DEAR, DEAR, WHAT CAN THE MATTER BE

Mark Twain remarked that “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."  No one needed it more last week than our own Donald Trump, who found himself stuck in a shithole country where the cheese is bleu and the politicians hit on your wife.  Cherchez le fromage. 

Even factoring in those hardships, it still appears to me that Donald Trump been acting stranger than usual since election day.  He traveled to the land of Roquefort and guillotines, ostensibly to honor those who served in World War I.  But when it began to rain, he decided he’d rather be at a civilized place like Mar-A-Lago.  He blew off the memorials, and scowled his way through the few public events he bothered to attend.  The only time he cracked a smile was when the Godfather, Vladimir Putin, favored him with a glance.  He left France early and returned to the United States, only to skip yet another opportunity to honor America’s war dead at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. 

I’ve seen speculation that Trump suffered a physical or mental health issue on this trip, and that his schedule has been scaled back to minimize his public exposure.  That’s not impossible, but he pops up just often enough with a rage-tweet or an impromptu interview that it’s hard to believe that he was really incapacitated.  The more likely explanation is that he was just sulking.

What’s really strange, though, is that Trump stopped tweeting for several days.  Oh, a few prosaic tweets were issued under his name, but they were obviously written by staff.  Stranger yet, a number of other right-wing outlets also went silent on Twitter during the second week of November:  Fox News, Wikileaks, National Enquirer, and Matt Drudge (who deleted all his tweets).  Golly, you’d think something was up.  Here’s what it looks like to me.

After an initial burst of optimism as polls closed on November 6, White House insiders say that Trump has retreated into “a cocoon of bitterness and resentment.”  Since bitterness and resentment are core components of Trump’s nature, you have to wonder how his staff could tell the difference, but apparently things have taken a turn for the worse in Trump’s world.  Let us count the ways.     

Perhaps Trump has finally begun to grasp the full import of the mid-term elections.  During the campaign, he did his best to turn the election into a referendum on himself.  That worked in 2016, and it worked again on his base in 2018.  But Democrats were ready for him this time.  They nominated a younger and vastly more diverse slate of candidates, who basically mopped the floor with most of Trump’s hand-picked candidates.  The trumpier Trump gets, the worse he does with the two-thirds of the electorate who are non-deplorables.  That became clear as Democrats flipped the House decisively and are close to breaking even in the Senate.

As a result, his firewall – not the mythical wall along the border with Mexico, but rather the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, which scuttled every attempt to hold Trump accountable – fell to the enemy.  The blue wave of 2018 grew slowly but inexorably.  In close races, Democrats resolutely kept calm and insisted on counting the votes, and their candidates have notched some impressive victories as the days have passed.  Gone are the days when Trump and his cronies could count on Republicans in Congress to stifle investigations into their corruption.  New Democratic committee chairs with subpoena power will put Trump’s affairs under a microscope. 

But it gets worse for Trump.  After two years, he finally got up the nerve to fire Jeff Sessions.  No doubt he thought his troubles with the Justice Department were finally over.  Unfortunately, he didn’t put much thought into the choice of the next Attorney General.  Instead, he appointed an unvetted sycophant as acting Attorney General.  It’s not clear that Matt Whitaker’s appointment is entirely legal, and anything Whitaker might do to interfere with Robert Mueller will certainly be challenged in court. 

Golly, who could have anticipated that a random right-wing grifter might come with baggage?  You and me, maybe, but no one who talks to Donald Trump regularly had the sense – or the nerve – to point this out.  Until last week, Matt Whitaker had been a small-time right-wing scam artist, cheating on taxes and bilking veterans.  A guy who was being investigated by the FBI suddenly became the boss of the FBI.  In other words, Whitaker is pretty much indistinguishable from other members of Trump’s Cabinet. 

Not that any of these mere peccadilloes keep him from being a good Christian.  Perish the thought!  

Why, when it comes to screening potential new judicial appointees, Whitaker said, “I’d like to see, are they people of faith?  Do they have a biblical view of justice?  New Testament.  And what I know is as long as they have that worldview, that they’ll be a good judge.”

Frankly, I think our judicial system could use a good dose of New Testament principles.  “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”  “Turn the other cheek.”  “Judge not lest ye be judged.”  “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”   “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”  Justice, in other words, tempered with mercy, humility, and a little common sense.

But that’s not what Whitaker meant.  Notice how quickly he qualified “biblical view” with “New Testament.”  He was making sure that his evangelical audience knew that he was excluding Jews.  That also makes hit a good fit for Trump’s team.

This is also the week that Trump is supposed to be working with his attorneys on written responses to questions from the Special Counsel’s team.  Those meetings must be a barrel of laughs, especially since there are persistent rumors that Mueller is likely to unseal a new batch of indictments in the near future.  They will reportedly include at least one member of Trump’s immediate family. 

OK, I guess maybe it’s not so hard to figure out why Trump is in a foul mood.  As St. Paul wrote in his epistle to the Galatians (6:7), “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”  Or, as the Old Testament prophet Hosea put it (Hosea 8:7), “they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

YOU COULDA DONE BETTER, BUT I DON'T MIND

There were a bunch of near-miss disappointments, particularly in the South.  Some races, including Arizona’s Senate contest, are still undecided.  But I’m feeling pretty good about the 2018 mid-term elections.

The one thing that absolutely HAD to happen, did happen.  Democrats took back the House of Representatives.  Despite gerrymandered districts designed to favor Republicans, and in the face of blatant race-based voter suppression, Democrats (and independents, and some #NeverTrump Republicans) turned out the vote, and good things happened.  The blue wave was real.

At the state and local level, Kansas kicked Kris Kobach to the curb and elected a Democratic woman as governor.  In addition to Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wisconsin all traded in Republican governors for Democrats; and Dems also flipped seven state legislatures.  That’ll be important when it comes time to redraw congressional districts after the 2020 census.  Florida voted to restore voting rights to convicted felons who have paid their debt to society, which will alter the voter demographics in that key swing state.  And in Kentucky, the awful Kim Davis, that clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, was turned out of office.

What’s next?  Dominoes are beginning to fall.  

Word is that Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions has “resigned” as Attorney General.  He lasted about 12 hours longer than I expected.  Whoever Trump nominates to replace him – someone named Matt Whitaker is now overseeing the Special Counsel’s investigation – will be someone whose loyalty is to Trump, rather than to the United States and its Constitution.  Republicans own the Senate for the next two years, and they can be expected to rubber stamp anyone Trump puts forward. 

But the next critical moves will likely come from Robert Mueller.  With the election over, he can unseal the indictments from his grand juries, and we’ll find out what he’s learned about the Trump-Russia conspiracy to steal the presidency.  Even if Trump’s plans include firing Mueller, it’ll be too late to stop the Special Counsel’s investigation.  When Adam Schiff takes the gavel from crooked Devin Nunes and becomes chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence in January, Republicans will lose an important pillar of their coverup.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, this election also demonstrated that Donald Trump remains popular with a substantial minority of the American population.  He’s burned every bridge to conventional electoral politics, and he’s gone all in on Deplorability.  The next couple of years aren’t going to be pretty.  But “pretty” stopped being an option two years ago. 

My bottom line is this.  The good guys won a critical battle.  Not as overwhelmingly as I’d have liked, but a win is a win, and I’ll take it.  Now Democrats have two years to absorb the lessons of 2018, choose a standard bearer for 2020, and figure out how to talk to a sharply divided country in a way that will get them to 270 votes in the Electoral College two years from now. 

Last week, someone asked critic Greil Marcus what Democrats should do if they took back the House but lost the Senate.  What he said makes sense to me, and I’ll close with a lightly edited version of his response.

“The first order of business should be to select the best possible, which is not to say previously-in-place, leadership team, with special focus on the whip and his or her team. Then find the least vulnerable to smear attacks and most competent committee heads and their teams. Make sure there is an eloquent, hard-boiled, close to impregnable group of people who will communicate with each other on a regular basis and who can run the place.

“Don’t talk about impeachment. Say it’s the last thing on our minds. (Without prospect of victory in the Senate, which would require proof of treason, if even that would work, it will only leave Trump stronger.) Slowly, but sequentially, begin investigations focused on cabinet members and the administration of government agencies by political appointees (or shadow administrators, as with Veterans Affairs) regarding malfeasance, self-dealing, favoritism, ignoring of Federal law, and other forms of corruption. Undermine the administration as if the game is chess.”

“Introduce strong and powerfully worded bills regarding voters’ rights, health care, citizenship protections, environmental issues, and business regulation. Strongly increase the budget of the IRS and hold hearings on how tax laws are being applied, and to whom. This won’t pass the Senate but they can be a platform in the making. To the degree it’s possible, block anti-Constitutional, base-giveaway, corporate giveaway, self-protective executive orders.”

THE HOPES AND FEARS OF ALL THE YEARS

We’re on the eve of the most consequential mid-term election of my lifetime.  I’ve been waiting two years for this day, and even though I’m cautiously optimistic about the outcome, there’s so much at stake that, as election day approaches, I just want it to be over. 

I have a voting philosophy which has served me well for the past couple of decades, and I offer it to you now, just in time for the 2018 mid-terms:  The worst Democrat is better than the best Republican.  I’ve voted by mail, and I marked my ballot for Democrats straight down the line. 

Why?  Because, however mavericky he or she may seem, any Republican who’s elected to the Senate will vote to retain Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader.  There aren’t any maverick Republicans in the House, so whoever House Republicans elect as their next Speaker of the House is sure to be a bad guy – Jim Jordan or someone like that.  Put it this way.  The best Republicans are still Republican, and Republicans gonna Republican. 

