Author Archives: Brian Lambert

Your Democratic Presidential Candidate Power Rankings!

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As promised — (ok, “threatened”) — you have here the first of a new Wry Wing Politics recurring feature. Your Democratic Presidential Candidate Power Rankings. (Insert flatulent tuba sound effect.)

As briefly as possible, this is the shtick:

Candidates are given two percentage scores. One for their real world potential, based on the fact that at this point in the game most voters only really know two or three of them. (Biden, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren to a lesser degree.) Then there’s a second ranking for, shall we say, a somewhat more informed opinion (mine) of each candiate’s ability to compete with Donald Trump and his despotic allies, which is to say Russian troll farms, North Korean web hackers, Saudi bone-saw artists-cum-financiers as well as wholly corrupt and nefarious American actors like Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell and the vast, echoing right-wing sewer.

The two scores are then averaged to produce … Your WWP Pow-pow-pow-errrr Rankings!

#1: 91% / 42%. (66.5%) Joe Biden. Biden is pretty much all name recognition. Which normally counts for a lot. His “blue collar” cred — (which is baffling since the guy’s been prowling the starchiest white collar halls of DC power for what, 50 years?) — still has detectable cachet with the much-anguished over “Reagan Democrats”, i.e. white guys roughly Joe’s age in the Rust Belt. But they truly are the crowd paying very little attention at this moment. The big downside with Joe is his (very) old school judgment. From Anita Hill to the gamed-out credit card system in Delaware, Joe has forever played the give-a-lot-to-get-a-little DC influence game. The fact that he was unprepared and taken aback by Kamala Harris’s busing shots in the first debate proves again he is nowhere near nimble enough to deal with a campaign cycle already veering into shamelessly reckless histrionics and corruption.

#2: 65% / 61%. (63%) Elizabeth Warren. Less name recognition than Joe and Bernie, but a whole lot more than the bottom dozen, plus the most fully thought-out policy proposals keeps Warren high up in the rankings. She’s smart, principled and tireless. But as a performer, a bit too single-note in her (well justified) indignation and outrage. Democrats are thoroughly disgusted with Trump, but the general population tends to gravitate to candidates who they feel are “cool” and “in control” and yet still capable, even in the face of epic stupidity, corruption and racism, to crack a smile from time to time. Another demerit is, like everyone else, Warren shows no sign of having a plan for neutering Mitch McConnell. Which means her grand, laudable policy proposals are DOA.

#3: 38% / 85%. (61.5%) Kamala Harris. In my capacity as all-knowing seer, Harris checks most of the boxes required to soundly defeat Trump. Essentially, they are these: no other candidate offers as dramatic a contrast to a lazy, corrupt misogynist and bigot as a black, female former state attorney general. Her relative youthfulness also signals to Millenials and younger (75% of whom vote Democrat) that she may also be aware of and concerned with issues 20 years down the road as well as the degradation Trump has wrought today. Moreover, Harris best signals, as I’ve said before, a wiliness — a higher level of enemy recognition and preparation for the truly foul and unexpected — then almost all of the others. She knows how to play the game to win. And … I’ve seen her smile.

#4: 21% / 80%. (50.5%) Pete Buttegieg. Mayor Pete I believe is the real deal, and in a normal world, (which has never existed), a nearly ideal candidate. Someone with Buttegieg’s remarkable intelligence and thoughtful demeanor is desperately needed to guide the world through climate change and reset key fundamentals — Supreme Court, electoral college — of our gamed-out, less-than democratic order. The appeal of a (really) smart gay guy to sophgisticated urban voters may well outweigh the inevitable troglodyte bigotry of rural Trumpists. Also, of all the mano a mano debate scenarios, Buttegieg v. Really Stable Genius is the one I’d like to see most.

#5: 52% / 43%. (47.5%) Bernie Sanders. Who doesn’t love Bernie? His Medicare for All idea is wildly implausible. (Let’s imagine for a second what UnitedHealth would do if President Bernie served up a bill putting them out of business in four years.) But, as The Stranger said to Jeff Lebowski, “I like yer style, dude.” Bernie is simply too old and too easily identified (and caricatured) as a “wild-eyed Socialist”, never mind that no one accusing him of that has the faintest idea what Socialism really means in 21st century USA. And like Warren, I’ve never been able to imagine Bernie beating Mitch McConnell at anything truly devious. His light is dimming as we enter the next round of debates.

#6: 27% / 62% (44.5%) Julian Castro. A pleasant surprise in the first debates. I had forgotten how articulate the guy was in Obama’s cabinet. (Remember when cabinet officials weren’t just a pack of decrepit grifters running up fat tabs on the taxpayers’ dime?) I see no path for him to the top of the ticket, but a smart, honest Hispanic from Texas as VP? Interesting. Very Interesting.

#7: 36% / 51%. (43.5%) Cory Booker. If Barack Obama hadn’t already broken the race barrier for the Oval Office, Booker might be given more consideration. But, he just doesn’t compare all that well to Obama. Maybe it’s the New Jersey thing and having to play paddy-cake with all the Wall St. fat cats living in his suburbs, but he’s too slippery for my tastes and, ironically, not nearly as quick on his feet as Harris or Buttegieg in the face of jaw-dropping stupidity … of which there will be a superfund-sized waste dump to deal with in 2020.

#8: 18% / 44%. (31%) Amy Klobuchar. Our gal hasn’t created any forward motion for herself. Her relatively high-standing here is more a reflection of the stark inadequacies of everyone lower than she is. Her performance before the NAACP convention in Detroit this past weekend exposed a potentially fatal flaw in her record, certainly in terms of inspiring the minority vote. By oh-so carefully threading the needle between supporting cops (appeals to rurals) and acknowleding an “outrageous situation” (sorta satisfies urban voters) with regard to cop conduct, she’s got dime deep support among blacks.

#9: 11% / 36%. (23.5%) Beto O’Rourke. Is this guy still even running? Talk about a vanishing act. As the past months have gone by I’m more and more convinced that the fanatical enthusiasm for his Texas Senate race last year was all about how much people despise Ted Cruz. There should be a “lane” for a candidate speaking the lingua franca of contemporary Americanese, peppered wit readily understanable pop culture references, metaphors and aphorisms. Passionate but common verbiage, in other words. Instead, the O’Rourke of 2019 sounds like he’s had his head injected with a quart of Stepford Candidate gelatin. Dude!

#10: 6% / 36%. (21%) Michael Bennet. Bennet is actually someone you could make a case for, if he were running against, umm, Bob Dole or George W. He’s intelligent and decent. Unfortunately he is about as compelling and inspiring as a “Clean Government Now!’ leaflet handed out on a street corner. Stay in the Senate and figure out a way to publicly de-pants Mitch McConnell. (I apologize for the imagery.)

#11 9% / 25% (17%) Kirsten Gillibrand. This woman reeks of un-modulated personal ambition. Is that me, a white guy, calling a woman “pushy”? Yeah, I suppose it is. So sue me. As much as she wants to deny it, her — ambition-driven — putsch against Al Franken really is a defining factor is her campaign. It was indelible proof of what a lot of Democratic party insiders thought she was all about as she clawed her way up the party ranks in New York. Just go away.

#12: 5% / 24%. (14.5%) Jay Inslee. Agreed. Climate change should be Issue Number One. Unfortunately, until all of Trump’s Griftopia is in cinders and (here I go again) Mitch McConnell is caught in bed with a live girl AND a dead boy, the topic won’t get so much as a committee vote in the Senate. Your candidacy is futile. But by all means keeping beating the climate drum.

#13: 3% / 18%. (10.5%) Steve Bullock. Why? You’ve been a reasonably popular governor in a mountain west state (with a third the population of Brooklyn) where the majority of men like to think they’re the Marlboro man incarnate. Go back to Montana and run for Senate against Steve Daines.

#14: 2% / 13%. (7.5%) Tulsi Gabbard. Again, I’m not sure what it is she’s really after? A Senate run? The Governorship of Hawaii? Apology withstanding, her anti-LGBT rhetoric forever places her in “deep outlier” land among 21st century liberals.

#15: 2% / 10%. (6%) John Hickenlooper. What I said about Steve Bullock. Faced off against the right candidate, Cory Gardner is an easy, fat target in Colorado. Go home and get yourself elected to that job.

#16: 2% / 8%. (5%) Andrew Yang. Okay. Another book deal and speaking engagements. I get it. But beyond that, you’re part of the season’s comic relief.

#17: 1% / 6%. (3.5%) Bill DeBlasio. He has progressive bona fides. But apparently no one actually, you know, likes the guy. Other than that, the country may have maxed-out its appeal for big, self-agrandizing Manhattanites.

#18: 0% /3%. (1.5%) Tom Steyer. I’ve seen your commercials. “Impeach the moronic racist now!” (TM David Simon.) As a billionaire, your job is to keep buying TV time … for someone else.

#19: 0% / 1%. (0.5%) John Delaney. Why is anyone listening to this guy at all? Or wait, what I mean is, “Is anyone listening to this guy, at all?”

#20: 0% / 0%. (0%) Marianne Williamson. Listening to her is like what I imagine Gwyneth Paltrow would sound like as a candidate. “When I pass a flowering zucchini plant in a garden, my heart skips a beat.” (Actual Paltrow quote.) But, unlike Kirsten Gillibrand, I’d have a couple glasses of organic wine with Williamson — and not throw one in her face.

Thank you for your patience.

Al Franken’s Latest Moment

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For mid-summer we’re looking at a busy week, scandal and resistance-wise. Robert Mueller testifies tomorrow. (I couldn’t have lower expectations. Bill Barr has ordered him not to say a word beyond his report, so even if by now Mueller knows he’s being played, he’ll do what his superiors tell him to do.)

Then next week the Democrats go at it again, this time Detroit. (WWP Democratic Power Rankings to publish soon.)

And right now we’ve got the reevaluation of Al Franken and them that done him in. With Jane Mayer’s storytelling in The New Yorker, we get a reiteration (with considerably more depth) on the hit job that took out Franken, (and to which he acceded). It was, as we already knew, the rawest of political calculations.

Franken the Accused had to go — and chop, chop — because Democrats had to present a face of unimpeachable #MeToo purity at that precise moment, since Alabama was in the process of deciding whether to send an accused child molester to the Senate. Whether the business with his USO pal Leeann Tweeden was true or yet another episode of classic Roger Stone ratfcking (to borrow from Charlie Pierce) did not matter a whit. Nor did whether there was really anything to the other accusations of butt-grabbing and groping served up by various women, including the one who said Franken pawed her at the State Fair while her family was taking their picture together. (Whaaaaa … ?)

Because everyone who follows The Game must offer a hot take in moments like this, otherwise liberal (to hyper-liberal) pundits having been feverishly feeding the furnace of opinion.

