Lance Mannion

Ted and Bo and the ACA

Posted early Tuesday morning, December 1, 2020.

President Barack Obama and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy on the sidewalk crossing the South Lawn of the White House, taking what may have been their last walk together, April 21, 2009. Photo via the Barack Obama Presidential Library.

I don’t know how things have gone if Ted had been alive and in good health for the whole of Obama’s first term. Negotiations over the Affordable Care Act would have turned out differently, that’s for certain, and maybe the fight would now be over the future of Kennedycare. But, then, it was a bunch of Democratic senators who made a hash of things, and I’m not sure even Ted could have won them all over. Ah, well. At least we had him when we had him. As senator, he got to call ten men "Mr. President". The first was his brother, of course. The last was Obama, which I'm sure must have gladdened his heart and probably seemed to him like he was closing the circle. From President Obama’s autobiography…

But, of all the pleasures that first year in the White House would deliver, none quite compared to the mid-April arrival of Bo, a huggable, four-legged black bundle of fur, with a snowy-white chest and front paws. Malia and Sasha, who’d been lobbying for a puppy since before the campaign, squealed with delight upon seeing him for the first time, letting him lick their ears and faces as the three of them rolled around on the floor.

With Bo, I got what someone once described as the only reliable friend a politician can have in Washington. He also gave me an added excuse to put off my evening paperwork and join my family on meandering after-dinner walks around the South Lawn. It was during those moments—with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, Michelle smiling and squeezing my hand as Bo bounded in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase—that I felt normal and whole and as lucky as any man has a right to expect.

Bo had come to us as a gift from Ted Kennedy and his wife, Vicki, part of a litter that was related to Teddy’s own beloved pair of Portuguese water dogs. It was a truly thoughtful gesture—not only because the breed was hypoallergenic (a necessity, owing to Malia’s allergies) but also because the Kennedys had made sure that Bo was housebroken before he came to us. When I called to thank them, though, it was only Vicki I could speak with. It had been almost a year since Teddy was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, and although he was still receiving treatment in Boston, it was clear to everyone—Teddy included—that the prognosis was not good.

I’d seen him in March, when he’d made a surprise appearance at a White House conference we held to get the ball rolling on universal-health-care legislation. Teddy’s walk was unsteady that day; his suit draped loosely on him after all the weight he’d lost, and despite his cheerful demeanor his pinched, cloudy eyes showed the strain it took just to hold himself upright. And yet he’d insisted on coming anyway, because thirty-five years earlier the cause of getting everyone decent, affordable health care had become personal for him. His son Teddy, Jr., had been diagnosed with a bone cancer that led to a leg amputation at the age of twelve. While at the hospital, Teddy had come to know other parents whose children were just as ill but who had no idea how they’d pay the mounting medical bills. Then and there, he had vowed to do something to change that.

Through seven Presidents, Teddy had fought the good fight. During the Clinton Administration, he helped secure passage of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Over the objections of some in his own party, he worked with President George W. Bush to get drug coverage for seniors. But, for all his power and legislative skill, the dream of establishing universal health care—a system that delivered good-quality medical care to all people, regardless of their ability to pay—continued to elude him.

Which is why he had forced himself out of bed to come to our conference, knowing his brief but symbolic presence might have an effect. Sure enough, when he walked into the East Room, the hundred and fifty people who were present erupted into lengthy applause. His remarks were short; his baritone didn’t boom quite as loudly as it used to when he’d roared on the Senate floor. By the time we’d moved on to the third or fourth speaker, Vicki had quietly escorted him out the door.

I saw him only once more in person, six weeks later, at a signing ceremony for a bill expanding national-service programs, which Republicans and Democrats alike had named in his honor. But I would think of Teddy sometimes when Bo wandered into the Treaty Room and curled up at my feet. And I’d recall what Teddy had told me that day, just before we walked into the East Room together. “This is the time, Mr. President,” he had said. “Don’t let it slip away.”

---from “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama.

The Trump of Chicago. Fifth Ward and Final Ward: Triumph of the gang

Ballot box stuffed Thursday, November 1, 2018. Re-counted Thursday, November 12, 2020.

Big Bill Thompson posing for a campaign photo in 1926 when he was running for his third term as mayor of Chicago, a campaign financed by Al Capone. 

Why did 70 million people vote to keep a villain like Trump as president is the question roiling up social media since the election, as if the answer isn’t obvious in the minds of people asking it and they aren’t prepared to give it in their next sentence. Here’s my next sentence and a couple more for good measure: Why wouldn’t they? Americans have elected villains, sharpers, scoundrels, thieves, knaves, charlatans, clowns and fools, and would-be dictators, often all stuffed into the same flashy suit, to every other office, high and low, in the land, since the beginning of the Republic: it was only a matter of time until one got himself elected president. The wonder, as I say in the notes below and have said in many other posts and tweets before and since, the wonder isn’t that we got a Trump for president, the wonder is we didn’t get one sooner. Big Bill Thompson, three-term mayor of Chicago in the 1920s, was one of those over-stuffed flashy suits...

November 1, 2018:

The reason I keep bringing up scoundrels like Big Bill Thompson every chance I get isn’t that I want to make the high-minded point that having survived the likes of Thompson---and Aaron Burr, and Boss Tweed, and Warren Harding, and Huey Long, George Wallace, Richard Daley, Spiro Agnew, Newt Gingrich, just to name a few of the most recognizable---we’re likely to survive Trump and his gang of vipers. I’m just hoping to remind any political journalists who happen to stray across this once-upon-a-time influential blog that those others existed and not only thrived but ended up paying no price or hardly any for their crimes and depredations. They fooled and they suckered many voters, but most people knew them for what they were and voted for them in spite of it---in many cases because of it. Thompson had two terms as mayor of Chicago, serving from 1915 to 1923, in which he racked up a fair number of progressive achievements but also showed himself again and again for the grafter and clown that he was at heart. In the 1922 mayoral election, he decided not to run again---he had his eye on higher and more lucrative office---and he was replaced by the reform-minded William Dever. Dever proved to be too mindful of reforms, particularly those regarding enforcing Prohibition. Thompson ran against him in the next election, and beat him by 85,000 votes. The people of Chicago were thirsty. They wanted a drink, and Thompson promised to give it to them. He made good on his promise, taking his cut, of course, and sharing it gratefully with Al Capone, with whom he was in cahoots and who had funded his campaign to the tune of a quarter of a million bucks. Thompson’s slogan that year was “Vote for Big Bill the Builder. He Cannot Be Bought, Bossed or Bluffed”.

The rest of the country viewed Thompson’s re-election as a new low for Chicago. The city had chosen as its mayor a “political blunderbuss,” in the words of one journalist---”indolent, ignorant of public issues, inefficient as an administrator, incapable of making a respectable argument, reckless in his campaign methods and electioneering oratory, inclined to think evil of those who are not in agreement or sympathy with him, and congenitally demogogical.”

Many saw Thompson as a product of the special cocktail of corruption and bluster that animated local life.

“They was trying to beat Bill with the better-element vote,” observed the humorist Will Rogers. “The trouble with Chicago is there ain’t much better element.”

But others recognized Big Bill as the symptom of a deeper rot permeating the country---”a strong example,” wrote the Indianapolis Star, “of the potency of demagoguery and appeals to prejudice in American elections.”

For one sociologist, writing in Century Magazine, Thompson’s victory proved that democracy itself had failed---not just in Chicago, but in any major metropolis.

“The people were not fooled,” he wrote. “They knew that a vote for Thompson was a vote for Thompson and the ‘boys.’”

The old open form of government---”the kind envisioned by Thomas Jefferson”---had given way to cabals of crooks, grafters, and party bosses who cut their deals behind closed doors.

“That is essentially what has come to pass with Thompson,” the sociologist wrote. “His election is the triumph of the gang.”

---from “Scarface and the Untouchable” by Max Collins and A. Brad Schwartz.

Thompson ran for a fourth term in 1931, but by then enough voters were tired of his antics that he was defeated soundly by Anton Cermak, who was reform-minded like Dever but also tougher-minded. Lessons learned. All’s well that ends well. Democracy is redeemed. Except that in less than a generation Richard Daley would be elected to his first term as mayor.

This was meant to be the concluding vote in a series that for some reason I didn’t conclude. Here are the links to the first four:

First Ward: "We low-brows got to stick together!"

Second Ward: "Away with decency! Give us our beer!"

Third Ward: A quiet election day in the Windy City.

Fourth Ward: Big Bill drains the swamp.

It's her...I think...I hope...It better be!

Adapted from the Twitter feed, June 15 and June 17, 2020. Written up July 15. Revised and posted Tuesday morning, August 4.

The ticket I’m rooting to see: Joe Biden with Kamala Harris on the campaign trail pre-lockdown. Uncredited and undated photo via Harris’ post in Medium announcing her endorsement of Joe for the Democratic nomination for President, March 8, 2020.

A joint note from the Departments of In Search of Lost Time and Like I Would Know…

I want to get this in for bragging purposes before Biden announces his choice for VP, just in case. Harris has been my favorite since she dropped out of the presidential race in December, for a number of reasons, the main one being I like how fierce she can be. But back then, when I had long since already concluded, reluctantly, that Joe would be the nominee, I thought Harris could provide the fire he lacked on the campaign trail. She could be Joe’s Teddy Roosevelt to his McKinley. Biden could campaign from his figurative front porch while she barnstorms around the country making fiery speeches and rallying crowds of the faithful. It also seemed he liked her and I expected he’d choose someone he was most comfortable with who could do the most for him attracting the voters he needed to win. That wasn’t Warren. Isn’t Warren. The pandemic has upended everything, of course, and I’m not sure how Harris’ strengths on the stump will carry over onto virtuality. But there’s also this: She’s what Joe isn’t. Someone Trump and the GOP can demonize in their voters’ eyes. Everybody likes Joe. That’s his main strength. But, wow, are they going to hate on her. They already do, even if they don’t know it’s her they hate specifically. She represents everything they fear and loathe. This makes her a problematic choice. Having her on the ticket might scare off potential Republican and Republican-leaning Independents in a way Biden himself doesn’t. And, then, there’s developing conventional wisdom that Biden might want a VP who won’t overshadow him, even inadvertently, by pursuing presidential ambitions of her own while she’s supposed to be giving her all to helping enact his Presidential plans and policies. One of Joe’s weaknesses throughout his career has been his susceptibility to conventional wisdom.