Every last Republican in Congress is either one of Donald Trump’s deplorables, or is terrified by the prospect of offending deplorables.  Every last Republican in Congress lusts after megabuck donations from right-wing billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch family.  Fear and greed are the twin drivers of Republican policy.    

Maybe your local Democratic alternatives are less than inspiring.  Maybe you have an opportunity to vote for a third-party candidate who’s personally charismatic, with genuinely progressive policy positions.  I’m saying don’t do it. 

Unless they’re Bernie Sanders or Angus King, they’re going to lose the election to one of the major party candidates, and the vote isn’t likely to be close.  They’ll never get a chance to implement the wonderful progressive policies they support.  Worse than that, voting for a progressive third-party candidate will only help elect a Republican, who will actively oppose progressive policies.

Yield not to temptation.  Vote for the boring Democrat.  And don’t pout about voting for “the lesser of two evils,” either.  What’s wrong with that?  Reducing the amount of evil in the world is worth doing.  At a minimum, it’s better than using your vote for empty virtue signaling. 

I’ll give the final word to Andrew Sullivan, a man I often disagree with.Recently, Sullivan wrote this in NEW YORK MAGAZINE: “I have many issues with the Democrats, as regular readers well know. None of that matters compared with this emergency. I don’t care, in this instance, what their policies are. I am going to vote for them. I can’t stand most of their leaders and fear their radical fringe. I am going to vote for them anyway. Because it is the only responsible thing there is to do.”

SO LONG, MOM, I'M OFF TO DROP THE BOMB

Yesterday I wrote about October surprises.  Today comes the news that a 20-year-old Deplorable named Jacob Wohl has promised to deliver an “October surprise” of his own on Thursday, which technically makes it a November surprise.  Wohl claims he’ll produce a woman who’ll assert that Robert Mueller raped her back in 2010. 

This isn’t Wohl’s first scam on behalf of Donald Trump.  He uses Twitter to issue transparently bogus claims about Democrats, and he’s not subtle.  They all start out “I was in a hipster coffee house, and heard some Dems whispering among themselves.”  Remarkably, those caffeinated hipster Dems always seemed to be whispering about how well Donald Trump is handling the issue du jour.  For a Deplorable, Wohl spends a lot of time in hipster coffee houses.

As you may have deduced, Wohl is not very bright.  He was pretty ostentatiously offering to pay women to accuse Mueller of harassment and assault.  When he found a taker, he couldn’t resist bragging about it.  He called various media outlets, pushing his story.  It sounded fishy to professional journalists, and they didn’t have to dig far to confirm their suspicions. 

In an attempt to convince the media that he had conducted a serious investigation, Wohl created a website for a sham organization called Surefire Intelligence.  Reporters are trained to be skeptical, and they decided to investigate rather than to take Wohl’s word.  Who could have anticipated that?  Not Wohl, that’s for sure.  The phone number he listed on the Surefire Intelligence website redirected to his mother’s voicemail.  Hi, mom!

Of course, Mueller got wind of the plot last week.  Did he panic?  Nope.  He immediately referred the matter to the FBI and simply got on with his work.       

If you run across any Deplorables who fall for this hoax and try to equate this Wohl’s accusation with those against Brett Kavanaugh, remember this.  When Kavanaugh’s accusers came forward, he and his Republican enablers did everything in their power to stave off an investigation, and when that tactic didn’t work, they rendered the brief FBI investigation meaningless by severely limiting its scope.  Faced with a similar charge, Robert Mueller simply told the FBI to get to the bottom of it. 

One of them has something to hide, and the other doesn’t. 

THEN WE CAN GET DOWN TO WHAT IS REALLY WRONG

Life comes at you fast, and there’s no reason it should slow down in October.  Nevertheless, especially in presidential election years, pundits are fond of speculating about potential “October surprises” – supposedly game-changing information that a candidate will drop right before the election in the hope of swinging votes to their side.  Henry Kissinger is credited with coining the phrase a couple weeks before the 1972 election, when he declared that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. 

Spoiler alert:  it wasn’t.

Donald Trump was proud of the October surprise he manufactured.  As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted, the so-called “caravan” of impoverished Central Americans slowly making its way north towards the American border was intended to be Trump’s equivalent of Hitler’s Reichstag fire – the pretext for demonizing his enemies, and maybe even for suspending civil liberties.  He’s already announced his intention to repeal the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship with an Executive Order.  That isn’t the way the Constitution is supposed to be amended, but will the Kavanaugh Court care?

But there are surprises, and then there are real surprises. 

Trump’s fans love that he’s transgressive.  But some of them have impulse control issues, and don’t understand the broader strategy involved in October surprises.  No one explained to Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers that they were supposed to wait until after the election to fuck shit up.  They took Trump’s words both seriously and literally, and in trying to advance his cause, they may have undermined their Glorious Leader’s best laid plans. 

I was in Norway during the rise and fall of Cesar Sayoc; and I was on a plane somewhere between Oslo and Tucson when Robert Bowers decided that killing some Jews in Pittsburgh would make our border with Mexico safer.  My “Saturday” lasted about 36 hours, and I’m still punchy from jetlag, so I apologize if I have a few details wrong, but in a way, that physical and mental distance gave me a slightly different perspective on these acts of domestic terrorism. 

Although Norway was cold and wet – beautiful, but still cold and wet – I never had the sense that significant numbers of their citizens hated each other.  They had a deadly one-man terrorist incident in 2011, but they didn’t go crazy afterwards, as the United States did in 2001.  Since the end of the Viking days, Norway has been dominated by every power in the region, from Sweden and Denmark centuries ago to Germany and Russia during World War II.  They haven’t forgotten, but they get along with all their neighbors now.

I watched from nine time zones ahead of Tucson as Republicans tried out a variety of responses to the pipe bomb attacks.  Their initial response was the old reliable “false flag” argument – Democrats must have been responsible for the bombs.  And not just a lone wolf Democrat, either, but a massive conspiracy funded by evil Jewish mastermind George Soros.

The “false flag” argument went belly up when the Magabomber (great nickname, wish I’d thought of it) turned out to be a guy with a long history of Trump fandom and right-wing violence.  A few hardcore QAnon fans are trying to convince each other that Sayoc is a Deep State plant who had been groomed for years and activated at a point that would generate maximum embarrassment for Donald Trump.  But that’s a tough sell outside of the MAGA fever swamps.

It’s weak tea, but the best argument the right-wing could muster about the pipe bomb affair was an oldie but goodie – the “tu quoque” argument that was developed back in the days of the Roman Empire.  “Tu quoque” is Latin for “your side does it too,” also known as “both sides do it” and “whatabout-ism”.  This position requires Republicans to equate yelling at people in restaurants with pipe bombs, but whatever.  Trump’s Deplorables don’t care about logical consistency.  When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead, all that matters is that their leaders fight back, even if the best they can manage is a variation on “I know you are, but what am I?”

Still, as bad as Sayoc’s bombs were, the Magabomber had to settle for second place in the contest for worst wingnut of the week.  The life blood of Trumpism is conspiracy – a belief that events around the world are being orchestrated by a sinister cabal bent on global domination.  And maybe you’ll find this hard to believe, but that sinister cabal always turns out to be Jews. 

In the wing-nut world view, Jews are all-powerful.  They run Hollywood, they run Wall Street, they run the European Union and the United Nations.  Jewish money is behind everything from the (bogus) Central American migrant “caravan” to Democratic congressional campaigns.  If you keep peeling back the layers of right-wing conspiracy theories, sooner or later you’ll find a deep vein of anti-Semitism.

If you were paying attention, you could spot anti-Semitic themes in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.  But even if you weren’t paying attention then, by August 2017, it had become too obvious ignore.  That’s when the neo-Nazis, the neo-Confederates, and all the other alt-right Neos crawled out from under their rocks and rallied in Charlottesville, VA.  Those “very fine people” sported swastikas and chanted “Jews will not replace us” as they marched towards the bloody confrontation they were longing for.   

As his legal and political climate becomes increasingly hostile, Donald Trump has doubled down on conspiracy, and he’s adopted some classic anti-Semitic dog-whistle terminology.  He advocates “nationalism,” rants against “globalism,” refers to immigrants (at least the ones from shithole countries) as animals and snakes.  He’s even taken to calling out George Soros by name. 

But wait, you might be thinking.  Look at all Trump has done for Israel.  Didn’t he move our embassy to Jerusalem?  Aren’t he and Netanyahu BFFs?  How could someone like that be anti-Semitic? 

Well, Trump and Bibi are kindred spirits – corrupt and thuggish – except that Netanyahu was a war hero, while Generalissimo Trump was grounded by his pesky bone spur issues.  But Trump envies and admires dictators, and while most strongman-rulers hold power in third world banana republics, Netanyahu is the elected leader of an important strategic ally.

But right-wingers don’t support Israel because they love Jews.  They support Israel because of something called “dispensational pre-millennialism” – a belief that the End Times, the Battle of Armageddon and all that – can only happen after a strong Jewish kingdom has been established, with its capital in Jerusalem. 

Fifty years ago, dispensational pre-millennialism was an obscure theory, espoused by a relatively small number of evangelical Christians. Then Hal Lindsey wrote THE LATE, GREAT PLANET EARTH.  Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins followed with their LEFT BEHIND books in the 90s, and suddenly “The Rapture” had gone mainstream.  The end of the world was at hand, and right-wing Christians believed that supporting Israel was a key factor in hurrying it along.  This is also the last chance that Jews will have to convert to Christianity before being doomed to eternal damnation. 

Long story short, in the Middle East, Jews occupy a theologically strategic position.  In the United States?  Not so much.  For American anti-Semites, that makes them fair game for demonization – and for some extreme elements, fair game for murder. 

