the Trump-Russia scandal confirms another story originally published by citizen journalist Louise Mensch weeks ago.  The Dallas News and the Washington Journal have reported that top congressional Republicans accepted campaign donations from a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin.  Call me cynical, but I can’t help but wonder if that explains the Republicans’ lack of enthusiasm for digging too deeply into Russian interference into last year’s election.

There’s another citizen journalist story that has yet to be confirmed by “legitimate” sources.  They say that the Washington Post is, at Robert Mueller’s request, temporarily sitting on a huge story about Donald Trump’s Moscow connections.  They expect an all clear from Mueller soon, at which point the Post will be free to drop the biggest story to date on Trump-Russia. 

IF YOU GO DOWN IN THE FLOOD IT WON'T BE MY FAULT

Hurricane Harvey has inspired a new meme from Trump’s base, who are, en masse,  demanding to know why President Obama went golfing in 2005 while Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans. 

You know what?  His dereliction of duty goes far beyond that.  Why did he do nothing to stop the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001?  Why did he stand idly by when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941?  Was he hanging with relatives in Kenya on April 14, 1935, when a blizzard of topsoil turned fertile Midwestern farmland into the Dustbowl?  Where was he on Black Thursday, October 29, 1929, when the stock market crash precipitated the Great Depression?  Probably in some mosque, bowing to Mecca.  Why was he so slow at getting relief supplies to the victims of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906? 

No other president has failed so consistently during an administration that lasted over a century!

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

So the bad man did another bad thing.  What else is new?  He’s going to do worse.   

Donald Trump has been eager to try out his pardon power because he needed to get some practice in before he faces off against Robert Mueller.  So he issued his first pardon to a man much like himself – a doddering old racist who made a mockery of the very laws he was elected to enforce.  And no doubt all the Flynns, Manaforts, and others involved in the Russian election hack took notice.  Two birds, one stone.

Unlike every other president in my lifetime, Trump doesn’t even pretend to being, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, “president of all the people.”  He thrives on enemies, and if there aren’t any handy, he’ll make some new ones.  As far as Trump’s concerned, he won the battle of Charlottesville.  He is now convinced that he can say anything – threaten to nuke North Korea, to invade Venezuela, and claim that there are many fine people among the ranks of the Klan and Nazis – and get away with all of it.  The worse he gets, the more his hardcore base loves him. 

And the longer congressional Republicans simply look the other way – either remaining silent or wringing their hands and issuing vague statements of concern – the more impotent they look.  Trump doesn’t give a damn about Republicans’ “concerns.” 

The only thing he really gives a damn about at this point is the investigation into his connections to the Russian election hack.  I can’t help but wonder if his sudden enthusiasm for a government shutdown is really just a pretext for shutting down one very small part of the government – Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of him and his family. 

Donald Trump can and probably will issue pardons to the suspects in Mueller’s investigation.  But that doesn’t mean they’ll walk away laughing.  Reporters can still report; criminals can still be publicly branded as such.  And as I’ve written before, much of the criminal activity at the heart of Mueller’s investigation took place in New York City, and it’s highly probable that anyone Trump pardons for federal crimes also broke state laws in New York, where they’ll find Attorney General Eric Schneiderman waiting for them.  Trump’s pardon power doesn’t extend to state crimes.  

The best case scenario for most of the people Trump pardons is crippling legal fees and ongoing public humiliation.  As the old song goes, “When tomorrow is today, the bells may toll for some, but nothing can change the shape of things to come.”

EVERY FORM OF REFUGE HAS ITS PRICE

Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”  Ironically, that statement is true no matter who says it, or when they say it.  Soul-trying time is always right now.  

I thought of the Paine quote when I read something a friend posted last week.  As I read her post, she was frustrated with some of her yoga teachers who have argued that it’s best to avoid getting involved with politics because political activity disturbs one’s peace of mind. 

I’m a yoga teacher.  I have an opinion about that opinion.  I probably have more than one opinion about it.  And I’ll begin by acknowledging that all of those opinions are based on second hand information, so I could be building straw man arguments.  Caveat emptor, as always.

Many of my yoga students are also FaceBook friends, so they know I have strong views about politics, and they know what those views are.  My students and I live in real world America, and we’re affected by what goes on there.  That doesn’t mean we have to obsess about it every minute of the day, or think about it while we’re doing yoga.  I pick my spots carefully when talking about current events in class, since that’s not what the students are paying me for.

That said, I’m curious about the idea that political action and peace of mind don’t mix.  The physical poses of yoga were developed many centuries ago as one part of a larger and more complex path designed to relieve human suffering.  That path starts with ethical behavior, and the first principle of ethical behavior is ahimsa, or non-harming.  I was taught that non-harming is more than just passive avoidance of hurting other living beings.  It requires practitioners to actively protect living beings. 

I believe that political engagement can be one way to practice non-harming.  It’s not the only way, of course.  I wouldn’t criticize anyone who finds that they’re simply not suited for the political arena.  Maybe they’re too shy, or too sensitive.  Maybe they’ve discovered that anger or despair overwhelms them when they look too closely at what’s happening in our country.  Maybe they’re burned out and are just taking a hard earned break.  I get it.  I’ve been in all those places. 

All that is by way of saying that I respect people whose choices are different than mine.  As King Solomon (and the Byrds) put it, there’s a time for every purpose under heaven.  But just because political activity isn’t your thing at the moment, I don’t see why anyone want to discourage others from pursuing ethical political engagement. 

I’m going to make a broad generalization here, but my guess is that most yoga teachers and yoga students in the United States are white.  And if you’re white, you’re insulated from the worst stuff that Donald Trump and his minions are doing.  Sure, maybe you’re poor, maybe you’re gay or lesbian, or any one of a hundred other potentially difficult conditions.  But if you’re white, you can pass.  ICE will probably leave you alone; they’re looking for Mexicans and Muslims.  If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, the police may arrest you, but they probably won’t murder you.  You have the luxury of privilege. 

I believe that, at some point, we’re all accountable for what we do with our privilege.  As James, the brother of Jesus, put it, faith without works is dead.  As Elvis Presley put nearly two thousand years later, yoga is as yoga does.  Yoga is not supposed to be about cultivating indifference to the suffering of others.  “Comfortably numb” isn’t one of the Four Immeasurables. 