At any rate, I’m still rooting for her. But, as always, like I would know.

The post below is adapted from a Twitter thread I posted back in June in response to that letter. You might remember it. Nope. Not that one, the one that appeared in Harper’s. The one before that one. The open letter to Biden from the self-styled liberal Democrats favoring Warren for the VP. The one putting forth arguments against Harris that were, ironically, sexist and implicitly racist in the way unreflectively morally and politically self-approving white liberals can be...

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

It’s her.

I think.

I hope…

So this open letter to Joe making the case for Elizabeth Warren and against Harris really broils my brisket.

And Lawrence Tribe’s defense of the letter infuriates me even more.

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, where Warren once taught, said that there would be some “symbolic ways in which some people would be disappointed” if Biden does not choose an African American woman, and that disappointment should count. But Warren’s record, he said, makes her the strongest choice.

“I think African Americans above all would be the first to say they are more interested in results than cosmetics,” said Tribe, who signed the letter.

Tribe should know better.

CNN political commentator and Democratic consultant Karen Finney said it succinctly in this tweet:

No ⁦@tribelaw, Black people are NOT “cosmetics” and it’ll be more than “symbolic” disappointment. Your comments are a prime example of the ways that white liberals are just as bad about telling Black people to just wait our turn. Shame on you.

The other top named signers are not representative of the Democratic left. They are charter members of the Democratic elite, just slightly more liberal than their fellow members.

In fact, that they would presume to speak for POC, tell them what's best for them and essentially tell them "wait your turn...again" disqualifies them from speaking for the liberal rank and file.

Harris was my first choice for the nomination. She’s my first choice for VP. It's not a symbolic choice for this old white guy either.

I not rooting for her because I want to see the first black woman as Vice-President. I want her to be the first black woman VP. Same as I didn't want Hillary Clinton in 2016 because I wanted to see the first woman President; I wanted HRC to be the first woman president. I think Harris will be good at the job and, if it should come to it, if President Biden decides not to run again or can’t, I think she'll be the best candidate for the 2024 Presidential nomination.

I see Warren as the symbolic/cosmetic choice. She'd add nothing special to the ticket except as a consolation prize to "progressive" voters who think Biden owes them for beating their preferred candidates.

The letter portrays Warren (D-Mass.) as the best prepared prospect to serve as president and one uniquely capable of helping Biden politically in the November election. It asserts that he is “already strong” among nonwhite voters but could use help winning over disaffected voters who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the primary — even as some of them have soured on Warren.

I’ll say Biden’s already strong among non-white voters. Particularly black voters. That’s how he won the nomination. But that doesn’t mean he can take them for granted. Rewarding and rallying the voters who got you here and showing you value them is far more an imperative than chasing after a petulant remnant who won’t appreciate your efforts to court them anyway and respond with the sought-after enthusiasm.

As for "qualified", I think Harris is the more qualified. She has more executive experience, she has more experience as a politician answering to a community, and she's even more involved in the current moment.

Then there's the bit about how Warren would make a fool of Pence in their debate. So what? First off, that's easy. Second off, nobody will care. The only reason for making that a qualification is intellectual snobbery and vanity. We'd all like to see Pence get his comeuppance

But it won't come in the form of liberal elitists smugly talking/tweeting/zooming about it the next day with other self-satisfied liberal elitists

What's more, Harris is a good debater and interrogator herself. That’s how she grabbed my attention. I jumped on her bandwagon before there was a bandwagon to jump on, in March of 2017, when she went after Neil Gorsuch at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. At one of the early debates last year, she got in trouble for being "too hard" on Biden. Warren would run intellectual circles around Pence. Harris would eat him alive.

And let me get this straight: A major concern about Biden is his age. His birthday’s November 20. That’ll make him seventy-eight come January 2021. We're worried his health and his stamina won't hold up over the next four years. So the answer to this is for him to pick as his VP a punk kid of...seventy-one?

Warren looks to be in great shape for a person her age. But people in their 70s are still old and they tend to develop all sorts of serious health issues seemingly overnight.

For the record, she's still only 70 until next week. Her birthday is June 22.

She has the energy and spirit that suggests she'll live to be a hundred. But it's not improbable that Joe will outlast her.

This is my most petty objection to the letter. But that its signers, while making the case that Joe’s age means that his Vice-President will have to be ready to take over at any moment, are pushing the notion that a fellow septuagenarian is the best qualified to step in if necessity demands is indicative.

It's incredible that at this moment the signers would dare tell black Americans to "wait their turn" and that an elderly white woman who floundered in the primaries in good part due to her failure to develop the necessary level of good will among them is their best hope.

What it comes down to is the signers pushing one of their own for the job and signalling quite plainly that they do not regard Harris or any of the other women of color said to be on Biden’s list as belonging to the club.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To read the whole story about the letter, follow the link to "Warren allies send letter urging Biden to pick her as running mate" at the Washington Post. For Harris' post endorsing Biden jump here.

Filed under The Presidential Horserace 2020.

Incentivizing work...on THEIR terms

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, July 13, 2020. Posted Saturday morning, August 1.

“Incenting” keeping workers in line: Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin speaking at a Cornonavirus Task Force briefing at the White House, April 2, 2020, while President Trump looks on, waiting for his turn to take over the microphone and begin another one of his lunatic stand-up routines. Reuters file photo by Tom Brenner via Business Insider.

[More July catch-up.]

The GOP is not the party of the working class. Not even of just the white working class. It’s not the party of workers at all. It’s the party of bosses. It’s the party of putting you to work on their terms.

In an interview on CNBC, Mnuchin said he favors extending enhanced unemployment benefits beyond their scheduled July 31 expiration, but he said any extension must protect both employers and employees.

“I’ve heard stories of where companies are trying to get people back to work and they won’t come because the enhanced unemployment,” Mnuchin said. “But we’ll fix that and we’ll figure out an extension to it that works for companies and works for those people who will still be unemployed.”

Said Mnuchin: “We’re going to make sure that people are incented to go back to jobs.”

---from “Trump Administration On Next Stimulus: Unemployed Shouldn’t Be Paid More Not To Work” by Kelly Ann Smith in Forbes, July 9, 2020.

I’ve heard stories of people not wanting to come back to work because they’re naturally “incented” to not risk getting sick and dying in a pandemic that’s still out of control. But YMMV.

Education Secretary on a mission to put an end to education

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, July 12, 2020. Posted Saturday morning, August 1.

Education Secretary at a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing being held in the Department of Education building, Wednesday, July 8, 2020. AP Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta via the Boston Herald.

[More catching up on my July blogging even though it's August.]

DeVos’ mission is to destroy public schools and make college unaffordable for the poor and working and lower middle classes. It’s part and parcel with the Republican corporatist plan to create and control a class of desperate and optionless laborers who will take any job at whatever pay the owners chose to pay them and stay on the jobs without question or complaint because there’s nothing else out there but poverty. Only the already well-off are supposed to go to the better colleges and universities, can have educations that will carry them into the ruling elite. Only the upper middle class are allowed educations that will, with luck, keep them, anxiously, upper middle class. The others, disproportionately people of color, will attend poor schools, underfunded and overcrowded, without resources or adequate supplies and up to date textbooks, where they will learn at best to read, write, and do simple math, enough to make them employable, useful, usable.

Just got to thinking as I was reading:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made clear on Sunday she wants schools to reopen fully for most students for the 2020-21 academic year, even as coronavirus infection rates are soaring in some parts of the country and some superintendents say it is impossible for them to do that.

DeVos made her latest statement about what schools should do on CNN’s “State of the Union.” In the interview with journalist Dana Bash, DeVos doubled down on calls she made last week for schools to reopen. “Kids need to be in school,” she said. “They need to be learning, they need to be moving ahead. And we can’t — we cannot be paralyzed and not allow that or not be intent on that happening.”

DeVos said nothing, however, about what school superintendents have been saying they need to reopen: billions of dollars in additional federal funding to cover the costs of changes they have to make and personal protective equipment they need to buy. In fact, DeVos last week threatened to withhold federal funding from districts that didn’t do what she wanted, even though she can’t unilaterally stop funding approved by Congress.

---“Do what I want: Betsy DeVos tells school districts trying to open for 2020-21” by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, Sunday, July 12, 2020.

The Party of Knaves, Thieves, Crooks, and Liars

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Monday, December 9, 2019. Posted Thursday morning, December 12.

Their hero, role-model, and martyr, declaring himself not a crook at a press conference, November 17, 1973. AP photo via the National Journal.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post…

Can the entire Republican political establishment in Washington be corrupt?

Sure it can.

Large-scale rings of knaves, thieves, scoundrels, and villains operating in their self-interest and against the national interest while using their political power for gain, advantage, pleasure, and amusement have been successful in both parties since the beginning of the Republic.

But the current GOP has been drawing on an exceptional pool of "talent" since the 1960s when it began to become a Southern party.

Along with their racism, bigotry, and know-nothingism, when the segregationists moved in and took over, they brought with them their tradition of politics as organized theft and brazen self-dealing.

And after Nixon honest and decent men and women began to shun the party, leaving it in the hands of people for whom Nixon was a hero, a role-model, and martyr.  And those people recruited and groomed a generation of apprentice crooks and liars who in their turn recruited and groomed a new generation who are overachievers in that field.

So, yeah, they're all corrupt. Corruption is what they do. None of them would have been nominated or appointed or hired if they weren't.

Any news organization that covers them as if they were something other than a carnival of thieves is complicit in the corruption.