I suppose the world will end sometime, but according to my Bible, Jesus himself said (Mark 13:32) that no man knows when it will happen.  In the meantime, the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule continue to apply.  We’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves, and as Jesus noted in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, everyone is our neighbor – even people we think of as our enemies.  Jesus didn’t say it would be easy, but he said we should do it.

In the immediate future, the most loving thing you can do for your neighbors, near and far, known and unknown, is to vote the party of hate out of office.  One week to go, friends.  Let’s keep our eyes on the prize.

EVEN THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST SOMETIMES HAVE TO STAND NAKED

“They had a very bad original concept. It was carried out poorly and the cover-up was one of the worst in the history of cover-ups.  They had the worst cover-up ever.” 

Robert Mueller could use that as the opening paragraph of his report on the Trump-Russia conspiracy, but those words were actually spoken by Donald Trump himself, complaining about the inefficiency of the Saudi assassination team.  It’s a fair point, albeit a cynical one.  Nothing wrong with murdering journalists, but for crying out loud, be professional about it.

I’ve been on the MS Trollfjord for the past two weeks, exploring the fjords along the coast of Norway.  I haven’t been “off the grid,” but my most of my attention has been on Vikings, the aurora borealis, and stuff like that.  As the trip nears its end, though, I’ve begun to re-focus on American politics.  In particular, I’ve been thinking about likely next steps in the Mueller investigation.  The impression I have is that election day will trigger some pretty significant developments.   

It seems likely that no matter which party winds up with control of Congress after election day, Donald Trump will fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  Everything I’ve read suggests that congressional Republicans promised Trump that they’d support Sessions’ ouster – AFTER the election, to avoid further riling up Democrats and independents.  Of course, we know that Donald Trump is both a creature of impulse and an inveterate liar.  Only a fool would take him at his word, but as November 6 gets closer and closer, the bargain may hold.   The last polls close at 6:00 p.m. Hawaii time, which is 11:00 p.m. in Washington, D.C.  Trump could take a metaphorical bone saw to the Justice Department at 11:01 on November 6 and still abide by his agreement with Congress.

Whenever it happens, we can be sure that the next Attorney General will be someone whose loyalty is to Trump, rather than to the Constitution.  The new AG may not shut down the Office of the Special Counsel, but at a minimum, he’ll give Robert Mueller a deadline to finish his work, probably no later than the end of the year.  The good news is, I believe Mueller is ready to do just that. 

In fact, I’ll be surprised if election week doesn’t bring a slew of new indictments against people in the Trump campaign, including members of his inner circle.  I’m less certain that Mueller will issue an actual summary report, especially if the purge of the Justice Department turns into a real bloodbath, and Mueller is among those fired. 

A summary report would be nice, but it’s the least important of Mueller’s remaining tasks.  Even if Democrats retake the House and/or the Senate, any report issued between now and January 3, 2019 will wind up in the hands of Republicans – committee chairs, the puppet Attorney General, and to Trump himself – all of whom will do their best to suppress, distort, and spin everything in the report that reflects badly on Trump and his inner circle.  Those kinds of secrets are hard to keep, but Team Trump will surely try.

Thus, while a public summary of Mueller’s conclusions would be great, the most important “reports” from the Special Counsel’s Office will be the indictments they hand down.  The guilty pleas and convictions Mueller has already obtained prove that Russia penetrated the Trump campaign at the highest levels.  Both Trump’s campaign manager and his top national security advisor were on the take from Putin-controlled oligarchs.  Mike Flynn flipped early and Paul Manafort flipped late, but both of them have provided inside information to the Robert Mueller, and the next wave of indictments should provide clues about what they told him.

Taken together, evidence included in both the old and new indictments will give us a comprehensive picture of who did what, when.  If there are any surprise witnesses for the prosecution – if, for instance, Jared opted to spill his guts in the hope of saving his own skin – we’ll know that too. 

The most important development of election week, of course, is the actual outcome of the election.  If Democrats are cheated out of congressional majorities by Russian vote fraud and Republican vote suppression, we’re screwed.  I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but vote early if you can.  That way if you’re run over by a bus between now and November 6, you can die knowing you did your part to save democracy.

IS THIS THE STORY OF JOHNNY ROTTEN?

Things change, Kundun, and life comes at you fast.  Especially if you’re a Republican, or live in a country ruled by Republicans.  Two years ago on this date, I was looking forward to Election Day, confident that Hillary Clinton would be the next president and wondering what would happen to the Republican Party in the wake of its defeat.  I figured it would turn into something unrecognizable.  I was right about that, at least.

In those innocent days, when I was just following links, I landed on an article on The Federalist website.  The Federalist has been in the news lately because its higher-ups were among those instrumental in pushing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.  Back then, I thought it was just another conservative website, albeit one with quirky views.

One such quirky view came from a Federalist writer named John Daniel Davidson, who wrote shortly before the election that “the white working class thinks Donald Trump can solve its economic problems. But their problems aren't primarily economic, they're cultural.”  Davidson went on to say that “if conservatives want to regain control of the Republican Party and actually govern, they’ll need to reach out to these people and speak to their anxieties—not by pandering to their worst fears and inclinations, but by persuading them that they are wrong about almost everything.  Working-class whites, to the extent they think China and Mexico have taken their jobs and despoiled their communities, are simply mistaken.  The problem with their neighborhoods and towns is not primarily economic stagnation, but cultural collapse.” 

Two years later, Davidson’s point about the source of working-class white anxiety remains valid, but he completely misread Donald Trump and the Deplorables.  Working-class whites continue to stick with Trump through thick and thin because he’s done exactly the opposite of what Davidson advised.  Trump tells his fans every day that their culture isn’t collapsing.  Instead, it’s being sabotaged by a vast conspiracy of foreign and domestic enemies. 

Not only does Trump absolve working-class whites from any responsibility for their own dilemma, he also offers them a long list of potential scapegoats to suit every occasion.  Blame Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.  Blame the Deep State. Blame the press.  Blame immigrants, Muslims, and football players who kneel during the national anthem.  Blame China and Mexico, blame ISIS and MS13.  What the heck, blame all of them at once.  They’re all working together, taking orders from paymaster George Soros.  Only Donald Trump and his big, beautiful wall can stop them.

Conservatives spent decades scolding African-Americans and Hispanics for “playing the victim card” when they tried to explain the challenges that minorities face in America.  Then Donald Trump showed wingers how much fun they could have by pretending to be a victim, even when they were rich, white, male, and in total control of all three branches of government.  You can do anything you want, and never have to take responsibility it.  In 2018, being a Republican means never having to say you’re sorry.  

Donald Trump is Hall of Fame narcissist.  Not giving a shit comes naturally to him.  But some members of the GOP still had remnants of a conscience, withered and twisted though it may have been.  They’d been lecturing Americans about family values and fiscal responsibility for decades.  They needed a new narrative to help them adjust to their party’s new disdain for those values.  And Trump gave them that narrative:  their real enemies were their fellow Americans.  Their entire way of life, everything they hold dear, is under attack by the Democratic Party.  When you’re in a war for survival, it’s OK to break a few rules along the way.

The most benign version of this narrative is that Democrats are chronic busybodies.  They want to impose a nanny state, where the government’s primary role is to promote social justice for minorities at the expense of whites, for the poor at the expense of the rich, and for women at the expense of men. 

Conservatives, according to this narrative, are actually freedom fighters.  They’re fighting for the rights of white Americans, especially rich white male Americans.  And the most important right they’re fighting for is the right to limit the freedom of everyone they disagree with.  Instead of a nanny state, conservatives want a church lady state, in which the government’s role is to hold progressives, liberals, and minorities to mid-20th century moral standards – while looking the other way when someone on their side does the same thing. 

What does this new GOP look like?  The party that Republican Dennis Hof threw in Las Vegas earlier this week is a microcosm of the new GOP.  Hof was running for a seat in the Nevada legislature.  He was also a real, honest to god pimp, with a string of brothels in Nevada.  He hosted a 72nd birthday party for himself on Monday, where guests included long-time anti-tax guru Grover Norquist, Arizona’s racist ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio, and porn star Ron Jeremy.  Just a bunch of typical Republicans out to have a good time, until Hof was found dead the next morning.

Speaking of parties and people dying, it now appears that a bunch of Saudi security agents were having a friendly get together in Istanbul last week when someone’s bone saw accidentally went off, dismembering a nearby Saudi reporter.  A damn shame, but accidents happen.  And if it turns out not to have been an accident, remember that the only protection against a bad guy with a bone saw is a good guy with a bone saw.  If the Saudi reporter had been packing his own bone saw, maybe none of this would have happened. 

But whatever.  We know it’s all good because the Saudi King has given Donald Trump his personal assurance that the Bone Saw Brigade wasn’t acting in an official capacity.  The Secretary of State Mike Pompeo summed up the official American position when he said, “I don’t want to talk about the facts.”  Including, presumably, the facts about massive Saudi financial support for the Trump family.  That’s why Donald Trump has been venting his rage in tweets targeting Stormy Daniels, Elizabeth Warren, and Taylor Swift rather than, you know, murderous dictators. 

Repressive governments around the world now feel free to simply murder dissidents, reporters, and anyone else who makes a nuisance of himself, and I wonder how long it will be before the United States decides to dip its toes into that water.  Already, Donald Trump’s demands for extra-judicial punishment for his critics are his biggest applause lines.  How likely is it that he’ll moderate his rhetoric if more serious threats to his power come along, either from voters in 2018 and/or 2020, or from the various legal investigations that are closing in on him?  