Over at the well-empowered gals website Jezebel, Esther Wang writes, “If Me Too has shed a light on the spectrum of abuse that women have been systematically subjected to, then it has also served to flatten a wide variety of experiences under one imperfect and unwieldy umbrella, giving those who would already tend to dismiss women’s claims or are uneasy at the idea of a ‘good’ man committing gross acts an easy way to defend their positions. ‘This isn’t Kavanaugh. It isn’t Roy Moore’, the comedian Sarah Silverman pointed out in the piece.”

Likewise, at Vox Matt Yglesias, lays out the basics of the political pageant, the need to appear fully supportive of every claim of sexual harrassment in the Roy Moore moment and the not-inconsequential certainty that Minnesota would appoint another liberal Democrat as Franken’s replacement.

But Yglesias then concludes by saying, “Yet the facts of the case are simple — his conduct was wrong, and it came to light under a series of circumstances when the best option for the causes Franken believes in was to step down, and so he stepped down. It’s true that he could have fought on, and perhaps from a purely self-interested perspective, he should have. But politicians aren’t supposed to be purely self-interested. At a critical moment, Franken actually did something selfless and correct. He deserves to be congratulated for it, but instead, he’s chosen to trash the potentially redemptive thread in the story and make things worse. “

But here’s “the thing” for me, and maybe for you. How do we know, and how can we judge, if what Franken did — whatever it was — was actually “wrong”? Everyone can interpret and surmise. But what really happened? What is true? Who among these folks has made an attempt to find out?

Unlike Roy Moore and Brett Kavanaugh and Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves and Charlie Rose and on and on, there has never been as far as I can tell any kind of serious investigation, official or journalistic, of the accusations made against him.

Even worse, and a very good reason for Franken to consent to a long interview with one the country’s most credible investigative joyrnalists, is that very few of his colleagues cared … at that moment. The corpse of his career on a public funeral pyre was the image the party decided it needed at that moment, (and could accept with Tina Smith in the wings). Nothing less was going to send a grander message to anyone undecided about whether to vote for Roy Moore or Doug Jones.

Out on the broader canvas the issue remains whether the Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer but catalyzed by an extraordinarily ambitious Kirsten Gillibrand, were played by fairly recognizable right-wing characters and tactics.

Again, we don’t know if they were. But the likelihood that Democrats sacrificed Franken — a truly aggravating thorn to Republicans — in hasty reaction to a political con is at least as plausible as Franken grabbing constituent butts in public and in front of their families.

None of this will change the fundamental of the story. Franken’s out and he won’t be back in that job.

But Jane Mayer’s story — by far the most fully told story of the episode — has to serve as an admonishment the next time the skittery herd feels pressure from such a remarkably loose collection of accusations.

The Raging Herd Defends The Pledge and ‘Murica in St. Louis Park

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Damn but it is hard not feel all elitist and superior while watching this Pledge of Allegiance business next door in St. Louis Park.

As a proud member of the Not Much of a Joiner sub-group of the human race, I pretty much always look at these herd-like explosions of group-think with a mix of curiosity and embarrassment. (Don’t get me started on get-a-life, “I bleed purple” football partisans.) Such spectacles seem to me to lack, mmm, what’s word? Self-respect? Dignity?

In fairness, “both sides” of the political spectrum are susceptible to the kind of mass psychosis we see playing out at St. Louis Park City Hall. The significant difference being that pissed-off liberals tend to flash mob over stuff like the latest cop killing of a black guy, some incident that reignites the fight over equal pay for women, or, you know, an American government running concentration camps for toddlers on the southern border.

Not so much over hoary, perfunctory symbols lacking any real impact on our quality of life.

But from moment word got out that “The Park’s” City Council was going to pass on The Pledge of Allegiance at its (wildly popular? Heavily attended?) meetings you could see not only where this was going but who was going to carry the message and who would join up for the Army That Saves the Pledge.

Maybe it’s the utter predictability of this stuff, the rote, robotic gesturing and blustering and performative histrionics that embarrasses me.

Now, I would agree with anyone who says The Park goosed this march of raging bovines by offering as a reason for dropping the pledge that it didn’t want to discomfit new immigrants or others who might not be so cool with pledging fealty to “one God”, a phase patched into The Pledge back in the Joe McCarthy-era to rile the Rooskies. I mean, they had to know that mentioning anything about “new people” was like waving a red flag in the (white) face every Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson zealot in a 100-mile radius.

Next time try something basic, like, “We need to speed these meetings up. Four hours is long enough to argue over pothole assessments.”

One other thought, after reading the Star Tribune’s lastest editorial about this episode, the one where the paper of record boldly declares, “What’s clear for elected public officials is that decisions about the pledge must be made carefully, in consultation with the communities they serve.”

Am I wrong or isn’t part of the job description over there the obligation to form and defend a definitive argument? Bravely admonishing public officials to “make decisions carefully” isn’t even the paper’s usual view from between the 40-yards lines. It’s more like threading a needle down the chalk-stripe at midfield. Sheesh.

The paper does get points though for printing a letter from Plymouth resident Harold Onstad, who said, “We have become fixated on going through the motions of standing for the anthem and listening to ‘God Bless America’ for the seventh-inning stretch, forgetting that it is much more important to fight for what is measurably best for the majority of our citizens with our words, our funds and our votes.

“Let us quit wasting time on our silly showpieces of patriotism and move on to the effort that is really needed to assure we will continue striving to be one nation with the best of futures for all.”

Clearly though we can assume Mr. Onstad is a godless, ‘Murica-last eltitist who probably doesn’t even own a pair of star-spangled socks.

Jeffrey Epstein, Poster Boy for the Exceptionalism of the 1%

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Of all the sleazy sideshow acts in our long-running carnival of fools and scoundrels, this business of Jeffrey Epstein is something I’d pay to see play out in all its lurid horror.

Epstein, a multi-millionaire financier, friend to the likes of Donald Trump. Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz is, I think we can agree, one colossal creep. He’s another example of dead-on perfect casting for the #MeToo era, besides playing like an over-the-top villain from that Showtime series, “Billions.”

What we know for certain is that the guy “frolicked” with girls “on the younger side”, to quote his buddy and repeat companion, Donnie Trump. And by “younger” we mean … well below legal age for naked rub downs and whatever else we can imagine, for which he compensated the children involved “hundreds of dollars”. In 1% jargon “hundreds of dollars” is also known as cash you don’t even stoop to pick off the pavement.

Last fall The Miami Herald sniffed out the rancid sweetheart con — orchestrated by Trump’s current Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta when he was doing the people’s business in south Florida. If you missed it, despite a stark and corroborated list of felonies involving said sex trafficking of minors, Acosta cut Epstein a 13-month work release sentence … without notifying the kids who he had molested. And … and! … clamped off any investigation into any pals of Epstein’s who might be involved.

Only “the best people”. (Rather than “calling” for Acosta’s resignation, Nancy Pelosi should drag him before Congress for public testimony.)

The Herald’s work on the case — fed by outraged sources in the Florida judicial system — failed to make any new waves under the state’s Trump-friendly new Governor, Ron DeSantis. But prosecutors in New York, where Epstein has one of his five homes, (a $70 million mansion just off Central Park), apparently failed to get their check in the mail from whoever bought off Acosta. (Okay, that’s not proven … yet.)

Along with thousands of pages in Florida’s files, which includes the feverish back and forth between Epstein’s lawyers and Acosta’s “prosecutors” to minimize any penalties, suspicion is running high that New York’s new information/evidence is so substantial, with so many new targets that bought-off MAGA hacks cannot dismiss it as “old news.”

This of course is where it could get (very) dicey for Bubba and Dershowitz and god knows who else. (Hell, there are even social connections — at least — to Britain’s royals. Imagine the dilemma for the royals-obsessed morning talk shows!.) Epstein’s alleged madam and procurer is the daughter of the British tycoon Rudy Perpich once wanted to cook a deal with right here in Minnesota.

So yeah, it’s a hot, juicy, perverted, disgusting mess. Very much in keeping with everything else about the Trump era. Plus, as they say on the infomercials, “there’s more!”. Bill Clinton! And, you gotta guess, other rich, pervy big shots.

Clinton’s office has issued a statement saying every time he consorted with Epstein he was accompanied by either staff or his security detail. Still, “frolicking” with underage girls on Epstein’s private jet or private island? Unfortunately it doesn’t strain credulity.

Here though is the thing I’d like to argue in the context of messaging for Campaign 2020. Anyone trying to exploit bona fide populist outrage could do worse than craft a campaign strategy on the nearly universal awareness and disgust with how routinely the 1%, (hell, make it the 5% just to round things out), slide off the back of felony justice in this grand democratic experiment of ours.

Democrats, Republicans, tinfoil hat Hannity dupes … all of them and everyone know this for a stone cold fact. The farce of “no one is above the law” is slapped across our faces every day.

Hell, Trump super-pal/NFL owner Robert Kraft of “happy ending” massage therapy in south Florida has so thoroughly gamed out the legal system down there, the only people facing serious punishment in his sleaze-and-squeeze are … the women who were trafficked in from Asia to yank on pudgy dirtballs rolling up in their Bentleys. They are the ones facing charges and crippling financial penalties.

Trump’s flagrantly bogus “drain the swamp” battle cry appealed to this deeply ingrained cynicism toward everything about D.C. politics. It was an obvious sham. But the essence of it had bi-partisan appeal. The trick to tapping the near universal disgust with how the rich and connected can game any system in which they play is in laying out the argument out in non-ideological terms.

Reality of course says that if you make an issue out of a “war” on every lizard in a Brioni suit gaming the system — be it the legal system, the tax system, the health insurance system, etc. — you’re eventually talking about new regulation, or at the very least, aggressive regulation/enforcement of laws already on the books.

And we know how the 1% – 5% feel about anything that sticks a wrench in their god-given right to exceptionalism.

So Really, Who Among Them is Ready for Campaign 2020?

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I’ve taken a few days to digest what the paid pundits digested immediately after last week’s Democratic debates. And now I’m telling anyone who listens that the quality I’m looking for among the 20+ candidates shouting, “Me! Me! Me!” is assurance that they’re aware and prepared enough for the unconventional-to-berserk campaign that is coming at us like a freight train in a mountain tunnel.

Here’s an example of what I mean. It’s something the cable news pundit class mentions a lot. Namely, “How will [Candidate X] look standing up there on the debate stage next to Donald Trump?” To which I say, like the crazed old geezer ranting at his TV, “Why should we assume Trump will show up for a debate?”

After everything else he’s done since riding down that gilded escalator, is it really so implausible to imagine him looking at poll numbers that never poke up above 42%, along with non-Fox media’s drumbeat incantation of his wooze-inducing corruptions and lies and say, to paraphrase the great Walter Sobchek of “The Big Lebowski”, “[Bleep] it dude, let’s go hold a rally.”

And yes, I’m serious.

