TO GET A LOT OF KNOWLEDGE WE'LL PROBABLY NEVER EVER USE AGAIN

According to the Bible (Genesis 1:26), God gave man dominion over animals:  “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Unfortunately, it appears that some creeping things didn’t get the message.  A few days ago, a young woman in suburban Phoenix decided to exercise her dominion over the jaguars in the Wildlife World Zoo, Aquarium and Safari Park.  She broke into the jaguar enclosure to take a selfie.  Hey, she was exercising dominion.  What could possibly go wrong?   

But one of the jaguars was apparently unfamiliar with the Book of Genesis, and instead of politely posing with the interloper, it attacked her.  The woman’s injuries looked painful, but did not appear life-threatening.  If you enjoy stories like this, you’re in luck, because they apparently happen all the time.  A YouTube search for “zoo animals attack” will yield hours of entertainment. 

I don’t know anything about the woman who decided it would be a good idea to get up close and personal with a jaguar.  I assume she meant no harm.  She was just clueless about jaguars.  Maybe just clueless in general.   

Speaking of creeping things, Paul Manafort has now been sentenced in two different jurisdictions, with at least one more trial to go.  His first sentence, 47 months, was considerably below the Special Counsel’s sentencing recommendation.  The judge argued that, apart from being a traitor and career criminal, Manafort had led a “blameless” life.  If you’re reading this, you know enough about Paul Manafort to know that “blameless” is not a word most people would use to describe his life and works. 

I mention the judge here simply as an example of what happens when one wealthy white man looks at another wealthy white man and thinks, “there but for the grace of God go I.”  Wealthy white men always give each other the benefit of the doubt.   

As examples of unconscious privilege, though, the judge and the jaguar lady have been left in the dust by an improbable scandal over college admissions.  Raise your hand if you thought that the biggest story of the week would involve college admissions practices. 

For nearly 40 years, I was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona.  Towards the end of that period, I got to interact regularly with senior university administrators.  I watched the sausage being made, and sometimes it wasn’t pretty.  Most of the administrators I worked with were good people, doing good work under difficult circumstances.  A few of them were jerks.  In other words, life inside academe is a lot like life outside it.  I’m not completely cynical about 21st century higher education, but I harbor no illusions about what goes on in those ivory towers.  And yet despite all my hard-earned worldly wisdom, this particular college admissions scandal took me by surprise. 

We should quickly acknowledge that there’s nothing new about wealthy parents buying their kids’ way into a prestige college.  From legacy admissions in Ivy League schools to large building fund contributions at public institutions, rich people have more options than the rest of us.  Just like they have in all other areas of life.  Rich people having leverage and using it doesn’t surprise me.

No, the thing that surprised me about the latest scandal is that someone analyzed the college admissions process and figured out that coaches, even in minor sports, have leverage in admissions decisions.  Unlike football and men’s basketball coaches with their megabuck salaries and endorsements, coaches of minor college sports don’t make that much money.  Golly, I wonder if any of those underpaid coaches would be interested in supplementing their income?  Why yes, some of them would.  In return for large bribes, some of these coaches helped rich kids with bad grades enroll in their prestigious institution of higher learning. 

I can’t help but wonder, though.  What happens when one of those bribery-admit kids gets to campus?  Does he have to at least try to play water polo?  How many roster spots can a coach afford to give to non-contributors before somebody gets suspicious?

Opponents of affirmative action complain that those policies penalize deserving white (or male) students in favor of rewarding minorities who have less worthy academic credentials.  This week’s college admissions scandal should make it clear that wealthy white kids have their own affirmative action programs.  Some of it is “hide in plain sight” obvious – the legacy system that got George W. Bush into Yale, for instance – but parts of it have been kept on the downlow until now. 

Will shining a light on this latest sketchy scheme bring about meaningful reform?  I doubt it.  After all, bribery is already illegal, which is why the FBI got involved.  No doubt some coaches will lose their jobs, and maybe even go to jail.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the parents.  The charges carry stiff penalties.  But it’s hard not to imagine a scenario in which a sympathetic judge notes that apart from a little light bribery, these moms and dads have led blameless lives.  What parent doesn’t want the best for their children?  We’ll waive the prison sentence and let them off with a fine.  Maybe even a big fine.  But these are people who can afford to fork over $200,000 to a whopping $6.5 million to get their underachieving offspring into college.  How much of a deterrent is the fine likely to be?

I have a better suggestion. Randy Newman got it right when he said, “It’s money that matters in the USA.”  But there’s a way to leverage that uncomfortable truth to make elite colleges more affordable for everyone.  I call it the Robin Hood option.  Elite colleges should reserve a certain number of slots in each freshman class for wealthy underachievers, and auction them off to the highest bidders.  Then they should use that extra revenue to hire more faculty and offer tuition rebates to the rest of the freshman class, whatever their parents’ income. 

The Robin Hood option even benefits the undeserving rich.  The cost of their kid’s “enhanced” tuition could wind up being significantly less than the bribes they were willing to pay.  Not to mention the fact that they wouldn’t have to commit a felony to get their kid into a prestige school.  That sounds like a win-win solution to me.

THIS IS MY CONFESSION, BABY, AND IT'S SUNG BY ALL YOUR SONGS

They say confession is good for the soul.  Here’s a confession.  I often have trouble summoning up outrage over the latest celebrity scandal.  That’s true even when the behavior in question is truly outrageous, as in the case of the pedophilia allegations against Michael Jackson (or R. Kelly, or Woody Allen, sadly ad infinitum). 

When a new allegation surfaces, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to shift from support for the victims (nothing wrong with that) to enthusiastic demands that the newly disgraced bad guy be cast into outer darkness.  From this day forward, no respectable person should attend, watch, listen to, or read his work.  He’s persona non grata until further notice, and don’t hold your breath waiting for that notice to come.

There’s even a name for this phenomenon – “cancel culture,” in which the canon in a given field is subject to instantaneous revision as the names of the unrighteous are purged from the rolls.  Two new documentaries have spotlighted the (alleged) crimes of Michael Jackson and R. Kelly.   I don’t have much at stake with these two artists.  I like a few of Michael Jackson’s songs, mostly from the Jackson 5 days.  I’m completely unfamiliar with the life and works of R. Kelly.  I don’t know whether allegations of pedophilia came as a shock to Kelly’s fans.  But anyone who paid attention to the last decade of Michael Jackson’s life had to know that something was seriously wrong with him.  Do the gory details make that much difference?

I started this post a few weeks ago, prompted by the controversy over Louis C.K.’s return to standup.  People had questions and concerns.  Is it too soon?  But if not now, when?  Is he sufficiently penitent?  But how can we know for sure? And who gets to decide?  Should we boycott?  But who should we boycott?  Louis C.K. was barely on my radar screen before his scandal broke, and I see no reason to start paying attention to him now.  I’m not boycotting him, exactly.  I’m simply continuing to ignore someone I never paid attention to in the first place.

But while I’m going to stay out of the debate about Louis C.K.’s path to redemption (assuming there is such a path, as well as someone with the authority to decide whether and when he’s completed it), I AM interested in the broader question of how to relate to art that was created by deeply flawed people.  For me, it’s not just an academic question, because quite a bit of my favorite music and literature was produced by people who led problematic personal lives.

While I was ruminating on these matters, Corinne Cooper posted a Facebook link to an article by Ben Freeland, entitled “When Does Good Art by Awful People Become Untouchable?”  Freeland offers examples of artists he regards as awful people, ranging from contemporaries like Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby to historical figures such as Charles Dickens.

Cutting to the chase, in my view the question posed in the article’s title is a false choice.  I believe that good art never becomes bad art just because its creator was a bad person. 

To me, it doesn’t make sense to argue, for instance, that “CHINATOWN is a great movie, but no one should watch it, because the director was a sexual predator.” Or “DAVID COPPERFIELD is a great novel, but no one should read it, because the author dumped his wife and took up with a floozy.” 

Creating art doesn’t exempt an artist from the rules of civilized behavior.  We should be open minded enough to tolerate eccentricities.  But there’s a difference between being eccentric and being a dick, not to mention being a criminal.  If an artist is a dick, by all means call him out.  If he’s crossed the line into criminality, put him on trial and throw him in jail if he’s convicted.  Do everything possible to make his victims whole, and to prevent him from victimizing others in the future.  Boycott his work if you think economic pressure is likely to bring about a change in his behavior, or help change the behavior of others like him. 

But a boycott isn’t going to have much impact on Charles Dickens and other dicks from bygone ages.  No one can read everything, and no one is obligated to read anything.  But judging the content of a creative work by the character of its maker strikes me as unnecessarily restrictive – not to mention that I have no information about the private lives of most of the artists I enjoy.

Personally, I think D.H. Lawrence got it right when he wrote: “Never trust the artist.  Trust the tale.”  Artistic creativity is a mysterious thing.  Tales take on a life of their own in the telling.  The best stories and songs go well beyond the intent, and even the understanding, of their creators.

That said, actors pose a special challenge in separating the artist from the tale he’s telling.  An actor’s job, after all, is to pretend to be someone he’s not.  Actors have makeup artists to help them look good and screenwriters to make them sound good – smart, brave, compassionate, and/or witty, depending on the circumstances. 

When I was a kid, I absorbed it all uncritically.  As far as I knew, Lucille Ball and Lucy Ricardo were the same person.  Of courses, when I was a kid, I also believed in Santa Claus.  But I got older and at least a little bit wiser.  I’m now able to distinguish between an actor and the character he or she is playing.  I believe it ought to be possible to admire Cliff Huxtable and despise Bill Cosby. 

And having said that, I’m also aware that there are people who insist that it’s impossible to separate the art from the artist.  All I can say is that those folks have a different view of art – and of human nature – than I do. 

I’ll limit myself to one example.  Frank Sinatra had one of the most expressive voices of the 20th century.  He could take a banal lyric and infuse it with loneliness, yearning, bitterness, or delight.  He was clearly a sensitive man.  A romantic, even.  Who knows, maybe his sensitivity made him feel unmanly and he tried to compensate by being a tough guy.  For whatever reason, he had lifelong anger-management problems, hung out with mobsters, and treated women badly.  Sinatra was often a nasty piece of work.  And he was also a great singer.   