When the first American journalist is murdered, or when Deplorable mobs begin to bust heads at Democratic rallies, how will Republicans react?  It’s not hard to guess what congressional Republicans will do – they’ll issue statements of concern, but like Mike Pompeo, they won’t want to talk about the facts.  I’m more interested in the reactions of rank and file Republican voters – our relatives, co-workers, and neighbors who believe that Trump speaks for them.

I hope I’m wrong, but my fear is that most of them will talk themselves into being OK with anything that helps keep Trump in power.  They aren’t going to turn back into good Eisenhower Republicans any more than John Lydon is going to turn back into Johnny Rotten.  Rust never sleeps, and everything Trump touches dies, including the souls of his followers.

TOMORROW I MAY BE SPLITTIN' TO BRITAIN OR NORWAY

My wife and I are leaving town for two and a half weeks – Tucson to Chicago to London to Oslo to Bergen, and thence on a Road Scholar “adventure” entitled “Astronomy Above the Arctic Circle.” From Bergen, we’ll hop a ship heading north – up and over the top of the peninsula, all the way to the Russian border. And then back.

I assume I’ll have at least intermittent internet access, but I can’t predict how much posting I’ll do. We’ll return home the weekend before Halloween, at which point normal bloviating should resume. In the meantime, keep the faith – and if you have a chance to vote early, do it.

I'VE SEEN FIRE AND I'VE SEEN RAIN

Here’s what Abraham Lincoln said about the Republican Party’s insistence on putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court come hell or high water: “Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” 

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham piled on: “I have argued to you that when you found that a judge was a perjurer, you couldn’t in good conscience send him back in a courtroom because everybody that came in that courtroom thereafter would have a real serious doubt.”

Those are actual quotes, but not about Brett Kavanaugh.  Lincoln was talking about Southern secessionists in 1860.  But since the literal and spiritual descendants of those old Confederates now control the former “Party of Lincoln,” the comparison still seems apt. 

Lindsey Graham made his remarks back in 1999, while advocating for the impeachment of Bill Clinton.  Back then, he argued that the punishment for lying about consensual sex should have been removal from office.  Nineteen years later, he’s arguing that the punishment for lying about non-consensual sexual assault should be a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

I’ve been writing regularly about politics for over two years, and one of my consistent themes has been that Republicans are hypocrites.  I’m now beginning to wonder if I’ve given them too much credit. 

The 17th century French philosopher Francois De La Rochefoucauld wrote that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”  But in the Age of Trump, Republican leadership no longer tries very hard to pay homage to virtue.  Maybe people like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are exactly what they appear to be – power-hungry, money-grubbing bureaucrats who no different than their counterparts in Russia and various other third world countries around the globe.  Maybe Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and the rest of the GOP’s evangelical cheering section are exactly what they appear to be – hustlers who’ve figured out that mixing religion with Republican politics pays better than religion all by itself.

Republicans are drawn to Brett Kavanaugh because they recognize a kindred spirit.  There are plenty of respectable conservative jurists who would sail through the confirmation process.  But it’s increasingly clear that Republicans don’t want another respectable conservative jurist on the Supreme Court.  They want someone like them.  They want a partisan hack. 

Republicans want an ally on the Supreme Court who can cut through the legalistic bullshit about justice and help them get away with shady stuff.  Brett Kavanaugh has spent his whole life getting away with shady stuff.  He’s a perfect embodiment of 21st century Republicanism.

If there are any actual hypocrites left in the Republican Party, they’re ineffectual politicians like Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski, who pretend to be “concerned” before they cave in and support whatever Donald Trump and the GOP leadership are promoting. 

And yes, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that there are Democrats who aren’t much better.  So why bother to get worked up about it?  Why bother to choose between bad and worse?  Science fiction writer Alexandra Erin explains.

“Here's why you should vote for your Democratic Senator to be re-elected, even if they suck, even if they've coddled Trump, even if they don't share your principles or seem to have any of their own: You aren't voting for Senators. You're voting for control of the agenda by proxy.”

“Our republic is on fire right now, and we need Democrats in office to fight it. Not because they are firefighters. We are! We're the firefighters. They're the water. Throw the water at the fire. It'll leave behind a big toxic mess and a lot of structural damage. But no more fire.”

Mid-terms matter.  The next one matters more than any in my lifetime. 

I NEVER DO NOTHING WRONG, BUT I ALWAYS GET BLAMED

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Lame duck Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who has so many good intentions that he could pave a highway to hell all by himself, rarely exhibits the courage of his convictions, but on Friday he finally did something right.  As a result, there will be at least a cursory FBI investigation into the Kavanaugh affair.  Good on ya, Senator Flake.  There’s so much more you could have done, but at this point, your frustrated constituents will take what we can get.  And the good news is, you’ve still got a few weeks in office to do the right thing. 

Last week, I saw a post from a Facebook friend about a conservative who was adamant that progressives did not possess “superior knowledge.”  Sadly, by the time I’d composed a response, I was unable to find the original conversation, so I’m posting my thoughts on superior knowledge here.  Apologies to the original poster.

I was drawn to the phrase “superior knowledge” because it reminded me of spiritual paths like Gnostic Christianity and Vajrayana Buddhism, in which advanced practitioners are granted insights into secret truths about the way the world REALLY works.  As a practical matter, if some modern mystic invokes “superior knowledge” – either to assert that he has it or to deny that you have it – they’re doing the verbal equivalent of knocking over the chessboard.  It’s an admission that they can’t win if they play by conventional rules.    

As I understood this particular case, though, it struck me that the conservative was denigrating “superior knowledge” as part of a defiant assertion of confidence in Trumpian orthodoxy, come hell or high water.  I took it to mean something like, “Maybe you’re smarter than I am.  I don’t care.  Maybe your arguments are cleverer than mine.  I don’t care.  All those facts you have at your fingertips?  I don’t care.  I believe in Donald Trump, and there’s absolutely nothing you can say that will convince me otherwise.” 

I’ve written before that there’s no point in arguing with someone like that, because you can’t change a person’s mind if he’s completely out of touch with reality.  But if the point of the argument is to appeal to undecided third parties, there’s nothing wrong with letting your opponent prove that he’s a fool, a liar, and/or a hypocrite. 

It looks to me like that’s what happened on Thursday, during the Christine Blasey Ford – Brett Kavanaugh hearings.  Republicans live and breathe conspiracy fantasies, so their questions for Dr. Ford were aimed more at convincing their followers that she was part of a sinister Democratic conspiracy than at countering any of her claims about Brett Kavanaugh.  Judging from the body language of the opposing sides, Senate Democrats were pleased with Dr. Ford’s testimony, while Republicans were angry, confused, and defensive.    

The goal of Senate Republicans was to keep their misogyny as subtle as possible, and otherwise “plow right through it,” in Mitch McConnell’s phrase, until the witness’s allotted time was up.   That’s why they spent so much time on their peculiar fixation with Ford’s polygraph test, which had no bearing on whether Ford was assaulted by Kavanaugh at a party back in the day.

But as important as Dr. Ford’s testimony was, the real fireworks didn’t start until Brett Kavanaugh took his turn on the witness stand.  Given one last chance to show the world that he was a good fit for the Supreme Court, he couldn’t pull it off.  He was just too angry.  Instead, we got an object lesson in the meaning of entitlement.  “I went to Georgetown Prep.  I went to Yale.  How dare you criticize me for alleged indiscretions in high school?” 

Even if we find Kavanaugh’s frustration and anger understandable, how a candidate handles frustration and anger is telling.  Instead of channeling his emotions into a constructive response, Kavanaugh was petulant and rude.  Wasn’t he an upper-class white male who defied the odds by graduating from Georgetown Prep and Yale?  Has that ever been done before?  Well, yes, thousands of times.  But Kavanaugh seemed to argue that  his educational pedigree should, by itself, automatically confer legitimacy on his candidacy for the Supreme Court.    

Of course, Kavanaugh was playing to an audience of one, and Donald Trump apparently liked what he saw – a guy who ignores rules designed for lesser men.  Like Trump, Kavanaugh bluffs and blusters, making up whatever story he thinks will work in the moment.  The key is to keep fighting.  Never admit you were wrong about anything.  Oh, sure, some of his yearbook comments were insensitive.  But apart from that, he was as pure as the driven snow while attending Georgetown Prep.

Kavanaugh’s insistence on his teenage righteousness makes you wonder whether any of his contemporaries at Georgetown Prep remember things differently.  It also makes you wonder whether Kavanaugh will tell the same stories to the FBI as he did to Fox News and the Republican-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Lying to Fox News is one thing. Fox wants you to lie; it’s what they pay you for.  And Senate committees these days are pretty chill about perjury, especially if the liar is a Republican.   But the problem with living too long in the Fox-Republican swamp is that you’re likely to develop some bad habits.  Lying gets easier the more you do it. 

But lying to Chuck Grassley and his dimwitted colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee is one thing.  If the day comes that you have to tell your story to the FBI, you’d better think twice.  Lying to the FBI is a felony.  If Kavanaugh decides to withdraw his candidacy rather than doubling down on his stories, we’ll know that he hasn’t completely lost his instinct for self-preservation.

I don’t know what direction the FBI investigation will take.  I’m not sure it will be possible to establish with certainty what happened at that party back in 1982.  But it ought to be easy for the FBI (or any other investigative agency) to determine that Kavanaugh lied under oath about his time at Georgetown Prep.  

His attempt to minimize his drinking problem is a good place to start.  My guess is that there are plenty of witnesses who will attest to seeing him blackout drunk at Georgetown Prep and Yale.  Follow that up by demolishing his pathetic attempts to spin the meaning of his yearbook comments about “ralphing,” “the Devil’s triangle,” and “boof,” and you’ve got a clear pattern of lying – under oath – to protect his reputation.   