Throughout 2016 Trump was the irresistible novelty object that cable news couldn’t get enough of. (They gave him $5 billion in free advertising.) The public regarded him as “fresh” and “entertaining”, even if they also knew he was a fraud and a buffoon. He wasn’t taken seriously.

In 2020 the “charm” of novelty is long, long gone. Trump’s 42% will harden around him. But the antipathy toward him from everyone who isn’t grazing on the droppings of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity is as hardened and intense as an extruded obsidian boulder.

Trump may be “a [bleeping] moron” to quote his former Secretary of State, but the one thing he knows fer sure is how to protect his brand, and that doesn’t happen when you walk out in front of 60-70 million people and take A: Questions from people who aren’t named Tucker and Laura (Ingraham), and B: Be exposed to accusation, follow-up and cross-examination from a Democrat who, unlike Hillary Clinton and everyone else on the planet, believes they’re coasting to an easy victory.

As I also keep saying — call me Nostralambertus — it is entirely likely, if not fully inevitable, that we are entering a campaign cycle unlike anything we have ever seen. A heretofore unimaginable [bleep]storm of hysteria, duplicity and sabotage.

Not only do we — and the Democratic candidate — have to prepare for Trump saying and doing anything to win reelection, (and avoid a torrent of criminal indictments), but we have to bake in the reality that Mitch McConnell, who notoriously refused to cooperate with the U.S. intelligence agency’s plan in the fall of 2016 to warn the public about Russian election interference, and since than has stifled every election-security measure pushed up toward the Senate, will pull every lever he can to protect Trump from himself, (and McConnell’s Senate majority from Trump.)

The long-standing agreement that major party presidential candidates submit to televised debates? I have two words for you: Merrick Garland. (Candidates are not required to debate.)

Any out-of-left field legal challenge on the trifling debate business can, like everything else, be shuttled off into the court system … which McConnell and his capos have been carefully stocking for years now. Hell, in that system we might even get a decision by Inauguration Day 2021.

So yeah, I watched the debates last week and constantly asked myself, “Can this guy/gal beat Trump and McConnell at their game? Are they savvy and, frankly, cynically-minded enough to anticipate how foul and nefarious the 2020 race will (not ‘can’) become?”

Besides all the vanity candidates — Marianne Williamson, Bill DeBlasio, Eric Swallwell, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Andrew Yang, Tim Ryan, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard — this personal criteria of mine also red-lined Joe Biden.

Joe’s game, a lot like traditional media outside New York and D.C., is so deeply invested in respect for tradition and the imagery of institutions, he is nowhere nimble or open enough to innovation to respond adequately — much less preemptively — to unprecedented cynicism, recklessness and border-line criminality.

So “who then” you may ask?

Next time: The premiere of Nosatralambertus’s “2020 LameHorse Power Rankings.”

Don’t you dare miss it.


If the Democrats are Serious About Climate Catastrophe …

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Like so many things lost amid our degrading obsession with Donald Trump is this odd business of old(er) guard Democrats’ unwillingness to devote even one of their 13 scheduled candidate debates entirely to the issue of climate change. This could still happen, but for the moment the idea is going nowhere.

The realization that climate change is a fact of life, and not just a devious scare tactic whipped up out of thick, hot air by Al Gore — right after he got done inventing the internet — is steadily gaining bona fides. “Average” people have heard about it and more and more believe it is real. A few less believe it’ll get worse. Fewer still believe it’ll get a hell of a lot worse, to the point of global catastrophe.

Most of those worrying about what life will be like on Mother Earth in the year 2080 imagine places like Miami looking like Venice on a bad day, along with occasional stories of floodings and drownings in far-off Third World places our clueless leader refers to as “shithole countries.” But that, along with a bunch of dead polar bears and shorter winters, will be about it. We’ll just go on rooting for the home team and keeping up with the Kardashians.

What the majority of people have yet to accept and absorb is that, in fact, based purely on our current emission numbers, global catastrophe is already the far more likely scenario than a couple dead polar bears and watery lobbies on South Beach.

Far more.

And not 60 years off in the future, but in 20 years from now, when even a few of us “I got mine” geezers will still be shuffling around, albeit disappointed all to hell that our assisted-living condo in Naples, Florida is under three feet of water.

Denial, not being a river in Egypt, requires Baby Boomers not to read, much less take seriously, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells.

The short, briskly-paced book is, in a single phrase, flat-out terrifying. The sort of thing that changes pretty much everything you look at every day. And that’s just as things are in 2019, with the amount of carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere today. The book is a stretched-out version of Wallace-Wells’ 2016 New York magazine story, that has become one of the three most-read pieces New York has ever published.

There is of course disagreement over the horrifying scenario Wallace-Wells paints — a world where much of the tropical and sub-tropical planet is unlivable because of sea rise, heat and humidity, and where even First World economies are crippled by the cost of constant, climate-fueled natural disasters and military conflict over mass migration.

Embedded in some of the disagreement in the scientific community — not the cynical chowderheads of the right-wing media bubble — is this thinking:

“Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism. They cite research suggesting that people respond better to hopeful messages, not fatalistic ones; and they meticulously fact-check public descriptions of global warming, as watchful for unsupported exaggeration as they are for climate-change denial.” (From The Atlantic piece linked above.)

My suspicion is that this view, that, “All that doomsday shit is a bummer, man” is part of the Democrats’ no-climate debate calculation. Why have their candidates out there talking about how terrible and hopeless everything is when we’re organizing a pep rally to vote Trump out of office?

While Wallace-Wells persistently emphasizes that we already have the ability to arrest climate change before the tipping point, (it would require something like a global, WWII-size mobilization — good luck with that), there is a fascinating generational psychology at play here. These days, Boomers like me think more and more frequently about how many “good years” we have left. Twenty? Thirty? Not so many we’ll have to live through full-on climate catastrophe? So we largely ignore thoughts of climate horror and focus on other things — like the buffoonery of Trump.

But our children, who are beginning to accept that they will in all likelihood have to live through at least some level of climate (and economic) catastrophe — (at current rates of carbon exhaust, Wallace-Wells sees 2040 as the point where climate calamity becomes constant) — may think differently. As in, “Who among this crowd is actually smart enough to do something?”

Pretty much every Democrat in the race has said something about climate change. Jay Inslee, the has-no-shot-at-all Governor of Washington has made it his sole focus. But an actual debate with Inslee, or Pete Buttiegieg, or Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden all forced to get deep in the weeds of “what to do” would, I believe, be instructive to the generations who are going to have to try and survive in Wallace-Wells’ most optimistic forecasts.

Also, deep in those weeds is Wallace-Wells’ and other climate-solvers’ real-world admonition that weaning the world off fossil fuels (as in: every car and truck is electric) and keeping up with steadily increasing energy demand is simple not mathematically possible with wind and solar alone. Like it or not, carbon-free nuclear has to be a primary option.

Given the most peer-reviewed and widely-accepted climate forecasts, what Democrat is prepared to advocate for that?


Nancy’s Game: Cut Mitch Off at the Knees

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Any doubt that “the I-word” is coming at us fast evaporated with Robert Mueller’s Byzantine, double-negative laced statement a couple days ago.

” … if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.” (Hello! Copy desk!)

The only question(s) now are, “By what name” and “when”?

The fundamental problems of accusing Donald Trump of gross corruption and criminal conduct remain the same. To reiterate: (1) Mitch McConnell will not permit a conviction of Trump under his watch. (2) Any chance Democrats had to promote their policies — climate change, women’s reproductive rights, gun control, consumer advocacy, yadda yadda — will be buried under a landslide of constant, hourly, tweet-by-tweet impeachment insanity, and (3) Impeachment plays to Trump’s only real game, which is chaos and supercharged partisan warfare.

But I have some confidence that Nancy Pelosi, who is steering this bus, understands the game she is playing. Despite the criticism of her for “slow walking” impeachment, I have to believe she appreciates that impeachment in 2019 is much more a competition with Mitch McConnell than Donald Trump.

The strategy as I see it is to commence impeachment by another name, reducing media hysteria as much as possible, and orchestrate a steady run of damning hearings that conclude (or not) as close to November 3, 2020 as possible. The effect being to give the extraordinarily cynical and diabolical McConnell little or no time to hold a fraudulent show trial and acquit Trump before election day.

Pelosi is well acquainted with McConnell and certainly sees him as someone fully willing to abuse and violate whatever law or tradition necessary to protect his tribe. Only a naive fool would expect McConnell (and Bill Barr) to behave honorably and within the bounds of accepted standards in an full out impeachment brawl.

Pelosi’s problem, in addition, to wrangling all the Democratic firebrands demanding “impeachment now, goddamn it!”, is staging and coordinating a long series of televised hearings that connect all the characters and dots in the Trump-Russia saga in a way that is understandable to the millions of semi-informed Americans who only read headlines or listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Day to day I’m constantly struck by how few people — even among those disgusted by Trump — are conversant in what has actually been revealed over the last two and a half years. On one hand, those people can be admired for not being the kind of sad pathetic bastard who follows this sprawling story obsessively. They clearly have lives I don’t.

But the point of an orchestrated series of hearings — not called impeachment — is to explain to “those with lives” how second and third-tier Trump-Russia characters like, for example, Trump Inc. CFO Allen Weisselberg and Deutsche Bank “private banker” Rosemary Vrablic fit into the story. And to use revelations from their public (i.e. televised) testimony to explain how Trump is fatally compromised by his long (long) association with Russian “investors”, i.e. oligarch gangsters.

Explaining in common language — unlike the very old school and convoluted vernacular of Robert Mueller — how Russian money has propped Trump up for decades then allows Pelosi to explain how and why there was obstruction of Mueller’s investigation into “collusion.”

The wild card — and I do mean “wild” — is Pelosi preparing for the sheer hellstorm of lies, rage and seditious threats Trump will — not “may” — unleash to protect himself against defeat in the 2020 election. Her understanding being pretty much what us sad bastards have come to appreciate.

And that is this: Trump may not fear impeachment so much knowing that his 91% approval rating among Republicans requires McConnell to contort the constitution to do everything possible to protect him on Capitol Hill. But defeat in the 2020 election, and the (no doubt messy, howling) removal from office means finding himself suddenly naked and exposed to a torrent of indictments from a dozen different jurisdictions.

Put most simply, Trump is in a fight for his life.

Removal from office, which will not happen by impeachment, means both the very high likelihood of financial ruin, (for a guy who is nowhere near as wealthy as the MAGA-hat crowd believes he is), and total, unequivocal exposure as arguably the most legendary fraud and con man in American history.

Pelosi’s strategy is to tell the story of Donald Trump’s long, sordid con well enough and long enough that Mitch McConnell never gets the opportunity to acquit the guy … by any means necessary.

Impeaching Trump Will Require Smart, Savvy Storytelling

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If the Democrats are going to impeach Donald Trump — and there’s zero doubt that’s what Trump wants them to do — they’re going to have to be a hell of lot better storytellers than they’ve been so far.