Do Sinatra’s private flaws outweigh his artistic achievement?  I say no.  I also say it’s a mistake to frame it as an either/or question.  I can enjoy Sinatra’s music without endorsing his personality.  If I’m naïve enough to assume that artists I admire share my personal values, I deserve to be disappointed. 

I live in a world full of flawed people, including me.  If I focused on their vices to the exclusion of their virtues, I’d quickly turn into a grumpy old man.  OK, I’m already a grumpy old man, but I’d get even grumpier.

My choice is to enjoy good art wherever I find it.  I do my best to avoid assuming that because someone is a good actor, or singer, or basketball player, he must also be a good person.  Maybe he is, and maybe he isn’t.  There’s no way to extrapolate from professional excellence to personal probity. 

Having said all that, I’ll finish with this.  I don’t presume to be the arbiter of what is and isn’t acceptable art.  You, dear reader, have a right to draw your personal line in a different place than I do.  As Jiminy Cricket used to say, let your conscience be your guide. 

https://medium.com/@benfreeland/when-does-good-art-by-awful-people-become-untouchable-b24b8fdd118f

THIS TIME THEY BIT OFF MORE THAN THEY CAN CHEW

“They were careless people,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald about the protagonists in The Great Gatsby.  “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Donald Trump has probably never heard of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, but he and his family are their 21st century successors.  And Michael Cohen was one of the people Trump hired to clean up his messes. 

Cohen testified to Congress on Wednesday that Donald Trump didn’t expect to win the election; he entered the race as a marketing ploy, and was surprised (and initially dismayed) when he won.  Conservative pundits said, hey, wait a minute.  You can’t argue that Trump didn’t want to win and simultaneously argue that he and his campaign asked Russia to help them beat Hillary Clinton. 

It’s a fair point, but one that is easily resolved.  In fact, there are several ways to reconcile this apparent contradiction.  The most obvious one is simple logic – you can participate in a race (be it a foot race or a political race) not expecting to win but still trying your best.  I don’t think that particular logic applies in this case, but I offer the example by way of demonstrating that the apparent contradiction is less than meets the eye.

I think Trump’s 2016 campaign makes a lot more sense if you assume that Trump is Putin’s willing dupe; and that both of them have motives that profoundly anti-democratic.  Both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are far enough outside the mainstream of American politics that pundits find it impossible to process their motives. 

My assumption is that Trump began his campaign in 2015 with one set of motives – primarily to extend his brand into the political arena in preparation for some big media launch.  But when victory became at least plausible (say when he was informed that Russia was willing to intervene on his behalf), he decided to go for it.  He enjoyed speaking before adoring crowds, listening to them cheer his every excess and transgression.  For a narcissist, it was the ultimate validation.  He could say and do anything – he boasted that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and not lose his base.  Why not go for it? 

That doesn’t mean he’s a criminal mastermind, playing eight-dimensional chess.  He’s a spoiled rich guy who’s accustomed to getting away with things.  As Sarah Kendzior put it, “Trump is not playing chess, he's playing charades. He's a career criminal skilled at spin. His backers, a transnational alliance, design the geopolitical strategy, not Trump.”

Vladimir Putin is capable of playing multi-dimensional chess, but I don’t believe that in 2015,  he expected expect Donald Trump to wind up in the White House.  He was happy enough to see Trump enter the race as a disruptive force.  Throwing sand in the gears of the American political system advances Russia’s long-term strategic goals.  Even when the primaries were over and the general election turned out to be Trump vs. Clinton, my guess is that Putin still didn’t expect his boy to win.  His initial aim was simply to damage Hillary Clinton’s reputation, so that she’d take office under a cloud and be preoccupied with scandals from day one. 

Basically, Putin bought himself a lottery ticket and hit the jackpot.  Trump, whose overriding ambition for much of 2016 was getting Putin to support the construction of Trump Tower Moscow, went along for the ride and suddenly found himself with a job, and a life, he didn’t want. 

If you find that hard to believe, take a look at the remarkable photo that accompanies this post.  It was taken on election night, 2016, ABC had just called the race for Trump.  Don Jr. is ecstatic.  Trump’s inner circle applauds and cheers.  But Trump himself?  I’d say he looks like his dog just died, except that Trump hates dogs.  He certainly doesn’t look like a guy who just achieved the goal of a lifetime. 

He looks more like a guy watching the shit hit the fan in slow motion.He doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen next, but he knows his life just changed irreversibly, in ways he can’t predict and probably won’t like.For that one brief, shining moment, Donald Trump was the smartest person in the room.

BEFORE YOU ACCUSE, CRITICIZE AND ABUSE

Jesus saved some of his most withering critiques for those he considered hypocrites.  “Why,” he asked (Matthew 7:3), “beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”  Or, in the words of the old saying, people who live in tin houses shouldn’t throw can openers.  Or something like that. 

Speaking of hypocrites, here’s Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, who tweeted this on Tuesday: “Hey @MichaelCohen212 - Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot...”  Witness intimidation much?

As it happens, Gaetz represents Florida’s ultra-red 1st Congressional District, encompassing the western panhandle.  Folks in the greater Pensacola area have been willing to overlook his 16 speeding tickets (not to mention perhaps as many as eight DUI’s), and also the fact that his college roommate was found dead under “suspicious circumstances.”  Florida newspapers have even suggested that Gaetz leads a “gay lifestyle” – specifically, that he had an affair with a closeted evangelical megachurch pastor. 

How did Teflon Matt overcome those obstacles?  It didn’t hurt that Gaetz’s daddy was the most powerful politician in north Florida, which is how Gaetz was able to stay out of jail long enough to win a seat in the House of Representatives.  Gaetz loves Jesus, the 2nd Amendment, and Donald Trump, not necessarily in that order.  In other words, Gaetz is a pretty typical modern Republican.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a typical modern Republican is trying to intimidate an important witness against Donald Trump.  But the strange thing is that Gaetz decided to attack Cohen by accusing him of acting like Trump.  Gosh, is cheating on your spouse a bad thing? 

Mote, meet Beam.If you don’t approve of adultery, maybe turn your attention first to your glorious leader.Donald Trump never met a sin he didn’t like, but his favorite is adultery.He’s pretty fond of lying, too, so when Republicans in Congress and in the media say that Cohen’s testimony can’t be trusted because he lied in the past, we have a right to insist that they apply the same standard to the Liar in Chief.

I CALLED MY CONGRESSMAN AND HE SAID, QUOTE

If you’ve read many of my posts, you know that I use a lot of quotations from people who are smarter and more articulate than I am.  It adds a touch of class, so to speak.  This particular post is really classy, because (once you get past this introductory paragraph) it consists entirely of things other folks have said better than I could. 

Joe Delmonico: “In the 1640's the Dutch inhabitants of New Amsterdam built a 12' wall to keep the bad hombres out. In 1664 the British ignored the wall and took New Amsterdam by sea. It's now called New York. They took down the wall and built a street. It's called Wall Street.” 

Sarah Kendzior: “In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters.  People for whom these problems have no alternative but to matter – for they structure the limitations of their lives – are locked out of the discussion.”

Sarah Kendzior: “This is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”

Sarah Kendzior: "The President has spent his whole life acting like Faust only without an actual soul to sell."    

Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition.… There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Helder Camara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.  When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

Josh Marshall: “Going back 3 years today and reviewing everything, or at least the big stuff, it's genuinely hard to imagine how Trump could have acted any more guilty than he has. Set aside whether he's guilty. If someone said, try to act as guilty as possible. He basically maxed out.”

Rick Wilson: “The arc of Trump’s recent history is long, but it always bends towards Russia.”

I'LL MAKE A BET THAT YOU'RE GONNA GET JOHN WAYNE BEFORE HE DIES

One morning last week, I checked my Twitter feed only to discover that John Wayne’s 1971 Playboy Interview was trending.  What the heck, I thought, William Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”

Turns out that Wayne was feeling feisty that day, and offered some intemperate remarks about minorities and women.  The interviewer baited him at times, but Wayne refused to equivocate.  He said what was on his mind, a lot of which came from the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.  Before Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, people had to make do with whatever right-wing propaganda they could find. 

Wayne said a lot of outrageous things, but these two lines drew most of the attention:  “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”  Someone on Twitter must have quoted these lines, which quite naturally drew flak.  Which is fair, because they weren’t taken out of context. 

The second sentence, about not giving authority to irresponsible people, makes perfect sense.  But if the second sentence is a no-brainer, the first sentence seems simply brainless.  White supremacy is precisely the thing that prevents minorities from living life, exercising liberty, and pursuing happiness like white Americans.  The inability to see that is prima facie evidence of white privilege.   

In 1971, when Richard Nixon was president and so popular that his followers were talking about repealing the two-term presidential limit, Wayne’s views weren’t all that uncommon.  He was more honest than most Republicans could afford to be in 1971, but he wasn’t running for office and felt free to say what was on his mind. 

John Wayne was born in 1907, at about the time that Bert Williams, America’s first Black superstar, launched his recording career. That’s him on the left in the image that accompanies this post.  W.C. Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw – and the saddest man I ever knew.”  Born in the Bahamas, Williams grew up in America, and formed a partnership with George Walker (on the right, in the top hat). 

Together, Williams and Walker took Broadway by storm in 1896, with Walker playing a city slicker and Williams playing a country rube in various comedies and musical productions.  Williams recorded some of his comic routines, and they became best-sellers in the earliest days of the commercial recording industry.  His recitation of “Nobody” was a number one hit in 1906 (YouTube link below), as was “He’s a Cousin Of Mine” in 1907.  

Williams died in 1922, and is largely forgotten today, although his legacy surfaced in popular culture at irregular intervals.  In 1940, Duke Ellington composed “A Portrait of Bert Williams.”  During World War II, the U.S. Navy commissioned a ship called the USS Bert Williams.  Bob Hope performed “Nobody” in the popular 1956 film “The Seven Little Foys.” Johnny Cash recorded it shortly before he died.  Sam Cooke had a hit with “Cousin Of Mine” in 1964, the last single he released before his murder; and Jerry Reed resurrected Williams’ “Dark Town Poker Club” (as “Uptown Poker Club”) in 1973.

That’s interesting enough, but it gets better.  Williams was light-skinned compared to his sidekick.  On stage, he used burnt cork to blacken his face in order to appear as a more convincing Negro for white audiences.  Williams may have been the first Black man to appear onstage in blackface, although blackface had been a tradition among white performers at least since 1828, when Thomas “Daddy” Rice introduced his stage persona, a character known as Jim Crow.