If Republicans were smart – and of course they’re not, which is why they’re Republicans – they’d realize that they could have everything they want in a Supreme Court justice if they’d just lance the Kavanaugh boil and move on.  Unless what they’re fighting for is the right to put a sexual predator on the Supreme Court. Which, because they’re Republicans, is entirely possible.

A HYMN TO HIM

“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”  All over the internet, conservatives, without a hint of irony, are asking Professor Henry Higgins’ famous question about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.  They’re full of opinions about things she shoulda and coulda done thirty years ago.  “Why didn’t she, as a young woman of 15, do what I, as an old man of 71, would have done in her place?  Or at least what I fantasize I would have done in her place.  Not that I would ever have been in a place like the one the young hussy found herself in, of course.”

The problem with this ancient argument is that in “he said, she said” situations, “he said” almost always outweighs whatever “she said.”  Republicans are doing their best to sell variations on that theme.  It’s very clear that Mitch McConnell and other senior Republicans knew there were red flags in Kavanaugh’s background.  They did at least that much preparation, and they thought they’d be ready when if a hint of scandal surfaced. 

Plan A was the infamous “Behold a list of 65 women Kavanaugh definitely didn’t rape” testimonial, which had obviously been prepared ahead of time for release at the first sign of trouble.  The logic was tortured – “because we can prove that Kavanaugh didn’t try to rape everyone, you must believe that he didn’t try to rape anyone.” 

John Dillinger could probably have come up with a long list of banks he never robbed, but in those days, opposition to bank robbery was pretty bipartisan.  Today’s Republicans view attempted rape as little more than a youthful indiscretion.  Boys will be boys, they argue.  The real problem is the 15-year-old girls who lead them astray, just as Eve did to Adam.

That sort of straw man attack is harder to sustain when the victim has a face and a name, and when Dr. Ford identified herself as Kavanaugh’s accuser, his defenders had to change tactics.  No problem, they thought.  Our Plan B will be ready in a day or two.  Plan B conceded that an attempted rape probably happened, but insisted that the perpetrator couldn’t have been the swell guy we want on the Supreme Court.  Mistaken identity, that’s the ticket.

Kavanaugh pal and prominent Republican attorney Ed Whelan built an elaborate (though evidence-free) theory to bolster the mistaken identity defense, which fooled some gullible wingnuts.  But Whelan’s lust for the kill clouded his judgment.  He named one of Kavanaugh’s high school classmates as the likely culprit.  An unproven theory is one thing, but a potentially libelous unproven theory is quite another.  Senate Republicans immediately began scrambling to disassociate themselves from Whelan’s work.    

With both prongs of the pre-emptive defense strategy rendered inoperative, Kavanaugh supporters were forced to freelance.  Despite having a fair amount of experience with sexual assault charges himself, the best Donald Trump could do was to trot out predictable clichés blaming Dr. Ford for not reporting the assault at the time.  North Dakota Republican Congressman Kevin Cramer got a little more creative, trying to spin Kavanaugh’s inability to remove Ford’s clothing as an act of chivalry – a recognition, albeit through a drunken haze, that no means no.  Professional hypocrite Franklin Graham offered a similar opinion: “She said no, and he respected that.” 

It was left to Florida Republican Gina Sosa to say what most Republicans were really thinking: “Tell me, what boy hasn’t done this in high school?” 

Well, me, for one.  But I was always a rebel.  Sosa’s blunt analysis – he probably did it, and we don’t care – may well carry the day.     

There are a lot of reasons not to let Kavanaugh anywhere near a Supreme Court seat.  He has an unblemished record as a partisan hack, and he’s been living way beyond his means.  There’s something fishy about the way he ran up large credit card debts, which suddenly went away when a seat on the Supreme Court beckoned.  There are conservative jurists waiting in the wings who have none of Kavanaugh’s baggage, but Senate Republicans seem to be taking this one personally.  It’s almost as though they resent the fact that obscure women can hold powerful men accountable for their past misdeeds.  

Male entitlement is one of the cornerstones of Republican philosophy.  Boys will be boys, after all.  If you’re a Republican, that’s just the way it is.  The only utility that the Republican Party has these days is that it embodies a lot of negative character traits.  Want to know what male privilege looks like?  Behold Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his sponsors. 

If you’re a guy, male privilege is easy to ignore.  A lot of it is simply the absence of barriers that non-men have to deal with.  Men don’t have to learn to dance backwards in high heels, or wonder if anyone would believe us if we reported that we’d been assaulted.  Women (and minorities) don’t have a pocketful of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards to help them through life.  Justice, for them, is always contingent on whether white males recognize the barriers they face. 

I obviously don’t know what happened at that drunken high school party in Maryland back in the 80s.But when Person A asks for a full investigation while Person B and his powerful friends do their best to stop such an investigation, I feel entitled to believe that Person B may have something to hide.Brett Kavanaugh is acting like he has something to hide.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND SAM SPADE GOT NOTHIN', CHILD, ON ME

“Come, Watson, come!  The game is afoot.”  Donald Trump could use someone like Sherlock Holmes to help him solve The Mystery of the Anonymous Op-Ed.  I like to think that Holmes would have chosen to work with Robert Mueller, but Sam Spade or Boston Blackie would have probably agreed to help Trump identify the mystery author – if the money was right.  Sadly, none of the fictional detectives in the 1957 Coasters hit, “Searchin’” are available at the moment, but hundreds of contemporary sleuths, professional and amateur alike, are on the case. 

I don’t know who Anonymous is, but I thought it would be fun to do some speculating of my own.  Look for motive and opportunity, I told myself.  Who had the motive and the opportunity to write the “resistance from within” article? 

Alas, just about every White House staffer had the opportunity, so that doesn’t narrow the list of suspects significantly.  Adding motive to the search filter doesn’t help much either, since I can think of several possible motives for writing the article.  Maybe the motive was patriotism, as Mr. Anonymous wants us to believe.  Or maybe Anonymous intends to leverage this article into a lucrative book deal and speaking tour.  Perhaps it’s someone who is getting revenge for being passed over for a promotion, or being humiliated in a staff meeting.  Maybe it’s the opening move in a longer game.  I have no insights into any of those angles, so I dropped that line of inquiry.

Washington insiders, though, were quick to develop lists of likely suspects.  As best I can tell, all of those named have issued vigorous denials. Of course they would, wouldn’t they?  One theory is that the author of the angriest denial probably wrote the article.  The angriest denunciation I’ve seen came from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but angry denunciations are her stock in trade, so that probably doesn’t mean anything.   

When he’s not demanding that the Times release the name of the author, Donald Trump has claimed that the article is a fake.  He says that about everything, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument, I’ll assume that the New York Times is being honest with its readers, and that the article in question really was written by a senior White House staffer.  If so, then a close reading of the text might provide clues about the identity of its author.

Take the word “lodestar,” for instance.  It’s an uncommon term, but it occasionally pops up in Mike Pence speeches.  The BBC, among others, have concluded on the basis of “lodestar” that Pence was Anonymous. 

But the rest of the article seems to suggest otherwise.  Anonymous seems most interested in foreign affairs, including trade policy.  The article lists “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military” as specific examples of Trump’s successes.  Those examples are interesting for what they DON’T include.  The dogs that didn’t bark may be as important as the ones that did.  You have to wonder why the article didn’t mention border security or Neil Gorsuch. 

The failure to mention Gorsuch, in particular, seems significant, since Trump’s judicial appointments constitute the main Republican excuse for their failure to hold the madman in the White House accountable.  Surely Pence would have included Gorsuch on a list of Trump’s successes.  Similarly, when it comes to foreign relations, the only thing Pence seems passionate about is Trump’s unwavering support for Netanyahu’s Israel.  Probably something to do with End Times and the Rapture.  But there was nothing in the article about moving the embassy to Jerusalem.  Apart from “lodestar,” I don’t see much of Mike Pence in the Times article.

I lean towards the likelihood that Anonymous inserted “lodestar” into the article to cast suspicion on Pence, or just to mess with him.  That’s the kind of thing a good writer would do – isolate the verbal tics of other potential suspects and insert them into your article to throw investigators off the scent.

Donald Trump himself has opined that Anonymous – or as he said in Billings last week, “Anommus” and “Anomanus” – was probably a woman, and someone with a foreign policy portfolio.  That begins to sound like Nikki Haley, currently Ambassador to the United Nations, and coincidentally someone #NeverTrumpers tout as a potential challenger for Donald Trump in the 2020 Republican presidential primaries.  Haley, of course, has denied being Anonymous in no uncertain terms.

No matter who Anonymous is, and no matter why they wrote the Times article, they’re headed down a dangerous road – the one that’s paved with good intentions.

Jeet Heer (staff writer for The New Republic), in a series of tweets on Saturday, wrote about two well-intentioned Germans who tried the “resistance from within” approach with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.  Spoiler alert:  it didn’t end well. 

This is a lightly edited transcript of Heer’s tweets.

“The novelist Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) & the political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) were near contemporaries & corresponded from 1930 until Schmitt's death. Both their lives were, of course, inseparable from the nightmare of German history.  Jünger was a great German military hero in the First World War, awarded the highest Prussian medal, a position that was solidified by his bestselling 1920 novel In the Storm of Steel, which answered pacifism by celebrating the cold sheen of mechanized war.  For Jünger, there was nothing more beautiful than Freikorps solidarity, which naturally attracted him in the Weimar period to far-right paramilitary challengers of liberal democracy, including, briefly, the Nazi Party.”

“Schmitt, a Machiavellian figure in several senses, had a different profile in the 1920s: He was not a Nazi but a conservative trying to figure out how to protect Weimar from extremism. You could say he was ‘Never Hitler.’  But like the German conservatives he counselled (notably von Papen), Schmitt's desire to preserve order led him to quickly shift from anti-Nazism to trying to trying to make Nazism work. He became the chief legal theorist of the Third Reich.”