All the reasons not to impeach Trump remain as valid as they’ve ever been.

A: No amount of evidence will convince the Republican controlled-Senate to convict him. As headlines go, he will be found “innocent.”

B: The “verdict”/acquittal will be strung out by Trump’s legal team and Mitch McConnell to conclude dramatically in the heat of next year’s election season, allowing Trump to rant with true finality, “Total exoneration!”

C: As infuriated as every anti-Trump voter will become over the course of the process, there’s no reason to believe the critical fraction of voters who pay little to no attention to details will respond in any other way than by voting in Trump’s favor in 2020.

D: Impeachment will be the only topic every Democratic candidate will be asked about and judged on until election day 2020.

If you are “the chaos candidate” (tutored and guided by the international maestro of chaos, Vladimir Putin), the all-consuming, total partisan warfare of impeachment with certain acquittal is a dream campaign strategy.

That said, Elizabeth Warren and others are absolutely correct when they say Democrats have a constitutional obligation, based only on what is known about the Mueller report today, to bring charges against Trump, politics be damned.

The essential issue is storytelling, which in modern America does not come in the form of a legalistic, 448-page government document, or blockbuster reporting like the two New York Times stories on Trump’s freakishly fraudulent tax-filings. Big complicated stories — a bit like “Game of Thrones” — are best presented on television, serially, regularly, with heavy advance marketing, an eye and ear for sympathetic characters and shrewdly ascending drama.

Raise your hand if you think today’s Democrats have that skill set.

In addition to the enormous obstacles everyone can see in plain sight, (the GOP Senate looking at Trump’s 91% approval among their voters), Democrats have to be aware of what lurks hidden beneath the surface.

A lot of what explains Bill Barr’s behavior — a 68 year-old establishment Republican coming back to go all-in for a flagrant fool and scoundrel like Trump — has to do with his sympathy for the power game as played most recently by Dick Cheney. Barr’s “go [bleep] yourself” attitude toward both Congress and legal tradition is a step-for-step repeat of Cheney’s reign “under” George W. Bush. (I refer everyone interested to Bart Gellman’s “Angler” for a full dramatic narrative of The Cheney Process.)

More to the point — and this is absolutely critical — as Bill Barr plays lead pharisee for a fundamental restructuring of American governmental (and economic) power, he can draw confidence that McConnell, with the conservative and highly influential Federalist Society, have now thoroughly stocked most levels of the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court, with judges sympathetic to their belief system. This is key to support of the so-called Unitary Executive Theory.

As of 2019 the court stocking is so thorough — or at least adequate — that (Republican) presidents truly are immune to any kind of traditional criminal prosecution. The guess is Barr believes that there are now enough judges on “the team” that the wheels of investigation can be gummed up, delayed and conflicted so badly that the only likely result of anything as supposedly conclusive as impeachment is … confusion.

Mitch McConnell, accurately reading the changing demographics of America, where white Americans are rapidly diminishing toward minority status, has long understood that gaming and stocking the judicial system is the best (only?) way to sustain control over American culture well past the point Republicans are able to win presidential elections … by normal means.

However Democrats imagine impeachment playing out, are they truly prepared to deal with how far outside the bounds of good faith, normal politics and litigation McConnell will take Republicans to protect Trump?

I have no confidence that they do.

Democrats are still playing the game as though the rules matter, while McConnell, Barr and others are quite literally writing new rules on the fly.

But … good storytelling is as powerful an emotional device today as it was around the cave fires of the Neolithic age. The Trump-Russia saga has so many primary characters, so many sub-plots, supporting characters and red herrings, unless you’re a sad nerd consuming this episode daily like a tele-novela (guilty) it’s mostly a blur.

Democrats would be smart to seek out some crowd-sourced expertise from professionals with a demonstrated talent for strategic storytelling. When to play up or play down certain characters and information. Key emotional plot lines. Where personality matters. Likewise, they have to conceive of a way to advance their investigation beyond the realms that Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr can control.

The normal, traditional judicial system is not going to be their friend in this matter.

Guilty or Not, Mohamed Noor is Not the Most Culpable Party

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As of noon Tuesday the fate of Mohamed Noor was, to borrow a lyrical phrase favored by polite journalists, still “in the hands” of a Minneapolis jury. If I had a service revolver pointed at my head, I’d predict Noor walks, on the by now familiar grounds that he is a cop who “feared for his life” when he saw something blonde and pink raise a hand outside his police cruiser two years ago.

Among beard-stroking legal theorists, the fundamental twist in this case is whether Noor’s conduct — a plainly terrified young cop, his gun out of its holster while responding to a fairly routine call to a reasonably well-lit alley in an upscale part of town with remarkably low levels of violent crime — constitutes a criminal action on his part.

The third-degree homicide charge seems to be a stretch, given the evidence and the average jury’s inclination to give cops every possible benefit of doubt.

The second-degree manslaughter seems a better bet, but to my mind hinges on the part that requires, ” … the person’s culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.”

This issue there is who created “unreasonable risk” and the mindset that “consciously takes chances of causing death … .” Was young, inexperienced Mohamed Noor wholly responsible for that kind of thinking?

Were I juror, I’d be annoying the hell out of the other 11 by arguing that the “consciousness” that killed Justine Damond was created at least as much by Minneapolis police training/or lack thereof as Noor himself. After all, his defense has heavily emphasized how carefully and completely he followed police training … to protect himself and his partner.

While the jury deliberates, the Mayor and the police union, led by the medieval consciousness of Lt. Bob Kroll, are squabbling over the department’s shall we say, “highly problematic” training practices, specifically the hyperbolic “warrior” training that instills an amped-up combat zone mentality on recruits.

Part of the training, as we’ve learned, involves stark reminders of the ambush killing of Minneapolis cop Jerry Haaf, 27 years ago in what was then a rough section of Lake St. It was a notorious case and a tragedy. But what exactly makes it so relevant to daily police work in 2019 that it is seared into young cops as the sort of thing they must be prepared to deal with every moment they’re on duty, answering routine calls in quiet, upscale neighborhoods on warm summer nights?

Insurance companies, with all their data-driven underwriting may be a bane of modern American life, but the weird thing is that the numbers — the probabilities and risks — usually don’t lie. Which is why I have to wonder what the real world statistics are on the likelihood of another Jeffry Haaf cop ambush in Minneapolis?

Think of it this way: since Haaf’s murder in 1995 how many Minneapolis cops have answered how many calls, eaten at how many greasy spoons, rolled through how many dark (and not really so dark) alleys without being ambushed? Add all that up and what are the odds — really — that a Haaf-like ambush will happen again? Are we into winning-the-lottery odds yet? Lightning strikes twice odds? Peace breaking out in the Middle East odds? Donald Trump saying anything truthful odds?

Your average Bob Kroll will of course fly into a red-faced rage about how, “It only has to happen once! You goddam elitist pussy!” which is an echo of Dick Cheney’s famous “One Percent Solution”. That’s the one where you go to war with an adversary if there’s even a 1% chance he’ll do something nasty.

Where this leads is the obvious answer to who is most responsible for the death of Justine Damond? A young, inexperienced cop with an overactive paranoia? Or the city that selected and trained him, firing his imagination him with a war zone mentality?

Even a conviction of Noor will do little to nothing to prevent the next cop, “fearing for his life”, from gunning down some unarmed  citizen. What will have some impact though is an enormous civil verdict — $10, $15, $20 million or more — against the city for its responsibility in consenting to police recruitment and training that instills more terror than competence in the people it badges and arms to “protect and serve.”

 

A Short List of Questions Post-(Redacted) Mueller Report

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As the specifics of The Mueller Report kept exploding like cherry bombs all day yesterday and into this morning, my list of questions and reactions kept getting longer and longer. As a confessed Trump/Russia obsessive nerd, here’s an abbreviated list (in no particular order) of where I’m at roughly 24 hours after release:

1: Mueller decided not to subpoena Trump for an in-person interview, the most conclusive way of determining “corrupt intent” in obstruction and a host of other wildly sketchy behaviors. He didn’t want a “protracted” fight with Trump, one that almost certainly would have gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Plus, there was the high likelihood that if Trump did get in front of a grand jury, a la Bill Clinton, he probably would have pleaded The Fifth from start to finish, rendering the whole fight meaningless. That said, Donald Trump truly is “Individual #1”, everything emanates from him and revolves around him, and the case against him (or even for him) is hobbled by not getting the best possible evidence from him. The fight for his in-person testimony should have gone forward. And let’s remember, it was only a bit over four months from the time Nixon got a subpoena for his White House tapes and the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously — that he had to turn them over. After 22 months of Mueller, we could have waited until July.

2: Likewise, how do we explain Mueller calling in the hapless Sarah Huckabee Sanders for an interview but not anyone in the immediate Trump family? Not Donald Jr., the “I love it!” recipient of the Russian offer to assist the campaign? Not Ivanka, arguably her father’s key advisor (can’t make it up), and not Jared Kushner, his Swiss Army knife of a lieutenant who had clearly demonstrated influence on obstruction by advising Trump to fire Jim Comey? I really want to hear Mueller explain that one.

3. There is nothing — zero — in the redacted report about Trump’s absurdly squirrely finances. Was a full investigation of Trump’s long, long experience with Russian “investor”/oligarch/gangsters truly not part of Mueller’s mandate? A lot of people, not just me, were believing that the presence on Mueller’s team of ace money-laundering prosecutor Andrew Weismann, was proof that Mueller was looking closely at how long-term Russian “investment” in Trump not only explained a comfortable existing relationship with Russians, but a key element in the Russians’ on-going leverage over him. Did Mueller farm all that out to the Southern District of New York? If so, what is anyone doing to prevent Bill Barr from putting a fat thumb on that scale? Never mind “collusion”. Never mind “conspiracy”. “Compromise” is the issue here.

4. Also in finances — understanding that money and the pretense of fabulous, Croesus-like wealth is absolutely essential to Trump’s highly suspect “brand” — was nothing more learned about Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, a.k.a. the only bank who would still do business with him? Subpoenas are now out from the House Oversight Committee. But was anything investigated regarding the credibly estimated $300-plus million Trump apparently still owed Deutsche Bank as recently as early 2018, (much of it for the construction of the Trump-branded tower in Chicago)? We have good information that many, if not all of Trump’s loans came from a bank within Deutsche Bank, a private bank with assets provided by … who, exactly? In that context it’s interesting to note the number of times in recent weeks the question has been asked whether Trump’s Deutsche Bank debt has been forgiven or dramatically restructured? Wildly speculating here, but if that bank-within-a-bank is in fact a depository for well-laundered Russian money and the Russians have agreed to “relieve” some of Trump’s debt burden … well that’d be kind of interesting, wouldn’t it?