Nearly a century has passed since Bert Williams died, and nearly 50 years since John Wayne’s Playboy interview.  And still white supremacy continues to dominate America’s civic discourse.  I refer, of course, to the state (or commonwealth, if you prefer) of Virginia, and its Governor and Attorney General, both of whom have blackface issues in their past.  Now we’re of the past as the 1980s, when you would hope that people – especially college educated people – would have known better.  But apparently not.

Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring were in college in the 80s.  College kids do some stupid things.  That’s partly what college is for, to get some late adolescent stupidity out of your system.  But blackface is a form of stupidity that feels particularly mean-spirited.

As best I can tell, neither Northam nor Herring have pursued racist agendas in their political careers, which would suggest that they’ve outgrown the casual racism of their younger days.  If that’s the case – and people on the ground in Virginia are better positioned to make that call than I am – then I’d be inclined to forgive them and move forward. 

Why?  Two reasons, one moral and one practical.   

If I may get all Biblical for a moment, let me point out that Jesus said (Matthew 7:1), “Judge not, that ye not be judged,” and (John 8:7), “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”  St. Paul echoed that theme when he wrote (Romans 3:10 & 23), “There is none righteous, no, not one….  For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

I’m not an office holder and I’m not running for anything, so my tepid youthful indiscretions will probably never become public.  But I’ll confess that, even though I never wore blackface or a Klan hood, I’m absolutely sure that as a kid, I said racist things.  I remember, for instance, an elementary school music class in which we learned “Old Black Joe,” and the teacher kept trying to get us to sound blacker – “I’se comin’, I’se comin’” and so on.  I sang it her way without a second thought. 

And my youthful racism wasn’t directed solely at African-Americans, but at anyone with a different religion, race, nationality, or ethnic background.  I grew up hearing derogatory names and ethnic jokes, and it stands to reason that I absorbed the terminology, if not the attitude behind it.  That was a long time ago, but when the roll is called up yonder, I’ll have to hope for justice tempered with mercy.  A whole lot of mercy.  And it seems to me that as a matter of plain fairness, I ought to be willing to extend mercy to other sinners.

As a practical matter, I also believe that progressives need to learn to take “yes” for an answer.  If someone wants to abandon the Dark Side, even gradually, we should encourage them rather than continue to browbeat them for their past mistakes.  If there’s no forgiving past mistakes, what’s the incentive to change?

Jim Wright, on his Stonekettle Station blog, wrote this: “Every candidate reinvents themselves every new time that they run. I don’t care (mostly) who they were back in the day, or what they campaigned on previously. I want to know who they are now. Who they expect to be in the future. Where I do think the past matters is if they’ll admit their past mistakes, up front, without excuse, and tell us how they’ve changed and what they’ve learned.”

That seems reasonable to me. I wish Governor Northam had said something like, “Oh my God, that picture is terrible.  I’d forgotten all about it, but I’m mortified.  I will spend the rest of my political career making up for that awful lapse in judgment.”  Instead, he spent days engaged in a public scramble for a cover story – any story – that would allow him to stay in office.  It was a pretty weak performance, although as of this writing, he’s still governor.  Mark Herring is still the Attorney General, and Justin Fairfax, who has his own (much more serious, in my view) issues to deal with, is still the Lieutenant Governor.

Are there any lessons that we non-Virginians can learn from the Northam/Herring incidents?  Apart from the possibility that, in the Age of Trump, you can ride out any scandal?  (Or at least you can if you’re white.  Jussie Smollett’s career as a martyr didn’t last too long.  Pro-tip of the day:  don’t pay your co-conspirators with a personal check.)

The reason I care about this is because we can expect more political scandals to surface as the Russo-Republican disinformation machine turns its attention to the growing field of Democratic presidential candidates.  They’ll happily start baseless rumors, but the odds are good that they’ll also find embarrassing information about some of the candidates, and the question for me is, what should I do then? 

First, I have a responsibility to verify information before forming an opinion about it, much less writing about it.  Social media encourages us to respond in real time to events that aren’t even finished.  The nature of the medium encourages us to jump to conclusions.  Sometimes we jump and a net appears – i.e. we guessed right, things were as they appeared to be, and our hot take holds up.  Other times, despite our best intentions, we’re like Wile E. Coyote after he’s taken two or three steps off the edge of the cliff and then looks down.  Uh-oh, no net. Better to delay forming an opinion until all the facts are in.

Second, I acknowledge that there are legitimate philosophical questions around the statute of limitations for various offenses.  How old do you have to be before you don’t get to use youth as a mitigating factor?  Are some things unforgiveable?  Which ones?  How do you rehabilitate your reputation?  How can you express contrition convincingly?  How much time has to pass before people will believe that you’ve had a genuine change of heart?  But until we have those discussions – and also agree on who gets to rule on each case – I’ll have to do the best I can on my own. 

I can tell you now that I’m going to err on the side of forgiving the trespasses of Democrats.  Why?  Because all the personal and political sins of the top ten Democratic presidential candidates PUT TOGETHER pale in comparison to those of Donald Trump.  Remember that when the media begins to harp on some flaw in the Democratic front runner.  The choice isn’t between a flawed Democrat and some platonic ideal of a presidential candidate.  The only real-world alternative to the flawed Democrat is Donald Trump. 

I intend to pay close attention to all the Democratic candidates, and when Arizona’s Democratic primary rolls around on March 17, 2020, I’ll vote for my personal favorite.  But if my personal favorite doesn’t win the nomination, I’m not going to sulk.  The eventual Democratic nominee is going to have faults.  He or she may hold positions I disagree with, or drive me to distraction with their campaign priorities.  I’ll still support them.  Whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be, whether it’s Bernie Sanders or Amy Klobuchar or someone in between, I will support them.  Whatever disagreements I have with them will pale in comparison to the garbage fire that is Donald Trump’s presidency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovy6rknFWnk

ALL IN ALL, IT'S JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”  Thomas Paine wrote that in 1776, in a series of essays collected as The American Crisis.  Paine knew an emergency when he saw one.  His next sentence presciently described the role of the Republican Party in the 21st century: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.”

1776 was a little before my time, but I was alive in 1952, although I’ll admit I wasn’t paying much attention to politics at the time.  My excuse is that I was only five years old.  I’ve been trying to make up for lost time ever since.  But I digress. 

In 1952, Harry Truman had decided not to run for re-election, and the war in Korea was looking iffy because China had entered the fray on the side of the North Koreans.  By the spring of 1952, the war was a miserable stalemate.  That was when the United Steelworkers Union called a nationwide strike.  They were demanding 26 cents an hour!  Not an increase of 26 cents an hour, but a basic wage of 26 cents an hour, or a little over $10 per week.  That’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez territory, folks. Socialism!  Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a mile.  No wonder the steel company bosses told the union to take a hike.

Nevertheless, the idea that the war effort needed an uninterrupted supply of steel for tanks, airplanes, and other military supplies, wasn’t crazy.  Truman saw this as a genuine emergency, and tried to nationalize the steel industry.  By a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court rejected Truman’s position.  William O. Douglas noted that there was indeed a crisis, but that it was Congress’ job, not the President’s, to fix it.  Truman wasn’t happy with the decision, but as he told reporters at a press conference, “I have no ambition to be a dictator.  He obeyed the Supreme Court’s decision.

Let us now fast forward to 2019.  I’m an old man now, and I’m paying an unhealthy amount of attention to politics.  And wouldn’t you know it, we have another national emergency on our hands.  His name is Donald Trump.  And now the man who is a walking national emergency has declared a bogus national emergency.  How bogus?  So bogus that even Ann Coulter, for crying out loud, tweeted “Look, the only national emergency is that our president is an idiot."  Yes, hell just froze over. 

And the cream of the jest is that Trump couldn’t resist proving Coulter’s point.  He jerked the rug out from under himself, deflating any sense of urgency by acknowledging that, “I didn’t need to do this.”  That might have been the only true thing he said in the entire speech.

Credit where credit is due, though.  Trump seems to have invented a brand-new kind of national emergency – a crisis that isn’t really critical, the classic solution in search of a problem.  And the problem is Donald Trump’s bruised ego.  He lost the 2018 mid-terms last November, he lost the battle of wills with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer over the government shutdown in January, and now he’s desperately looking for a way to save face.

(Speaking of Trump’s face, the photo that accompanies this post is someone’s best-guess rendering of what Trump would look like if he dropped the orange makeup and the comb-over.)

The worst part of this whole charade is that EVERYONE knows that the fight over the wall is entirely symbolic.  Trump only cares about it because he trained his base to salivate whenever he used the word.  He campaigned in 2016 as a blunt-talking, swamp-draining fighter for the common man (as long as the common man was white).  He also campaigned as the world’s greatest deal-maker.

As the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg notes, it’s easy to boast about possessing those two traits on the campaign trail, but impossible to actually govern that way.  You can be a bully, or you can be a negotiator, but not both.

Trump is a natural born bully who revels in being transgressive and doesn’t mind making a lot of enemies in the process.  Trump the great deal-maker?  Well, we haven’t seen much of that guy.  Certainly, Trump has been an abject failure as a deal-maker since he’s been in office.  My suspicion is that Trump was never much of a negotiator, and that the deals he brags about were ones in which he made money by stiffing his employees and customers.  When your partners are international mobsters, they let you get away with it.  But it’s harder to get away with that kind of stuff when you live in the White House and everyone is watching. 

The best negotiators look for common ground as they negotiate deals, and try to enlarge that ground so that all sides are happy with the final agreement.  Donald Trump spent the first two years of his presidency doing his best to shrink America’s common ground, both externally, with our international partners and internally, among ourselves.  

That’s the real emergency we have to deal with.The only walls that will help solve that emergency are the prison walls that will, inshallah, someday soon house members of the Trump crime family. I would gladly pay more taxes to help build those walls

HE AIN'T HEAVY, HE'S MY BROTHER

Nowadays, companies and their ad agencies have access to sophisticated polling and market research to test new slogans and products.  When I was growing up, though, it was often trial and error.  “Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes,” was the phrase advertising men used. 

Donald Trump has surely heard the phrase, though it’s hard to know whether he realized he was following that principle in his State of the Union message last week.  But it’s clear that his advisors and speechwriters have decided that “socialism” is the latest addition to their list of MAGA scare words, along with “MS-13,” “ISIS,” “taxes,” “Pocahontas,” and “Nancy Pelosi.” 