Personally, I’m convinced that whatever inner peace I have comes from helping others.  That includes paying attention to political events that cause suffering – and, at least once in a while, trying to do something to help.  Even if it’s something as minor as writing a blog post like this one.  

OLD TIMES THERE ARE NOT FORGOTTEN

Is there a difference between George Washington and Jefferson Davis?  Between Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee?  All four of them owned slaves.  So they must be morally equivalent, right?  That’s what Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday. 

Of course that’s bullshit. The differences are obvious. 

First of all, America’s moral vision evolved in the decades between 1790 and 1860.  A fairer comparison of attitudes toward slavery would be Lee vs. Grant and Davis vs. Lincoln. 

But there are more important distinctions.  For all their faults (and I won’t deny or minimize them), Washington and Jefferson were among the most important architects of the United States of America.  Any honest assessment of their careers must take that into account. 

On the other side, whatever personal virtues they may have possessed, Confederates like Davis and Lee did their best to destroy the United States of America in order to perpetuate human chattel slavery.  That’s a pretty big difference.

Before the outbreak of war, Robert E. Lee served honorably for 32 years in the United States Army.  But when he had to make a choice, he rejected the United States and fought for Virginia and slavery.  He may have done it reluctantly, but he did it.  He helped kill tens of thousands of American soldiers.  Lee’s reported misgivings about secession remind me of today’s reports of anonymous Republican congressmen who claim privately to be shocked and embarrassed by Donald Trump.  Then as now, actions speak louder than words. 

It’s hard to find anything positive to say about Jefferson Davis.  He had an undistinguished political career, sandwiching two incomplete Senate terms around a stint as Secretary of War during Franklin Pierce’s doomed presidency.  He resigned from the Senate when Mississippi seceded from the Union, and was almost immediately chosen and the first (and last, unless you count Donald Trump) President of the Confederacy.  That didn’t work out well either. 

It’s important to see those Confederate monuments for what they are.  Statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and their ilk are the racists’ way of telling African Americans that the Civil War isn’t over.  Slavers may have lost the initial phase of the war in the 1860s, but they haven’t given up.  They’re continuing the fight in other arenas, and they’re convinced that Donald Trump is on their side. 

The postwar glorification of Dixie was very literally fake news – a massive and largely successful campaign to rewrite history by manufacturing a fictional southern “heritage” that provided white people – in the south and elsewhere – with an excuse to celebrate racism.

Here’s an idea.  If racists demand their participation trophies for finishing second in the Civil War, give them monuments of Robert E. Lee surrendering to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House.  Give them statues of Jefferson Davis in chains in a Union prison.  Those events are their real heritage.

UNDERSTAND YOUR MAN

Rosanne Cash posted this message on Facebook yesterday.

A message from the children of Johnny Cash:  We were alerted to a video of a young man in Charlottesville, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi, spewing hatred and bile. He was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of Johnny Cash, our father. We were sickened by the association.

Johnny Cash was a man whose heart beat with the rhythm of love and social justice. He received humanitarian awards from, among others, the Jewish National Fund, B’nai Brith, and the United Nations. He championed the rights of Native Americans, protested the war in Vietnam, was a voice for the poor, the struggling and the disenfranchised, and an advocate for the rights of prisoners. Along with our sister Rosanne, he was on the advisory board of an organization solely devoted to preventing gun violence among children. His pacifism and inclusive patriotism were two of his most defining characteristics. He would be horrified at even a casual use of his name or image for an idea or a cause founded in persecution and hatred. The white supremacists and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville are poison in our society, and an insult to every American hero who wore a uniform to fight the Nazis in WWII. Several men in the extended Cash family were among those who served with honor.

Our dad told each of us, over and over throughout our lives, ‘Children, you can choose love or hate. I choose love.’

We do not judge race, color, sexual orientation or creed. We value the capacity for love and the impulse towards kindness. We respect diversity, and cherish our shared humanity. We recognize the suffering of other human beings, and remain committed to our natural instinct for compassion and service.

To any who claim supremacy over other human beings, to any who believe in racial or religious hierarchy: we are not you. Our father, as a person, icon, or symbol, is not you. We ask that the Cash name be kept far away from destructive and hateful ideology.

We Choose Love.

Rosanne Cash
Kathy Cash
Cindy Cash
Tara Cash
John Carter Cash

August 16, 2017

‘Not one of us can rest, be happy, be at home, be at peace with ourselves, until we end hatred and division.’ Rep. John Lewis

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW

Nothing like a couple weeks’ vacation to settle the nerves, right?  On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump was tanned, rested, and unready.  He was also righteously pissed off.  He’d allowed himself to be talked into offering a half-hearted condemnation of his alt-right followers in Charlottesville, for which he was widely scorned by everyone outside the Fox-Breitbart axis of evil.  So he did what he always does when he’s mad.  He tweeted a complaint about the “Fake News Media” who are never satisfied with his very, very good statements. 

But that didn’t relieve the pressure.  His anger boiled over on Tuesday afternoon in a press conference that will go down as the craziest in the history of the event.  Google a photo of the event and take a look at John Kelly, who looks like he’s passing a kidney stone.

Trump was tired of pretending to be reasonable.  Instead, he unleashed his id, doubling down on his original “many sides” position: “There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You have just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group.”  He called some of the Tiki-torch terrorists “very fine people.”

David Duke spoke for the Klan-Nazi community when he tweeted “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.”

It can’t get any clearer than that.  Republicans can’t pretend they don’t know what kind of man their president is.  Now we’ll see what kind of men (and women) they are.

YOU CAN DO ANYTHING BUT DON'T

At the height of his popularity in 1956-57, Elvis Presley’s concerts made legal authorities nervous.  Their teenage children were being driven into a frenzy by this outlandish young man, who carried on like nothing they’d ever seen on a stage before.  In Jacksonville, a judge even threatened to arrest Elvis for impairing the morals of minors unless he stood still while he sang.  Elvis responded by standing still and waggling his fingers, driving the kids crazy that way.  But he knew where to draw the line.  At one venue, he was about to launch into “Blue Suede Shoes,” with its famous line “you can do anything, but don’t step on my blue suede shoes.”  But when he noticed that some kids were getting rowdy, he said, “This song says you can do anything.  But don’t.  Just don’t.”  