5. It’s already understood that Muller’s obstruction section is in essence a road map for Congress, (i.e. Democrats) to begin aggressive investigation … or more. And everyone is making much of all the Trump aides who just ignored his “crazy shit” and refused to cooperate in flagrant obstruction. But, come on! Since when does it matter that the perp was too stupid or lazy to actually pull off the obstruction? The fact he — the President of the United States — tried so often (and so recklessly) to obstruct investigation(s) doesn’t make it less of a crime. And  again people, this is over a matter — Russian rigging of an American presidential election — about a quadrillion and a half times more serious and relevant to you and me than Bill Clinton obstructing “justice” into sexy time with an intern.

6. Speaking of flagrant, Bill Barr’s gobsmacking defense of Trump was of course appalling, and it reaffirms a key (and politically exploitable) factor in explaining the seething in American culture today. Namely that every system that matters is gamed out in favor of the wealthy and connected — the “insiders”, the people who can leverage — via money or favors — any and all rules in their defense, no matter how naked their crimes. That said, how much do we know about Bill Barr’s private finances? Not to go all tinfoil hat here, but it’d be reassuring to take that question off the table.

7. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing the long-strategy of Barr and the White House (and Mitch McConnell and the Freedom Caucus) being basically a taunt to Democrats to press the impeachment button. Given the picture Mueller does paint and things likely to emerge out of all the other investigations into Trump’s epically sleazy business career, the rest of Trump’s term is going to be more of the same. But what turbo-charges the conflict in Trump’s favor is a full-out impeachment. Total war is where Team Trump is preparing to go anyway to win reelection (and thereby postpone an avalanche of indictments when he does leave office). But impeachment is nuclear fuel for the base. Torches, pitchforks and precious Second Amendment rights. Democrats are going to have to be especially canny in keeping the fires red-hot without setting MAGA-world aflame.

8. Finally, (for the moment), Mueller’s “no conspiracy” decision teeters on the very thin edge of the fact that he couldn’t show anyone on Team Trump with a direct, almost contractual agreement with Russians to game the election. In other words Mueller couldn’t prove that Team Trump engaged — hands-on — in the technical aspects of the hacking, the WikiLeaks dumping, the Cambridge Analytica-style social media distortion, etc. Common sense that is cutting “conspiracy” implausibly fine. Trump knew about it. Trump accepted it. Trump continues to deny the Russians had any role in the attack. What’s more, neither Trump nor Bill Barr yesterday has ever expressed any concern, much less outrage, that the attack happened.

And then there’s the fact the … Trump and everyone around him has lied about their chumminess with Russians every goddam time they’ve been asked.

 

Every Day, A Higher Level of Infuriation with the Justine Damond Case

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We should be able to agree that the entire police culture is on trial in Minneapolis these days, and not just Mohamed Noor. With every passing day of trial testimony the natural reaction — certainly from me — is greater and greater infuriation.

Few incidents put “the blue wall of silence” and the truly horrifying inadequacy of police hiring and training in starker relief than the killing of Justine Damond and the “professional response” by Minneapolis police in the minutes and months afterward.

As we’ve learned through the first weeks, the two cops immediately involved, Matthew Harrity and Noor, ignored police procedure about body cameras, as did virtually every other cop who arrived on the scene, turning them on and off as they saw fit. Likewise, we’ve learned that contrary to the original, long-standing police version of the event, the alley in which Damond was killed wasn’t pitch dark, but so well illuminated by street lighting that the next wave of arriving cops could plainly see her lying dead on the ground as well as the surrounding area.

Then there’s the “startling” slam on the police car that so terrified Noor he fired at the first shape he saw outside Harrity’s window. We now learn that the slam on the car was something that only churned up into the story days after the event, by which time the whole case was pretty much in lockdown by “the blue wall”, with Noor refusing to explain himself and other officers forced to give testimony by a grand jury.

The credibility of police in a civilized society is a pretty damned important matter, and here in Minneapolis, and all over the USA, that credibility continues to take a ferocious beating. Why? Because tech advances and social media are more and more able to transmit real-time evidence of actual police behavior. The taxpaying public can now see — fully, as in the case of Philando Castile, and intermittently in the Damond case — how more or less average cops go about their daily business. And, frankly, it’s terrifying.

When the Noor trial started it was estimated at a straight-up 50-50 call on his guilt. I doubt that has changed. Noor’s Somali ethnicity may play a role in this case that the Hispanic ethnicity of officer Jeronimo Yanez didn’t in the Castile case. But it’s likely that typical jury respect for anything with a badge will again be a powerful counter-balance to the appalling behavior of Harrity, Noor and so many other cops on the scene in quiet, leafy southwest Minneapolis that fateful night.

I mean, FFS, what goes through a trained cop’s mind when they can’t bring themselves to tell the arriving EMT crew what actually happened?

Clearly, a lot of rethinking of the basic cop code has to be done to relieve public concerns that too many of these people are poorly vetted, ill-trained, demonstrably terrified individuals playing out a bizarre kind of military adventure on city streets, with themselves as executioners routinely exempt from punishment.

What to do?

1:  Offer significantly better compensation to attract a much higher quality of police candidates. Give communities a true choice in the quality of people they’re (arming) and putting on the streets, rather than forcing cities to pretty much take (and keep) whoever walks in the door.

2: Vet out the most militaristic “Bulletproof Warrior” crowd, the people itching for the authority a badge and a gun gives them. Don’t try to adapt them to police procedure, simply red-line them at the get-go.

3: Never, ever, allow two newbie cops in the same car on the same beat. Neither Harrity or Noor had the emotional stability or experience to deal with Damond situation, and that’s with the reminder that they supposedly “feared for an ambush” in southwest [bleeping] Minneapolis, a neighborhood with one of the lowest violent crime rates in the country.

4: Multi-projectile police revolvers. Service weapons with two separate loads of ammunition. The default position being either rubber bullets or chemical darts. If cops are responding to a Hollywood-style shoot-out they can switch their weapons over to the real thing. (Harrity and Noor had a military-style rifle in their car.) In the meantime, given the horrifying tally of citizens executed by inexperienced cops “fearing for their lives”, a rubber bullet fired in terror at a nice lady in her pajamas would have a much different ending than … her being dead on the spot.

5: A fresh re-writing of the city’s police standards and legal consequences. As in:

a:  fail to turn your body camera on when responding to a possible crime — you’re fired.

b:  fail to fully describe the events of a shooting to arriving back-up, EMT and supervisors — you’re fired.

c: “decline” to give any statement or testimony to police or state investigators after a police-involved shooting — you’re fired. Likewise, counsel an officer involved in a shooting incident not to speak to investigators — you’re fired.

In a fair world, where as Randy Newman said, “It’s money that matters”, a massive, eight-figure pay-out to the Damond family for the actions of Noor and the Minneapolis police might get the gears turning on some of these reforms.

Not that I’m betting on it.

 

 

 

 

 

Again, the Star Tribune and MPR Keep Their Distance from a Big, Volatile Story

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As of last Friday, Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews/Fox Business News empire had mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 3,181 times in 42 days, an average of 75 times a day. Murdoch’s media empire is similarly obsessed with my congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, to the point where last week his Manhattan paper, the New York Post, mashed her up — on a full-color cover — with the exploding World Trade Center.

The pile-on aimed at Omar naturally included Murdoch/Fox’s biggest fan/property, Donald Trump, who went on a Twit tear against Omar to the point that literally hundreds of other publications and public figures have expressed disgust at the attacks and fear for Omar’s safety. As of this morning U.S. Capitol security is “assessing” how much additional attention they need to give … a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota.

I’ve always placed faith in the notion that it’s pretty easy to see what people fear most simply by listening to what they talk about the most.

In the case of MurdochWorld the concept of fear is of course inseparable from their “assessment” of what their audience wants to hear. (What’s the First Rule of Show Biz? “Give the people what they want.”) In AOC and Omar, Murdoch-Fox has a twin tri-fecta for its predominantly old, white and male audience — i.e. two young, not-(entirely) white women.

As I say that part is easy to understand. Not that it makes the threat to Omar’s safety any less legitimate. Hell, less than two weeks ago FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that white supremacy was a “persistent, pervasive threat” to the security of the United States. No one following the news with intelligence and good faith denies what the FBI is correctly seeing. Not that Sarah Sanders or Trump or Stephen Miller or Fox (as far as I can tell) made so much as a peep about this FBI’s of fact.

But here’s the curiosity, locally, as far as the Ilhan Omar story goes. While the furor of what Omar said to a group in California in late March has been intense, to say the least, Minnesota’s largest news organizations have been treating it like a mildly curious side-show. Strib reporter Patrick Condon wrote a straight-down-the-middle-no-value-judgment-here piece on April 11, dutifully quoting, in a fair and balanced way, both sides of the controversy, giving each equal weight. Since then though, as Trump has twitted and the attacks on Omar by Murdoch Inc. have become an international incident, the Star Tribune has left the story to wire services, as though what? their DC correspondents have more important stories to cover?

This morning’s Strib has a tout to the latest Omar story (inside on A4) at the top left of the front fold. But the reporting therein is a product of The Washington Post.

Since the uproar over her “some people did something” speech the paper has taken no op-ed stance on the controversy. Likewise, MPR is content to use AP coverage  — of an international furor over Minnesota’s highest profile congressperson. (Obviously, MPR is never in the business of taking a values-based stand on anything, much less assessing the validity of what Omar said in California or the Fox media/White House attacks on her.)

The behavior of the Star Tribune and MPR on the Omar story bears a striking similarity to their “we have no fingerprints on this” non-coverage of accusations of staff abuse by Amy Klobuchar.

Which leads you to ask, “What is the similarity here?”

Is it that neither news room is yet aware of what the Fox/Trump machinery is saying about Omar? Of what papers from England to Australia are saying about the episode? Are both newsrooms too understaffed to prioritize a national/White House assault on … a metro area congresswoman? Or is it perhaps another one of those stories that screams “partisan dynamite” so loudly that it is most, um, prudently, farmed out to other more faceless, and more distant messengers, organizations who are less well-defined targets for wrath and antipathy?

I’m guessing it’s the latter.

The basic rub with this latest Omar story is that no fair-minded, dutiful reporter could listen to her entire California speech and come away with any interpretation other than what she was saying was that the entire world’s muslim community — 1.5 billion people — was being held responsible for the criminal actions of 19 people, “some people”, who attacked the US on 9/11. Likewise, no professional newsroom could look at the truly dangerous Murdoch/FoxNews/Trump re-framing and exploitation of those comments and see it as anything but the grossest and most reckless kind of exploitation.

Could Omar have spared herself some of the heat from the Murdoch/Trump echo chamber if she had instead said something like, “… 19 criminals, 15 of them privileged youth from our great ally Saudi Arabia, attacked us on 9/11 and as a result every muslim everywhere, all 1.5 billion of us, has been tarred as a radical terrorist. Did that happen to white, male Americans when Timothy McVeigh blew up that building in Oklahoma?”