I’m not going to debate the “true” meaning of socialism, because I don’t think it matters.  The United States is a post-ism society.  The primary characteristic of American culture is its ability to absorb (co-opt, if you prefer) aspects of other cultures, whether in the form of food, music, or whatever.  If we like something, we’ll embrace it, whatever its origins.  And in the process of embracing a foreign influence, we’ll tinker with it if we’re in the mood.  Which we usually are.  We wind up with Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, and we think of them as just as American as KFC and McDonalds.  Which they basically are.

Donald Trump, of course, couldn’t define socialism if his life depended on it.  But that doesn’t matter, because as of Trump’s State of the Union message, socialism is whatever Democrats propose in the way of policy.  Never mind that some of those proposals call for a return to tax rates that Republicans thought were fine during the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations.  That was then, this is now.  Yesterday’s Republican saints are today’s Deep State traitors. 

My view – feel free to call me a socialist if you like – is that government does a better job at providing critical public services – national defense, police, fire, and utilities like gas, water, and electricity – than private businesses ever could.    

For protection against evil doers, foreign and domestic, I’d rather rely on the American military and my local law enforcement personnel than on a collection of militia goobers.  My utilities are remarkably stable.  Apart from infrequent and temporary storm-related outages, I don’t have to wonder whether I’ll have electricity or hot water in my house. 

Sadly, I’m not nearly so confident about the reliability of services from private businesses.  As an example, last week our Wi-Fi was down for three days.  Based on past experience with my internet service provider, similar outages will likely happen once or twice again before 2019 is over.  First world problem, sure.  But I live in the first world, so those are the kind of problems I have.

On its surface, the debate over “socialism” is about which public services are critical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and whether government (at the national, state, and/or local levels) can provide those services less expensively and more efficiently than the private sector.  For those inclined to mutter darkly about faceless government bureaucrats taking away their freedom, here’s a clue.  Faceless bureaucrats also run Big Pharma, Big Medicine, and Big Insurance.  Some bureaucrats – public and private – work hard to deliver positive outcomes for their paying customers.  Others just go through the motions and collect a paycheck.  You can find the full spectrum of energy and sloth, of competence and incompetence, on both sides of the public/private divide. 

The real debate over socialism, though, isn’t about efficiency or any other practical matter.  It’s a continuation of a philosophical debate that goes all the way back to the Book of Genesis.  Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel.  Cain murdered his brother and when God called him on it, Cain basically shrugged and asked “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  As far as Cain was concerned, the answer was obviously no.  God disagreed. 

Centuries later, after attempting to work first through a series of patriarchs, then a series of kings, and finally a series of prophets, God finally sent his only begotten son to straighten things out.  Jesus (Luke 10:27) endorsed this recipe for achieving eternal life: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

Wait a minute, one of Jesus’ enemies said.  That sounds good, but who is my neighbor?  Jesus replied with the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37).  The story has lost most of its punch because modern readers don’t understand what a Samaritan was. 

Two thousand years ago, the Roman province of Judea was divided into four parts, one of which was Samaria.  Samaritans were regarded by other Judeans as outcasts.  They were heretics, who worshiped their sacred Mount Gerizim and had their own set of ten commandments.  They were unclean.  Good Jews shunned them.

Jesus used the parable of the Good Samaritan to respond to the Pharisee’s question about whom we’re obliged to love in the same way we love ourselves.  A traveler on an isolated road is attacked by thieves and left to die.  A prominent member of society passes by and ignores the injured man.  So does a prominent religious figure.  Then a Samaritan comes along and helps him.  Which of the three, Jesus asks, was more neighborly?  Obviously, it was the much-despised Samaritan. 

Dang.  Even if your neighbor is your worst enemy – a member of ISIS, a member of MS-13, even a member of the Democratic Party – a Christian is obliged to love him just as they love themselves.  That, of course, is the last thing that Republicans want to hear.  Oh, they’ll pay lip service to Jesus.  Just don’t ask them to actually follow his teachings.

What remains of the loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires in the Republican Party know a dog whistle when they hear it; they’ll repeat the mantra du jour without really caring how much truth it contains.  MAGA types are more gullible, so maybe some of them will fall for the con and start seeing socialists lurking in every shadow. 

But the real point of the exercise is to find a rhetorical weapon that will intimidate Democrats into abandoning their progressive legislative agenda.  If they can do that by calling us socialists, their next step will be to demand that Dems purge left-leaning members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  AOC, I’m sure, will simply carry on, mocking her critics along the way.  I hope the rest of the party follows suit.  I’m not worried about the newly elected congressional Democrats, and I’m sure as hell not worried about Nancy Pelosi caving, since she’s one of the toughest, smartest, people around.  But there are some older Democratic politicians who may need some hand-holding from the leadership when the usual Beltway pundits criticize them for refusing to compromise.  

I believe I’m better off when my fellow citizens are happy, healthy, peaceful, and safe.  For various reasons, many of my fellow citizens can’t afford those things.  My investments are several zeros smaller than those of Jeff Bezos, but I have more money than I’m likely to be able to spend before I die.  I’d be happy to pay more in taxes in order to live in a more just and peaceful society. If this be socialism, make the most of it.

NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.”  Abraham Lincoln said that in his annual message to Congress, on December 2, 1862.

Tonight, Donald Trump will try and fail to follow in Lincoln’s footsteps.  On the one hand, some of his aides have been telling the press (anonymously, of course) that Trump will pose as a healer – the man to bind the country’s wounds and unite the nation again.  On the other hand, Trump himself has been trying to promote the speech by teasing the possibility that he’ll declare a state of emergency and divert money appropriated for the U.S. military towards building a big beautiful wall.  Or maybe a fence, or a barrier.  Whatever, maybe a crocodile infested moat, 2000 miles long. 

As emergencies go, this one is basically non-existent, and trying to terrify the nation into believing in this fantasy is hard to square with being an above-the-fray unifier.  The only crisis on our southern border is a humanitarian one, which Trump created and has no interest in solving.  Trump is facing a crisis, of course.  Nancy Pelosi is eating his lunch, which is a personal emergency for him.  For the rest of us, it’s a hopeful sign of progress, and quite the opposite of a genuine threat to our national security. 

If his past history is any indication, Trump will begin by reading woodenly from a teleprompter speech written by staff.  He’ll get bored sooner or later and begin riffing incoherently about something he just heard on Fox & Friends.  Maybe he’ll talk about women bound and gagged with blue electrical tape.  Maybe he’ll try to make a case for sending American troops to Venezuela.  Maybe he’ll launch into a rant about witch hunts. 

The point is that, whatever Trump talks about, he’ll be lying.  That’s who he is.  It’s what he does.  He can’t help himself.  Remember that if you watch the speech.  Remember it when you hear media types analyze the speech.  Any commentator who takes Trump’s words at face value is foolish or dishonest.  Or both – we can’t rule that out.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes (link below) that if Trump tries to declare a bogus state of emergency, Nancy Pelosi has the power to ask the House of Representatives to vote yea or nay on supporting it.If a resolution against the state of emergency passes the House, as it seems likely, Republicans in the Senate will finally have to take a public stand.  In the event of a floor vote, they’ll have to declare themselves.  In the event that Mitch McConnell tries to ignore the House resolution and refuses to schedule a Senate vote, they’ll have to take a public stand for or against that.

Lincoln concluded his speech to Congress in 1862 with these prophetic words: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves.” They can run, but they can’t hide.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/04/if-trump-declares-national-emergency-pelosi-can-jam-republicans-heres-how/?utm_term=.84f98a6661d4

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY

Sometimes I wonder what history will see as the worst thing Donald Trump has done as president.  The environment, the Supreme Court, kids in cages – the list of damages is depressingly long.

But when all is said and done, I wonder if the most lasting damage may come, not from policy screwups (which, after all, can be replaced by better policies) but from Trump’s attempts to obliterate traditional political norms and replace them with his own personal brand of greed, narcissism, and paranoia. 

I’m an old guy.  Donald Trump is the 13th president of my lifetime.  From Eisenhower to Obama, Trump’s predecessors used their first weeks in office to at least try to unite the country behind their agendas.  Why not?  It doesn’t cost anything to be magnanimous.  What the heck, it doesn’t cost anything just to fake magnanimity.  The speech writes itself: “Let us put aside partisan differences and work together to make this a better country.”  Americans love a good winner.  Or we used to, anyway.

But Trump doesn’t know how to be a good winner.  He absolutely cannot tolerate criticism.  Critics are enemies.  Enemies must be destroyed, or at least subjugated.  So as soon as he was inaugurated, he started his re-election campaign, staging rallies in Deplorable strongholds and inciting his base against Democrats and the press. 

MAGA true believers love it, but outside those fever swamps, it appears that two years of constant turmoil is beginning to wear thin.  The outbreak of “Clinton fatigue” in the late 90s was largely confined to members of the D.C. punditocracy who had developed a personal dislike for Bill Clinton.  Twenty years later, though, Trump fatigue is a widespread phenomenon, as demonstrated by the results of last November’s mid-terms – and also by the fact that every time Trump delivers another pro-shutdown speech, his popularity drops.  That’s the good news.

The bad news is that there appears to be an irreducible 25-30% of the nation that will stick with Trump come hell or high water.  That cohort amounts to a cancer on the body politic that will plague future presidents of both parties (or hypothetical new parties) as they try to restore the country’s health.

And the thing that will make treating that cancer more difficult is the Trumpian concept of fake news.  I’m not talking about simple dishonesty.  I’m a grownup.  I know that all politicians spin events to reflect favorably on them.  They stretch the truth, and sometimes tell outright lies.   Even politicians I like.  Even the one who said he’d never lie to me.  I’m not perfect myself, and I don’t demand perfection from the politicians I vote for.  Nevertheless, I’d like them to know the difference between truth and fiction, and to serve the truth as best they can.  

Donald Trump, however, has showed his followers how to ignore inconvenient facts and construct narratives around current events that match their prejudices.  Take, for instance, the image that accompanies this post.  It’s a political cartoon by a right-wing propagandist that not only distorts what actually happened in last week’s now-famous confrontation between Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann, but turns it upside down and inside out.  And since news is fake and truth is simply a matter of opinion, I fear that there’s a non-trivial chance that the original image of the MAGA smirk will disappear down the memory hole, and this cartoon’s version of the event will wind up as the last word on the incident. 