And please note: I didn't mention you know who. The GOP isn’t corrupt because of Trump. Trump is their president BECAUSE he is corrupt.

On the most corrupting influences in politics

Posted Monday evening, November 18, 2019.

Another very short essay:

The most corrupting influences in politics aren’t money and power.

They’re vanity and ego.

Money and power are next.

But right after them are family and friends and the feelings of loyalty, obligation, responsibility, sympathy, love, and guilt they engender.

A life of neither praise nor blame: Marco Rubio's place in hell is not actually in hell

Adapted from the Twitter feed and mined from the notebooks, Sunday, October 27, 2019. Posted Monday morning, November 18.

“The Barque of Dante” by Gustave Dore.

Florida's Republican Senator and virtual lay preacher Marco Rubio has me inspired to read Dante and the Bible for reasons he probably wouldn’t like.

Early this past summer, Rubio, unbidden and not followed by me, began showing up in my Twitter feed to tweet bible verses at me and anybody else unfortunate enough to wander into the shadow of his virtual sidewalk pulpit. He seemed to prefer King James versions of the Psalms. I’m a Revised Standard Version citer of scripture myself. The tweeted passages of chapter and verse I saw were short and without commentary or annotation. I’m not sure what he was up to. Probably just being a good Christian by his lights, beginning the day with a prayer and doing his praying in public the way many American Christians do---the way many Americans do even if they’re not believers. We make prayers of many things. Listen to the callers on sports talk shows the morning after a game. Read the tweets in your TL without focusing on the specifics. Pay attention to what your co-workers are saying as they settle in at their desks. Listen for the tone of people in any workplace use when they greet each other, their clients, customers  as they take up their stations on the line or step up to their counters and cash registers, climb into the cabs of their trucks, call in their first patients, open their briefcases, or pick up their tablets, grade books, or tools. “Hot enough for you?” can be as much of a prayer as a Hail Mary. We’re all hypocrites certain of our reward, although I prefer not to think of us as hypocrites. I think of us over-sharers. It’s like Saul Bellow said, we can’t resist the opportunity of doing acquaintances the favor of cheerfully brow-beating them with bits of well-intentioned advice and helpfully offered if unasked for opinion. Bellow would know. A great chunk of his writing is advice and opinion, not always cheerfully given but usually, at least when he was in good form, funny enough to let pass without argument. We seem to take it for granted that whoever we’re talking to, even a perfect stranger, has been waiting all day to hear what we think. But Christians, especially of the conservative variety, seem to believe it’s their duty to let us know they’re doing us a favor by sharing what they regard as good news---the Good News. 

And there are many other things that starting the day with a prayer might mean. It’s a way of offering the fruits of the day to God. It’s a way to ask for his help getting through whatever life dumps on you during the course of the day. It’s a way to remind yourself that there’s more to life than work and making money. It’s a way to compose yourself, order your thoughts, tame your emotions, and get both your mind and body in gear. It can be any combination of all of those things or all of those things. On the other hand, it can be hypocrisy, an attempt to fool God or yourself or your voters into thinking you are a good and pious Christian and deserve your office and to continue in it just for that.

How many psalms contain lines that are versions of “Lord, save me from my enemies and curse them to pieces while you’re at it!" Invoked by politicians, they might as well translate as “Vote for me and to hell with my opponent!”

Like I said, I don’t know what Rubio was up to, but I pretended to think he was confessing to a guilty conscience. Those lines from the Psalms, I wrote, weren’t prayers of penance, they were cries of lamentation and despair. Rubio was crying out in terror as he felt his soul being pulled down to hell. I fancied he was feeling the guilt all supporters, enablers, and kowtowers to Trump ought to be feeling. And I quoted a passage from Canto XXXIII of Dante’s “Inferno” in which Dante and Virgil encounter the damned soul of a priest Dante thinks is alive and well back up on earth. The priest’s spirit explains that hell has a good share of damned souls among its population whose bodies are still walking around up top inhabited by demons making mischief and doing evil in their names---Dante’s version of zombies, walking dead but sentient and with personalities. 

Rubio’s Twitter prayers were showing up in my timeline in late spring and early summer. Sometime in mid-summer they stopped---well, I stopped seeing them. Given the vagaries of Twitter and changes in my own schedule that changed the times of day when I looked at my feed, I was probably just missing them. For all I know he tweeted out all of Leviticus and the whole book of Numbers when I wasn’t looking and had moved on to Dueterotomy. Recently, however, he’s started appearing regularly again.

These days his tweets are more prosaic and explicitly political. He’ll still throw out the occasional bible verse, but more often I’ll see something like this one:

Two things are true

There’s only been ONE man EVER who was always right & deserves blind loyalty & his name was Jesus;

And

No matter what a Republican does the left will never be fair to them. What they want is Republicans who will douse themselves in kerosene & light a match.

I’m not sure Jesus himself felt he deserved blind loyalty. After all, he did choose the apostle most prone to questioning him and who is famous for having denied him three times as the rock upon which to build his church. Never mind. The point is that Rubio’s trying to have it both ways here: taking an allusive swipe at Trump loyalists in the Republican ranks but then, as if frightened that even that weak bit of dissent would get him in trouble, turning right around to lash out in no uncertain terms at Democrats. 

Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a Republican political strategist without portfolio and a regular conservative commentator for various TV bobblehead shows who has never been fondly disposed toward the villain in the Oval Office, has been seeing the same tweets. She was a supporter and friend of Rubio’s. Not so much anymore. She’s angry and disappointed with him, and she’s expressed it on TV and on Twitter. Here’s a good example:

My God.

Trump turned the talented guy once lauded as the “Republican Savior”, into a caricature of his former self. He hides behind Bible verses to defend a man who eviscerates Christian & American values daily. Marco could have been a contender. Now, he’s just a pretender.

Broadcast journalist and news show producer Soledad O’Brien is more than angry. She’s furious, and not the least bit circumspect about it. @-ing right at him, she’s called Rubio a coward, a coward again, a cowardly senator, an American Coward, a “Profile in Courage”, and a man without a moral compass,

Then she gets mad.

You are horrible.

She's been the opposite of an amen-choir.

Rubio:

"Did you fail to rescue those who were being dragged off to death,those tottering, those near death, because you said, 'We didn’t know about it'? Surely, the Searcher of hearts knows and will repay all according to their deeds" 

Proverbs 24:11-12

O’Brien:

Yes, Senator, the Lord is noticing these failures of yours.

Rubio: “LORD, be gracious to us; for you we wait. Be our strength every morning, our salvation in time of trouble!

Isaiah 33:2

O’Brien:

Yes Lord, we wait.  For Senator @marcorubio to grow some courage and stand up to corruption. We wait as Little Marco shrinks even smaller to Tiny Marco, because he lacks bravery and lacks ability. We wait for him to stand up for those values he likes to talk about.  Amen.

And responding to the tweet that got to Navarro-Cárdenas, she tweeted back with the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

. A Senator so cowardly he won’t stand up to President Trump nor name him in this tweet. Surely there’s a biblical verse about cowards that would apply here?

There probably is, but I can’t call one to mind at the moment. There is a passage from Dante, however, that fits the bill.

It’s routine now for Democrats and liberals to call Republicans cowards for refusing to stand up for the country by standing up to Trump. I don’t think they’re cowards. Most of them. I think they’re Republicans. The most representative Republicans. The party is rotten with racists, know-nothings, bigots, hypocrites, sexists---male and female---bullies, authoritarians, moneygrubbers, status-seekers, grievance-collectors, resentment-mongers, revenge-seekers, ignoramuses, and fools, and they send people just like themselves to Congress, and a great many of those who are not truly representative are cynical and corrupt and willing to pretend for the money and the power that it earns them. There are plenty of cowards among them. They aren’t afraid of Trump himself so much as his voters though. They’re afraid of losing their jobs. Almost all of them, even ones from the reddest of red states and districts have to worry about being primaried from the Right. Marco Rubio, however, would seem to be in pretty safe position compared to a lot of the rest of his caucus.

Rubio was re-elected to the Senate in 2016. He doesn’t have to worry about his job for another three years. And he won with over 200,000 more votes than Trump got in Florida, 4,835,191 to 4,617,886 or 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 49. 

But I think Rubio is afraid of something else.

He’s afraid of spoiling his own future Presidential hopes.

Rubio is only forty-eight. He can run in the next five presidential elections after this coming one and still not be as old on the fifth go-round as Trump, Bernie, or Biden are now and Warren will be next fall.  But at least for the next few cycles he’ll need the votes of the base to win the nomination. And to have a chance of securing those votes he has to at least appear to be with them in their loyalty to their hero-king. It must gall him though. He knows he’s a better person than Trump. He knows he’s more deserving of his office. He knows what Trump is and what the base wants. And he has some pride. He must hate it that he has to crawl before the bully and idiot who humiliated him in 2016. And he’s shown signs of having a conscience and a heart, particularly in his dealings with the students who survived the shootings at Parkland. 

But to show it---let alone act on it---would cost him votes among the hideous men and women he needs. So he’s stuck, trapped between principle and ambition, afraid to do the right thing, afraid to go all-in for Trump like the weasel Lindsey Graham. Neither hero nor villain except by cowardly default, he lives a life of ineffectiveness and inconsequence, a life that earns him neither praise nor blame, and Dante assigns a place for such timid souls. 

It’s just inside Hell’s gate, on the bank of the River Styx. Here they spend eternity, despised by the saved and the damned, ignored by the angels and the devils. Their punishment is to know what they might have done, could have done, should have done, and will never be able to do...

Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries
were echoing across the starless air,
so that, as soon as I set out, I wept.

Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements,
accents of anger, words of suffering,
and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands—

all went to make a tumult that will whirl
forever through that turbid, timeless air,
like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls.

And I—my head oppressed by horror—said:
“Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?”

And he to me: “This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.

They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.

The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them—
even the wicked cannot glory in them.”

And I: “What is it, master, that oppresses
these souls, compelling them to wail so loud?”
He answered: “I shall tell you in few words.

