Author Archives: Brian Lambert

Dear Ilhan Omar: Don’t Sand All the Sharpness Away

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My congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, seems to be getting a painful lesson in the value of nuance. I hope she doesn’t take it too seriously.

As of this morning (Wednesday) Ms. Omar has dodged the bullet … fired by her own Democratic colleagues … and will not be specifically cited in a lip service “condemnation of anti-Semitism.” The new, watered-down version now will include counter-balancing language also condemning “anti-Muslim” speech. Given another couple days and a few more committees the Democrats will be boldly condemning mean people, potholes and dogs barking after midnight.

Omar and other members of the Democratic freshman class — the wildly celebrated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among them — should be commended for delivering the left-wing version of what the right-wing goobers claim they wanted with Donald Trump. Namely, someone who would go to DC and “shake things up.” (There’s a Newtonian unity at play here.)

The key difference being that the goobers and Trump have little to no foundation in historical reality and think spitting in the face of common sense and decency is revolutionary. With Omar, Cortez and the like, they clearly understand how powerful influences keep vital, full-spectrum discussions of important issues walled-off and neutered.

Omar is either very brave or very naive in disregarding the impact her image — dark-skinned woman in a hajib — has on America’s cultural battlefield. She’s an absolute godsend (a white, male, bearded god … send) to Gooberus Americanus, FoxNews and every uber patriot itching to take the fight to the towel heads once and for all. I suspect Mother Superior, Nancy Pelosi, has already had a chat with Omar about the fund-raising she’s doing for the Republican party.

But for those of us over here in the Reality Bubble, Omar, while problematically blunt and only mildly abashed is, like AOC, broaching some truly important issues. And she should continue doing so, with only minimal sanding of her sharpest edges.

There is simply no question that Congress’ resoundingly uncritical support of Ariel Sharon-Benjamin Netanyahu-style leadership, rancid with its supplication to the most intolerant conservative religious factions in Israel (and the US), needs to be regularly called out for “allegiance.” No intelligent person disputes the importance of supporting a (mostly) democratic government in Israel. Just as no intelligent person should dispute the obvious antagonism the likes of Sharon and Netanyahu — pandering to the interests of the most radically conservative forces — is constantly inciting among Palestinians and the profoundly cynical governments in Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

Amid all the attention Omar has received in the past couple weeks, precious little has been paid to equally blunt comments she’s made on American subservience to Saudi Arabia … which is not a Jewish state, in case you forgot.

In a series of Tweets over the Trump administration’s refusal to press the Saudis for the truth about the murder of (Amazon-owned and biased Washington Post) journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Omar said, “Once again, our President proves that you can’t buy a moral compass. And Saudi Arabia proves that you can, on the other hand, buy a President.”

Here’s a piece from never-that-close-a-pal-of-Jerusalem, Glenn Greenwald. Also good is this from Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight.

Not just at the heart of what Omar is saying, but right there on the face of it, is the argument that money (shocking!) has thoroughly distorted American objectives in a number of critical foreign relationships. In a sane world, Omar’s bluntness would provoke a healthy conversation about whether unequivocal loyalty to the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu is in the best interests of the U.S, the Middle East or even Israel. (Jared Kushner is probably finessing that one as we speak.)

All that said, there is roiling support for the essence of what Omar has been saying from American Jewish leaders uncomfortable with Netanyahu-style leadership and America’s lock-step “allegiance” to that kind of rigid and corrupt authoritarianism. It is also demonstrably true that here in ‘Murica, support for Israel-no-matter-what is at least as fervent among white, evangelical (know-nothing) Christians as among the average Jewish voter.

So, Dear Congresswoman Omar:  You’re on to something significant. My concern is that as .037% of the current Congress, you’re fully prepared to take far more heat and threats of violence than have ever been aimed at an actual bigot, like, oh say, male and very white Steve King.

 

 

 

 

Klobuchar Games the Star Tribune

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Finally, this past Saturday (not Sunday if you’re paying attention) the Star Tribune published its own reporting on the controversy around Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of her staff. It included a long, comprehensive interview with Minnesota’s senior senator-turned-presidential candidate.

Oh wait. What? It didn’t? She only consented to a written statement? And they bought that?

You really should ask yourself, “How does that happen?” Arguably the most prominent elected official in the state, continuing to deal with (highly) unflattering accusations about her personal behavior, denies an interview on the topic to (without question) the state’s largest news organization … and that organization accepts that response?