Ten days after the 2016 election, St. Louis-based reporter Sarah Kendzior wrote an open letter to Trump voters in Missouri.  She asked them to “Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.  Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.” 

That strikes me as a pretty prescient description of the formerly respectable faction of the Republican Party, who now find themselves living in existential dread of Donald Trump and his base. 

We haven’t achieved peak 1984 yet, but the Trump-Fox-McConnell axis of evil is doing its best. 

I’ll give George Orwell the last word: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.  And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”

THEY SAY BELIEVE HALF OF WHAT YOU SEE, AND NONE OF WHAT YOU HEAR

In his novel 1984, George Orwell wrote: “You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

As someone with a human mind, I’ve thought about that last sentence a lot, and it makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not a bad single-sentence summary of the worldview articulated 2500 years ago by Shakyamuni Buddha, and it seems to have the support of contemporary quantum physics.  Not that I claim to be an expert in either field.  And since I live in a world where most people never question appearances, I often get sucked into that mode of thinking myself.

Which begs the classic Zippy the Pinhead question:  Is it 1984 yet?  Maybe the concept of Doublethink is the Rosetta Stone that will unlock of the mad ravings of Rudy Giuliani, who says one thing today and the opposite thing tomorrow.  The press calls that “walking it back.”  I don’t know whether there’s a method to Rudy’s madness or not, but if we ignore the specifics of his statements and look at the larger pattern, it’s clear that Giuliani is simply the living embodiment of Donald Trump’s world, in which reality is whatever Trump says it is in the moment.  Those moments are ephemeral, and so is reality.

Which brings me to the latest battle in the War on Reality, which started on Friday.  No doubt you have all seen photos and video of those MAGA kids from Kentucky mocking a Native American man.  Perhaps you’re aware that the initial version of the video was tweeted out by a fake Twitter account registered in Brazil but claiming to be a school teacher in California.  Soon enough, a longer version of the video surfaced. 

That was all the right-wing noise machine needed.  They claimed that the earlier video had been edited to make the kids look bad. (Pro tip:  the MAGA hats all by themselves accomplished that.)  They demanded retractions from people who criticized the MAGA boys.  Remarkably, a lot of pundit types on twitter and even in the mainstream media backed down.

But here’s the thing.  The longer videos, the different angles, the larger context – none of it changes what happened.  The original video, however shady its origin, got the most important thing right.

Here’s what I think happened.  There was an anti-abortion march in Washington, D.C., an annual event with substantial participation by field-tripping high school and college students.  That’s why the MAGA kids from Kentucky were there.  Earlier that morning, there had been an Indigenous Peoples March.  That’s why Nathan Phillips was there. 

And then there were a handful of professional disruptors known as the Black Hebrew Israelites, who appear to be an African-American equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church (the “God hates fags” cult).  They showed up to heckle everyone else. 

The Black Hebrew Israelites were exchanging ritual insults with the MAGA kids from Kentucky when Nathan Phillips tried to defuse the situation by walking into the space between them.  The MAGA kids quickly turned their attention to Phillips, and began mocking him.  And then came the MAGA smirk seen ‘round the world.

The smirking kid’s parents hired a public relations firm, which wrote a press release claiming that he was just trying to be friendly.  Sure, that makes sense.  If you’re a wealthy white kid, and you’re looking for some non-verbal ways to appear friendly towards minorities, nothing works better than a smirk and a MAGA hat.

The PR spin was ludicrous on its face, but that didn’t stop conservatives from embracing this counter-factual narrative.  After all, hadn’t they uncritically accepted an improbable story last summer to excuse the actions of another wealthy white teenage boy back in the 80s?  And now, Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh has a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Before they decided that the MAGA kids were pure as the driven snow, conservatives reached for the “boys will be boys” excuse.  Hey, they’re teenagers.  Cut them some slack.  And it’s true that teenage boys behave like jerks sometimes.  This is known.  It can be anticipated, and even planned for, you know, in situations like high school field trips, just to pick a random example. 

Which raises an important question: where the hell were the chaperones?  Why didn’t they step between the MAGA kids and the Black Hebrew Israelites and herd their charges out of harm’s way?  Nathan Phillips was trying to defuse a tense situation.  That wouldn’t have been necessary if two or three of the adults tasked with representing Covington Catholic High School had done their jobs.

So yeah, the situation as a whole was a little more complicated than the original video revealed.  The MAGA kids got sucked into a shouting match with the Black Hebrew Israelites, and testosterone was already flowing when Nathan Phillips decided to play peacemaker.  But the kids from Kentucky obviously weren’t averse to confrontation.  They chose to wear MAGA hats, which, in civilized quarters, is clearly confrontational.

Yeah, I’ll cut them a little slack because they’re just kids, whose capacity for empathy is, shall we say, underdeveloped.  And they’re from Kentucky, where MAGA hats are probably a common sight.  Teenage boys don’t have much experience with conflict avoidance. I get that.

But that doesn’t mean that I have to deny what I see with my own eyes.  The initial video of the confrontation followed the classic Latin formula, “in medias res.”  Never mind the context, cut to the chase.  I saw nothing exculpatory in the later videos that conservatives claimed were game-changers.

Sure, it’s not a bad idea to hold your fire until all the facts are in.  And sure, the MAGA kid may have been nervous, maybe even have been scared. Sometimes life comes at you fast. But he responded with a classic white privilege move, and the rest of the Kentucky MAGA contingent joined in with gleeful mockery and insults.  They were high school boys acting like assholes.  That’s not a hanging offense, but it’s fair game for criticism. 

Covington Catholic High School was right to be embarrassed by the behavior of the students and adult chaperones they sent to Washington, DC.  Luckily, this is a classic teachable moment, and I hope CCHS has the sense to use it as such.

YOU LIKE ME TOO MUCH AND I LIKE YOU

Isn’t it funny how some presidential candidates have to pass a media likeability test, and others don’t? Isn’t it funny how the candidates under the most pressure to be “likeable” are almost always women? And how the likeability bar seems always to be set just out of reach of all of them, because it’s designed to weed out progressive women?

Republicans spent nearly a quarter century demonizing Hillary Clinton. After a while, they got progressive Democrats, Greens, and Libertarians to join the dogpile. As a result, in 2016, even though she was running against a man who was the least honest, least moral, and least qualified candidate in modern American history, mainstream media decided that it was Hillary who had the likeability problem. Who knew email server security was the key to likeability?

Now those same pundits are wringing their hands in faux concern about Elizabeth Warren. There aren’t many parallels between Clinton’s history and Warren’s, but they do have one thing in common. If you guessed gender, you win the prize. Or you would if there were a prize, which there is not.

You know who doesn’t have a likeability problem? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young Democratic Representative from the Bronx. She drives wingnuts crazy, and I’m loving it. In the Republican fantasy world, young Latin American women have only two career paths. They’re either in the U.S. dropping anchor babies, or joining caravans in Mexico so they can cross the border into the U.S. and drop anchor babies.

For conservatives, the idea that someone like that could win an honest Congressional election simply doesn’t compute. They’ve tried their best to dig up dirt, but she’s the Roadrunner to their Wile E. Coyote. The biggest scandals they’ve found are that she called herself Sandy as a teenager, and that she appeared in an amateur dance video as a freshman in college. The horror!

AOC just laughs and mocks her critics, which further unhinges the wingnuts. Now the tinfoil hat crowd has been reduced to claiming that Ocasio-Cortez herself released the dance video in a false flag operation designed to make conservatives look stupid.

But of course, conservatives are perfectly capable of making themselves look stupid. Case in point: compare what we know of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s teenage years with those of new Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh. One was a dancer. One was a drunk and date rapist. Anyone who hates on the dancer is stupid.

And then there’s Rashida Tlaib, the new Democratic Representative from Michigan, who at a recent party, told other guests about a conversation she’d had with her son after the election. Among other things, she told him that “we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.” Break out the smelling salts, because Republicans clutched their pearls and repaired to their fainting couches en masse.

Back in 1973, the Supreme Court created a three-pronged test for obscenity, the first of which involved applying contemporary community standards. Let us, therefore, review some recent history of Republican community standards regarding the f-word.

Here are a few examples of famously foul-mouthed Republican politicians. In 2004, then-Vice President Dick Cheney told Democratic Senator Pat Leahy to “go fuck yourself.” He said that on the floor of the Senate. In 2000, candidate George W. Bush called a New York Times reporter a “major league asshole.” In 2017, Martha McSally, the former Arizona congresswoman who lost her Senate race to a bisexual atheist, was quoted as saying “Let’s get this fucking thing done” to encourage her fellow Republicans to repeal Obamacare. Why even Donald Trump himself has a long history of using the F-word. I’ll cite one example from his first “exploratory” presidential campaign in 2011: He promised to read the riot act to China, “Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25%.” (Because trade wars were easy to win, even back in 2011. But I digress.

Did Congresswoman Tlaib violate contemporary standards when she referred to Donald Trump as an MF? Clearly not. She was with friends, at a party, talking the way people talk. Even Republican people.

Ah, but was it appropriate to apply the term to Donald Trump? Personally, I’ve seen no solid evidence that Donald Trump ever had sex with his mother. On the contrary, he’s on record as being attracted to much younger girls, including his own daughter. So if Representative Tlaib’s comment was intended literally, she bears the burden of proof.

But my guess is that her use of the term “motherfucker” to describe Donald Trump wasn’t intended to be taken literally, but rather to convey generic contempt and disapproval, with which I heartily concur, although I tend to use less colorful language to convey my own views.

I wasn’t brought up in an environment where cursing was a thing, so I tend to use euphemisms most of the time. But in American in the year of our lord 2019, the old 20th century language taboos are observed most often in the breach.

I’m old fashioned enough to think it would be better for public figures like Tlaib to hold their fire until Robert Mueller, and/or Adam Schiff, gives them concrete evidence of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors (including having sex with his mother). Then, by all means, impeach the motherfucker.

IT TAKES A WORRIED MAN TO SING A WORRIED SONG

I took four years of Latin in high school, and one of the things we did in those classes was memorize a bunch of “famous” (or at least famous 2000 years ago) Latin quotations. I still remember some of them, including “O tempora, o mores,” or “Oh the customs, oh the times.” The Roman orator Cicero said that in the first century B.C., complaining about the decline in morality in the late Roman Republic.