“Once Hitler was in power, the two friends had reversed their politics of the 1920s: Junger, although not a critic of the regime, kept his distance, while Schmitt (lavished with power & position) defended the Night of the Long Knives.  Junger, smartly, told Schmitt to quit & leave Germany. Schmitt didn't and in any case quickly lost political power but not before forever tarnishing his own name. By the late 1930s, both were in a kind of limbo, an internal exile.

“The two men continued to correspond in the 1930s & 1940s, but (for obvious reasons) couldn't discuss their politics directly. So instead they relied on allegory (which Junger also did for his 1939 covertly anti-Nazi novel On the Marble Cliffs).  So instead of talking about Hitler directly, Junger & Schmitt wrote to each other about Hieronymus Bosch, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville & Malraux….”

“Schmitt kept returning to Melville's novella ‘Benito Cereno’ -- about a slave rebellion. The title character is a Spanish captain who seems to be the head of his ship but in fact is a prisoner of mutinous slaves who really direct the action.  I'll leave aside the grossness of equating revolting slaves to Nazis for another day, but it is very tied to how order-loving German conservatives saw the 1930s: Nazis were an insurgency from below which elites failed to quell.”

“The subtext of Schmitt's letters is clear: I am Benito Cereno -- when it looks like I was collaborating with the regime I was actually a prisoner with no agency.  When I read the anonymous Times op-ed, it called to mind many of the dilemmas faced by Junger & Schmitt, about conservative elites trying to tame racist demagogues, about the need for secret communication, about how quickly the adult in the room can become a prisoner.”

GONNA FIND OUT WHO'S NAUGHTY AND NICE

Here’s a scenario for you.  An incompetent commander, in over his head, issues orders that will surely end in disaster.  His subordinates decide to take matters into their own hands.  The commander is easily distracted, and the subordinates meet with initial success.  Then the disobedience becomes too obvious, and it’s apparent that a full-scale mutiny is going on.  When the commander realizes what has happened, he rants and raves, vowing to track down the culprits and hold them accountable.  Sound familiar? 

I just described, in broad outline, the plot of THE CAINE MUTINY, which was based on a real historical incident in World War II.  Lt. Commander James Marks took command of the Navy destroyer USS Hull in Seattle in the fall of 1944.  His reputation as an inexperienced and incompetent captain preceded him, and reportedly led twenty sailors to jump ship in Seattle rather than sail to the South Pacific under his command.  The fears of the AWOL sailors soon proved to be justified. 

On December 17, 1944, Admiral “Bull” Halsey decided to “see what they were made of,” so he ordered Marks to steer the Hull into the teeth of a massive typhoon in the Philippine Sea.  That nearly led to the first mutiny in the history of the United States Navy, as the crew begged their officers to relieve Marks of his command.  But the officers refused, and followed the fatal order.  Over 200 sailors died when the Hull capsized and sank in the typhoon.

Herman Wouk based his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (later a film starring Humphrey Bogart) on the Hull incident.  But in Wouk’s novel, the crew actually does mutiny against the Caine’s commanding officer, Captain Queeg.  The leaders of the mutiny are court-martialed, but are acquitted when Queeg reveals his obvious mental instability on the witness stand. 

Today, we’re watching Donald Trump pace back and forth on the deck of the Caine, raging about stolen strawberries.  Or rather, about “TREASON,” in the form of disloyal subordinates.  First, the New York Times published excerpts from Robert Woodward’s forthcoming book, FEAR.  They followed up that bombshell with an anonymous opinion piece, allegedly by a senior member of the White House staff, asserting that many of those closest to Trump think he’s insane, and have been working behind the scenes to thwart his craziest schemes.

The most remarkable thing about Woodward’s book and the anonymous op-ed piece is how much of it we already knew.  Similar stories appeared in Michael Wolff’s FIRE AND FURY last January, and again last month in Omarosa’s UNHINGED. 

Hey, guess what?  Donald Trump is dangerous and incompetent.  He’s lazy and ignorant.  He’s unfit to be president, and his staff doesn’t respect him.  They don’t respect each other very much either, and leak embarrassing stories about their colleagues as well as about Trump.

Predictably, presidential spokesmen denounced and denied everything.  And yet reporters covering the White House agreed that their own inside sources had been telling similar stories from the very beginning of Trump’s presidency.  Off the record, of course. 

The only new thing we learned this week is that some White House staff have actually mutinied.  These mutineers aren’t Deep State operatives that President Obama embedded to thwart Donald Trump.  No, Trump’s own appointees – the Shallow State, as some have called them – are the ones who have been countermanding his orders.  And the cherry on top is that until one of them spilled the beans in the New York Times, Trump didn’t even notice.

But now that he knows, he’s damned well going to find out who stole his strawberries.  Trump’s minions are dutifully issuing denials.  Famous libertarian Rand Paul has proposed a classic libertarian response:  make everyone in the White House take a lie detector test.  Atlas Shrugged, and Jesus wept.

The question before us now is whether this mutiny is a good thing or a bad thing.  I have mixed feelings about the situation.  Depending on precisely what the mutineers stopped, it could go either way.

What is clear, though, is that the anonymous senior official who wrote the Times article is at least partly trying to cover his own ass (and those of his fellow mutineers).   He/she/they know that their building is on fire and the roof will collapse soon. 

They’ll crawl out of the wreckage and start looking for new jobs.  They know that a stint in the Trump White House will look about as good on their resumes as a drunk driving conviction.  Ah, but if they were secretly part of the Resistance!  That would put everything in a different light.  Adults in the room, and all that.

I come down on the side of exhausting legal options before staging a slow-motion coup d’état.  Dude (or dudes, plural, including dude-ettes), resign your job, go public with your information, and demand that Congress do its duty.  Impeach Mr. High Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Or – as the anonymous senior official in the Times suggested – make the case for invoking the 25th amendment because Trump is mentally incapacitated.

Would either strategy work?  Not the first time.  But if there are a lot of you, maybe the cumulative effect would generate change.  At the very least, it will build momentum for regime change, starting with the November 6 mid-term elections. 

#NeverTrump Republican Rick Wilson put it this way in a tweetstorm last night.

A quick memo for #DeepStateThroat, the WH NYT Op-Ed writer. First, golf clap. Half marks. You know what you're doing in service to Trump is morally indefensible, but you're trying to "But Gorsuch!" yourself out of the ethical hole.  This tells me you at least have some vague survival instinct and know that you need a marker on the board for when the walls close in for the last time. I want you to apply that survival instinct and look to the near future.

Three things are coming, two of which you're sure. A) You know the system of subverting Trump you boasted about is marginal and unstable. Your wins were small, and now they're utterly over. B) You know Mueller is coming, November is coming, and all the easy days are over.  C) Most importantly, you're going to get caught. I know. You were careful. The burner phone. The off-campus only contact. The careful opsec. You're still going to be caught. It's ok. You should welcome it. It's your chance to do the *actual* right thing, finally.

Before they bust you out, you need to build an exit message plan. You need to have a stack of stories. I know you do. You need to go public, fast. Get into the daylight as quick as you can, not like Omarosa, but like a true whistleblower. Now, here's the hard part.

Your only value now is in pulling down the entire system. First movers? Book deal. Last? "Welcome to Arby's." The value of the tenth asshole from the WH who says, "I saw all this crazy, terrible, illegal, dangerous stuff and still tried to help" is exactly zero.  No one in the WH will help you. No one there *can* help you. The edifice is crumbling, the King is mad, and no amount of tweeting, no rally, no Fox filibuster will save it. Run before they catch you. Tell it all. Save yourself, and help save the country.

Your only value now is in pulling down the entire system. First movers? Book deal. Last? "Welcome to Arby's." The value of the tenth asshole from the WH who says, "I saw all this crazy, terrible, illegal, dangerous stuff and still tried to help" is exactly zero.  No one in the WH will help you. No one there *can* help you. The edifice is crumbling, the King is mad, and no amount of tweeting, no rally, no Fox filibuster will save it. Run before they catch you. Tell it all. Save yourself, and help save the country.

WHEN THE WHITE KNIGHT IS TALKING BACKWARDS

Between 1985 and 2005, Garry Kasparov was the greatest chess player on the planet.  He became a human rights activist in post-communist Russia, and was harassed and even assaulted for his work.  He left Russia in 2013 and now lives in New York City.  He can speak authoritatively about dealing with dictators.

On Sunday, he tweeted, “Working with demagogues and autocrats is like working with cancer. You fight it. You cut it out. These aren't political differences, it's deciding if we're going to have politics at all.”

It’s pretty clear that congressional Republicans are leaning towards not having politics at all.  Everything I’ve read lately suggests that they’ve offered a deal to Donald Trump.  What they want from Trump is nine weeks of relative calm, during which they can confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice.  They also hope that two drama-free months will allow them to salvage some endangered congressional seats on November 6.

In return, on November 7, Republicans will give Trump the all clear to fire Jeff Sessions and appoint a new Attorney General who will do his best to end, or severely limit, the Mueller investigation.  They will also agree not to interfere when Trump pardons Paul Manafort and perhaps others involved in the Russian conspiracy to steal the 2016 presidential election. 

Plainly stated – assuming my conclusions are correct – in exchange for another Supreme Court seat and slightly improved odds in the mid-term elections, Republicans have agreed to precipitate a constitutional crisis. 