It’s easy to understand Klobuchar’s goal. She wants to diminish this “bad boss” story to the point it evaporates. Later Saturday she was making jokes at the annual Gridiron Club charity dinner about eating salad with a comb. As crisis management goes, that’s good form. Get up and do some self-effacing humor about your screw-up. Every smart politician knows that strategy.

But what about the Star Tribune? Klobuchar seems to be selling the notion that, “Yeah, I’ve been tough. But that’s how I get things done.” What though is the Strib’s selling point? “Well, uh, we were shamed into devoting actual staff time to seeing if this stuff was true. But, dang it, when the Senator wouldn’t talk to us we, you know, just had to go with what we got. But by God we’re still tough, hard-nosed, call-’em-as-we-see-’em reporters and editors! Neither fear or favor, baby!”

Riiight.

To quickly review: The story of Klobuchar’s staff mistreatment broke days before her gala (snowy) presidential campaign kickoff. With startling few exceptions, no Twin Cities news organization so much as breathed a word about it, even though tales of “Amy the mean boss” have circulated in knowing circles around town for decades. When some kind of mention had to be made, the “play” was to wrap the accusations within the dismissive verbiage of “anonymous” sources and “on-line” publications, which was to say organizations with much lower standards than the Strib, or MPR.

But the story didn’t go away, and when The New York Times did its own legwork and ran the tale of the salad and the comb, the Strib seems to have found itself in a bit of a professional pickle. To the point that — two weeks after the story broke — it finally assigned a couple of reporters to, you know, see if any of this “anonymous on-line” business could possibly be true.

And what did they publish on Saturday (not on Sunday, with two to three times greater circulation)?

I quote:

“The Star Tribune interviewed four former Klobuchar staffers who all said her treatment of subordinates regularly went beyond what they considered acceptable even for a tough, demanding boss. They described similar kinds of behavior: Frequent angry outbursts over minor issues, regular criticisms and admonitions in front of others, office supplies or papers thrown in anger, cutting remarks and insults on a nearly constant basis, waking up to long strings of e-mails from Klobuchar sent late at night or in the early morning.

All shared those observations on the condition they not be named in this story, for fear of reprisal.”

Along with this admission:

“Klobuchar did not grant an interview for this story.”

Put bluntly, the problem of (presumably young) staffers fearing reprisal is not unusual for any news organization trying to report on powerful figures in politics or business. But not demanding a direct interview with Klobuchar on the festering matter is.

If the Star Tribune doesn’t have the clout — or is unwilling to exercise the clout it has — to get so prominent a public official to respond to accusations in a national story with serious consequences for her presidential aspirations, who does? And to be clear I don’t blame the reporters. This is one where either the editor-in-chief or the publisher makes a personal call and explains that funky “Who needs who more?” thing all over again.

The question then is what’s their leverage? Klobuchar knows the Star Tribune is in a position where they have to run something, given how far behind the story they are, and her bet is that again saying pretty much nothing is better than responding directly and spontaneously to specific incidents. Her strategy is all about tamping this story down and getting on with the bigger business of winning the Democratic nomination.

At the very (very) least, the Strib could devote some staff-generated column space to discussing a few of the more interesting and provocative questions that have risen up around this story. Such as whether this whole episode is purely sexist? And whether prominent women truly are being held to standards both qualitatively and quantitatively higher than their male counterparts?

The standards may be different for women, but in totality are they worse? I don’t know. But I think, given the #MeToo movement and all the women running for office, it’d be a brave and interesting discussion to engender among the public at this moment.

Sadly, I don’t foresee the Strib (or MPR) pushing this topic much further, unless again, it gets shamed into it by forces beyond our state borders.

Michael Cohen: “I fear … there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

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You couldn’t help but make a direct, almost umbilical connection, between Michael Cohen’s parting words yesterday … “Given my experience working for Mr Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power” and the performance of 99% of the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.

As was plain to everyone watching, the Republicans, led by the loudest and most cynical of the (so-called) Freedom Caucus, had zero interest in refuting anything …  anything, mind you … Cohen accused Trump of being. Not of being a “racist”, or a “con man” or a “cheat”. Hell, if Cohen produced a HiDef video of Trump kidnapping schoolgirls (or boys) off the streets of Mole Hill, West Virginia and shooting them up with opioids the Republican response would still be, “Oh, yeah! But you want a book deal, you lying bastard!”