Those who are here can place no hope in death,
and their blind life is so abject that they
are envious of every other fate.

The world will let no fame of theirs endure;
both justice and compassion must disdain them;
let us not talk of them, but look and pass.”

---from Dante's "Inferno", Canto III, translated by Alan Mandelbaum.

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First Reading: "Little Marco crying out in terror as he feels his soul being sucked down into hell".

Second Reading: "From the letter of St Plum to the Cuthberts".

In place of a Psalm: "The Eager Damned".

And today's Communion song: "Dante: Figures in a Landscape".

Filed under Sunday Sermon.

Blind fools!

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Sunday evening, November 10. Posted Monday morning, November 11. Slightly revised Monday afternoon.

“Woe Unto You, Scribes and Pharisees” by James Tissot. Circa 1890. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, via Wikipedia.

Scribes. Not lawyers. Scribes. It’s “lawyers” in the song from “Godspell”. Scribes in both Matthew and Luke. The composers of the song needed the two syllables. Jesus needed only the one. Don’t these God-botherers ever read their bibles?

A 3-year, coordinated effort has been underway to remove [Donald Trump] from office.

Jesus warned us — watch out for the lawyers

—-Trump toady, apologist, and Scriptural illiterate Republican Senator from Tennessee Marsha Blackburn on Twitter, Sunday, November 10, 2019.

The gospel Blackburn thinks she’s alluding to is probably Matthew’s. But it might be Luke’s. Likely it’s a conflation of both vaguely remembered from her Sunday School days. The key word in Matthew, and in Luke, and in “Godspell” is “hypocrites” and the important line is “they do not practise what they teach.”

Yep. It’s teach not preach, he says pharisaically and aware of the irony.

I wonder if Blackburn saw that her fellow hypocrite and even more embarrassingly toady Rand Paul tweeted this the other day (The link is to Howard Dean’s response, so there’s a cushion.):

From law professor and Chairman of the Board of the Federalist Society Steven G. Calabresi: House Democrats Violate The 6th Amendment By Denying Trump A Public Trial

Luke has Jesus chastising the “experts on the law”. This Calabresi qualifies, at least in Rand Paul’s view—-and keep in mind Rand Paul himself is an expert on nothing except eye glasses paid for by Medicare which he purports to want to see trashed—-as an expert on the law.

There I go again, citing scripture for my purpose. Jesus was disputing with the experts on religious law, you know, the people who scolded others on the proper way to be Jewish the way Right Wing Christians like Blackburn scold their fellow Americans on the proper way to be Christian—-which is their way. Those would be the “lawyers” Blackburn’s warning us Jesus warned about. Those are the “lawyers” Jesus said don’t practice what they teach, the “lawyers” who “on the outside look righteous to others, but inside...are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”

Blackburn, you won’t be surprised to hear, is a classic ladder-puller. She boasts of being the first woman from Tennessee to serve in the United States Senate without acknowledging the role feminism played in getting her there and while voting to deny other women the rights and benefits that would give them the opportunities to make their own way in life. She's anti-abortion but hardly pro-child and pro-mother. She’s also anti-LBGT rights, a climate change denialist, a rejector of evolution, a staunch supporter of Trump’s anti-immigration policies—-she’s not about to invite any strangers in—-and a Second Amendment absolutist. She joined in nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his handling of North Korea. As a member of the House of Representatives she voted to repeal the ACA every chance she got. No comfort for the sick there. Children have to suffer and die so the rich can store up even more treasure on earth. A typical Right Wing Republican.

There’s another phrase that appears in Matthew, Luke, and “Godspell”.

Blind fools!

In which Jimmy Carter is reminded that the political is personal

Posted Thursday afternoon, August 22, 2019.

“Area 1002 of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, looking south toward the Brooks Range mountains.” Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, via Wikipedia.

[Editor's note: This is the post I said I was working on when in my note on my brother Lyle's post card from Alaska. I said I was working on it. I didn't say I was working fast on it.]

Nothing better demonstrated how far Carter’s legislative and political skills had been honed since the fiasco of the water wars than what he accomplished by negotiating, securing passage, and signing into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. And he accomplished it in 1980 as a lame duck president after his loss to Ronald Reagan, with one foot out the Oval Office door. Without exaggeration it is one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation in the nation’s history. Its scope was breathtaking. It added more than 157 acres of national parks, [ten] national wildlife refuges [including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], [two] national monuments...[ten] national forests and [two national] conservation areas...[and] twenty-five wild and scenic rivers. But it was balanced legislation, opening 95 percent of the state for unrestricted oil and gas exploration.---Stuart Eizenstat, from “President Carter: The White House Years”.

Looking back forty-odd years later, that last sentence’s “balanced legislation”, makes it a more problematic statement than it may have been in 1980 when there was still an oil crisis and everybody was looking to reduce our dependence on imported oil. But the whole passage carries a point Eizenstat keeps coming back to in “President Carter”, his memoir of working as Jimmy Carter’s senior deputy advisor for domestic affairs. It is the thesis of the book.

Jimmy Carter was a more successful president than he gets credit for being.

Eizenstat looks with a cool, assessing eye at the reasons for that. One is Carter wasn’t the most adept political leader going. He was temperamentally opposed to doing things because they were politically expedient. In fact he could be resistant to doing things that he wanted to do and knew were the right things to do if he thought they were to his benefit politically or might be perceived that way. He also tended to see what he wanted to do and the right thing to do as being the same thing. The result was that he tended to see anyone who wanted to do something other than what he wanted to do and had different ideas from his about what the right thing to do as being against doing the right thing. In saying Carter honed his political skills Eizenstat is stating the truth, but it’s implied that Carter learned to get over himself. Everybody he dealt with didn’t need to be the moral paragon Carter thought himself to be, and he became less in the habit of letting his moral judgment get in the way of his political judgment. And he learned that he didn’t need to get everything he wanted in a deal for the deal to still be a good one. Still, this must have presented him with a problem.

[Alaska’s] two senators, Republican Ted Stevens and Democrat Mike Gravel [Yep. The same Mike Gravel.], united against the bill, although they bore both political and personal grievance against each other arising from an airplane crash in 1978 that took the life of Stevens’s wife and almost killed him, for which rational or not, he blamed Gravel for delaying his departure with dilatory action in the Senate. The two rivals joined to write their own limited bill designed to drag out the legislative process until some provision of the Settlement Act expired, returning the land to eligibility for development.

I need to go back a bit here. 

The bill Stevens and Gravel united in opposing wasn’t the one that became the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

One of the factors that makes it extremely difficult to get any major piece of legislation passed is that there are almost always other pieces of major legislation in place that have to be replaced or complemented by the new legislation or incorporated into it. And it has to be worked out in passing the new legislation what will happen to the policies and programs the old legislation put into action. Whatever is decided, thousands and thousands and thousands---even millions---of lives are going to be disrupted, and they’re not going to be happy about it, even if ultimately its to their benefit. Elizabeth Warren is already being challenged on this front, more than the other Democratic candidates, because she’s proposing the most new programs and the most detailed ones, along with plans for putting them into law. But so do the candidates coming out for Medicare for All. Customers may learn not to miss their private insurance but the millions of people who work for the private insurance companies that will be put out of business, finding themselves suddenly unemployed aren’t just going to shrug philosophically and walk across the street to apply for jobs at McDonalds. High-level executives will come out all right. Secretaries, janitors, warehouse and dock workers, data entry clerks, customer service reps,  IT technicians, low-level accountants and actuaries aren’t going to get golden parachutes. What’s to become of them?

Complicating things even further is Congress itself. Senators and House members don’t sit around waiting for the president to present them with proposed legislation to debate. They have their own plans, agendas, and goals. While the president and his administration are preparing a bill to submit to Congress, legislators are going forward with their own bills which may conflict with the administration’s.

Before [Carter] could achieve this historic environmental legacy, however, he was faced with a challenge that would have left it stillborn two years earlier. More than eighty million acres were set aside for conservation under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, passed in the Nixon administration to clarify the land rights of the idigenous people after the discovery of oil off Alaska’s coast at Prudhoe Bay. An additional forty-five million acres were set aside by Nixon’s Interior Secretary, Rogers C.B. Morton, but would be reopened for development if Congress did not act by December 18, 1978.

Multiple efforts to resolve outstanding issues foundered in Congress and in the autumn of 1977 Representative Mo Udall, a committed environmentalist from a pioneer Arizona family, introduced a bill with sweeping conservation provisions designed to protect what he described as the “crown jewels of Alaska.” It brought in full force Alaska’s political and business leadership and energy companies, fearing that passage would limit their access to the area’s vast natural resources.

Stevens and Gravel weren’t necessarily in the pockets of the oil companies, but it’s likely that what united them despite their personal antagonism was political expediency. The money and jobs that opening up their whole state to “development” would make their constituents happy and grateful and that would lead to their getting re-elected.

Eizenstat doesn’t go in for psychoanalyzing or mind-reading, nor, unfortunately, does he make it a practice to give Carter’s own direct accounts of events, but I would like to know what Carter made of the Stevens-Gravel alliance and what his reaction was when Stevens showed up at the White House one day to throw Gravel under the dogsled.

With only two months to the December deadline, Stevens met with Carter in October  to indicate he was willing to negotiate with the White House and blamed Gravel for the impasse…

When Tip O’Neill said all politics is local, this is what he meant. Issues of national scope and import get hashed out at the lowest local levels where what’s good for my district, my town, my neighborhood, my family, my daily life matter more to voters than what’s good for the country at large. The bulk of his workdays revolved around his ushering out of his office some member of his caucus who’d just given him an earful about what he needed to keep the voters in his district happy in order to usher in another member of the caucus who wanted to give him an earful about what would make her voters happy, which was invariably at odds with what the first member’s voters wanted. And she would be followed by two more members with their own mutually-exclusive earfuls to deliver.

Adding to the fun would be O’Neill’s having to sort out what the members’ voters wanted and needed from what the members themselves wanted and needed. Ego, vanity, self-interest, ambition, and easily-bruised feelings colored every meeting, and had to be taken into account to get anything practical done.