I was a church-goer back in those days – University Baptist Church in Wichita, Kansas – and though I don’t remember being forced to memorize any Bible verses, I heard some of them often enough to remember quite a few of them. I have a meditation teacher who sometimes challenges the class to name all of the ten commandments, or to quote the first words that angels say to humans. I do pretty well at those exercises.

(In the gospels, angels revealing themselves to humans often introduce themselves by saying “Fear not.” Angels must have been pretty scary looking.)

Whether you subscribe to the notion that we live in degenerate times, or prefer to believe that, every day in every way, we’re getting better and better, it’s clear that the world has changed a bit since the days of Cicero and Jesus. I thought it might be instructive to do a point/counter-point comparison between some recent statements by Donald Trump and his followers and comments on the same topic by earlier religious and political figures.

For instance, this week, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. pledged undying fealty to Donald Trump. The Washington Post asked him if there was any conceivable thing Trump could do to lose his support. “No.” Trump has that effect on his supporters, and he knows it. During the 2016 campaign, he bragged that he “could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Not among evangelicals, anyway.

Falwell went on to assert that Biblical morality applied to private individuals, but not to nations or their leaders, and then offered this doozy. “A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume. It’s just common sense to me.”

There was a guy in Galilee 2000 years ago who had a different perspective on how charity works. The Gospel of Mark (12:41-44) tells this story: “And Jesus … beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing. And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury: For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.’”

Fast forwarding nineteen centuries, let us consider something Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address in 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Roosevelt was speaking to a nation mired in the Great Depression, warning them to resist the temptations of fearmongers on both extremes of the political spectrum, fascist and communist alike.

In 2019, fear is about the only tool remaining in Donald Trump’s kit. His rallies are like George Orwell’s two minutes of hate, although they last longer than Big Brother’s did. Trump raises the specter of various bogeymen, and his Deplorables quake on cue. But Trump himself cares little and knows less about ISIS, Iran, and illegal immigrants. For him, they’re just props in his re-election campaign. As long as they keep generating applause, he’ll keep harping on them.

It’s in his tweets and comments to the press that Trump’s fears surface. When he gets worried, he begins to babble. By all accounts, the last thing he wanted to do at Christmas was go to a combat zone. But having shamed into visiting American troops in Iraq, he couldn’t help blurting out a coded version of his concern for his physical safety: "We felt very safe coming in. It was a pretty difficult journey in certain ways. But we felt very, very good. Very safe.” That used to be known as whistling past the graveyard.

In that same speech on December 26, Trump said “We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven’t even heard about. Frankly, it’s ridiculous.” He returned to the theme in rambling remarks to his Cabinet on January 2, speaking about Afghanistan: "Why isn't Russia there? Why isn't India there? Why isn't Pakistan there? Why are we there? We're 6,000 miles away? But I don't mind... I think I would have been a good general."

Those pesky bone spurs deprived the world of a second Napoleon.

FDR, who had rather more serious health challenges, offered a different perspective in his fourth inaugural address in 1945: “We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community. We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’"

Donald Trump has cronies and sycophants, but he appears to have few, if any, actual friends. It’s no wonder he has trouble with the concept Roosevelt articulated.

Finally, let us harken back to the Access Hollywood tape of 2005, which featured an edifying dialogue between Donald Trump and Billy Bush. The Access Hollywood tape became public on October 7, 2016. (Later that same day, Wikileaks began releasing embarrassing emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. A remarkable coincidence, eh? But I digress.) It was on this tape that Trump boasted, “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

On Thursday, #NeverTrump Republican Bill Kristol offered a paraphrase of the Access Hollywood tape that ought to worry Trump a lot more than a visit to a heavily fortified American military base. Reminding Trump of the new Democratic House majority, Kristol tweeted, “When you control the House, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab the president by the ____. You can do anything.”

As of today, Adam Schiff chairs the House Intelligence Committee, with jurisdiction over matters relating to Trump-Russia. Elijah Cummings chairs the House Oversight Committee, with jurisdiction over corruption in government. Jerry Nadler chairs the House Judiciary Committee, where any impeachment proceedings must begin. Richard Neal chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, which is primarily concerned with budget matters. But there’s also a fairly obscure 1924 law that empowers Ways and Means to subpoena any individual’s tax returns. Maxine Waters chairs the House Financial Services Committee, with jurisdiction over the banking industry (including the Trump-Kushner money trail). Elliott Engel chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, which can investigate whether Trump’s business interests overseas – current and potential – have influenced Trump’s foreign policy. Eddie Bernice Johnson chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which will focus on climate change.

In short, January 3, 2019, is the first day of the rest of our lives.

TACH IT UP, TACH IT UP, BUDDY GONNA SHUT YOU DOWN

In botanical terms, a weed is simply a plant that thrives in chaotic conditions – disturbed soil, competition for light and water, that sort of thing.  Donald Trump is the political equivalent of a weed.  He thrives on political chaos, and he always has a plentiful supply because he generates chaos wherever he goes.

That’s something to keep in mind when you’re wondering how long the partial government shutdown will last.  For Trump, the only downside of the shutdown is that, for appearances’ sake, he can’t go to Mar-A-Lago and play golf over the holidays.  As he put it in a Christmas Eve tweet, “I am all alone (poor me) in the White House.”  Has any president sacrificed more?  Cue world’s tiniest violin, as it plays “Cry Me A River.”

But where’s Melania?  Where’s Barron, Tiffany, Ivanka, Eric, and Don Junior?  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.  Much less five of them.  Much less nine ungrateful grandchildren. 

I don’t believe that Donald Trump was literally alone in the White House.  But I do believe it’s possible that the seasonal focus on tidings of comfort and joy might get under the skin of a man who doesn’t have much experience with either.  But I digress.

Trump and his followers don’t care about the 800,000 government employees who aren’t getting paychecks.  They don’t care about the additional millions of American citizens who depend on the services those furloughed employees provide.  For Trump’s people, those aren’t bugs, they’re features.  Their goal is to inflict misery on people who are different from them.

It’s important to realize that Donald Trump has been itching to shut down the government for years.  In 2014, a year before he even announced he was running for president, he told Fox News, “You know what solves it?  When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster.  Then you’ll have a [laughs], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

Trump is doing his best to create precisely those conditions.  His tax cuts for billionaires juiced the stock market for several months, but, as the saying goes, everything Trump touches dies.  He sabotaged multiple sectors of the economy with tariffs and trade wars.  Then he threatened to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve, whom he appointed a year ago.  As you might expect, investors took notice of this erratic behavior.  The stock market is down 15% since he dubbed himself “Tariff Man.”  The Obama recovery is now history, and Wall Street is officially in a bear market. 

As if that weren’t enough to destabilize the economy, Trump has upended decades of American foreign policy, siding with dictators while insulting (and in some cases, demonizing) pretty much every traditional ally and neighbor we have.  With the departure of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the last independent voice in the White House will be gone.  Trump’s most influential advisors now include Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Mohammed bin Salman, as well as the assortment of talking heads on Fox News on any given day.

The Fox shills are just in it for the money.  They make a good living by spouting wingnut propaganda.  The foreign dictators have a vested interest in throwing sand in the gears of American society.  On both ends of the political spectrum (or perhaps simply both sides of the same political coin), there’s also a substantial nihilist element in American politics.  Republican Deplorables join Greens, Libertarians, and even some Bernie Bros in rooting for the country to go to hell in a handbasket.  All of them profess to believe that they’ll be the ones to pick up the pieces.

They can’t all be right.  And since third party progressives have a tendency to succumb to the narcissism of small differences, my guess is that they’ll come out on the short end of the stick.  The People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front will spend most of their time and energy fighting each other, and the end result will be the re-election of Donald Trump. 

Be careful what you wish for, folks.  Let’s resist the temptation to further fragment the American body politic, and do our best to keep the United States united.

Or, as Donald Trump put it in his Christmas address to the troops, “It’s a disgrace what’s happening in this country.  But other than that, I wish you a merry Christmas.”

WORD TO THE WISE

Donald Trump can’t help himself. He’s convinced that he’s always the smartest person in the room, even if the only time that could possibly be true is at Trump family reunions. Most of the time, Trump confuses being rich with being smart. Having lots of money means you can buy your way out of a lot of trouble, and that’s how Trump has lived his life up until recently. He thinks he outwitted his opponents, when he really only outspent them.

But if you’re president, your life is under a microscope. Getting away with things becomes harder. Nevertheless, Trump has doubled down on bluff and bluster. It’s not surprising, really, since it’s all he knows. If Trump were 10% smarter and 10% less arrogant, he’d be 100% better off. But then he wouldn’t be Donald Trump, would he? Trump can’t resist explaining to the world how smart he is, even if it means telegraphing his strategy to his opponents.

Thus it was that early Tuesday morning, Trump dropped a tweet that helped turn what was supposed to be Mike Flynn’s uneventful sentencing process into something pretty weird. Flynn had been cooperating with Mueller. He’d reached a plea deal with the Special Counsel’s team. The plan was that everyone would show up in court and Judge Emmet Sullivan would sign off on the deal, and everybody (except Donald Trump) could get on with their lives.

But wingnuts never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Out in the right-wing fever swamps, an idea was taking hold, and soon the phrase “perjury trap” was on every wingnut’s lips. It quickly became an article of faith on the Right that Flynn had been entrapped by cunning FBI agents, who baited him into lying by not telling him not to lie. Or something like that. You expect that sort of tortured logic from the people at Fox, but for some reason, Flynn’s attorneys decided to stick a version of this claim into their sentencing memorandum.

Then Donald Trump added fuel to the fire by encouraging Flynn to stand tall. On the morning of the sentencing, he tweeted “Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him.” The tweet was worded in a way that suggested Trump expected Flynn to say something unexpected.

But why would Flynn say anything at all? I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like a guy who’d benefitted from a generous plea bargain agreement would be coached to keep his mouth shut. “Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. I’m dreadful sorry, and I promise not to do it again.” And exit stage right.

But keeping your mouth shut is an option that wouldn’t occur to Donald Trump. If he gets an idea, he immediately blurts it out to friend and foe alike. Trump telegraphs his strategy to anyone who’s paying attention.