Maybe.

But given the Fox/Trump obsession with selling muslim terror to their primary audience and the stark visual reality of Omar — a brown female in a hajib, I truly doubt it. Anytime she says anything, her words are a target for hyper-cynical retrofitting. Every day the Murdoch machine needs new fuel to fire the base.

Still, I fail to see how the Star Tribune and MPR, again, can see this latest full-frontal attack on, as I say, the most prominent person in the state’s House delegation, as a noisy sideshow most wisely left to others to cover.

Oh yeah, they’d take plenty of heat if they gave a full and accurate appraisal of Omar’s comments and the tone of the Murdoch/Trump reaction. But the thing is, that’s the news game. It’s what happens when you — not someone else — does your job and gives your audience the complete story.

If that scares you, find another line of work.

Joe Biden Serves No Purpose in 2020

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Since most elections are run on the strategy of selling the biggest possible contrast between yourself and your opponent, I see even less reason to give Joe Biden another thought.

While Biden is a stark contrast to Donald Trump in terms of respect for truth, personal integrity and an interest in people other than himself, too much about him is attached to another time, a time rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror. And we’re not just talking his old school, creepy uncle squeezing and sniffing and kissing of women he doesn’t know particularly well.

Biden has been around so long DC and the media are clogged with people who have been up close with the ex-Senator and Veep. None of them describe him as sexually predatory. To date no one has retold a tale of Joe pinching butts, trying to talk an intern into a one-on-one “counseling session” in his hotel room or ruining anyone’s career because they declined his offer for some free-range canoodling.

His style is more the sage and avuncular shtick. The wiseman/tribal elder forever ready to console and demonstrate empathy … personally.

But the thing is, that kind of paternalistic vibe gets more out of step with modern America with each passing day. Maybe it’s true that the Trump-voting blue-collar crowd in the Rust Belt still has a lingering affinity for old, straight white guys who can find Scranton on a map. But the energy driving  Democrats today is — I’m pretty sure — fueled by desire for a radical, dramatic change on wide range of topics, from women’s rights to tax fairness to climate change, and as top-of-the-ticket names there are at least a half-dozen better options than Biden already on the menu.

More and more I’m betting that Democrats in general are going to migrate toward a candidate most unlike Trump. Young and vigorous instead of old and decadent. Smart and well-read instead of intellectually lazy. Honorable instead of morally repugnant. Optimistic instead of fear-mongering. Whether this also means female rather than an appalling sexist [bleep]hole, I can’t say yet. But it’s trending in all those directions.

The desire for “the candidate” best able to drive a wave that not only defeats Trump but takes out another chunk of the Republican wall of obstruction is seen in virtually every poll out there today. The underlying attribute to that yet-to-be-determined person is the power to inspire.

Inspiration of course is weird, ephemeral thing. It’s a highly aspirational emotion. Voters project all sorts of hopes and dreams on such a person. And, somewhat ironically, that projection is easier to do the less they know about the person. Hang around the game 20, 30, 40 years and everybody knows everything about you and no one can project anything “dreamy” on you anymore. What they like about you is that you’re familiar.

Despite their current (name recognition-driven) standing in the polls, my bet is that Biden’s “known knowns” (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld) also apply to Bernie Sanders. Both of the grand old men have the temporary benefit of affection largely based on the fact people know them. (There’s more aspiration attached to Bernie.)

But — prediction here — all that will begin to shift, and quickly, once revved-up, mad-as-hell voters realize that there are younger people, better attuned to the culture of the moment, (and in terms of the looming horrors of climate change, likely to still be alive in 2040 when the [bleep] really hits the fan), standing at the next podium over on the debate stage.

Do I have anyone particular in mind? Yes and no. There are so many Democrats out on the field at the moment it’s nearly impossible to get a full sense of each of their “inspirational” qualities, or lack thereof. But yeah, with every appearance he makes, Mayor Pete Buttegieg does more to elevate himself as someone who has thought well and thoroughly about the stuff that matters, even to a Boomer geezer like me.

Here’s his latest.

One thing for certain is that Donald Trump continues to destroy the value of tradition in politics. So let’s not expect a traditional candidate running a traditional campaign is going to flush him out office.

 

 

Does Bill Barr Really Think He Can Get Away With This?

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One week later, The Big Question is: does Bill Barr really think he can pull this off?

As many of us know, less than 48 hours after Ken Starr wrapped up his (far longer and more expensive) investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual hijinks he dropped a 400-page report Congress and the public. Oooo, stained dresses! Cigars! Dirty talk! Love it!

By contrast, Barr, arguing that Robert Mueller’s work, because it operated under a different legal arrangement, needs, you know, a lot of time-consuming finessing and redacting and re-phrasing and, well … mostly it needs delaying, in order for Trump’s claim of “total exoneration” to settle in.

Unlike say, Rudy Giuliani or Matt Whitaker or some other of Trump’s other legal “talent”, Barr doesn’t seem to be a sad fool with no regard for history’s verdict or his reputation. That said, he is playing a perilous game in those regards. He has to be smart enough to know that his narrow and vaguely paternalistic interpretations of law (i.e. “I’m the legal savant here, you lesser people just go on about your petty business”) could quite easily backfire on him, and badly when — not if — Mueller’s full volume of information is released … or leaked.

He’s heard the name, Robert Bork, I’m quite sure.

If Barr is so stupid as to play along with a White House strategy to declare victory, parade around the country and the Twitter-verse calling everyone who has followed the Russia case in extreme detail “losers” and “pencil necks” he’s in for a very rude awakening. While Trump and his usual crowd of “libtard”-hating dead-enders, the folks who only know what Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity tell them, are still doing their touchdown celebration ..,. they haven’t noticed that they’ve spiked the ball 40 yards short of the goal line.

Moreover, on a human-reputational level, this clumsy game Barr is playing with the non-release of everything Mueller found out — which is dead certain to be chockfull of damning details about how badly Trump may be “compromised” by his corrupt activities — is accelerating the infuriation of not just the Adam Schiffs and Elijah Cummings and Jerrold Nadlers of the world, but the mainstream press as well. None of those people — all of whom have invested thousands of hours analyzing Trump/Russia/obstruction — are any too happy about being smeared (by fools) with the assertion that they’ve been both wrong and “biased.”

Put another way, anyone who cares to know knows damn well that Trump has engaged in a Vegas buffet of corrupt business and campaign activities. How so? Because it’s been out there for everyone to see for years.

The country beyond the MAGA crowd wants this story told. In full, with all the juicy “blue dress” details. And they expected Mueller to tell it.

So now, in this interlude between Barr getting the report and figuring out how to release it with as little damage as possible to the man who appointed him, American adults are disappointed-to-disheartened that this storytelling is being twisted up into yet another round of rancid partisan legalisms.

In that context, if Barr “succeeds” in redacting or murking-up the most damaging evidence Mueller produced, I ask you, has there been a better, more righteous excuse for a Daniel Ellsberg – Pentagon Papers-style leak than this?

The Russians hacked into a presidential election on behalf of the improbable, disreputable character now in the Oval Office. A character now simultaneously alienating allies and abetting long-standing Russian goals at every possible turn … without ever … ever … acknowledging what the Russians did.

Seriously smart people are not going to put up with this.

Buh-lieve me.

Post-Mueller: Raw Politics and a Million Questions

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All morning I’ve been thinking about the famous video of Bill Clinton explaining for the camera what the real meaning of “is is”. It was not Bubba’s finest moment, but it was the President of the United States, under oath for four hours and forty minutes answering questions before a grand jury. He was answering them badly and, uh, excessively legalistically, mind you. But he was answering them.

Donald Trump has not done that — about a matter considerably more relevant to the protection of the American public than canoodling with a White House intern — and it appears Robert Mueller never pushed to force him to answer any questions live, in person and under oath. Nor, as far as we know at this moment, did Mueller ever bring Donald Trump Jr. in to ex-plain what exactly he was doing (or did afterward) as organizer of the infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with multiple Russians offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (aka “Little Adam Shitt”)* has been wondering aloud for weeks about this investigatory oddity.  Not that it means that Mueller is part of an establishment cabal (the deep state underlying “the deep state”, you might say) conniving to keep Trump in office. But rather it could be an indication of a strictly legalized, small-“c” conservative, only by-the-book process designed exclusively to deliver foundational information to Congress and let Congress to then take it wherever they may.

Too many obsessive Mueller-watchers have held a belief that somehow an hour after Mueller finished his work, a half-dozen FBI agents would grab Big Donny by the nape of the neck and frogmarch him out of the Oval Office.

That was never going to happen, which is one reason even Trumpy-insiders like the much abused and humiliated Chris Christie have been saying for a while that Trump’s biggest problem has never been Mueller as much as the Southern District of New York, (and all the other legal offices in his home state). That crowd, furiously filing terabytes of information about Donny’s flagrantly corrupt business activities in Manhattan for the past 50 years, has the power to bring charges that present Trump with the likelihood of complete financial ruin … once he leaves the White House.

But for the moment — as in the last 72 hours — the most salient point is that while, yes, Mueller found no (prosecutable?) evidence of collusion and did not “exonerate” Trump for obstruction, all any of us really knows about the two-year investigation, the 500+ witnesses and the 2800 subpoenas, is what Attorney General Bill Barr characterized in his four-page “op-ed” as critics are calling it.

Given that 800,000+ pages of raw data on the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation, (you know, the one that almost certainly meant a Sixth Extinction apocalypse for the American way of life), there’s no excuse whatsoever for all of Mueller’s raw data — not just his full report, but everything in his taxpayer-funded files — to also be turned over to Schiff, Jerrold Nadler and others.

The basic idea of a Special Counsel is to keep the investigation away from politics, but then when completed, turn it over to politicians for wherever the grand battle royale will take it. That is obviously what has to happen here, and pronto. The public interest in what has been going on — about a cyber attack on our election system, not intern canoodling or a private e-mail server  — has unprecedented public interest.

Without over-playing the partisan hack card, Bill Barr is a true believer of Dick Cheney’s “unitary executive theory”, which basically places the president above and beyond any standard of law applying to everyone else. Barr is also the guy who “auditioned” for his current job with an unsolicited multi-page memo last year reinforcing those beliefs to Trump’s legal team.

Whatever else Barr may be trying to achieve by his minimalist characterization of Mueller’s investigation, what he has achieved over the weekend, by allowing Trumpland to crow loudly about “total exoneration”, is new handicapping of Democrats in the grand political fight that was always to come. With Trump now unleashed to bellow “no collusion” to every MAGA rally he can schedule, the Democratic counter-attack on what are still literally dozens of potent legal fronts, will be viewed by the Trump base as just the wretched whining of poor losers.