Trump’s flagrant incompetence and corruption has never bothered the likes of Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan and … it’s very important to emphasize … it never will.

Those two, the leaders of The Wrongest of The Right Wing, get elected and stay in office because they bring full-on toxic cultural warfare, not in spite of it. They are the equivalent of Subutai the Mongol for America’s fear-driven racist under-class. For that sad over-stressed crowd, ethics, legality, logic and human decency are incidental to defeating … liberals. “Liberals” of course being code for uppity women, blacks, Hispanics, climate change, electric cars, mass transportation, cheaper prescription drugs and everything else that comes with common sense in 2019.

Meadows and Jordan may not be quite the abject fools and buffoons that some of their colleagues are. Here’s looking at you ex-Loooosiana Sheriff and wearer of weird, ill-fitting vests, Clay Higgins

(may you personally re-confiscate Cohen’s “boxes”), or Carol Miller of West Virginia,

or Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin,

or … well, it got to the point, before the lunch break, where the Republicans looked to be in a competition to see who among them could sound most most like they were having an ischemic stroke; bug-eyed and struggling to put two coherent sentences together. With the exception of Justin Amash from Michigan, you’re excused if you thought the brain-eating zombie apocalypse had already attacked and fed off the GOP caucus.

Lord, what a collection of goobers.

But my point here, and it too is somewhat apocalyptic, is that this crowd; bred, raised and sustained on the raging gibberish of talk radio (several of them are ex-talk radio hosts), don’t have the genetic composition to concede defeat. Because of that, it is worth considering that they will see Trump being driven from office by the legal weight of Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York and/or defeated at the ballot box in 2020 as the catalyst for all-out civil insurrection.

As Cohen suggested and others who have known Trump for years have concurred, Trump will resort to anything to avoid (or reject) defeat. This is acutely true in the context of this moment, where the Presidency may be the only thing that temporarily protects him from total financial destruction. Should the SDNY indict him for bank fraud, tax fraud, insurance fraud and on and on, the penalties for could easily leave him penniless, a blubbery shamble in a Trump Gardens efficiency, rocking a soiled wife-beater and eating cold, day-old KFC out of a bucket.

Facing that prospect Trump will have no choice but to rally the goober masses, the cesspool swamp of deplorables that re-elect the Jim Jordans, Mark Meadows, Glenn Grothmans and Carol Millers of the planet … because of their indifference to decency and common sense and revulsion of “liberals.”

Now, we always want to avoid hysteria and hyperbole. But you know that line you keep hearing about how, “this isn’t normal”?

Well, it could very easily, and likely, get even less normal.

#Oscars So Sappy

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Before I refill my popcorn bowl for six hours-plus of Michael Cohen Live! tomorrow in DC, I have to hammer that “Green Book” Best Picture nail, like pretty much everyone else already has.

As a life-long movie fan, and as someone who (he says smugly) believes movies can be art, I assure you with near 100% certainty that 10 years from now “Green Book” will be yet another all-but-forgotten example of Hollywood sentimentality while “Roma” will still be regarded as one of the 50 finest movies of this era. This year, among the Best Picture nominees, based on the marriage of artistic expression and technical craft, on the breadth and depth of human fears, aspirations, motivations and desires — on how life is lived — there was “Roma” and then there was everything else.

Critics and fans who, like me blurted out “Are you [bleeping] kidding me!?” when Julia Roberts announced Best Picture, have had this experience before … many times. (And let’s not forget 1969 when “Oliver!” won and “2001” wasn’t even nominated. Or 1977, when “Rocky” beat out “Network.”) There’s a deep, sappy strain of treacly, middle-brow do-gooderism that has always run through Hollywood.

But I mean, let’s be real, the movie industry is a business based on selling the most tickets it possibly can. Cut the widest path into mass appeal. Art is fine, popular is much better. Hollywood’s self-satisfying liberal neurons get all fired up and excited at the thought of giving the world’s ticket buyers a big, glamorous demonstration of what it believes the world wants to see … in Hollywood’s values.

The rub of course is that the Oscars are handed out by The Motion Picture Academy of ARTS and SCIENCES, which kinda, sorta implies that its big awards show exists to salute and commend the best of the cinematic “art”, as well as the “sciences” that help convey artistic expression to the masses. It shouldn’t matter whether “the best” sold 100 million tickets or 100,000.