In this particular case, it kinda makes you wonder if somebody on Fox floated a harebrained scheme about Flynn repudiating his guilty plea and complaining that he’d been railroaded. Was that supposed to be the cue for Donald Trump to step in with a pardon? Who knows?

Judge Sullivan obviously smelled a rat, and it appears that he decided to set a perjury trap of his own. He took the unusual step of placing Flynn under oath at the sentencing, and got Flynn on record affirming his guilt. Sullivan repeatedly asked if Flynn wanted to proceed with his guilty plea, seemingly daring the defendant to retract his confession.

It took them awhile, but Flynn and his attorneys finally grasped that Sullivan was prepared to reject Mueller’s lenient sentencing recommendation and send Flynn to the pokey to teach him a lesson. Flynn decided that discretion was the better part of valor and agreed to delay sentencing for a few months while he proved that he was committed to helping Mueller rather than simply angling for a pardon.

In other news, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has submitted a letter of resignation, in the form of a scathing critique of Trump’s whimsical moves – I won’t dignify them by calling them policies – in the international arena. Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Turkey are calling the shots, and Mattis got tired of it.

Kyle Smith, writing in National Review Online, put it succinctly: “Trump knows almost nothing about almost everything. And yet his stupidity wouldn’t be so troublesome if it weren’t for his arrogance, and his arrogance wouldn’t be so troublesome if it weren’t for his stupidity. If Trump was smart but arrogant he might steamroll over some more experienced people and do some necessary things. If, by contrast, he were merely stupid but diffident, he might easily be tricked into thinking he was in charge while mature, rational people like Mattis were actually making the important decisions.”

As we head into the high holidays, that’s where we stand. The ship of state is sinking, and anyone with half a brain is heading for the lifeboats. The rest of us are trying to bring a stupid, arrogant man to justice, and in the process, restore American democracy. It’s a job worth doing.

AND SUDDENLY THAT NAME WILL NEVER SEEM THE SAME TO ME

Thanks to Robert Mueller and his colleagues in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, being number one will never be the same again.  Now grand juries are using the term to flag unindicted co-conspirators in the Trump-Russia investigation.   Even if you pride yourself on being a rugged individualist, you don’t want to be Individual-1 (or any similar numbered alias) in a federal sentencing agreement. 

Take Individual-1 in Michael Cohen’s sentencing agreement – please.  Individual-1 got a heads up that last week was going to suck.  He just didn’t know how bad.

[Narrator’s voice over: “It was pretty bad.”]

How bad was it?  Last week, Individual-1’s former personal attorney and his former campaign manager were both sentenced to prison for felonies they committed on Individual-1’s behalf, which sucked, big time.  And this week didn’t go much better, with the sentencing of his former National Security Director, plus a surprise guilty plea from Maria Butina.

Who is Maria Butina, you may be wondering?  How does she fit in with Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Mike Flynn?  Butina could turn out to be the Mata Hari of the Trump-Russia scandal. 

(Who is Mata Hari, you may be wondering?  She was a femme fatale who spied for Germany during World War I, and was executed by a French firing squad in 1917.  But I digress.)

Maria Butina is a Russian national who spent the better part of the past decade ingratiating herself in American right-wing circles.  She hung out with wacky ex-sheriff David Clarke, who was once prominent in Trump’s orbit.   She had a boyfriend named Paul Erickson, a Republican operative with ties to both the NRA and the Donald Trump campaign.  The FBI believes Erickson helped funnel illegal Russian donations to the Trump campaign – via the National Rifle Association.  Yes, the NRA has been funded by Russian money. 

Russia itself has some sensible laws relating to firearms – restricting handguns, automatic weapons, and so forth – but Vladimir Putin loves the 2nd Amendment as long as it stays in America.  Giving American crazies and criminals unlimited access to firepower is definitely in the Russian national interest. 

Will Maria Butina’s plea change anything?  Well, maybe.  First, on general principles, it will be interesting to learn just how much money Russia laundered through the NRA.  Wouldn’t it be funny if the world’s most enthusiastic Second Amendment supporters turned out to be Russians? 

Second, it will be interesting to see which Republicans besides Donald Trump benefitted from illegal Russian campaign contributions.  Gosh, could that be one of the reasons why Republicans have been unenthusiastic about investigating Trump’s campaign finances?  Maybe some of them have shady transactions of their own that they’d just as soon keep on the downlow.

But perhaps the most interesting question is why Butina chose to plead guilty in this case.  It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Russians who cooperate with western intelligence services tend to see their life expectancy shorten considerably.  They become prone to falling out of upper story windows, and eating radioactive soup.  Butina must know that.  Which is why observers suspect that her guilty plea was greenlighted by Vladimir Putin. 

Could Butina’s deal with SDNY be a signal from the Home Office in Moscow that patience with Donald Trump is running thin?  Details of her plea may be classified, but it would be very interesting to know who Butina ratted out in her plea deal.

Vladimir Putin is not a sentimental guy.When assets turn into liabilities, he pulls the plug.Eventually – maybe sooner, maybe later – Putin will apply that unforgiving calculus to his boy in the White House.Donald Trump may think that a Republican majority in the Senate gives him a firewall against impeachment, but if he loses the confidence of his patron in Moscow, things will fall apart fast.

THERE'LL BE RAZORS FLYIN' THROUGH THE AIR

In 1939, Winston Churchill spoke of his frustration with Russia, a country he described as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”  “But,” he added, “perhaps there is a key.  That key is Russian national interest.” 

In some ways, it doesn’t matter precisely why or how Russia interfered with America’s 2016 presidential election.  The key question is simply whether they did it or not.  And it sure looks like they did, because why wouldn’t they, given the chance?  A confused, angry, divided America is absolutely in the Russian national interest, especially if Americans themselves could be manipulated into sowing the confusion, the anger, and the divisiveness.  And when the dust settled on November 8, 2016, Putin and his oligarch pals were the big winners. 

Putin’s path to victory in 2016 turned out to be relatively easy.  So many Americans made so many foolish decisions.  That’s the most direct explanation for how American democracy went off the rails in 2016.  But that doesn’t fit the mainstream media narrative about salt of the earth working class white people being the backbone of the country, so it took a while for the press to grasp that they had to stop parroting outdated conventional wisdom about the nature of the American electorate.

The 14th century logician William of Occam (or Ockham) proposed an easy test for choosing between competing explanations for the same phenomenon.  The simplest explanation (assuming it accounts for all the facts) is the best explanation.  This test became known as “Occam’s Razor.”

Sadly, Occam’s Razor seems almost quaint in the 21st century, where power is the only enduring fact, and inconvenient truths can be denied or ignored.  Enter QAnon, stage right.  I don’t know whether QAnon is a prankster, a performance artist, or a true believer.  But since his predictions seem designed to make his followers look foolish, the “true believer” option seems unlikely. 

Consider Q’s recent prediction that on December 5, Donald Trump would arrest 60,000 of his enemies and put them in concentration camps.  Not 6, or 60, or even 600, which would be an unprecedented mass arrest.  No, wait and see.  It’s gonna be 60,000. 

But December 5 came and went, and as best anyone can tell, Democrats and prominent #NeverTrump Republicans are still at large.  There has been no sign of mass incarcerations.  George H.W. Bush’s funeral on December 5 would have been a perfect opportunity to round up many of the key architects of the Deep State, but they all seem to have walked away from the memorial service, unrepentant as ever.

That’s the sort of publicly embarrassing miscalculation that would end the career of your run-of-the-mill doomsday prophet, but Q is made of sterner stuff.  He and his surrogates have the advantage of operating in an environment where “fake news” is the only news there is. 

What?  You say you didn’t hear about those 60,000 arrests?  Well, of course not.  Don’t be naïve.  Mainstream media is covering it up.  Just be patient.  All secrets will be revealed and all prophecies will be fulfilled – if not this time, then next time for sure.  January 9 seems to be QAnon’s next deadline. 

In the meantime, back on planet Earth, Robert Mueller is the anti-QAnon.  He’s methodically laying out evidence of criminality in the highest levels of the Trump regime.  Those of us who’ve been paying attention have guessed, at least in broad outline, what Mueller was likely to find.  And now we’re getting confirmation, most recently in the form of Michael Cohen’s plea deal with the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York (SDNY). 

According to Cohen’s sentencing recommendation, a mysterious figure known only as “Individual-1” directed him to commit two felonies.  Which, come to think of it, is a felony all by itself.  Individual-1 would appear to be in big trouble.  But who could Individual-1 be? 

Oh, wait!  SDNY’s sentencing recommendation provides a clue.  “Individual-1, for whom Cohen worked at the time, began an ultimately successful campaign for President of the United States.”  That narrows the possibilities down a little bit.  I’m beginning to suspect that Individual-1 is Donald Trump.

Remember back in early 2017, when pundits fell over themselves every time Donald Trump managed to get through a public appearance without making a complete fool of himself?  “OMG,” they’d exclaim, “this is the pivot we’ve been waiting for.  Today is the day Donald Trump became president.” 

We don’t hear that much anymore.  Outside the fever swamps of propaganda outlets like Fox News and QAnon, Trump’s not fooling anyone.  Well, maybe he’s fooling himself.  Last night, Trump greeted Cohen’s sentencing agreement with a tweet: “Totally clears the President.  Thank you!” 

Maybe Trump’s lawyers hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to explain to him who Individual-1 is.  Besides which, a claim of complete exoneration is hard to reconcile with the whole “witch hunt” narrative Trump has been trying to build.  But consistency isn’t the point.  The point is simply to give the base something they can cling to for a couple of days, while Trump manufactures a new distraction or two.  One thing Donald Trump is good at is changing the subject.   

Meanwhile, we’ve learned a new synonym for “collusion.”  It seems that in the summer of 2016, a Russian agent offered Donald Trump, Jr. (or as SDNY might put it, “Individual-1-Junior”) what he called “political synergy” and “synergy on a government level” in return for a few teensy-weensy considerations.  In other words, we’ll help you steal the election if you’ll get rid of the sanctions Obama placed on us.  And, hey – there’s no law against establishing synergy, right?

Actually, yes there is – if the synergy takes the form of tangible campaign assistance from a foreign government or foreign national, it’s an illegal campaign contribution.  Folks like you and me would hear that offer and immediately think, “Whoa, that sounds kind of shady, I’d better stay away.” 

But Individual-1’s family fortune was built on shady opportunities, so it’s not surprising that Junior’s response was, “If it’s what you say, I love it.”