All that could shift pretty fast with a crowd-sourced scrutiny of Mueller’s entire report and all his raw data.

Maybe then we’d get answers to hundreds of questions.

Like:

1: Did Mueller ever get Trump’s tax returns?  If not, why not?

2: Mueller’s team included the much-celebrated Andrew Weismann,  a renown pitbull on money-laundering scams, something the Trump family has engaged in flagrantly for years. What did he find? And given the collection of Russians characters using Trump properties for criminal purposes and the leverage that played against Trump, how did that not lead to conspiratorial links?

3: What about the case of Cambridge Analytica? It’s an episode where we find not only Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Trump campaign aid Brad Parscale, but Michael Flynn and most significantly Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the wackadoodle climate change-denying billionaire father-daughter team behind the creation of both Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica. We know Cambridge had a way to micro-target voters down to precise precincts. Who weaponized that information? How exactly was it used?

And 4: If nothing else. For god’s sake tell us why virtually everyone in Trump’s orbit was constantly, perpetually lying about their contacts with Russians?

*As described by our president.

Obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes

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At the moment I’m struggling with an Elizabeth Holmes obsession. No, not that kind of obsession. Rather the kind that can not understand how people like Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, nutjob Amway heiress Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Communications, the Waltons of WalMart, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, super-lawyer David Boies were conned by a twenty-something blonde with a weird voice who never blinked.

The story Holmes is all over the place at the moment. There’s a podcast, “The Dropout”, an HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” by Alex Gibney,  the book most of this is based on, “Bad Blood”, by Wall Street Journal writer John Carreyou and soon … a Hollywood movie with Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes, (to be directed by Adam McKay of “The Big Short” and “Vice”.)

Reduced to its most basic, Holmes claimed to have created a home espresso-size machine that could take a blood sample from a pinprick and run 200 analyses pretty much while you waited. Tapping the above-mentioned luminaries and more, she pocketed $900 million in investments, set up shop in Silicon Valley, hired dozens of employees, (as many marketing and branding gurus as scientists and engineers), and began building the intense cover-gal cult of blonde and blue-eyed Elizabeth … i.e. the long-awaited female Steve Jobs.

Everything about Holmes and her company, Theranos, is now in ruin. The $900 million is gone — $300 million to lawyers she was once paying at the rate of $1 million a month — and Holmes is facing charges of criminal fraud that could toss her in jail for 20 years. (Although, given what’s happened with Paul Manafort, she too may get off with probation for her “otherwise blameless life.”)

My copy of “Bad Blood” just arrived. But I watched Gibney’s doc, listened to a couple of hours of the podcast and inhaled a half-dozen Vanity Fair-like features. It’s an amazing, Hollywood-worthy story. (And the lead character is blonde!) But even after all that, I’m still left asking, “How?”

How did major league figures like Shultz, Kissinger, Boies, Slim, Murdoch and others buy into this con? Murdoch in particular invested $120 million. (DeVos was good for $100 million. Shultz, Kissinger and Boies were board members.)  On what possible basis?

I used to assume that before a canny old bastard like Murdoch threw down as much as a 20% tip he’d made damn sure he got everything and more than he was paying for. As in, for example, the best scientist-engineers he could find, with orders to Holmes that they were coming into her lab to verify that the machine — which she named “Edison”, after you know who — actually worked, or at the very least that there was bona fide science showing the concept was doable.

Clearly, none of that happened.

Being a wretched cynic and part-time pervert, my first theory was that the weird but-still-sort-of-attractive blonde was “encouraging” the old dogs with private, Robert Kraft-like consultations, even though at their age you’d worry that Shultz and Kissinger might have a stroke at the mere thought of it.

But apparently that isn’t true, either. The best explanation to date of this stunning gullibility on the part of some of the absolute lions of Spy vs Spy vs Spy insider diplomacy, international investment and skullduggery is that … she won them over, and kept them won over despite mounting evidence of fraud, purely on the basis of her family pedigree and Jobs-inspired bullshit.

In her family history there is a genuine medical hero, with a hospital named after him in Cincinnati and then there were her D.C.-based parents/power couple. (Her father was for a time — wait for it — an executive at Enron.) Somehow, maybe because when you get to a certain status in life you get lazy and place more value and trust in the pedigrees of who you know than real-time due diligence, the Shultzs, Kissingers, Boies, Waltons and Murdochs lent their name, reputation and money based on social association instead of gimlet-eyed investigation.

All to a con that on the face of it seemed far too good to be true.

Not that I worry for a second about any of them, you understand. It’s just that if these types of people — Harvey Weinstein’s go-to-guy Boies in particular sticks in my mind — are so judgmentally sloppy and easily deluded by a character like Holmes how can they purport to have any credibility on any other subject?

Part of the explanation for their immunity from shame and reputational disgrace is of course that most of them have their own media offices and control their own press. Stories such as this are fascinating because they are so rarely revealed to the public, much less so widely disseminated.

Still, not one of them hired an actual expert to find out if there was anything behind the bullshit … coming from the dropout child of pedigreed parents?

The revolution can’t come soon enough.

Let Us Praise Devin Nunes’ Golden Cow … and Mom.

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I like to remind friends anguishing over “the state of things” that — at least until we hit the fatal tipping point — there is a counter-balance to the stupendous landfills of venality and criminality choking the headlines. And right now there’s no story making that counter-balancing effect clearer than Devin Nunes suing … Devin Nunes’ Cow … and Devin Nunes’ Mom.

The no-doubt atheist writers for the Jimmy Kimmels and Stephen Colberts of the world had to have fallen to their knees in praise of Yahweh and golden calves for this latest heaven-sent torrent of “you can’t possibly top this” comic material. I mean, Nunes is outraged that people (maybe the same person) claiming to be his cow and his mother are constantly making mercilessly fun of him, mainly for being a witless tool of a corrupt moron? Where could they possibly get that idea? And how dare they!

Technically, Nunes — the California Republican most identified as a complete Trumpist stooge — is suing Twitter. On the grounds that the OCD-inflaming social media platform is damaging his hard-earned reputation … for being a witless tool of a corrupt moron, apparently. He’s demanding $250 million in damages for this suit and is threatening to bring “many more” in his valiant effort to rid the world of snarky bastards who make fun of public fools.

In case you’ve missed the first chapter:

” … the lawsuit objects to a colorful array of claims made by the since-suspended account @DevinNunesMom:

– ‘Nunes is ‘not ALL about deceiving people. He’s also about betraying his country and colluding with Russians’

– ‘I don’t know about Baby Hitler, but would sure-as-shit abort baby Devin’

– ‘Alpha Omega [Nunes is an investor in a Napa vineyard] wines taste like treason’

and

– “falsely [suggesting] that Nunes might be willing to give the President a ‘blowjob.’”

The lawsuit also accuses ‘Devin Nunes’ Cow’ of spreading false claims to its 1,204 Twitter followers. Those claims include stating that ‘He’s udder-ly worthless and its [sic] pasture time to move him to prison” and “Devin is whey over his head in crime’.”

Naturally — and also hilariously, where Devin Nunes’ Cow had 1204 followers before Nunes’ suit, the number exploded to over 152,000 by the end of the day, with off-shoot accounts like “Devin Nunes’ Goat”, “Devin Nunes’ Grandmother”, “Devin Nunes’ Lawyer” and “Devin Nunes’ Cock” sprouting by the minute. [UPDATE 3/21: @DevinNunes’Cow = 528,000 and still growing.] Simultaneously, “Devin Nunes’ Mom” — with a gleeful push from snark-loving liberals — was pushing north of 300,000 with the goal of more followers than (the real) Nunes. (Oops! It’s now suspended.)

This is all gob-smacking, extremely funny, cathartic and reassuring. When the history of the Trump era is carved in granite, Devin Nunes will be there as the most … well, I can’t use “witless stooge” again so soon in the same rant, can I? The guy’s a nearly impossible tool/fool. You really wonder what weird, anomalous genetic combination spawned someone so astonishingly devoid of self-awareness and common sense?

But there’s an element of this Twit-storm carnival that gnaws at me.

Not being a Twitter guy, (Life Goal #14: Less time staring at a glowing screen, not more), this may be another opportunity to remind snarky, hipster, tech-inhaling liberals that Nunes’ people, the crowd out in Fresno that keep on re-electing him, probably because of his witless stooge-ism, isn’t living on a regular diet of Twit.

The modern press corps and the entertainment industry have an intravenous relationship with Twitter. And it’s not just the appeal of the immediate news flow. The second-by-second call and response of Twitter is like an individualized Nielsen rating for every reporter, pundit, comic and elected official’s ego. You can tell in a flash if you’re tracking or not. If you matter, or not. If you’re a player, or not.

But while Twitter is 99% of the conversation at The Cool Kids’ Table, it’s (very) telling that Team Trump 2020 is making its biggest social media investment in … Facebook, otherwise known as Crazy Grampa in Sun City’s Slow-Mo Twitter.

Nunes’ — my guess here — represents a whole class of people who, A: Don’t “get” Twitter, B: Don’t “get” irony and satire, but C: Do get an enormous chunk of their “news” off of Facebook. The tales of how Facebook has allowed itself to be gamed over and over again by Russians and other cynical actors are well-established. But Team Trump is betting that it can do what it did all over again next year. Facebook nation hasn’t changed.

Facebook better suits a crowd — picture your average 65-plus retiree with a couple free hours before the weekly gun show meet-up — that isn’t on the move. They can sit home and scroll through what their tribe is trading today: Hillary Clinton sex rings in pizza parlors, invading Honduran toddlers with machetes for lopping off the heads of heroic Vietnam vets, skinny wackadoodle liberals coming to take your hamburgers away.

Nunes gets that crowd.

For me, I’m left wondering who is backing the guy’s latest shameless absurdity? Who’s going to pick up his legal bills? And/or how much of this nutjobbery is just a Michelle Bachmann-style set-up to extract “legal fund contributions” from the Crazy Grampas on Facebook?

 

 

 

 

Beto the Celebrity Man-Child v. The Women

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By my estimation, less than two hours elapsed between the time Beto O’Rourke announced he was running for POTUS and the moment he took  fire for being straight, white and male. Welcome to the big show, Mr. ex-Congressman!

I have no preferred horse in the race at this moment. (There are several Democrats I wish would just shut up and go away.) But the immediate, visceral reaction to O’Rourke — who announced simultaneous with a full-on giga-as-Gaga celebrity Vanity Fair cover — is going to be not just one of but maybe the critical factor in terms of who liberals/progressives choose to run against Trump.

In case you haven’t noticed, the ladies have had enough of the straight white male thing.

For The Cut Kimberly Truong says, “… as charismatic as O’Rourke may be, his candidacy already seems to be drawing anxieties and misgivings from women, for multiple reasons. One of those has to do with the announcement video itself, in which his wife, Amy, sits beside him on a couch, doing not much more than simply gazing at him in a show of support. … That is of course, not to mention the stark contrast between the ways the media has presented O’Rourke’s persona as charming and magnetic and the ways some of those same outlets have covered Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, which often focus on doubts about her ‘likability’.”