But it does.

Before the telecast there was lots of talk about the minefield of screw-ups this year’s glitzy pageant was blundering through. No host! Cratering ratings! How about an Oscar for Best Popular Movie? How about handing out a few of the dull awards during commercial breaks?

Speaking of minefields, in the era of “Oscars So White”, #MeToo and #TimesUp, the Academy’s clear and almost comical determination to inoculate itself against any new charges of racial or gender insensitivity likely contributed to “Green Book’s” disproportionate appeal. I mean, as I watched the parade of remarkably diverse presenters, I had to wonder if guys like Tom Hanks, Matt Damon and Tom Cruise had had their SAG cards pulled.

Distilled to its essence, all those controversies were rooted in the Prime Directive of the Academy Awards — namely: put on a TV show that gets bigly ratings. (As though either the Academy or ABC/Disney would be lining up at a food shelf if the Oscarcast audience slides below 40 million.) The niggling question of whether the nominated movies were truly the year’s most artistic or most technically creative wasn’t really on the radar.

But this is really deep same-old, same-old.

The Oscar telecast has always felt more like a mash-up of Broadway and dinner theater than an event unabashedly devoted to movies. It’s (another) celebrity fashion show, with an orchestra, lots of interruptions for singing and dancing, a couple of snarky jokes and, of course, if we’re lucky, moments of bona fide apex Hollywood. (Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. Now that’s what you call “puttin’ on a show”, folks.)

But the show itself — an event supposedly all about commending the best of the year in movie making — is forever incapable of devoting itself top filmmaking. It can’t even bring itself to describe to its massive international audience how movie art is made great, or even “artful”. This year’s show for example devoted easily 10 times as much of its hyper-super valuable airtime to Best Song nominees than examples of the year’s best editing or cinematography.

You tell me which is more core to the essential heart of movie-making.

 

 

 

 

Never Mind The New York Times, The Local Press is Still Giving Klobuchar a Pass

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How’s that old saying go? “Even a mental picture is worth 10,000 words”? In an image-conscious world there are pictures that stick in your head, pretty much obliterating, you know, balanced reasoning.

Here in Minnesota we’re very familiar with the picture of pre-Senatorial Al Franken pretending to accost the ample bosom of a sleeping colleague, a colleague who was on his USO trip largely for the thrills her ample bosom gave our fighting troops in the Middle East. Later accusations that Franken was also accosting buttocks (ample or otherwise) while taking photos with constituents of course went uninvestigated. But those charges didn’t have to be proven true. Franken’s judges and jury — here’s looking at you presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand — had the frat boy photo with the sleeping bosom.

 

That was all they really needed. Franken was guilty of, well, contempt for womanhood, to put it one way. We couldn’t think of anything more dehumanizing or revolting! What an ogre! He simply had to go!

And now we have … Amy Klobuchar eating a salad with a comb. No photographic evidence is needed. We all get the picture. A picture that invariably comes with the GIF-like image of a woman sticking a groaty comb with teetering salad in her mouth … just to spite a terrified staffer. (I still don’t buy that a U.S. airline didn’t have so much as a plastic fork on board for — for a US Senator — for a flight from South Carolina to DC.) But, whatever.

I’ve already said what I think about the not-dead-yet stories of Klobuchar mistreating her staff. (Short answer: I don’t care.) And I understand that most readers don’t give a damn about how Minnesota’s local media did — or in this case didn’t –– cover the first round of accusations against Our Favorite Senator. Likewise, I am well aware that for many women, these attacks on Klobuchar are pure sexism — women being held to different, higher standard than piggish males — period. Full stop.

But as someone who was once a member of “the media”, and who wrote about “the media” and is still intrigued by the editorial choices made by “the media”, I have to say, again, that the locals’ performance in this sideshow to the Klobuchar campaign roll-out was remarkably … weak. Or “lame”, if you prefer. And still is.

It’s one thing to play the PR homer for the local sports teams. And it’s one thing to fill half your news hole day in and day out with “Service Journalism” entertainment-irrelevancy. But when that policy is directed at an elected official strategizing for the White House, it’s just not excusable. Again … period. Full stop.