The personal is political, as the saying has it. But the political is personal, too, extremely, painfully, and often embarrassingly so.  

One of the first and most important lessons Pop Mannion taught me about politics is that you should try to put aside your personal feelings. That’s nearly impossible. But even if you manage it, count on it---nobody else will. Which means that among the feelings you have to put aside are your anger, disappointment, and resentment at their failure.

So, what he taught me was that I wasn’t cut out for politics.

Most human beings aren’t. That includes most politicians.

Given that, it’s a wonder anything that’s the least bit political gets done.

Or stays done.

Thirty-nine years later, the oil companies are still pushing to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge And the Republicans in Congress and the malicious and destructive oaf in the White House want to let them. So do many local residents---many being a relative term in Alaska---who want the money and the jobs that would come with the oil rigs, including some indiginous people. They want the money and the jobs too, but they have concerns. They’re worried the drilling will hurt or scare off the caribou herds. They want to be able to hunt the land their ancestors hunted for a hundred generations. That might complicate things for the oil companies. Another thing that might make it complicated is their own corporate greed. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, there may not be enough oil down there to make it worth their while to drill. And, finally, the Trump Department of Interior official in charge of selling the drilling leases has resigned. He says a better opportunity has come along that he can’t turn down. Given he’s a Trump administration hack, making him corrupt by definition, that’s a way of saying he sees a better prospect for getting rich off his government connections.

Nothing makes the political personal like greed.

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"President Carter: The White House Years" by Stuart E. Eizenstat is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

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Nancy Pelosi is counting votes

Posted Wednesday night, July 17, 2019.

“Democratic majority leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, right, emphasizes a point as he talks with senators, from left, John F. Kennedy, D-Ma., George Smathers, D-Fla., Hubert H. Humphrey, D-Minn., and William Proxmire, D-Wis., in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 29, 1957.”  AP Photo via Wisconsin Public Radio.

It’s not easy. Wasn’t even for LBJ, who was very, very good at it…

Of all [Lyndon Johnson’s] political abilities--and he had so many remarkable political abilities---one of the most remarkable was his ability toe count votes, to know in advance which way a congressman or a senator---and during his six yeas as Majority Leader, he had to know every senator because e was often operating with a one-vote majority, 48 Democrats, 47 Republicans and Wayne Morse, an independent---to know how every senator was going to vote on a particular motion of piece of legislation. Vote-counting---accurate vote-counting: to be right in your count, when you have to be right---is a very rare ability. Sometimes a senator will mislead his Leader---the Majority or the Minority Leader---about how he’s going to vote, or will say he’s undecided himself and isn’t going to decide until the last minute, or even until the roll call itself has begun, and sometimes a senator is torn between conflicting pressures and beliefs. One day he feels he’s going to vote Aye and the next day he feels he’s going to vote Nay. Sometimes a senator doesn’t know himself until the very last minute where he’s going to come down.

---from “Working” by Robert Caro.

First in a series: Here's what comes next ----> "The most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy."

They're not afraid of him, at least not any more than a lion tamer is afraid of the lion

Posted Thursday morning, March 14, 2019. Updated below, Friday afternoon, March 15.

“Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, introduced a measure that would curtail the president’s powers under the National Emergencies Act of 1976.” Photo by Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Calling this capitulation might undersell what’s really happening here. What this whole exercise really confirms is that Republicans are actively enabling Trump’s abuse of power and merely looking for cover to get away with it.---Greg Sargent, the Washington Post, March 13, 2019.

Maybe Trump really convinced them of the need to pilfer from the military in support of an emergency declaration that the president himself said was unnecessary. More likely, they are frightened of crossing a man who warns that those who do “put themselves at great jeopardy.” Either way, it’s not that these lawmakers are ignoring their constituents – it’s that they are heeding a constituency of one.---Dana Milbank, the Washington Post, March 12, 2019.

This is Trump’s GOP — silent, intellectually dishonest and afraid to confront a president and an administration that flaunts its ignorance and offers no factual basis for its own positions.---Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post, November 28. 2018.

Sen. Bob Corker unloaded on his fellow Republicans for cowering from President Donald Trump.

The retiring Tennessee senator was angered that his amendment to the defense authorization measure that would reclaim congressional prerogatives on trade and tariffs would not be up for a vote, and he mocked his colleagues for not standing up to the president, including the chamber’s no. 2 Republican, Majority Whip John Cornyn.---Eric Garcia, Roll Call, June 12, 2018.

See, I don’t think they’re afraid of him. They like him. The fact of him, at any rate. They like having him there. They like what he does for them. They like him as a distraction. He takes the heat for doing unpopular things they want done---signing the tax cuts, trying to kill the ACA and take health care away from children, the elderly, the sick, the poor and unfortunate so their donors can pay less in taxes and bully and terrorize their workers with threats of taking away their barely beneficial benefits. They like that he’s deregulating like a supply sider’s dream come true. They like that he’s pulled us out of the Iran deal and the Paris accords.  They like that he saves their donors money, which makes their donors happy, which keeps their donors donating.

They like it that the pundits and analysts and liberals in general forget it’s their doing and blame him, as if he had any real say in the ACA repeal bills or the tax cut bill or now in putting together “his” budget, as if he has any idea what’s in it beyond the hurt it will inflict and the damage it will cause. They like it that he gets the “credit” for appointing their judges. Think he has any idea who those judges are before he’s told which one to appoint to which bench this time?

They don’t like it when he gets it into his head that he really is the President and decides to stop play acting and do some actual presidenting on his own. The tariffs and losing his easy to win trade wars, announcing he’s pulling our troops out of Syria without a plan or asking their permission, shutting down the government and at Christmas no less, attempting to remake our relationships with North and South Korea as Valentine’s Day present to his man-crush, shrugging off the horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi and defending the monster who more or less casually admitted he ordered the murder---these were all his ideas, and they’ve caused the Republicans endless headaches. They don’t like it when he causes them trouble. The emergency declaration is causing them nothing but trouble.

Some of them are beginning to openly wonder if he’s more trouble than he’s worth.

But they’re going to keep putting up with him. They’re just going to continue to keep a close eye on him. They’ll keep doing what they can to keep him in check by keeping him calm and contented, as much as a personality at odds with itself, motivated by indiscriminate resentments, angers, and fears, full of self-doubt and self-loathing can be contented and calmed. But they’re not afraid of him. No more than a lion tamer is afraid of the lion, at any rate.

Lindsey Graham seems to have figured out how to do it:   Fawn and flatter, flatter and fawn. Scream and shout and throw performance art temper tantrums in his defense while insisting he doesn’t need defending. Compliment him fulsomely, show him some obeisance and a degree of deference, let him have little things he wants now and then, go along from time to time when going along won’t cost the donors anything, and he’s happy as the pig he is in mud.

The problem is their fortunes are tied up with his, and his fortunes are tied to his voters. Not just to his mobs of hideous men either. To loyal rank and file Republicans. November’s elections showed their aren’t as many of the latter as there were before Trump made clear what “unconventional”, “unorthodox”, and “controversial” mean. (Note to political journalists and editors and producers: those words are not synonyms for destructive, irrational, irresponsible, reckless, lunatic, and dumb.) and, although there are still an awful lot of them, they can’t be relied upon to turn out and vote Republican as they’ve traditionally been. Meanwhile, the mobs of hideous men stick with him no matter what and become more ferociously devoted the more trouble he causes for the country and the Party.

The Republicans need every vote they can get. Karl Rove taught them that for Republicans to win all they needed to do was get one more vote than their opponent. That meant that they could play to their base without having to worry about enlarging the tent.

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne has a column arguing the Democrats have a double-edged sword to parry. The Republicans, though, have their own two-way trouble: The media commentariat and the leftistiest leftists are obsessed with those mythical Obama to Trump voters (Trump got significantly fewer voters in each of those Blue Wall states he carried than Obama did in 2012. Where did those Obama voters go? Not over to Trump), but the Republicans have to worry about the Dubya to McCain to Mitt to the, Well, ok, Trump, what the hell, how bad can he be voters. The problem is how to win back and keep those voters without pissing off the hideous men. And that’s who they’re afraid of. The hideous men. And not so much them. They’re contemptuous of them. They’re afraid of losing their votes.

They’re afraid they won’t turn out. They’re afraid they’ll leave their ballot lines blank or vote Democratic or minor party just to show ‘em. They’re afraid they’ll support primary challenges from the right.

Much fuss has been made over Trump’s talent and skill at manipulating the media. Much of that fuss has been made by the media who are desperate for an excuse for their failure to resist him in 2016 and to their inability to put a dent in him since (as well as their likely reversion to form in 2020). To hear them tell it, Trump has powers and abilities far beyond those of “orthodox” and “conventional” politicians.

Trump does have a powers and an abilities.

He has the power to convince the mobs that he shares their fears and hatreds and that their enemies are his enemies and the power to persuade them that he has the strength and the will to protect them.

He has the ability to get the media to cover---present---as real the image he wants to project.

Have to note that in the House and the Senate are many Republicans who aren’t the least bit afraid of the mobs of  hideous men and losing their votes because they are hideous men and women themselves and enthusiastic members and leaders  of the mob. The Republican leadership is afraid of them and the trouble they cause as much or more than they’re afraid of the mobs and much more than they’re afraid of Trump on his lonesome.

But even those hideous members of the House and Senate Republican caucuses who cruised to election and re-election in November, surfing the Blue Wave with arrogance and malicious glee, have to be careful.

You can’t be love Trump enough to satisfy his mobs.

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Updated Friday, March 15, 2019 to take into account how Thom Tillis has made fools out of both of us: David Leonhardt in the New York Times:

Congressional Republicans offered up two conflicting storylines yesterday, and it’s worth keeping both in mind.

1) Multiple senators hypocritically supported President Trump’s emergency declaration for a border wall.