For Vox, Laura McGann wrote, “Beto O’Rourke jumped into the Democratic presidential primary on Thursday sounding like he hasn’t heard much about the big debate in recent years over how we judge male and female leaders. Just before he announced his run, O’Rourke boasted to Vanity Fair that ‘I want to be in it. Man, I’m just born to be in it’. NBC reporter Kasie Hunt spotted the inherent double standard the comment represents: Men are rewarded in politics for showing ambition, while women are punished.”

And here’s Jessica Heslam in the Boston Herald and Pete Kasperowicz from the (conservative) Washington Examiner.

The counter-balance though to millions of activated women disgusted with Trump (and Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Rush Limbaugh and their loudmouth, overbearing brothers-in-law) is everyone else who just wants to win. To sweep Trump and his enablers out of power. The latter crowd — still the majority is my guess — is less concerned with gender and policy than the ability to lead another wave election. A wave large enough to immediately reverse catastrophic neglect and corruption fostered by Republican rule.

Who knows if O’Rourke has the chops to pull that off? Critics point out that he raised $70 million and nearly beat Ted Cruz in [bleeping] Texas because … well, because he was running against Ted Cruz, one of the most loathsome trolls ever dropped into a Senate office, (which is really saying something.) The obvious and immediate counter to that one is … “WTF! Trump is worse!”, something no one can dispute.

Establishment conservatives like George Will (a “never Trumper”) mock O’Rourke, calling him a “skateboarding man-child”. But Republicans are truly afraid of him. Uber-progressives meanwhile are complaining he lacks sufficient policy gravitas, which again is also true. Right now O’Rourke is a lot like Barack Obama in 2007 in that he’s this neon-bordered celebrity idol-like white board on which anyone can imagine anything.

But here’s the bummer for both activated, pissed-off women and uber-progressives … that celebrity-vague [bleep] works. At least if the goal is winning an election in the most sweeping and convincing manner possible.

At this moment my betting money is still on Kamala Harris. She seems, well, wily, without being devious. To mis-paraphrase Lou Grant, “I like wily.” I’ve never thought Bernie Sanders is wily enough. Harris also seems truly comfortable up close in the retail game, and she too has a lot of celebrity vibe going for her. Not as much as straight, white and male O’Rourke, but plenty enough to work with.

O’Rourke ran a remarkably error-free campaign against Cruz. He displayed abundant energy and he speaks effortlessly and naturally in a contemporary, pop culture-laced language familiar and therefore appealing to voters who are not policy wonks, but who know enough by now to understand that Trump is both a fool and a criminal.

So that was Day #1 in Beto 2020.

Let the circus proceed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The College Admissions Scandal: Enough is Never Enough

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Purely as a distraction from Trumpy’s [bleep] Show this college admissions scandal is the bomb. Even if at the reptilian psychological roots of this episode we can’t help but be reminded of The Orange One and his base of sad, true believers.

The heart of this particular scandal is the insatiable human yearning for status. It really is essential evolutionary biology. Higher status gives you and yours a better chance of survival and passing on your genetic material. Every study you can find is chock full of statistics showing that with higher status comes higher levels of self-satisfaction and greater distance from psychologically and physically harm.

Here’s a paragraph from Adam Waytz at Scientific American: “[Psychologist PJ Henry at DePaul University’s] theory is based on a considerable psychological literature demonstrating that individuals from low-status groups (e.g. ethnic minorities) tend to engage in more vigilant psychological self-protection than those from high-status groups.  Low-status people are much more sensitive to being socially rejected and are more inclined to monitor their environment for threats.  Because of this vigilance toward protecting their sense of self-worth, low-status individuals are quicker to respond violently to personal threats and insults. … To provide evidence that tendencies for psychological self-protection were the crucial critical link between status and violence, Henry assessed survey data from over 1,500 Americans.  In this nationally representative sample, low-socioeconomic status (low-SES) individuals reported far more psychological defensiveness in terms of considering themselves more likely to be taken advantage of and trusting people less.”

In other words, the lower you perceive your status to be the generally angrier and more irrational and defensive your become, as well as more prone to self-destructive behavior.

There’s also this from a Science Daily piece: “The strongest test of the hypothesis is whether the possession of low status negatively impacts health. The studies reviewed showed that people who had low status in their communities, peer groups, or in their workplaces suffer more from depression, chronic anxiety, and even cardiovascular disease. Individuals who fall lower on the status hierarchy, or what the authors call the ‘community ladder’, feel less respected and valued and more ignored by others.”

But the crowd getting rounded up in this college admission scandal — parts of which I’m still trying to get my head around — are people who already have high status. A couple Hollywood actresses, high-powered lawyers, CEOs. That part of it is what makes it so irresistibly rich.

Also the part about the “Instagram influencer” daughters.

I mean, what is going with someone who can afford $6 million bucks to game the admissions system? As a naked out-front contribution slapped into the hand of some Dean $6 million should be enough to grease the skids for even the worst doofus off-spring. At least one of the “top” schools in the country would find a spot for the little loser.

So you start thinking the issue then has to be that the high status parent has become so accustom to the privileges of status that being told “no” by the school they absolutely must get into is inconceivable. “No” imperils status. There could be a slip on a rung of the great status ladder. What if word got out that little Jimmy Dimwit didn’t get into … Stanford, Yale or USC? How tongues would wag at the country club! Therefore, bribes must be paid. The system must be gamed. Unimpeachable status must be reaffirmed!

The ludicrous lengths humans will go to assert status in any situation is so basic it’s the stuff of thousands of years of satire. You think of the preening foppery of the post-renaissance courts, the millions of scenes, stories and jokes about hapless guys making fools of themselves trying to impress girls, and women at a “peer lunch” squeezing in thinly-masked assertions of greater-status-than-thou … be it over vacations, fashion accessories or the sheer damn brilliance of their children.

It’s the Great Human Theater and a lot of life wouldn’t be as entertaining without it. Hell, the advertising industry — and the fashion industry, the automobile industry, the cosmetics industry, the monster house industry and on and on — would collapse if we somehow stuck a needle in everyone’s brain and extracted the status hunger gene. So who’s surprised it’s a part of the college admissions industry?

But as I say, the comedy in this particular situation is that these are people of already indisputably high, substantial status who are revealed to be (criminally) desperate to preserve that status and pass it on.

You gotta laugh.

It’s just another episode that reminds me of the classic Homer Simpson – Montgomery Burns moment.

 

Homer: “Mr. Burns, you’re the richest man in the world. You OWN EVERYTHING!”

Mr. Burns: “Ah yes, but I’d give it all up for just a little bit more.”

 

 

Gay Mayor Pete and “This Porn Star Presidency”

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There are some lines that describe an era so perfectly that for a brief moment in the tornado-like news cycle of our modern world people stop, take notice and let it register. “This porn star presidency” is one of those lines.

The author of that brilliant encapsulation of our skanky common moment was the current mayor of South Bend, Indiana, 37 year-old Pete Buttegieg. Also included in his vitae are:  Harvard graduate, Rhodes Scholar, Afghan war vet and … gay. In other words: Not exactly your usual combination of stuff.

Buttegieg, who gets lots of love from Democratic media machers like the “Pod Save America” kids, is running for president and was doing the obligatory town hall with CNN’s Jake Tapper Saturday night. By the next morning, pundits were in a bit of a swoon. Donors, too. Naturally the latest porn-saturated insanity out of Trumplandia had something to do with it.

As Buttegieg was auditioning in front of his first big national audience, we were learning about the madam of the sleazy strip mall massage parlor/whorehouse where Trump buddy Robert Kraft (billionaire owner of the New England Patriots) had a habit of stopping by for what is colorfully referred to as a “rub and tug”. (Likely more “tug” than “rub” if we’re being honest.) It seems the madam has so thoroughly ingratiated herself with Trump and his tacky, “ewwww”-inducing crowd of “Boogie Nights” hangers-on she’s cuddled up close to him at Mar-a-Lago and is openly selling White House access to Chinese favor-seekers.

Buttegieg is clearly very smart and also a good public performer. He has some pretty progressive ideas, but he explains them in well-composed sentences and paragraphs low(er) information voters can understand. His tone Saturday was also an entirely appropriate mix of sadness (over the sheer goddam shamefulness of Trumpiness) and disgust (over the enablers of such a sleazy role model.) The “porn star presidency” line came in response to a question about who he’d rather have as president, Trump or Mike Pence.

(Couldn’t I just drive a stake through my ears instead?)

So yeah, a big moment for Mayor Pete, and based on it, purely for horse race purposes, I am formally moving him up into the super-elite “Lambert’s Top Five.” (Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke and now, Buttegieg.) That ought to spike his fund-raising.

But Buttegieg reignites a point I think is, um, foundational, in this race. Namely, Trump’s opponent next year has to pull together a lot of different people, not just the “empowered” women and jazzed up “young” (under 25) who only rally for presidential elections. To deliver a true wave election that sweeps out a few GOP senators, a wad of state legislatures and other things XXX-Trumpy, the 2020 Democrat has to have extraordinarily broad “celebrity” appeal. Both you and I may roll our eyes at the pop culture fanboy/fangirl aspect of this stuff, but it’s a stark reality people. “Traditional” is probably not going to cut it … deep enough.

I don’t think what I’ll generously refer to as “The Chronically Pissed Off Gun Crowd” as critical to Democrats’ chances of winning. Mostly old, white and male, conventional thinking is that those coots are so marinated in their self-pity and sense of victimhood they’re unreachable with any policy-driven message. But, true as that may be, they aren’t exactly ideological. They’re as eager for someone to “stop all the bullshit” as you and I am.

Getting them into the mix — without alienating “the base” (the pissed-off gals, disgusted “young”, ranting bloggers, etc.) pretty well nails down a big commanding win.

So how does “the gay thing” play?

 

Maybe not as bad as you might think. Based on quite a bit of direct, personal experience with badly groomed dudes nursing $2 beers in dive bars across this fine and exceptional country of ours, I don’t think “gay” is the landmine you might think. Most of them know someone, male or female, who swings for the other team. (Some may swing themselves, given their common reality of having a hard time keeping a gal, if you know what I mean.) It’s nothing they openly celebrate. Northern Wisconsin and the mountain west aren’t exactly the West Village. But “discomfort” isn’t quite the same thing as “freak out”.

All that might change of course when — not if — someone comes up with an Al Franken-level photo of Buttegieg in drag at a Gay Pride parade or (horrors!) kissing his husband. But if he’s been talking “authentically” and coherently, as he seems genetically inclined to do, he could survive that kind of thing.

So, Gay Mayor Pete, welcome to The Elite.