There seems to be a good chance that Democrats will take back the House, and in 2019, begin serious investigations into Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors.  But it will be much harder to flip the Senate, and even if Democrats were to pick up enough seats to reach a slim majority in that body, a two-thirds vote would be necessary to convict Trump and remove him from office.  It’s hard to see that many Republican senators who’d even be willing to consider such an action.  A more likely outcome is that a Democratic House will find ways to expose Trump’s corruption, but unless he decides to quit, the only way to get rid of him will be to vote him out in the 2020 presidential election. 

Of course, this scenario begs the question of whether Trump could restrain himself for two months.  Between his stream of consciousness campaign rally rants and his rage tweets, it seems more likely that he’ll continue to blurt out incriminating statements. 

Consider this Trump tweet from September 3: “Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff......”

In other words, Trump wanted his Attorney General to obstruct justice in order to keep two congressional seats in Republican hands.  (And as you might expect, he lied in this tweet.  While Duncan Hunter’s misuse of campaign funds lasted seven years, beginning when Barack Obama was president, the insider trading that brought down Chris Collins happened in June, 2017, which is solidly in the Trump era.)   

Given the viciousness of Trump’s attacks on Jeff Sessions, I find myself wondering if there’s any truth to speculation that Sessions has cut a deal with Robert Mueller in order to avoid prosecution for his own involvement in the Trump-Russia conspiracy.  But it’s equally possible that he just enjoys having a job that allows him to harass minorities, and that he’s willing to endure any degree of humiliation in order to hang onto that job as long as possible. 

Be that as it may, neither Trump nor congressional Republicans know what Robert Mueller will do between now and November 6, and that’s a pretty serious wild card.  If Mueller (or a prosecutor in a different jurisdiction, for that matter) indicts Don Jr., Jared, or Ivanka, all bets are off.  Ditto if Trump is named as an unindicted co-conspirator.  If one or more of those hypotheticals come to pass, Trump is likely to go ballistic.  But Trump is Trump, and he could go ballistic anyway.  Two months is a long time if you’re a crazy person.

In the meantime, Rudy Giuliani is laying down a smokescreen in order to confuse as many people as possible.  In August, he claimed that Mueller was legally required to go silent during the run up to the election.  Of course, there’s no such law, rule, or regulation.  There is a defensible custom that the Department of Justice should avoid even the appearance of using the criminal justice system for partisan political purposes.  (Looking at you, James Comey.)  But neither Donald Trump nor anyone who is likely to be indicted in the near future (looking at you, Don Jr. and Jared) is on the ballot this November.  Candidates who ARE on the ballot in November are obviously free to distance themselves from the Trump crime family.  If they choose not to do that, it’s on them, not on Robert Mueller.

Most recently, Giuliani has told the NEW YORKER that Trump intends to assert a claim of executive privilege to suppress any report that Mueller might issue.  That, in Garry Kasparov’s terms, is deciding not to have politics at all.  It is further proof that Donald Trump is a demagogue who intends to ignore his oath “to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The next big battle in the war against this cancer on our body politic will take place on November 6.  We can’t afford to lose this one.

QUIET VILLAGE

Between my junior and senior years in high school, my best friend decided to graduate early and go off to college a year ahead of schedule.  I was an introvert, and though I liked a few of my classmates, I largely retreated into myself for a couple of years.  Oh, I finished high school and did a freshman year at a local college, but my social life was minimal.  The only things that kept me connected to the world outside my bedroom were my magazine subscriptions.

In those days – 1964-1966 – I subscribed to Billboard Music Week, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, The Realist, and The Village Voice.  Billboard was the main trade publication of the record industry, and it helped me keep track of new music.  As far as I know, it’s still around. 

I.F. Stone’s Weekly was a leftist political newsletter that helped cut through the official bullshit about the civil rights struggle and the war in Vietnam.  Its back issues are now online (link below).

The Realist came out monthly (most of the time) and was subtitled “free thought, criticism, and satire.”  Editor Paul Krassner was my hero back the – smart, funny, and radical.  Back issues of The Realist are also now online (link below).  Isn’t the internet wonderful?

The Village Voice touched many of those same bases every week.  I particularly looked forward to reading Richard Goldstein’s Pop Eye columns, and a couple of years later, Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide album reviews.  The Voice was the first (and until Rolling Stone came along in 1967, the only) national journal that covered rock music appreciatively.  And they had a remarkable stable of other writers – Nat Hentoff, Andrew Sarris, Ellen Willis, John Wilcock, Jack Newfield, Garry Giddens, Wayne Barrett, and others I’ve probably forgotten.

When I moved to Lawrence, Kansas and enrolled in the University of Kansas in the fall of 1966, I let my subscriptions to I.F. Stone’s Weekly lapse.  The Realist was moving from monthly to whenever Krassner got around to it, which might be next month, or next year.  By the early 70s, waiting for a new issue of The Realist was like waiting for the next installment of Game Of Thrones. 

But I continued to renew my Village Voice subscription until about 1980, when its editorial priorities had begun to narrow (from my perspective) and I had other resources to keep me abreast of pop culture.  No hard feelings, but I was no longer in a New York state of mind.

Now comes word that The Village Voice is shutting down.  End of an era, and all that.  I’m grateful that it was around when I needed it.  RIP, The Village Voice.

http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php

http://www.ep.tc/realist/

PLEASE DON'T TALKE ABOUT ME WHEN I'M GONE

One of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies is Mark Antony’s speech on the assassination of Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.” Then, of course, Antony goes on to praise Caesar.

There’s a Latin phrase – de mortuis nil nisi bonum – that dates back centuries before Julius Caesar lived and died.  In English, it’s “of the dead, nothing but good.”  Not speaking ill of the dead strikes me as a generally sensible policy, at least in the short term, and assuming the deceased wasn’t a truly awful person.  Let the loved ones grieve in peace and save the criticism until after the funeral.

But the ancient Romans weren’t operating on internet time, which was probably one of the reasons why they declined and fell.  Nowadays, everyone has a hot take on everything, and the sooner you get yours out there, the better.  That’s why I’m going to offer a few opinions about John McCain right now, even though he hasn’t been buried yet. As far as I’m concerned, your first funeral is the one that counts.  

There’s no reason to doubt that McCain comported himself heroically as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.  Apart from that, the highest praise I can offer is that Donald Trump hates him.  McCain did some expert trolling of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin when he planned the details of his own funeral. 

McCain was probably the best Republican of his time, which is damning him with faint praise.  He was on the wrong side of most policy debates in his long career, but he had an authenticity about him that made most of his fellow Republicans look like empty suits. Which of course they were.

There was plenty to criticize in both McCain’s personal and public life.  In the Navy, his recklessness cost taxpayers three airplanes, not including the one shot down over Vietnam.  He cheated repeatedly on his first wife.  I don’t know if he was personally homophobic, but he consistently spoke and voted against gay issues.  He was an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Iraq.  For all his mavericky-ness, he toed the Republican Party line the vast majority of the time. 

But nothing he did was worse than giving Sarah Palin a national stage in 2008, by making her his running mate.  She was a con artist whose primary skill was her instinctive ability to connect with the people who, eight years later, would become Donald Trump’s deplorables.  Palin laid the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump and the zombification of the Republican Party.

To his credit, McCain owned up to some of those mistakes, although it would be fair to describe much of his self-criticism as too little too late.  In today’s degraded political climate, I guess that makes him a statesman.

IN MY MIDNIGHT CONFESSIONS

There’s an old saying that if you put a frog in a pot of water and lower the temperature very gradually, the frog will stay put until it’s too late.  He’s frozen in a block of ice.  Or something like that.

Today’s Republican Party is that frog, and Donald Trump is the block of ice.  I think most of Republicans are happy to be chillin’ with the villain.  But I have to wonder whether, if congressional Republicans had known eighteen months ago what they know now, at least a few of them would have been shocked enough to say oh my god, we can’t let this happen. 

But now they know.  And they’re starting to worry about the consequences.  On Sunday, Axios reported (link below) that Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have written a confession of malfeasance and dereliction of duty.  Of course, they didn’t frame it quite that way.  They’re circulating a list of investigations they expect a new Democratic House majority will launch in 2019 if the expected blue wave materializes and Democrats take back the House in November. 

Nothing on the list is surprising.  They’re all matters that, in bygone days, congressional majorities in either party would have handled as a matter of course.  But contemporary Republicans use it to frighten each other, like kids telling ghost stories.

The good news is that it’s almost September, and the mid-term elections that once seemed an eternity away will be here in eleven weeks.  Arizona’s primary elections, which also seemed an eternity away, are taking place today.  I voted by mail weeks ago, so I’m just sitting back and watching

I’m especially interested in AZ’s Senate race, where Martha McSally, a bland right-wing Republican, is running against two unabashed white nationalists.  Send your thoughts and prayers to racist Republicans who are forced to choose between an experienced bigot, in the person of convicted criminal Joe Arpaio, and loony newcomer Kelli Ward, who might be even worse.  Well, it would be (almost) impossible to be worse than Joe Arpaio, but Ward is giving him a run for his money. 

It probably doesn’t matter much, since it’s likely that Ward and Arpaio will split the MAGA vote and hand the win to McSally.  The best thing about this race is that McSally’s Senate candidacy means she can’t run for re-election in House CD2.  That gives the Democratic congressional nominee a great shot at taking back the seat that rightfully belongs to Gabby Giffords. 

There’s so much at stake in the 2018 mid-term elections that I can only think about them with a mixture of anticipation and dread.  But it’s a very encouraging sign that Republicans themselves seem to be expecting the worst. 

https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-elections-republicans-preparation-investigations-180abf7b-0de8-4670-ae8a-2e6da123c584.html

MADE IT, MA! TOP O' THE WORLD!

So Mike Pence wants a permanent American presence on the Moon, does he?  How about a penal colony, whose first inmates could be members of the Trump crime family?  Better build it fast, though.