We know so much more about the Trump family now than we did two years ago.  We know about their sketchy personal histories.  We know about their sketchy business practices.  We know how long and how deeply they’ve been involved with Russian mobsters.  Now Robert Mueller is using that sketchy history as the canvas on which he’s painting his analysis of the 2016 election. 

Some people, including members of the press whose regular sources leak like sieves, are frustrated with Mueller because his team doesn’t leak.  Some have responded by cultivating new sources and breaking new stories.  Other – pundits and reporters alike – seem to have gone in the opposite direction, shutting down their critical faculties and refusing to acknowledge behavior patterns that are obvious to more reality-based observers, including members of the grand juries that Mueller and his colleagues have worked with.  

For the past two years, there’s been so much random information out there that it’s been hard to separate the signal from the noise.  But with every new indictment and sentencing recommendation, Team Mueller is connecting dots.  And with every new connection, the possibility of an innocent explanation for the Trump-Russia “synergy” gets harder to believe.  Occam’s Razor and Winston Churchill agree:  the key is Russian national interest.  Hold that thought, and the Trump presidency begins to make sense.

OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE

Back in August, 2017, I wrote a post speculating about the possibility that Vladimir Putin’s hold over Donald Trump was connected to the workings of Trump Model Management, which ostensibly represented aspiring models, many of them teens from Eastern Europe. 

Be that as it may (and it still strikes me as plausible), I mention it now because one of Trump’s pals is about to return to the spotlight.  As I wrote back then, in an interview with New York Magazine in 2002, Trump expressed his admiration for a guy named Jeffrey Epstein: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.  He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

“On the younger side” in Epstein’s case meant 13 or 14 years old.  In 2007, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution and served a few months in prison.  Definitely a terrific guy, lots of fun to be with.  Unless you were a teenage girl.

Thanks to the Miami Herald (link below), Epstein’s whole sordid history will finally be revealed.  The Herald demonstrates that Epstein basically got away with a slap on the wrist for molesting hundreds of under-age girls, some of whom he passed around to his buddies.

How did he avoid decades of jail time?  He can thank Alexander Acosta, the man who was Miami’s top federal prosecutor back then.  For reasons that remain unclear, Acosta offered a sweet deal to Epstein’s attorneys (among them Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, who gravitate towards sleaze like flies gravitate towards garbage).  The hearing was secret, and none of Epstein’s victims were allowed to testify.  Epstein did 13 months instead of multiple life sentences.

If the name Alexander Acosta rings a bell, you might be a public policy wonk.  Acosta is now our Secretary of Labor.  Yes, Donald Trump rewarded the prosecutor who gave his pal Epstein a break with a Cabinet appointment.  Alexander Acosta is now in charge of enforcing America’s labor laws, including those against human trafficking.  You can’t make this stuff up.

As the old saying goes, everything Trump touches, dies.  And Jeffrey Epstein’s time in the barrel may be at hand.  There’s a civil suit in Miami that will begin next week, in which Epstein’s victims will finally be allowed to tell their story in court.  Check out the details via this link.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html

IF THAT'S A CRIME, I STAND CONVICTED

And the dominoes begin to fall.  Donald Trump finally turned in his homework, which precipitated a very interesting development in Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Trump and his legal team gave the Special Counsel their written answers to Mueller’s questions over a week ago.  And yesterday, after initially asking for a delay, Mueller submitted his sentencing recommendations for Paul Manafort.  The timing of those two events seems connected, and it looks like Mueller may have sprung a trap.

Remember that Manafort was convicted of 8 felonies, and pleaded guilty to 12 others.  In return for leniency in sentencing, he agreed to fully cooperate with Mueller’s investigation.  That agreement included very draconian penalties (asset forfeiture, long prison sentences) for lying to the Special Counsel.  And then he lied to the Special Counsel. 

Why might he have taken that risk?  I can think of three possibilities. 

First, maybe he and his legal team were stupid enough to think they could lie and get away with it.  Second, it’s entirely possible – probable, even – that Manafort has reason to expect a pardon from Donald Trump.  And third, it’s also entirely possible that Manafort knows that the Russian mob (in the person of his former patron, Semion Mogolevich) will kill him and his entire family if he tells everything he knows.  Those three possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

It’s the second possibility, the prospect of a pardon, that interests me.  It is a matter of record that Manafort’s attorneys had a joint defense agreement with Trump’s attorneys.  Team Trump probably thought they were milking the Manafort probe for inside information that they could use to protect their boy.  My guess is that Mueller knew all along (based on testimony from other witnesses and on wiretaps) that Manafort was lying to him, and used him to bait a trap for Donald Trump.  If Trump’s written testimony lines up with Manafort’s demonstrable lies, that’s going to look an awful lot like obstruction of justice, not to mention perjury.  That’s assuming, of course, that Trump lied in his written testimony, which seems like a pretty safe bet.

Mueller also promised a “detailed sentencing submission” that details Manafort’s “crimes and lies.”  Since the case has already been adjudicated, it’s hard to see how our faux Attorney General Matt Whitaker could suppress or manipulate it. 

I’ve read speculation that Mueller will submit two versions of his “detailed sentencing submission” – one with some information redacted for public consumption, and a complete version for the court’s eyes only.  If that happens, I suspect that one of the first things Adam Schiff will do when he takes over as chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence on January 3 is subpoena the full report.   

Long story short?  Yesterday was a good day for the good guys.

WHO READS YESTERDAY'S PAPERS?

No matter how badly Republicans have screwed up over the past 50 years, Beltway pundits can’t seem to help themselves.  They believe, as an article of faith, that Republicans are masters of governance.  Republicans are pros, and Democrats are amateurs.

Never mind the Watergate scandal, Iran-Contra, and the disastrous wars in the Middle East.  Let us not speak of the racist, know-nothing elements that now form the majority of the GOP voting base.  Let us also ignore the GOP’s abandonment of core principles such as family values and fiscal responsibility.  Not even Donald Trump’s obvious collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election is enough to derail the narrative. 

Inside the Beltway, Republicans are assumed to be the adults in the room.  Republicans were born to rule. 

A half-century of real-world events have made it clear that Republican leaders are corrupt and/or incompetent.  But Beltway pundits can’t process that, so they just look the other way.  But even when they look the other way, they still see the world through the decades of Republican spin.  They can’t make sense of the evidence in front of their face.  That’s why, when forced to concede that there was, in fact, a Blue Wave in the 2018 mid-term elections, they’ve turned to their favorite fallback narrative – Democrats are in disarray. 

My take:  Democrats are not in disarray.

Why do I believe this?  Well, first of all, there’s the actual election earlier this month, in which Democrats did remarkably well.  They picked up at least 39 seats in the House of Representatives, the largest mid-term gain since 1974.  If the party that picked up 39 seats is in disarray, how would you describe the party that lost those 39 seats? 

The Republican Party is about as homogeneous as you can get in these here United States, c. 2018.  Democrats are a diverse bunch, and that means they sometimes disagree about tactics, strategies, and even about policies.  Beltway pundits see that as weakness.  Their heroes are manly men who impose their will on everyone else.  No thanks, fellas. 

It’s no coincidence that the Democrats who are taking the most flak from the punditocracy are women.  After two years of scapegoating Hillary “lock her up” Clinton and Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren, Republicans and their friends in the media have focused their ire on Nancy Pelosi, who, at the age of 78, was a much more effective House Minority Leader than Paul Ryan was as Speaker of the House during the first two years of the Trump regime. 

But it’s the 28-year-old newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has conservatives absolutely frothing at the mouth.  OMG – she’s not only a woman, but she’s young, and also Puerto Rican.   

Republicans and the punditocracy are mostly older, wealthy, white, and male.  They’ve spent their lives expecting deference from women, minorities, and young people.  When they don’t get it, they’re angry and hurt.  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.  Welcome to the 21st century, guys.

Last week, Politico’s Michael Grunwald tweeted “Can someone explain why Republicans gleefully investigate imaginary corruption while Democrats seem afraid to investigate real corruption?”  Hold on there, bub.  Grunwald is dead right about the Republican penchant for trying to cover up their own corruption by investigating Democrats.  But he’s dead wrong about the rest of it.  Democrats are NOT afraid to investigate real corruption.  Don’t believe it?  Wait until after January 3, when the new House majority is sworn in, Robert Mueller has unsealed a few more subpoenas, and Adam Schiff starts issuing subpoenas.

Oh, sure, you can find timid Democratic voices – politicians in swing districts who feel obliged to tone down the rhetoric, or old-timers who are stuck in the go-along/get-along mode.  But there aren’t many of them, and they won’t be making decisions for the party. 

I went to bed on election night feeling OK about the results.  A solid win in the House, and a good effort in the Senate, where the odds were stacked against Democrats – and where Mike Espy has a fighting chance against the awful Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi.  As days passed, and more close races were won by Democrats, I felt even better. 

The hard part is waiting.  As I write this, we’re 40 days away from January 3, when the new Democratic House majority will be sworn in.  We know that congressional Republicans will do their best to pass pernicious legislation while they still have a majority in the House.  We can be confident that Donald Trump will behave erratically.  He’ll say and do silly things, stupid things, and evil things.

We can also be confident that Robert Mueller will keep calm and carry on, and that he has contingency plans ready for whatever Trump throws at him.  He steadfastly refuses to show his cards, which is a good thing – albeit a frustrating thing for people like me who are eager for him drop the hammer on the Trump crime family. 

My advice (in case anyone cares)?  Our job right now is to be patient.  We won the battle we had to win.  Come January 3, the balance of power will shift further in our direction.  Sooner rather than later, aspiring presidential candidates will begin jockeying for position.  Let’s give all of them a fair hearing. 

Above all, let’s not succumb to the temptation to re-litigate the 2016 Democratic primaries.  If you see people on Facebook or Twitter trying to resuscitate the Clinton-Sanders feud, assume they’re either trolls or Russian bots.  Don’t get sucked down that rabbit hole. 

The good Lord willing, neither Bernie nor Hillary will be the Democratic standard bearer in 2020, and that’s a good thing.  I’m a baby boomer myself, and it’s time for my generation to let go.  Both Sanders and Clinton are right about a lot of things, and good for them.  But their window of opportunity has come and gone.  In 2020, I want to vote for someone younger than I am. 

I endorse the sentiment expressed by President John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address:“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”