Thom Tillis of North Carolina was the most blatant. Two weeks ago, he opposed the Trump move as an unacceptable power grab, writing in a Washington Post op-ed: “There is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that there’s an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach — that it’s acceptable for my party but not thy party.”

As recently as Wednesday, his staff sent nasty emails of denial to Aaron Blake of The Post when Blake described Tillis as turning “wobbly.”

Yesterday, however, Tillis caved. He did so after conservatives began talking about supporting a primary challenge to him in 2020 if he voted against Trump. “This is Trump’s party,” Rachel Bitecofer of Christopher Newport University notes.

Tillis makes it sound like the White House, um, persuaded him to cave, excuse me, change his mind. Aaron Blake in the Washington Post:

By midweek, though, it was clear Tillis was looking for a way out. He tried to help forge a compromise in which a president’s national emergency powers would be curtailed so he and others could vote with Trump.

What he did Thursday: Even though no compromise was reached, Tillis pulled a complete reversal and voted with Trump.

“A lot has changed over the last three weeks,” Tillis maintained. “A discussion with the vice president, a number of senior administration officials, a lot of collaboration with my colleague from Utah [Sen. Mike Lee] that’s a serious discussion about changing the National Emergencies Act in a way that will have Congress speak on emergency actions in the future . . . As late as today the president makes a statement that he’s willing to work with us.”

So the more fool me, I suppose, for thinking they're not afraid of Trump. Except, it's not Trump who spooked Tillis. The Washington Post's Robert Costa reports on Twitter:

Several prominent conservative activists and donors privately tell me they were ready to start drafting primary challengers to Tillis if he held firm, with an eye on Mark Meadows or Mark Walker

It wasn't Trump. It was the donors. The donors love Trump. And that's who the Republicans are really afraid of. Not Trump. Not the hideous men. The donors.

Why do you think they call them mouthpieces?

Mined from the notebooks, Thursday, February 28, 2019. Posted Wednesday, March 6.

Still STILL not the worst person in the book “Football for a Buck” by Jeff Pearlman: Young New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump with his then fixer and beloved legal mentor, the infamous McCarthyite attorney Roy Cohn, announcing the United States Football League had filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, October 18, 1984. Photo by Marilynn K. Yee, courtesy of the New York Times via Time magazine.

Then there was the time, at Donald Trump’s instigation, the United States Football League sued the National Football League. It didn’t go so well.

This was in October of 1984. The USFL filed antitrust suit alleging that the NFL was using its clout as a monopoly to shut the financially floundering USFL out of television deals that might have saved it from going under with all hands.

The USFL’s lead attorney was initially league commissioner and former league counsel Bill McSherry, but...

The morning after he filed the complaint, McSherry was asleep in his Larchmont, New York home, when stirred awake by his wife, Betty. “Bill,” she said, “you have to see this!” The nearest television was tuned to the Today show, which was featuring the USFL’s lawsuit against the NFL. On the screen, at a Manhattan press conference, were two men: Trump and...Roy Cohn

“Of all the people he could hire as my cocounsel,” said McSherry, “Donald gets Roy Cohn.”

Yes, Roy Cohn---the attorney who discovered initial fame in the mid-1950s, when he represented Joseph McCarthy during the infamous tar and feathering of allege American communists and communist sympathizers. Cohn, wrote Michelle Dean of the Guardian, “was a kind of stage director of the major events of the Red Scare...another man would have let himself be an invisible functionary in those proceedings, but not Cohn. He made himself visible. He wanted to be front and center...shamelessness, in fact, was Cohn’s defining trait.” In this regard, the veteran attorney found a sibling-like figure in Trump, who first sought Cohn’s services in 1973, when he and his father were sued for discriminating against African Americans in their real estate rental policies. Although the Trumps ad, indeed, violated the law, Cohn’s advice was simple: “Tell them to got to hell!”...

Now at the press conference, Cohn was at his absolute best. Life magazine’s Nicholas von Hoffman called him “a master performing on television.” And the compliment fit. An odd-looking man with sleepy, almond-shaped eyes, elephantine ears, and a nose the shape of a crooked ice pick, Cohn stood before the gathered press and spoke persuasively of the NFL’s monopoly, and insisted a secret committee existed, with te sole purpose of destroying the USFL. Tough his refusal to cite any actual evidence raise eyebrows, it was overshadowed by his bombast and masterful articulation. Cohn may well have been one of America’s most loathsome men, but he was the best loathsome man to have on your side. “I can only make analogy to a criminal case,” he said at the press conference, a jabbing index finger accentuating his words. “How do they catch anybody? They catch anybody by someone on the inside coming along and saying, ‘Hey! You have a right to do a little concluding that we didn’t find this out and place it in the lawsuit by accident. Obviously, the information was supplied to us, and obviously, when [the NFL] created the USFL committee, they did not create it for the purpose of going over the airwaves or into newsprint. They didn’t expect anybody to know about it. We allege it was done in a clandestine manner.” ---from “Football for a Buck” by Jeff Pearlman.

Watching MIchael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee [last] Wednesday [February 27, 2019], it might have looked as if the Republicans’ agenda for the hearing was to showcase the worst and the dumbest of the GOP House Caucus.

There they were, proudly grandstanding for the cameras: The dentist who believes that his twenty-five years drilling teeth have given him special insight into other people’s characters. The former cop who doesn’t understand the rules of evidence collection. The self-pitying birther who with tear-filled eyes demanded that everyone in the room stop thinking he’s racist even though he’s quite obviously racist. And the ranking member, a shouting, swaggering, and proudly jacketless middle-aged bully boy notorious for having looked the other way when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State and credible reports reached him that a university doctor had sexually abused members of his team.

The list goes on. Pierce has the bill of particulars.

And then there’s Matt Gaetz, who’s not a member of the committee but muscled his way into the act by engaging via Twitter in some lighthearted witness intimidation---

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.”

---in the process calling attention to his own less than savory past---drunk driving, spreading lunatic Right Wing conspiracy theories, inviting a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union and earning himself a slap down from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and bringing himself to the attention of the Florida Bar.

Called out on his audition for the part of a Trump mob legbreaker---“Ok, Matt, pick up from where your character says, ‘Nice marriage, you got there, Mike. Be a shame if anything happened to it.’”---Gaetz desperately denied he intended the tweet as a threat and eventually worked his way to a grudging apology and attempt at self-exculpation. But the damage was done.

At any rate, like I said, it might have looked like their agenda was to deliberately make fools of themselves and embarrass the Party, but of course that wasn’t what they thought they were up to. They were out to make the hearing all about Michael Cohn and his dishonesty and not about Donald Trump and his.

Their tactic was simple: find various ways to hammer the point that Cohen couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about how he made a career out of lying on Trump’s orders and behalf because he’d been convicted of lying on Trump’s orders and behalf. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” as they maturely put it on a poster prominently displayed behind him by the mind-reading dentist, as if this was a high school pep rally and they were taunting their cross-town rivals. Which is in fact what it was.

Republicans are always and only talking to other Republicans. The object isn’t to persuade or even to argue with the rest of us. The object is to keep their voters riled up and eager to stampede to the polls. Make them too mad to think just react.

Cool-headed, reasonable analysts on both the left and the oppositional right pointed out that no Republicans on the committee came to Trump’s defense. But the base doesn’t think he needs defending. They don’t believe he did anything wrong.

The Evangelical right believe that Trump has reformed and given up all his sinful ways since God made him president.

Rank and file Republicans don’t believe a Republican can do wrong. Republicans are good people, the only good people. Good people don’t break the law. If one appears to there must be a good excuse or their accusers are lying. Besides, laws are for other people, and anyway the worst Republican is better than the best Democrat, not just politically but morally.

And then there’s a cohort among Trump’s mobs of hideous men who don’t care he broke the law. In fact they like it that he did. They wish they could. The law, as they see it, is written by self-serving bastards to keep them down. Trump breaks the law and gets away with it in their place. He beats the bastards at their own game.

As far as they’re concerned, all politicians are crooked, all lawyers are shysters, and all businessmen are ruthless, rapacious, and unprincipled thieves, and all three are self-dealing opportunists who will do anything to make a quick buck by picking the pockets of working stiffs and owners of little businesses in someway and thwarting their dreams of a lot with a view on the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Seen through this lens, Donald Trump is no worse than most and better than a lot of them, particularly the ones who operate in New York and Washington, and if you’re set up to be screwed you might as well have another operator operating on your side who knows how to screw them back.

But it’s sinking in, slowly, that Trump is in fact...Trump! And none of them, not the Evangelicals, not the rank and file, not even the hideous men, want to face it.

Trump can’t be stupid because that would make them stupid or voting for him. He can’t be incompetent. He can’t be an immoral, unethical, unprincipled sleaze. He can’t be a fraud and a cheat. He can’t be a pathological liar. They can’t admit Trump is what he is because that would be as good as admitting they were played for either suckers or fools. Either way, they’d be admitting they made a giant mistake, and who’s ever eager to admit that?

So they don’t want to hear it. What they want to hear---what they need to hear, over and over again---is that he is what he isn’t and isn’t what he is. They need to be assured and reassured that it’s not him it’s THEM, those Others, his and their enemies.

They don’t want the Republicans in Congress to defend him against the charges presented in Cohen’s testimony. They want them to defend him against his enemies. Not just defend against them. Defeat them. And you don’t defeat enemies by arguing lawyeristically with them. You fight back and beat them into the ground.

Cohen is on the enemies list and that’s what the base wanted to see---the Republicans on the committee defending their President by verbally beating the lying snake into the ground.

Thing is, to paraphrase J.Pierrepont Morgan, Trump doesn’t hire lawyers to tell him what he can’t do; he hires them to tell him how to do what he wants to do. As “everybody knows”, lawyers are not the bosses of their clients. They are surrogates. Their job is to act in their clients’ stead. In effect, they are their clients.