That is advice that progressives would do well to keep in mind as the stakes in future elections keep getting higher. 

I take an occasional look at a handful of conservative websites to see how much distance they’re willing to put between themselves and Donald Trump.  Even from Trump’s opponents on those sites, there are a lot of “tu quoque” arguments.  “Tu quoque” is Latin for “what about Hillary Clinton’s emails.”  Actually, it means “you also.”  It’s a way to change the subject by claiming that whatever my side did wrong, your side did too, only worse.

The conservative tu quoque response to the Nazi-Klan terrorism in Charlottesville has taken the form of a complaint that “the Left” (by which they mean everyone from Hillary Clinton to radical anarchists) has failed to adequately denounce something called Antifa.  I’d never heard of Antifa, so I looked it up.

It appears that Antifa isn’t exactly an organization.  It is, rather, a movement of sorts, dedicated to fighting fascism by acting like fascists.  This year, they’ve disrupted events in Berkeley and Portland, and they were apparently present to some extent in Charlottesville.

Antifa seems like less of a threat to American democracy than Nazis and Kluxers, but that’s mostly because there are fewer of them than their right wing counterparts.  We saw their like in the 60s and 70s, when crazy-angry members of legitimate organizations splintered off into small terrorist groups like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Cutting right to the chase, I denounce them.  I reject their tactics.  I don’t condone violence except as a last resort self-defense effort.  Their tactics validate the Nazi/Klan paranoia and make it easier for the fringe right to recruit new members.  They also force progressives to spend valuable time and energy trying to explain the difference between members of the responsible resistance and nihilistic anarchists. 

As long as I’m denouncing, I’ll extend my disapproval to the silly things that left-leaning celebrities sometimes say.  Show biz types who are accustomed to running their mouths occasionally toss off what they think is clever quip and the right wing propaganda machine springs into action.  Fox & Rush turn every ill-considered comment into a cause celebre. 

Just because we have the right to do something doesn’t mean it’s smart to do it.  All of us need to think twice – at least – about venting in ways that will force Democratic leaders to spend time and energy defending an exercise of free speech that hurts our cause more than it helps. 

Is it fair that Republicans get to say (and do) outrageous things, while Democrats are held to a higher standard?  No, of course not.  But it’s the hand we’ve been dealt, and until we can shuffle the cards, let’s try not to make things harder for ourselves.

This is not to say that I want progressives to shut up, or to express themselves timidly.  There are conspicuous exceptions – Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, to name two – but most national Democrats are overly cautious.

Paul Waldman, in the Washington Post, wrote: “Democrats are forever worried about whether they might be criticized, whether Republicans will be mean to them, whether they might look as though they’re being partisan, and whether they might be subjected to a round of stern editorials. Republicans, on the other hand, just don’t care. What they’re worried about is winning, and they don’t let the kinds of criticism that frightens Democrats impede them. It makes Republicans the party of ‘Yes we can,’ while Democrats are the party of ‘Maybe we shouldn’t.’”

So what should Democrats do about an opposition party that has become shamelessly authoritarian?  Conventional wisdom always argues that Democrats should be more like Republicans.  I beg to differ.  If we can’t offer a better alternative, and explain it so that voters understand it, we deserve to lose.  And we do not deserve to lose.

But while I don’t want the Democratic Party to turn into the mirror image of the Republican Party, I do wish Democrats (and progressive independents) could find a way to focus more on winning and less on ideological purity.  If we want to take back Congress and the White House, fratricide has to stop.   It’s important to recruit and support candidates who can compete effectively in their state or congressional district, even if they stray from party orthodoxy on some issues. 

Let me put that another way.  The most important vote our Senators and Representatives cast is for the party’s leadership in the House and Senate.  I would welcome 20 or 30 additional conservative Democrats in Congress if it meant that Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House instead of Paul Ryan, and Chuck Schumer rather than Mitch McConnell was Senate Majority Leader.   

I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, YOU'RE NOT THE TRUTH

I DON’T BELIEVE YOU, YOU’RE NOT THE TRUTH: “Best regards to all those injured in Charlottesville.” That was Donald Trump’s message to the victims (and presumably the perpetrators as well, because all lives matter) of the Nazi terror attack on Saturday. Regards? A strange thing to say, impersonal and hollow.

Trump’s weasel words sparked innumerable demands for him to do better. The unusual thing about these demands is that many of them came from conservatives. But on Saturday, Donald Trump said what he meant, and meant what he said.

It took two full days for his staff to convince him that his initial response was a public relations disaster. This morning, they dragged him out for an unscheduled speech in which he reluctantly read a few lines critical of white nationalists from a teleprompter – but only after patting himself on the back at great length on the performance of the American economy.

No doubt some Beltway pundits will gush over how “presidential” the speech was. But the Nazis and the Klan can read between the lines. They know where his sympathies lie. Their leaders – Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller – remain in the White House, and with Robert Mueller closing in, Trump’s base is all he has left. As long as he can keep congressional Republicans afraid of “the base” (and especially the Nazi fanboys who function as the movement’s shock troops), he can hope that most of them will resist calls to bring him to justice.

Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald noted another factor in Trump’s reluctance to criticize his Nazi and Klan supporters: “He has daddy issues. And he would never speak against his dad, the white supremacist.”

Contemporary newspaper accounts are a bit skechy, but it is a matter of record that on Memorial Day, 1927, a thousand robed and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan busted up a NYPD parade in Queens. Yes, you read that right. The Klan attacked a parade of policemen.

Why? A lot of the cops were Irish or Italian Catholics, and the Klan hates Catholics. Seven Klansmen were arrested. One of the seven was Fred C. Trump, the father of our 45th President. Like father, like son?

Ultimately, though, the origin of Trump’s affinity for racists is less important that the fact that it’s a part of his makeup. He’s 71 years old. At that age (and I say this as a 70 year old), the habits you’ve cultivated all your life rise to the surface. They become who you are. And Trump is obviously suffering from dementia of some sort. If he changes at all, he’ll change for the worse.

THE STRAW THAT BROKE THE CAMEL'S BACK?

I don’t watch television.  If there’s breaking news I want to follow, I check my Twitter feed, where at least the biases in reporting are biases I’ve chosen.  That’s how I followed the events in Charlottesville yesterday, and I’m sensing a glitch in the matrix.