Donald Trump has always been shady, and now, as his alibis turn to ashes and his legal options dwindle, he’s begun talking like a mobster. Since he pretty much is a mobster, talking like one isn’t a big stretch.  He’s even tweeted sympathetically about Al Capone.  The G-Men could never convict Capone on any of his manly gangster crimes.  Instead, the poor fellow had to do time in Alcatraz for income tax evasion.  Witch hunt!

When Michael Cohen turned on him, Trump exposed his criminal mindset by calling his former fixer a rat.  Not a liar, mind you, but a snitch.  He complained to Fox & Friends that it was unfair that small time crooks were encouraged to inform on their bosses in return for lighter sentences.  Paul Manafort, though – now there’s a stand-up guy.  Trump praises the grifters and con artists in his Cabinet, but complains bitterly about his own appointees in the Justice (or “Justice”) Department who are actually behaving honorably.  He’s trying to run the American government like a crime family.

Maybe that’s not surprising, since Trump has been around crime figures all his life.  I poked around and found some fascinating links between the New York Mafia’s Five Families in the 1970s and Trump’s contemporary legal difficulties.

I’ll start with Carlo Gambino, the most powerful organized crime figure in the country in the early 70s.  In 1973, a small-time crook named James McBratney murdered his nephew.  Murdering relatives of Mafia dons is not the key to living a long life, and it wasn’t long before McBratney was gunned down in a bar. There were several witnesses, all of whom identified John Gotti as one of the shooters.  He and an accomplice were charged with murder.

Enter Roy Cohn, hired by Gambino to defend the killers.  Remarkably, Cohn negotiated the charge down to attempted manslaughter.  I guess you could argue that there was indeed an attempt to slaughter a man, although usually when those attempts are successful, it’s called murder.  Be that as it may, Gotti was sentenced to four years in prison and was paroled after serving two.  We’ll pick up his story shortly. 

Roy Cohn was a man of many parts, all of them bad.  He was Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel in the 1950s, and abetted McCarthy’s attempt to purge the government of suspected communists and homosexuals.  The “communists” were mostly imaginary, but the lives of many gay men were ruined during the “lavender scare” of the early 50s. 

After McCarthy’s career went down in flames, Cohn moved to New York and became a lawyer/fixer for the rich and powerful, one of whom was Donald Trump.  Trump’s corporation violated the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent space in their 39 apartment buildings to African Americans.  Cohn and Trump lost that case, but Cohn proved helpful to Trump in other ways.  Among other things, Cohn introduced Trump to Rupert Murdoch, the man who is responsible for Fox News, which is where Trump gets most of his fake news and bad advice.  Cohn was eventually disbarred for a variety of unethical and unprofessional acts. 

Interestingly for a guy who was so publicly homophobic, Cohn himself contracted AIDS in the 80s, and died of the disease.  His pal Roger Stone insists that “Roy wasn’t gay.  He was a man who liked having sex with men.”  That seems like a distinction without a difference.  Roger Stone is another guy who became a friend of the Donald.  Stone acknowledges that he’s likely to be charged in connection with the Trump-Russia collusion scandal. 

As for John Gotti, he returned to the Gambino family when he got out of prison, and found that it was riven by factional disputes.  Carlo Gambino had died while Gotti was in prison, and had named his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, as his successor.  There were other claimants to the throne, and Gotti sided with them.  He was an ambitious guy, and in 1985, he made his move.  He put a hit on Castellano and became the new head of the Gambino crime family.

Unlike his peers in Mafia leadership, Gotti enjoyed publicity, and was lionized by the New York tabloids as “the dapper Don” and “the Teflon Don.”  He lost his Teflon in the early 90s when he ran into the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, a fellow named Robert Mueller.  Mueller was appointed as the Director of the FBI in 2001, while Gotti died in prison in 2002.    

Al Capone didn’t die in prison.  Frank Nitti and the Chicago Outfit were getting along just fine without him, and Capone was in no shape to run a criminal empire in any event.   By the time he was paroled in 1939, he was suffering from late-stage syphilis.  His doctors said he had the mentality of a 12-year-old.  And that brings us nearly full circle.  Capone knew he was sick, and spent the last years of his life in various care facilities. 

Our guy with the mentality of a 12-year-old has no such self-awareness.  He wants a wall, a parade, a Space Force, and now, apparently, a moon colony.  He probably won’t have much luck with those. 

But what he wants most is to dominate people, and as president, he has the power to do a lot of damage.  Because he has the mentality of a 12-year-old boy, he’ll screw it up, but the next few months are likely to be a rough ride.  Buckle your seatbelts, everyone.    

ALL THE TRUTH IN THE WORLD ADDS UP TO ONE BIG LIE

Dang, where did all these witches come from?  And what impact will Tuesday’s news have on the body politic?  To quote Bill Kristol quoting Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”  I’ll take it.

Christmas morning may be ho-hum compared to the bonanza of goodies we got on Tuesday.  There was symmetry in the 8 counts that Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to, and the 8 counts Paul Manafort was convicted of.  Those two political earthquakes dominated the headlines, but the day actually brought us a trifecta. 

The third piece of good news was that Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter (and his wife) were indicted on charges of using campaign funds to pay their personal bills.  Hunter was the second congressional Republican to endorse Donald Trump.  The first?  Why it was Chris Collins, who was charged with insider trading two weeks ago.

Donald Trump sure seems to be a magnet for shady characters, doesn’t he?  Birds of a feather and all that.  Or as Rick Wilson says, “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” 

For me, Tuesday’s most intriguing news was the revelation in one of the charges Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to that he had an accomplice in committing one of his felonies.  An unnamed “candidate” conspired with Cohen to make an illegal campaign contribution to Donald Trump in the form of hush money to keep two women from spilling their secrets right before the election.  Gosh, who could that candidate have been?  Probably Hillary Clinton, right?  Lock her up!

But no.  Lanny Davis, Cohen’s lawyer, said straight out that the candidate was Donald Trump.  Davis then posed the key question: “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn't they be a crime for Donald Trump?”  Indeed.

At a rally in West Virginia, Trump ranted “Where is the collusion?  Find some collusion.”  Lanny Davis obliged him.  Davis indicated that Cohen would be happy to talk to Robert Mueller’s team about “not just the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which is what the Trump Tower meeting was all about, but also about knowledge of the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and cheered it on.” 

Trump is now, for all practical purposes, an unindicted co-conspirator in the commission of a felony.  His partner in crime has already ratted him out on that charge, and appears to be ready to spill his guts to the Special Counsel about a lot more collusion and obstruction of justice. 

It won’t matter at all to the MAGA crowd. (“My Attorney Got Arrested.”)  They’re deep in denial, and their reflexive response will be, “I know you are, but what am I?”  It won’t matter much to congressional Republicans, who are terrified of the MAGA crowd.  But Tuesday’s news should further alienate independent voters and thus help Democrats in swing districts.  Maybe that’s the best news of all. 

It’s time for Trump to play his trump card.  Yes, Rudy Giuliani must go on TV and dazzle the nation with his rhetorical gymnastics yet again.  If truth isn’t truth, then maybe a felony isn’t a felony.  Collusion isn’t collusion.  Conspiracy isn’t conspiracy.  High crimes and misdemeanors aren’t high crimes and misdemeanors.  What have they got to lose?

I'M TELLING YOU, MY DEAR, THAT IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE

In 1970, Johnny Cash asked the musical question, “What Is Truth?”  On Sunday, Team Trump weighed in with a couple of unconventional answers.  

Trump’s TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani got all mystical, telling the host of Meet The Press that “Truth isn’t truth.”  While the world was trying to figure out whether Rudy was being oracular or merely Orwellian (or maybe just stupid), Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren chimed in with a definition of her own.  “Truth is the new hate speech,” she tweeted. 

“What a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”  That’s from George Orwell himself, in the novel 1984.  Decades ago, when the year 1984 was still in the distant the future, I read the book for a high school English class.  We took it for granted that Orwell was describing life in Russia.  Nothing like that could ever happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  

There’s an old saying, often wrongly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  Steven Dutch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, has updated that maxim.  “Eternal vigilance,” he says, “is not the price of liberty. It’s the price of everything. Every object you own has to be maintained. In society, there will always be people who oppose whatever you hold dear. They will try to overturn, evade or weaken your reforms. Others will seek power, wealth, or status without doing any work. The only way to keep what you have is to guard it constantly.”

We failed to do that in 2016, and now we have a president who takes orders from Russia while his party looks the other way.  But Putin’s man in D.C. wasn’t very bright to begin with, and his cognitive decline is clearly accelerating.  He seems to be re-enacting a cheap reality show version of King Lear’s descent into madness, insisting on unremitting praise from his courtiers while raging incoherently against his enemies.

Trump was overconfident when he won the election.  He thought being president would be easy.  He’d spent a lifetime using his wealth and fame to stay out of serious trouble, and now – or so he thought – he’d have the resources of the federal government to watch his back while he basked in the support of his fans.  What could go wrong?

But Trump and his family broke laws along the way, and they were sloppy about it.  The press that indulged him when he was a playboy real estate tycoon and covered him as an entertaining change of pace when he got into politics, belatedly began doing their job once he was elected president.  Now his sins are catching up with him. 

His public life and his private life are both under scrutiny.  Robert Mueller knows things Trump desperately wants to keep secret.  Ditto for Michael Cohen, for Omarosa, and for Stormy Daniels and her attorney Michael Avenatti.  Trump is cornered, and he’s completely unprepared to deal with people who can’t be bought or bullied.  All he can do is rage-tweet.

Hillary Clinton got it right when she said “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”  Or anything with else.  These are dangerous times.  It’s scary how much is riding on the November 6 mid-term elections.  Eternal vigilance everyone!