Trump learned everything he wanted and needed in an attorney from Roy Cohn. When Cohn died, he went looking for attorneys who would be as ruthless and unethical as Cohn on Trump’s behalf. He didn’t have much choice. Ethical attorneys quickly learned to steer clear of him. He didn’t dare hire one if he could have because that would mean letting him or her in on his secrets---his crooked schemes, his frauds, his failures, and his general ineptitude---so someone like Michael Cohen was exactly the unscrupulous sort he needed to act in his stead. To be his surrogate self.

The trouble for him now is that in a significant way Michael Cohen isn’t a Donald Trump double.

Cohen has a conscience and a sense of shame.

He didn’t discover either about himself until Robert Mueller presented him with a mirror into his soul. By then it was too late to save himself from the law. But unlike others Mueller has taken down and will take down, Cohen hates what he saw in the mirror, and he decided he didn’t want to be that villain any more. That doesn’t make him a hero. He’s a repentant sinner who, like most repentants since Adam and Eve, is motivated primarily by his sorrow at having been caught.

What he got caught doing was being very diligent at doing what Donald Trump needed him to do to keep Donald Trump safe from the consequences of his many moral, ethical, and financial screw-ups. There is no evidentiary defense against this fact the committee Republicans could muster and plenty of evidence supporting Cohen.

The base certainly didn’t want to hear that, and the committee Republicans certainly didn’t want them to. There left nothing for Ranking Member Jim Jordan and his lieutenants on the committee to do then except act out the last line of the version of the centuries-old legal saw attributed to Carl Sandburg and purportedly favored by Trump apologist and apparently self-appointed pro bono legal counsel Alan Dershowitz:

If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell

Jordan, who I’m convinced goes jacketless so people can see it when he puffs out his prodigiously broad chest and beats on it, was especially enthusiastic about the pounding and yelling, to Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader’s great glee.

Which brings me back to “Football for a Buck”.

Roy Cohn eventually grew too ill to continue representing the USFL in its suit against the NFL. The attorney Trump, who characteristically had taken over the whole show and made himself its star, was---marginally---not quite the sociopath Cohn was, but he was also not as smart and not as talented in the courtroom or in front of cameras. He was, however, in Trump’s view an improvement on Cohn one respect. Cohn led Trump by the hand. This character as more than willing to take his lead from Trump.

[Cohn’s] replacement, as selected by Trump without any input from the league’s other owners, was Harvey Myerson, a 47-year old attorney who went by the nickname “Heavy Hitter Harvey.” Myerson, according to a New York Times profile, “has come to personify the two sides of modern corporate law practice: its glamour, visibility and profitability as well as its instability, riskiness and potential for treachery.” He was described by Time magazine as “menacingly combative” but that passage left out rude, harsh, arrogant, dismissive and unlikable. His rate was $400 per hour, and his salary from (warning, take a deep breath) Finley, Kumble, Wagner, Heine, Underberg, Manley, Myerson and Casey---a 700-lawyer Manhattan-based firm---was $1.4. Myerson owned a Ferrari, a Rolls-Royce, five homes, a vast collection of cigars (he always reeked of smoke) and 20th-Century art. Though married, he lavished his wealth upon a string of mistresses---giving one an $86,000 Cartier ring and a $24,000 full-length mink coat. “To Myerson,” a former partner said, “there is no distinction between persuading his wife or clients or partners of something.”

“In short,” writes Pearlman, Myerson “was the personification of slime.”

He was something else, according to Jerry Argovitz, the former owner of the Houston Gamblers who had joined the front office of the Trump-owned New Jersey Generals: “absolutely beholden to Trump.”

But despite Myserson’s courtroom demeanor---

“Harvey was just a pounder [said Argovitz] he pounded on people. He yelled, he screamed, he hollered, he pointed fingers. And I don’t think he was very good at making legal points.”

---and despite taking his cues from Trump and putting Trump front and center in court---

“He was in Trump’s pocket [said players agent Steve Ehrhart, one of the actually decent people in “Football for a Buck”]. Whatever Donald said, went. And Donald wanted to be the star of the trial.”

---which meant despite Trump giving testimony that was, naturally, a string of obvious and disprovable lies, the USFL won the lawsuit.

“Won” being a relative term.

The jury awarded damages of...one dollar.

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“Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL” by Jeff Pearlman is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

House Republican Leader: There's no place in the Republican Party for Republican Congressmen

This post has been moved. Sorry for inconvenience. Please follow the link to read "House Republican Leader: There's no place in the Republican Party for Republican Congressmen".

We live in a country at the mercy of hideous men

Mined from the notebooks, Saturday, January 12, 2019. Posted Tuesday morning, January 15.

They need him to roar and beat his chest. He needs them to shriek and jabber. It's a banding of weak and frightened brothers....

President of the hideous men: Donald Trump at a rally in Cleveland. November 5, 2018. Photo by Carolyn Kaster/AP via the Washington Post.

Stunts. The shutdown. The sudden intransigence on paying for the Wall---now! Today! This minute! It’s all for show. He’s putting on a display for his mobs of hideous men whose screaming red faces he’s missing at his rallies. He’s trapped himself in the White House playing at being president. He hasn’t left there in months. (Except when he has.) And he hates it. He misses his rallies as much as he misses golf. More. The camera isn’t on him when he’s playing golf. The world isn’t talking about him.

He needs those rallies. He needs his hideous men. And they need him. He draws strength and courage from their adoration. They draw strength and courage from him. He needs to show them he’s being tough. They need to see him being tough. They need him to roar and beat his chest. He needs them to shriek and jab ber and jump up and down on their branches.Theirs is a banding of weak and frightened brothers united by their mutual desire to make the world pay for their feeling weak and afraid. As long as their shrieking and jabbering drowns out everything else, he’ll roar and beat his chest and keep the government shut down until his demands for his Wall are met---or until he can at least claim a symbolic victory of having extorted that 5 billion bucks out of Nancy and Chuck.

The shrieking and jabbering of the hideous men is why Republicans in Congress won’t stand up to him. They need the shriekers and jabberers for reasons of political survival as much as Trump needs them for reasons of ego and vanity. Years ago, well before the coming of Trump, the Republicans decided that instead of needing to broaden their base, they could win with just the votes of the base. All they needed was to get one more vote than the Democrats. But that meant they couldn’t afford to lose a single one of the hideous men’s votes. Not just the hypocrites and cowards have had to live in fear. Even the most loyal and steadfast ultra-conservatives from the reddest districts in the reddest states have to fear a primary challenge from the right.

Remember Eric Cantor?

Congressional Republicans sure do.

Never mind that David Brat got kicked to the curb this past November. He lost by 2 percentage points. To a woman who got in his grill. You know how Republican men feel about losing to a woman. The lesson many of them likely took from Brat’s defeat is they need to do more to please the hideous men and keep them coming out in force.

Seems to be the lesson they took from the election in general.

Congressional Republicans want the shutdown because Trump wants the shutdown because his hideous men want the shutdown, no matter how much pain and suffering it causes, no matter how close it brings the country to rack and ruin.

That’s the advantage Trump has in this fight. His hideous men’s commitment to making the world pay. They don’t care that people are being hurt. They like it that people are being hurt. They like it that the National Parks are becoming a disgrace. They like it that people are facing losing their homes and businesses. They like it that the shutdown’s causing heartache and pain. They like seeing things going to rack and ruin. That’s what they voted for Trump to do. Hurt people and break things. Other people ideally. But they don’t mind being hurt themselves as long as those other people---THEM! Those others. Those people!---are hurting more.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

In the Department of Great Minds Not Only Think Alike They Write Alike Too: The other day I picked apart a column by Karen Tumulty. This one I endorse almost word for word, because I agree with it and it validates my opinion and makes me feel smart. I feel like I could have written it myself. In fact, I more or less just did.

The Great Shutdown Showdown of 2019 has shown more clearly than anything before the central reality of Donald Trump’s presidency: He does not lead a country; he leads a movement.

Trump is president of the Republican base. He knows how to make his most passionate supporters vibrate like the reed of a clarinet. And they have the same effect on him.

That is why he was willing to go to the wall over The Wall, despite the fact that most Americans think it is a lousy idea. It is why he proudly claimed ownership of what has now become the longest government shutdown ever, and is deservedly getting more of the blame for the pain that it is causing…

Trump’s base...will stand and applaud. And that, after all, is the only sound he has ever been able to hear.

Follow the link to read the whole column “Trump is the president of the Republican base — not the country” at the Washington Post.

Where Trumps Come From, Maine edition

Posted Monday morning, December 31, 2018.

A class act finishes on a high note:

Gov. Paul LePage signed off on the state’s first-in-the-nation ranked-choice election to Congress on Friday, but also left a note of protest against the voter-approved election law that propelled Democratic state Rep. Jared Golden to a victory over incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin in the 2nd District.

LePage initialed Golden’s certificate of election but also wrote “stolen election” beside it before sharing a photo of the certificate on Twitter with an additional comment.

I’ve signed off on the CD2 election result as it’s no longer in federal court. Ranked Choice Voting didn’t result in a true majority as promised – simply a plurality measured differently. It didn’t keep big money out of politics & didn’t result in a more civil election #mepolitics,” LePage’s official account tweeted.

This was as much LePage’s FU to the voters of Maine as it was an FU to Golden.

But the voters maybe deserved it. They elected this lunatic twice! The first time was something of an accident. LaPage won a four-way race in 2010 with only 37.6 percent of the vote (speaking of winning "simply" a plurality). But in 2014 he was re-elected. It was a three-way race this time, with the Democratic candidate and the Independent combining for 51.8 percent of the vote, but still LePage won 48.2 percent. (Also a simple plurality, but why be picky?)  I think most people are still dumbfounded that we somehow elected Donald Trump president (“We” being a figurative term).

How could that happen? “we” keep asking ourselves. It must have been the Russians! It was Comey! It was the political press corps’ obsession with her emails and journalists’ relentless kneecapping of her! It was the Bernie die-hards! It was Jill Stein! It was her own fault! She was fatally flawed! She took too much for granted! She didn't go to Wisconsin! She! Her! It! They!