Donald Trump is clearly the worst president in our country’s history, and every day he gives us new proof of that dubious achievement.  In one sense, his pathetic comments about Nazi terrorism in Charlottesville are no different than literally hundreds of previous tweets and remarks.  No one who pays attention to Trump was surprised by what he said, or by what he didn’t say.

And yet the response to his failure of leadership yesterday has taken on a different tone.  It’s not just his usual critics who weighed in with their usual perfectly reasonable criticism.  Yesterday, even Republicans who have taken pains to avoid criticizing Donald Trump seem to be fed up. 

James Fallows, editor of The Atlantic, wrote:  “No one can ever predict what the defining moments of political eras will turn out to be.  GW Bush had no idea that Katrina would matter.  Trump faced that test today, and failed it more abjectly, nakedly, and cravenly than he has the other responsibilities of his office.”

“Heckuva job, Brownie” marked the beginning of the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.  Could it be that “many sides” and “cherish our history” is about to have a similar impact on Donald Trump?

CHERISH IS A WORD I USE TO DESCRIBE

CHERISH IS THE WORD I USE TO DESCRIBE:  “We must cherish our history.”  So says Donald Trump, deploring violence on all sides of the terrorism in Charlottesville, even though only one side engaged in violence.  Trump has no problem criticizing everyone from Barack Obama to Mitch McConnell, but he can’t bring himself to say a harsh word about Hitler Youth.

Those guys were straight up Nazis.  They didn’t try to hide it.  They carried swastika flags, flashed Nazi salutes, and chanted “blood and soil.”  They’re Nazis, making common cause with the Ku Klux Klan – and rallying behind their leader, Donald Trump.  

Cherish our history?  The only history they care about is Confederate history.   Heritage, not hate?   The heritage they’re talking about is slavery. 

Really it all comes down to one thing.  They’re sad because they can’t own a black person.

ON A DAY LIKE TODAY, I PASSED THE TIME AWAY, WRITING

Herewith, some thoughts about two controversial memos that have recently made news.  A couple of decades ago, I went through a period of writing controversial workplace memos myself, so I can sympathize with the impulse.  Luckily, I worked in academe, so while my bosses may have been exasperated, they didn’t try to get rid of me.  Towards the end of my career, my sins came back to haunt me.  I became an administrator and one of my assignments was to deal with complaints from disgruntled employees.  Karma’s a bitch. 

The two memos I want to discuss are the “Google diversity memo” and the National Security Council “Cultural Marxism” memo.  Both were written by obscure functionaries in large organizations who lost their jobs over what they wrote.  You can find the full text of both memos with a quick Google search.  And speaking of Google….

James Damore is a now ex-Google engineer who wrote a 10 page memo in which he argued that Google’s diversity policy was misguided.  His argument really resonated with folks who were predisposed to agree with it.  He even claims to support diversity in the workplace.  He just thinks men are different than women, and that those differences play out in terms of interest and aptitude for Google’s work.

Actual scientists have pretty much shredded his argument.  As Suzanne Sadedin (link below) put it, “To an evolutionary biologist, the idea that sex differences are purely socially constructed is simply implausible. That said, the argument in the document is, overall, despicable trash.”

Damore gives the game away when he argues that the diversity Google really needs is intellectual diversity, particularly in the form of more employees with conservative political views who happen to agree with him.  Naturally, conservative pundits are trying to frame this as a simple free speech issue. 

But look.  This dude wrote a 10 page memo using junk science to justify discrimination against women.  His memo harmed Google by creating (or more likely, amplifying) a hostile work environment for women currently on the payroll, and it also resulted in negative publicity that will almost certainly make it harder for the company to recruit new women employees.  No organization needs that.

No organization needs Rich Higgins, either, although until a few days ago, we were paying his salary.  Higgins was placed on the National Security Council by Moscow Mike Flynn.  Being Flynn’s protégé was, as NSC Director H.R. McMaster understood, an enormous red flag all by itself.  But instead of keeping his head down, Higgins wrote a 7 page memo claiming that there is a vast conspiracy, involving pretty much everyone to the left of Sean Hannity, which is out to destroy Donald Trump.  Higgins calls this conspiracy Cultural Marxism, and claims that it operates on a “Maoist Insurgency model.”  And where is this Maoist insurgency taking place?  The “battlespace,” as Higgins calls it, is the media, including social media. 

Facebook is one of the combat zones.  Watch out for unexploded memes.

I guess that makes me part of the conspiracy, and of course Higgins isn’t wrong when he says that there are a whole lot of people who’d love to see Donald Trump become an ex-president as soon as possible.  But he earns his Tinfoil Hat Merit Badge by claiming that all of us malcontents are taking orders from the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Yes, everyone from Stephen Colbert to John McCain is working hard to help radical Islam impose sharia law from sea to shining sea.  Admit it, isn’t that what we all really want?

Higgins is obviously nuts, but right wing nuts are a dime a dozen.  What makes Higgins special is that his memo found its way into the hands of Fredo Trump Jr., who passed it on his Dad.  Trump senior famously doesn’t read anything longer than a single page, and this particular memo is a tough slog even for me.  (On a good day I can read up to a dozen pages at a single sitting.)  So someone must have summarized it for the president.  And that’s how Higgins earned his place in the Right Wing Conspiracy Theory Hall of Fame, alongside Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society. 

Damore and Higgins have a First Amendment right to express their views.  They do not have a First Amendment right to keep their jobs if they go public with views that help sabotage their employers.

Damore, a bright lad with a wee bit of a history of public anti-feminism, may well have thought he’d worded his memo carefully enough to get away with it.  Higgins, whose memo is what psychologists call “batshit insane,” may nonetheless have been surprised to have been fired, given his fans in the White House.  I think Damore is toast, but Higgins may yet find himself vindicated.

When McMaster fired Higgins, the Bannonites and their Russian allies pushed back hard, and that battle is still in progress.  That makes McMaster sort of a canary in the coalmine.  If he survives, it’s an indication that there are still some grownups in the White House who can clean up messes and perhaps even delicately steer Trump away from his worst impulses.  

Right now, Trump is playing “wag the dog,” manufacturing international incidents in an attempt to turn attention away from the legal noose that’s tightening around him and his family.  As painful as it is to admit, the generals – McMaster, Kelly, and Mattis – are probably our last line of defense against really stupid and dangerous presidential behavior.  If they quit or get fired, it’ll be a pretty good sign that Donald Trump is preparing to go full Dr. Strangelove. 

Luckily those old “Duck and Cover” public service announcements are on YouTube. 

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-anti-diversity-document-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin

WHEN MY EYES BEHELD AN EERIE SIGHT

When the Cuban Missile Crisis was going on, I wasn’t paying attention.  I was 15 at the time, and I remember the popular music of mid-October, 1962, with great clarity.  But the whole “brink of World War III” thing?  Not so much.  Respect to Bobby “Boris” Pickett, the Crypt-Kicker Five, and “Monster Mash” – in memory yet green.

But since then, I’ve read some history.  There are commentators on the right who hope to dignify the name-calling going on between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un (two men with bad haircuts who owe their current jobs to their respective fathers) by comparing it to the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I beg to differ.  The most important difference between then and now is that in 1962, there were adults in the room.

Kennedy and Khrushchev ratcheted up the tension to a dangerous level, but after a rational cost-benefit analysis, both sides backed down.  The USSR pulled its (largely symbolic) missiles out of Cuba in return for Kennedy’s promise that we’d stop trying to invade Cuba and dismantle American nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey.  Done and done, and no World War III.

Trump has lost face at home over the Obamacare fiasco, and he’s been backed into a corner by Robert Mueller.  In Trump’s mind, the only thing to do under those circumstances is change the subject.  So he blurted out some nonsense about “fire and fury,” much to the surprise of his military advisors, who began immediately to distance America’s foreign policy from the blathering of its commander in chief. 

Of course, Kim Jong-un double dared Trump to back up his talk.  Thus far, Trump has responded with his usual bluster – “maybe fire and fury wasn’t tough enough” – but so far he hasn’t done anything.  My fervent hope is that the Generals – Kelly, Mattis, and McMaster – will band together and stop him from starting a nuclear war. 

North Korea has been an unsolvable puzzle for Democratic and Republican presidents alike.  The Kim dynasty’s apparent craziness is different from Trump’s combination of narcissism and dementia.  Three generations of Kims have made North Korea into a fourth world country that just happens to have nuclear weapons. 

In 1969, Richard Nixon was tempted to attack NK but dropped the idea because there were too many downsides, even if we “won” the war.  Kim wouldn’t go down without a fight.  Seoul, population 10 million, is only 35 miles south of the border between the two countries.  That’s well within artillery range, even if Kim refrains from using nuclear weapons.  With or without nukes, NK has the capacity to inflict millions of deaths on South Korea, including some of the 150,000 plus American civilian and military personnel living in or near Seoul. 

North Korea is so poor that the entire country of 22 million people is on the verge of starvation right now.  Any disruption of their infrastructure would result in millions of civilian deaths north of the DMZ.  As Colin Powell said prophetically before the Iraq War, “If you break it, you own it.” 

Instead of bragging about how tough he is, Mr. Art of the Deal should be asking his experts what North Korea wants.  My guess is that they want us to promise not to attack them (the one similarity to Cuba in 1962) and to show them a little respect.  As an alternative to World War III, that doesn’t seem like too high a price to pay.

Hillary Clinton called it last summer.  “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

Here’s a link to an article in The Federalist (a conservative website) that reviews some of the difficulties war planners deal with when they contemplate an attack on a small country with nuclear capabilities.

https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/10/nixons-north-korea-dilemma-illuminates-hard-bomb-small-countries/

TWO PATHS YOU CAN GO BY, BUT IN THE LONG RUN (Facebook November 14, 2016)

Progressives now have a choice to make – partner with the Democratic Party or leave it behind, joining forces with the Greens or with … who, exactly?  Well, that helps clarify matters. 

Or at least it does for me.  I’m a center-Left guy, and my intention is to stick with the Democrats.  I loved Barack Obama and would happily have voted to give him a third term.  I thought Hillary Clinton would have made an excellent President.  But folks to the left of me, who think Obama was mostly a disappointment, are going to have to weigh their options and make choices pretty quickly if they hope to have an impact on the political landscape anytime soon. 

I’ve already made my position on the Green Party clear.  I like their platform, I don’t respect their candidates, and I despise their strategy of hiding in the weeds until they find a new opportunity to sabotage Democrats.  Sabotaging Democrats is the unwritten mission statement of the Green Party.  And what has it gotten them?  In 2000, it got them eight years of George W. Bush, with war in the Middle East as the main course and a global financial crisis for dessert.  Now it’s gotten them Donald Trump.  Enjoy your tyranny, guys.

Maybe you think that’s a little harsh.  If so, show me a list of Green Party accomplishments.  They’ve been around for at least 25 years.  Which of their policy proposals have they enacted?  Why, if Jill Stein was so much better than Hillary Clinton, couldn’t she manage to win at least as many votes as crazy Gary Johnson?  Progressives who opt for the Green Party are just grandstanding.  They aren’t serious about getting anything done.  I have nothing to say to them.

What other alternatives might progressives have?  A new independent party?  That’s easier to imagine in theory than to pull off in practice.  Its founders would have to be people who are much more serious than the Greens have been.  And by serious, I don’t mean just sincere.  Starting a new party from scratch would take years of difficult and thankless work by hundreds of people, with no guarantee of success in the end.  Maybe that’s why third parties wind up with mostly unserious people.

This New Progressive Independent Party (NPID) would have to decide what the Greens did wrong, and find ways to get those things right.  And then they’d have to out-compete the Greens for disaffected Bernie fans, not to mention Latinos, African-Americans, and other minorities, all of whom have thus far pretty much ignored independent progressive movements.  

The hypothetical NPID would have a second challenge – the tendency that Leftist groups have to splinter into warring factions.  That’s the heart of the progressive dilemma.  How much compromise is too much compromise? 

Some of the appeal of a third party is that it allows its members to feel like mavericks.  Rebels with a cause don’t like to compromise, which is how the Judean People’s Front wound up fighting with the People’s Front of Judea.