A little of all of the above, I think. But really we have a long history of electing Trumps to every other office, from school board to governor. You'll note that both of LePage's victories happened before Trump even announced he was running. LePage was an avatar not a disciple. As I’ve often said, the wonder isn’t that we elected one of them president.

The wonder is it didn’t happen sooner.

To read the whole story and get the backround, follow the link to “LePage takes parting shot at ‘stolen election’ that cost fellow Republican his seat in Congress” at the Portland Press Herald.

Top image courtesy of the lunatic’s own Twitter TL. He was proud of his petty little lunatic act of vandalism.

The more Trump changes, the more he remains the same

Posted Friday night, December 7, 2018.

All-around amazing guy at absolutely everything: the new owner of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League circa 1984. Photo by Ray Howard of the Associated Press.

Donald had a habit of saying things that were “without a sliver of truthfulness?” Really? Even back then? How about that?

“The first time I met Donald Trump was on a flight to a league meeting,” said Vince Lombardi Jr., son of the the legendary Packer coach and president/general manager of the Michigan Panthers. “I didn’t know who he was, just he was a busy young guy. He started asking me all these football questions, then he told me I had no idea what I was talking about. I thought, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ Later on, I noted one very unique thing about the people who worked for him. They only knew two words--- ‘Yes, Donald.’”

People paying a visit to Trump’s office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower didn’t merely sit in a bland reception area, waiting to meet the big man. No, they first had to endure an eight-minute film that chronicled the greatness of Donald J. Trump, New York icon and all-around amazing guy at absolutely everything. The video lavished plaudits upon “the visionary builder.” Read a deep-voiced narrator over shots of Trump Tower: This is Manhattan through a golden eye, and only for the select few...Any wish, no matter how opulent or unusual, may come true…

“It was ridiculous,” said Barry Stanton, who covered the Generals for the Journal-News, a

Westchester, New York-based paper. “Part of the the film was actually a sales pitch for condos at Trump Tower. And it wasn’t optional. If you wanted to speak with the Donald, you had to hear how amazing he was…”

Though [league commissioner Chet Simmons’] wasn’t one for eccentric millionaires and their annoying excesses, the USFL needed stable ownership. So he could overlook the warning signs, like the NFL having ignored Trump in approximately 2.7 seconds when he made overtures to buy the Baltimore Colts in 1981. Or when Trump---boasted without a sliver of truthfulness---that “I was offered NFL teams. I could have bought NFL teams in the course of the last three or four years…”

...at the league meeting in New Orleans…Trump told his peers that the league had been “heading very rapidly downhill”...until his arrival. According to the the book Trump Revealed, Trump alone, “by his own account, had orchestrated a complete flip in the perception of the USFL among fans, reporters, and the people who controlled the purse strings at major television networks.”

...

“He understood nothing about football,” said Mike Tolin, who produced the league’s weekly highlight show. “Far less than your average fan.”

...

“He was great entertainment,” said Charley Steiner, the Generals’ announcer. “But he was also poisonous. He didn’t care about the league, about the players. He cared about one person, and only one person only.

:”He cared about Donald J.Trump.”

---from “Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL” by Jeff Pearlman.

Women disrupt the narrative

Posted Friday morning, November 16, 2018. Revised for clarity, Friday afternoon.

“Women don’t like me? What’s up with that?”: Brett Kavanaugh testifying at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, September 27, 2018. AP pool photo by Saul Loeb via KTAR News.

[Editor’s note: I didn’t do any hot takes on the election for reasons. What I’ve got at this point aren’t even lukewarm takes anymore. But FWIW I took notes and I’ll be posting my room-temperature takes over the next few days. Here’s the first one. Don’t burn yourself.]

Remember this guy?

Wasn’t he supposed to have caused a backlash? The mobs of hideous men would rally in defense of their right to be hideous? Big victory on the way for you know who? Democrats would rue the day?

I haven’t heard much about it in the post-election chatter among the chattering classes. Have you?

There was a backlash. Voters rallied. Incumbent pols rued the day. But the backlash went the wrong way. The wrong voters rallied. The wrong pols rued the day.

Turns out the narrative was wrong. And it was wrong for a reason it’s often wrong.

What women want wasn’t taken into consideration.

So the chatterers in the chatting classes did what they always do when the narrative proves to be wrong, that is, when events show them up to have not known what they were chattering about---they went on chattering as if the narrative had never been the narrative. They all knew. They knew all along. “Here,” they say when called out on their mistakes and blunders, “Look at the weasel words I worked into my analysis back in May or whenever! See how careful I was to hedge my bets? Now can we chatter about the narrative on something else?”

Back at the beginning of October when he was confirmed and the Republicans were doing their victory dance in the end zone, it was part of the narrative that the Democrats had screwed up the hearings. If they’d handled it right, that is, if they’d handled it the way the chatterers with the brilliant clarity of hindsight knew all along they should have handled it, that wouldn’t have happened. Of course it could only have not happened if Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, and Ben Sasse had done the right and brave thing. Who seriously believed that would happen? I mean beside the people for whom the existence of politically brave and morally courageous Republicans is necessary to their pretense that the pretty and polite people in expensive suits who buy them lunch, invite them to parties, give their spouses jobs and write their children recommendations for college, grad school, and internships are in charge of the Party and the yahoos in Congress and the state legislatures aren’t the real Republicans and have no influence in the party? The real Republicans are pragmatic centrists who, if only the Democrats knew what was good for them, would gladly join with Democratic pragmatic centrists to keep the yahoos at bay and run the country with the wisdom and steady-mindedness that only white, male centrists are capable of.

The chatterers thought that if the Democrats had been smarter, more disciplined, more like they knew they’d have been if they were in Congress, Kavanaugh would have been rejected---or confirmed. It didn't matter to the chatterers which.---after  “serious”, legalistic, rational debate that it was up to the Democrats to engineer. “Instead” they just made Republicans mad and resentful and gave Trump material for his rallies.

Dumb Dems.

That the Republicans have longsince made getting mad and resentful their preferred style of debate (It’s called demagoguery. The political media call it populism.)  and Trump doesn’t need material to rile up the mobs at his rallies because they come riled up and with the intention of riling themselves up even more---Trump could get them to chant “Lock her up” about the local TV meteorologist predicting a sunny day in summertime---doesn’t figure in the chatter.

The goal wasn’t to defeat Kavanaugh. That was a hope, but a distant one. The goal was to show the women who make up most of the Democratic rank and file and do most of the political heavy-lifting that they mattered. That their politicians would go to the mat for them.

The hideous men were mad and they did come out in force, and some Democrats paid a price for it.  But by the time the election came around Kavanaugh himself wasn’t an issue. He was just another thing Trump slapped his label on and used to sell himself. The election didn’t turn on the hearings. It turned on whether or not enough women were mad at a whole bunch of things which Kavanaugh either epitomized or for which he was the last straw.

Turned out, enough were.

And it was those other things that brought them charging to the polls where they were determinedly headed already.

Can we chatter about that?

Filed in Smoke-filled Rooms and Newshounds.

The Trump of Chicago. Fourth Ward: Big Bill drains the swamp

Posted Tuesday night, October 30, 2018.

Vote early, vote often: Big Bill Thompson, described as “permanently on the take”, casts his vote on one of the election days during his third go-round as Mayor of Chicago in the late 1920s. File photo via the Chicago Tribune.

[Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in a series. Links to the previous posts are below.]

Big Bill Thompson campaigned for mayor in 1927 by running against his opponent’s economic record. William Dever, the incumbent mayor, Thompson said, had been bad for business. This was true...if your business was a speakeasy, rum running, a betting parlor, a brothel, or any enterprise that depended on bribing cops to look the other way or if you were one of those cops.

“When I’m elected [Thompson promised,] “we will not only reopen those places those people have closed, we will open ten thousand new ones.”

Al Capone liked the sound of that. He ‘threw his support behind Thompson”. If money is speech, Capone spoke loud and clear, to the tune of 100,000 bucks, according to Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz in “Scarface and the Untouchable”. Big Bill defeated Dever by 85,000 votes.

Thompson took office on April 11, promising to “give the old town the greatest ride for prosperity she ever had!” The ride began when Thompson rehired the corrupt police chief Dever had fired, with an order to throw the crooks “out in ninety days!” In fact, Thompson chose one of those crooks---Capone crony Daniel Serritella---as Chicago’s new city sealer. Ostensibly in charge of protecting consumers by checking scales, Serritella was really a fixer with an office in City Hall easily accessible to aldermen and others. He’d performed much the same role during the campaign, ferrying money from Capone to Big Bill.

---from “Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago” by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz.

End of Part Four. Follow the link to go back to Part Three. Or if you want to jump back to the beginning: “We low-brows got to stick together.”

The Trump of Chicago. Third Ward: A quiet election day in the Windy City

Posted Thursday morning, October 25, 2018.

Election day 1924 in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, Al Capone’s territorial headquarters, was somewhat fractious. “Cicero Chief of Police Albert W. Valecka, left, with one of dozens of people injured by roving bands of "sluggers," who intimidated, beat up and even kidnapped voters, election workers and campaign workers on election day in Cicero in 1924.” Via the Chicago Tribune. Things were a little less rough in Chicago’s mayoral election in 1927. A little.

What was it Marx said about history repeating itself? First as tragedy, then as farce?  My take has always been that history happens as tragedy and farce simultaneously, and it’s horrifying or funny or both, depending on the angle you’re looking at it from. Chicago, election day, April 5, 1927…

For a Chicago election, things were relatively quiet---a couple of bombings, two election judges kidnapped, a dozen voters harassed. The only fatality happened the day before---Vincent “Schemer” Drucci, killed when he resisted cops who picked him up on a roust, a Capone enemy gone without Outfit involvement. On the negative side, Bugs Moran, nicknamed “the Devil” by the Capone crowd, rose to chief of the North Side mob.

---from “Scarface and the Untouchable” by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz.

End of Part Three. Part Two is here. Part One is back here.