But the biggest short term challenge for any progressive independent party is that the dominant Democratic voices in the next cycle are likely to be Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and their supporters.  If its left wing steps up, Democrats will co-opt much of the progressive agenda, and they’ll have the star power to establish the narrative and steer the conversation.   

Maybe Democratic leadership will marginalize the Sanders/Warren wing of the party, or maybe progressive Democrats will get their turn but fail to lead the Democrats back to power.  We’ll know the composition of the new Democratic leadership team soon.  How it performs won’t be clear until the 2020 presidential election is in the books.  If Sanders/Warren aren’t given a chance or if they get their chance but can’t win a national election (see George McGovern, 1972), perhaps there’ll an opening for a new party on the Left. 

The final wild card is that nobody knows what the Republican Party will look like in four years.  Maybe we’ll be in the early days of the Thousand Year Reich, or maybe (as I hope and rather expect) they’ll screw up so badly that the GOP will dissolve into warring factions.  Maybe, instead of a new progressive party, we’ll wind up with new ultra-right and center right parties. 

In the long run, it just seems to me that partnering with the Democratic Party is the path of least resistance for those who are serious about implementing a reasonably progressive agenda. 

More on that soon.  In the meantime, always look on the bright side of life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M

THE FIRE NEXT TIME (Facebook November 12, 2016)

As we learn more about how Trump won this election, the nature of the Democratic side of the problem is coming into focus.  Trump got fewer votes than either John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012.  Clinton did even worse, simply underperforming among voters who voted for Barack Obama in those earlier elections.  If she’d had Obama-level turnout in even a few states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – she’d be President-elect today.

Most people will look at those numbers and blame Clinton and her campaign for the loss.  I’m here to offer a contrarian view.  Clinton wasn’t the main problem.  Short-sighted, self-indulgent Democrats and left-leaning independents were the main problem.  They bought into the “flawed candidate” narrative and either stayed home or voted Libertarian or Green. 

Flawed candidate?  Of course Clinton was a flawed candidate.  I’m a flawed citizen.  Who doesn’t have flaws?  You want to see what a really flawed candidate looks like?  Take a look at our next President. 

Doing the right thing isn’t always exciting.  We can’t lounge around, fighting vainly the old ennui, declining to bestir ourselves unless we’re swept off our feet by someone with great charisma and perfect policies.  Our job as adults is to make the best choice available from the range of realistic options. 

Am I saying that you may occasionally have to vote for someone who’s not charismatic?  Someone you may not like much, and disagree with on some things?  Yes, that’s what I’m saying. 

If your house was on fire, would you make the firemen wait until you’ve finished a background check on each of them to make sure they’re worthy of saving your life and property?    That’s the best metaphor I can come up with for this election.  Donald Trump was the fire and Hillary Clinton, with all her flaws, was our last, best hope of putting it out.  Instead, progressive voters proved to have a citizenship deficit on November 8. 

Too many people pouted about being uninspired.  Too many others seemed to think that the purpose of their vote was to demonstrate their moral superiority to Hillary Clinton.  Those are extremely self-centered ways to think about exercising your franchise. 

I offer this as an alternative approach.  As a citizen, your job is to use your vote to protect your country and your fellow citizens.  Helping save the country from Donald Trump would have been a nice moral thing to do.  Inspiring, even.

On Twitter, Molly Manglewood wrote “Voting 3rd party is a good way to let marginalized groups know that your abstract principles are more important than their very real lives.”  If your principles helped elect Donald Trump, you’ve got the wrong principles.  Fix them before the next election.  Please.   

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/politics/gary-johnson-jill-stein-spoiler/index.html

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE

My short post about Jill Stein earlier this week prompted some good comments about the Green Party, and I said I’d write more about the Greens soon.  Upon reflection, though, I believe I said most of what I have to say about the Green Party in a couple of Facebook post on November 12 and 14, less than a week after the election.  That was before I started a blog, so I’m going to add those entries to STRANGE THINGS HAPPENING EVERY DAY, but I’ll share a combined and condensed version of them here, and then add some thoughts. 

On November 12, I wrote this.  Short-sighted, self-indulgent Democrats and left-leaning independents helped elect Donald Trump.  They bought into the “flawed candidate” narrative about Hillary Clinton and either stayed home or voted Libertarian or Green. 

Flawed candidate?  Of course Clinton was a flawed candidate.  I’m a flawed citizen.  Who doesn’t have flaws?  You want to see what a really flawed candidate looks like?  Take a look at our next President. 

Too many people pouted about being uninspired.  Too many others seemed to think that the purpose of their vote was to demonstrate their moral superiority to Hillary Clinton.  Those are extremely self-centered ways to think about exercising your franchise.  I offer this as an alternative approach.  As a citizen, your job is to use your vote to protect your country and your fellow citizens.  Helping save the country from Donald Trump would have been a nice moral thing to do.  Inspiring, even.

On November 14, I wrote this.  I’ve already made my position on the Green Party clear.  I like their platform, I don’t respect their candidates, and I despise their strategy of hiding in the weeds until they find a new opportunity to sabotage Democrats.  Sabotaging Democrats is the unwritten mission statement of the Green Party.  And what has it gotten them?  In 2000, it got them eight years of George W. Bush, with war in the Middle East as the main course and a global financial crisis for dessert.  Now it’s gotten them Donald Trump.  Enjoy your tyranny, guys.

Maybe you think that’s a little harsh.  If so, show me a list of Green Party accomplishments.  They’ve been around for at least 25 years.  Which of their policy proposals have they enacted?  Why, if Jill Stein was so much better than Hillary Clinton, couldn’t she manage to win at least as many votes as crazy Gary Johnson?  Progressives who opt for the Green Party are just grandstanding.  They aren’t serious about getting anything done. 

Do progressives have options outside of the Democrats and the Greens?  Could they start a new progressive third party?  That’s easier to imagine in theory than to pull off in practice.  Its founders would have to be people who are much more serious than the Greens have been.  And by serious, I don’t mean just sincere.  Starting a new party from scratch would take years of difficult and thankless work by thousands of people, with no guarantee of success in the end.  Maybe that’s why third parties wind up with mostly unserious people.

A new progressive party would have to decide what the Greens did wrong, and find ways to get those things right.  And then they’d have to out-compete the Greens for disaffected Bernie fans, not to mention Latinos, African-Americans, and other minorities, all of whom have thus far pretty much ignored independent progressive movements.  

Then they’d have an additional challenge – the tendency that Leftist groups have to splinter into warring factions.  That’s the heart of the progressive dilemma.  How much compromise is too much compromise?  Some of the appeal of a third party is that it allows its members to feel like mavericks.  Rebels with a cause don’t like to compromise, which is how the Judean People’s Front wound up fighting with the People’s Front of Judea.

[Here are some further thoughts from nine months later, on August 10, 2017.]

A smart progressive movement would stop running doomed presidential campaigns and start at the bottom, running candidates for unglamorous offices at the local level, winning some of those elections, and doing a good enough job to win more elections next time.  Elect some state legislators, and eventually a few people to Congress.  Do that on a state and local basis for a decade or two, and maybe voters will take them seriously when they decide to run a candidate for president.

Or maybe they could just join forces with (infiltrate, if you prefer) the Democratic Party, learn to live with compromise, and actually protect their country from people like Donald Trump.  That would be faster and almost certainly more effective.

I’ll close this post by quoting someone besides myself!  This is Tony Kushner, author of Angels In America, in an interview with Mother Jones in 2003. 

“Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.  Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country’s future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs — if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate — don’t give him your vote.”

Substitute Trump for Bush, your least favorite Democrat for Lieberman, and Jill Stein for Ralph Nader, and those are words to live by as we contemplate the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

WHATEVER IT IS, I'M AGAINST IT

Hat tip to Charles Pierce of Esquire for the YouTube link, and to Jeet Heer of the New Republic for this comment:  “Frankly, the clear-sighted leadership of Rufus T. Firefly would be welcome at a time like this!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyeKYQdYISg 

BUT THAT WAS YESTERDAY, AND YESTERDAY'S GONE

I’ve said this before, but I have a few new readers now, so it’s time to say it again.  I make mistakes.  I have biases, conscious and unconscious, and although I think of myself as honest, I’m certainly not infallible. 

If I discover that I’ve made a factual error, I’ll correct it and point to the correction.  If I offer a prediction that turns out to be wrong, I’ll acknowledge that, too.  Ignoring your own mistakes is the surest way to lose whatever credibility you might have had in the first place.

Which brings me to Dr. Jill Stein, pictured here with Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn at a dinner hosted by Putin in December, 2015.  Stein, of course, was the Green Party candidate for president in 2016.  Last October 14, candidate Stein, who knew that she’d have better luck trolling for votes among disaffected Democrats than among Republicans, said “Hillary Clinton's foreign policy is much scarier than Donald Trump's." 

Well, scary is as scary does.  Yesterday Stein tweeted “Urgent. Prevent WWIII. Flood the White House switchboard now: Negotiate don’t escalate with North Korea!”

Reasonable enough, I guess, but as New Republic senior editor Jeet Heer tweeted in response, “If there was only something Jill Stein could've done to stop Trump from becoming president.”

A little humility from Dr. Stein would have been nice. 

WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK

I write these posts and tinker with them until I think they’re finished, and as soon as I publish them, I begin having second thoughts.  Here are some brief (for me) attempts to tie up a few lose ends on recent issues. 

A citizen journalist has pointed out that both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal referred to Robert Mueller’s new Washington DC grand jury as a “special grand jury.”  If those two sources are correct, and I assume they are, it’s kind of a big deal. 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Manual (9-11-101), a regular grand jury’s job is to determine whether there is probable cause to believe that a federal crime has been committed within their jurisdiction.  Regular grand juries are impaneled for months, and review lots of different cases during their tenure.  The probable cause standard is less rigorous than “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  If the grand jury believes that probable cause exists, they issue a bill of indictment.  If they don’t find probable cause, they return a “no-bill,” and move on to the next case.  They don’t explain their decisions.  They just issue indictments or no indictments. 

A special grand jury, on the other hand, is impaneled to review a single matter.  In addition to issuing bills of indictment (or deciding not to), it is also authorized to “fashion a report, potentially for public release, concerning either organized crime conditions in the district or the non-criminal misconduct of appointed public officers or employees.”  Trump supporters will surely criticize and second guess whatever the special grand jury does, but it seems like Mueller wants to make sure that the grand jury has a chance to explain its decisions directly to the public.

Turning to another matter from last week, the unauthorized release of transcripts of Donald Trump’s conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia has struck a nerve in some quarters.  Jeff Sessions calls them leaks and vows to hunt down the leakers and burn them at the stake.  Or something like that.  Pundit David Frum tut-tuts that such leaks will damage international relationships, because foreign leaders can no longer depend on the confidentiality of their conversations with the American president. 

Sessions, of course, is an idiot.  The harder he cracks down, the more leaks there’ll be.  You don’t stop leaks by trying to crush the leakers.  You stop leaks by hiring good people to staff your office and then earning their respect.  Of course, that option is pretty much off the table for the Trump Administration.

I understand Frum’s concerns, but I think he and others who view the release of confidential information as inherently damaging to American interests are missing an important point.  In the case of Trump’s conversations with Mexican and Australian leaders, no national security issues were involved.  Neither foreign leader was made to look foolish.  The impact of the transcripts was to demonstrate that the current American president is a temperamental, hypocritical nitwit. 

Some of us were convinced of that already, but it’s useful to have this confirmation in the public record for Americans who try to make reality-based political decisions.  I wouldn’t call the person who released these transcripts a leaker.  I’d call him (or her) a whistleblower.  I think the distinction between those two concepts is important.

I’m not a mind reader, so I can’t be sure of the motive behind the unauthorized release of any piece of information.  For that matter, most of us rarely do anything, good or bad, for just one reason.  If I’m going to make judgments about the unauthorized release of confidential material, the most important question for me is the content of the information, not the motive behind it release.  I care about whether, on balance, the information contributes to the ability of citizens to make better political decisions – measured against, where applicable, any harm it may have done to individuals and institutions.   

If the confidential material (whether or not it has a security classification) appears to be petty and ultimately inconsequential (like John Podesta’s emails) I think of that as leak, and I assume its release was designed to embarrass a rival or sabotage someone’s career – “dirty tricks,” as this tactic was called back in the Watergate era.  If, on the other hand, the confidential material reveals a breach of public trust, such as some illegal or unethical activity, then I call it whistle blowing, and I applaud it.  

And finally, apart from the firing and pardoning issues I wrote about on Sunday, there are a couple of other matters that could cause Donald Trump some heartburn before the end of the year.  He’s obviously got to worry about remaining in Vladimir Putin’s good graces, and their relationship has turned rocky lately.  If Putin decides his “useful idiot” is more trouble than he’s worth, he’ll release the kompromat, and the game will be over.  Since I’m rooting for the game to be over, I hope that day comes soon.

As many people have pointed out, Trump’s many missteps and disasters have so far been self-inflicted.  He’s surrounded himself with the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and they’ve bungled nearly everything. 

Sooner or later, though, a genuine crisis will land in the president’s lap, and Donald Trump and his cadre of grifters will find themselves in way over their heads.  How would those clowns respond to a serious provocation by North Korea, or a major terrorist incident on American soil, or even a natural disaster of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina?

Let's pray that Trump is long gone before those sorts of decisions are required of the White House.

NONE DARE CALL IT

We’re now about halfway into our first and hopefully last summer of the Donald Trump presidency.  As Republican consultant Rick Wilson has written, “One rule of Trump’s Russia problems: They never get better.” 

I’m convinced that these last two weeks will go down in history as the period when the Trump presidency passed the point of no return. 

I’m hoping that the (well-deserved) collapse of Obamacare repeal will turn out to be a watershed moment for Republicans.  The 49 Republican senators who dutifully voted YES on a bill that most of them hated woke up the next day to see their three colleagues who voted NO hailed as heroes.  Those 49 went out on a limb for their leadership, and Mitch McConnell sawed that limb off while they looked on helplessly.  If Republican senators are smart, McConnell will find that lock-step party unity is harder to come by once Congress reconvenes after Labor Day. 

Yes, I know.  Republican senators haven’t been particularly smart so far.  But without “Repeal and Replace” sucking up all the oxygen in the room, perhaps some of congressional Republicans will reflect on polls showing Trump’s popularity continuing to decline, even among his dreaded Base.  Maybe a few of them will conclude that tying their political fortunes to Trump’s erratic behavior isn’t such a good idea.  A few may be enough.

We’ve also reached the point at which the issue is no longer whether Trump can weasel his way out of the trouble he’s gotten himself into.  Rather, it’s about whether he’ll decide to cut his losses, or whether he’ll thrash around like a bull in a china shop, making things even worse for himself – and for us.

A devil’s advocate argument for the cut-his-losses option would go like this.  What if Trump spends his vacation golfing at his own resort, and when it’s time to go back to work, he realizes that he’s just had more fun in two weeks than he’s had in the past seven months?  Could he cut a pardon deal with Mike Pence (while simultaneously blaming Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Republican Congress for screwing him over) and retire to Mar-A-Lago permanently?  I wouldn’t bet money on it, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility.

It’s easier, though, to imagine that when he’s not golfing, Trump will spend his time watching Fox News and talking to his attorneys, stoking his anger to the tweeting point, and maybe to the point of making risky moves.

It’s been clear for the past month that what Trump really wants to do is fire both Robert Mueller and Jeff Sessions, and his path to the former depends on the latter.  Congress, in a rare display of bipartisanship, has signaled that it is serious about opposing either action.  They’re spending their August recess in pro-forma session, which means that Trump can’t dump Sessions and make a recess appointment of a new Attorney General with the authority to fire Mueller.

Ironically, Trump’s best case scenario is to re-enact Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.  All he’d have to do is fire Sessions, and then order Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller.  If Rosenstein refused (and either quit or got fired), no problem.  Just keep firing people until you find someone down the chain of command who’d agree to fire Mueller.  What could be simpler? 

Another way Trump could scratch the itch to fire somebody would be to fire National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who is now under attack from Russia and the Bannonite alt-right.  This would be a huge PR disaster, but scapegoating McMaster would help mollify Trump’s BFF Vladimir Putin, which is probably a net win in Trump’s mind.

Alternatively, Trump could fire John Kelly, his Chief of Staff du jour.  If General Kelly had been Trump’s CoS from day one, he might have made a difference.  But at this point, it’s too little too late.  He’s tidying up the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Trump has never liked tidy.  It’s hard to imagine that he won’t soon grow weary of being babysat by Kelly and just say “Let Trump be Trump.” 

McMaster and Kelly are both working to limit the influence of Steve Bannon. If they win the internal struggle, Bannon could decide it was time to spend more time with his family and resign, which would disappoint Trump’s alt-right supporters.  World’s tiniest violin, etc. 

Apart from firing people, Trump will be tempted to take other unwise actions before the end of summer, most of which relate to his Russia problem.  I still think there’s a better than even chance that Trump will issue pardons to members of his family, and perhaps also to some people connected to his campaign.  But the timing is tricky.  The longer he delays in issuing pardons, the more likely it is that one or more co-conspirators will crack and agree to cooperate with Mueller in return for leniency.  I’d be surprised if that hasn’t happened already in a couple of cases. 

Everything Trump wants to do would be a major public relations disaster (which, in Trump’s fantasy world, might not matter).  But pardons would lead directly to a new set of legal risks for those he pardoned.  Firing Mueller wouldn’t stop the grand juries from continuing their work (see link below).  They (not to mention congressional committees) could still subpoena everyone Trump pardoned as witnesses, and they’d have no recourse to the 5th amendment.  If any of them lied under oath, they’d find themselves in serious trouble. 

At this point, trying to stop Mueller’s investigation is tantamount to standing at the base of a mountain and commanding an avalanche to cease and desist.

Trump’s support in the polls is at an all-time low, and he may be losing defenders in Congress, but he can take some comfort in the fact that his friends at Fox News (at least the ones who haven’t yet been fired for sexual harassment) are hanging in there.  Sadly, the leftovers at Fox are struggling to find viable talking points on Trump’s behalf.  Their current position is “Would you even care if he was guilty?” 

It’s a bold approach, but it doesn’t leave them much wiggle room.  The only two positions they’ve got left are “Treason?  Fuck Yeah!” and “Putin for President in 2020.”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoetillman/heres-how-a-grand-jury-works?utm_term=.tyyQMnBkw#.nydYrRzWM