When the first accusations were thrown at Klobuchar by reporters at The Huffington Post, an attitude among the local press corps was something akin to sniffing dismissal. “The Huffington Post! Please! Since when is that real journalism! Why half their news hole every day is filled with entertainment and irrelevancy! Movie stars and cutsie-poo singers we’ve never heard of! We are Serious. We have standards! Everything on the record or we don’t run it! Anonymous sources? Not us in a billion years!”

As a result, there was practically no reference to The Huffington Post story in the days leading up to and immediately following Klobuchar’s kick-off. The “sourcing” standards at The Huffington Post simply didn’t meet the standards of The Star Tribune, or Minnesota Public Radio or the Pioneer Press or our local TV news rooms, (the primary news sources for most of us.)

There were exceptions, and good on them. But the prevailing editorial decision (likely based on the fact that literally dozens of other unimpeachably Serious news organizations, like the Boston Globe, Bloomberg News, etc. were comfortable enough with The Huffington Post’s sourcing to run the story) was to make a fleeting reference to “on-line” and “anonymous” accusations deep in the Strib’s mostly “hail and hallelujah” copy. Further, when Klobuchar finally responded to the “on-line” accusations by conceding that she can be a tough boss — because her “grit”, you understand — the matter was relegated down to nothing more than predictable reaction to a “demanding” boss.

Things changed just a wee bit this Friday when The New York Times picked up where The Huffington Post left off and did their own reporting, which churned up the story of the groaty comb and the salad. Apparently accepting that The New York Times’ sourcing standards are at least as lofty as theirs’, the Strib on Saturday ran the Times piece (not their own reporting to be sure) under the headline, “Klobuchar seen as tough boss.” (Worth noting is that the hed for on-line version was: “Former Amy Klobuchar staffers describe work environment of volatility, distrust.” I’d like to think someone in the Strib newsroom complained about that soft-core dead tree version.)

Let me repeat, I don’t care if Klobuchar rants and berates her staff or eats salads with groaty combs. That’s not why I vote for her.

But gross sexism withstanding, this was a campaign issue when The Huffington Post first reported it and is more so now that The New York Times has put its stamp on it. It matters.  It looks very much like something that could prove problematic for Klobuchar, a lot like Howard Dean’s manic yell was for him in Iowa years ago, not to mention the underlying character issue with Klobuchar is a lot more potent.

Contrary to the way the Strib, MPR and others around town hoped to play this at the get-go, the issue isn’t merely whether Klobuchar is a “demanding”, or “tough” boss, which suggests someone who yells a lot when stuff goes wrong. It’s whether she’s chronically abusive and demeaning to her staff of mostly lowly-paid young people. There’s a very big difference there.

Frankly, I’m not convinced the accusations against Klobuchar are only rank sexism. And I do think there’s an interesting conversation to be had on that question.

My point here is that the local press is still failing a basic obligation to report out a clear obstacle in Klobuchar’s campaign.

 

 

 

 

 

This Jussie Smollett Epidemic of Fake Bias Must End!

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Interesting clash in the Culture Wars this morning.

On the one hand we have the latest in a staggering long line of ultra right-wing gun fetishists plotting a pissed-off white guy’s jihad against, well, everything, (but mostly “liberals”.) While on the other we have (yet another) chowderhead legislator — right here in Minnesota — zeroing in on an epidemic that only exists in his mind and the FoxNews/InfoWars bubble.

The Coast Guard officer caught  stockpiling the usual thousands of rounds of ammo, dozens of guns, drugs and god knows what else is a by now all-too familiar character in contemporary American mythology. (He was caught, in part, by searches he made on his gummint work computer … doh!). This guy was playing the usual role. That of the solitary, righteous, avenging white warrior, prepared to die for racial purity. There’s an endless supply of these guys.

Early reports suggest he was planning something “on a scale rarely seen”. That may be hyperbole based on his truly delusional ranting. (And yes, he too was frothing about restoring the “white homeland”.) But the central point is that he was armed to the teeth enough to pull off something at least as nasty as the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, or the Charleston church massacre, or the … well I’m trying to keep this under 700 words, so you’ll have to Google the rest.

Meanwhile here In Minnesota, we have Republican Representative Nick Zerwas of (deep Sixth District) Elk River simultaneously demagoguing the kind of existential fears that keep your average talk radio jockey in business … fake claims of hate crimes.

(You may want to move it up on your list of things to worry about. Right after, “Did I leave the garden hose out last fall?”).

To be specific, Zerwas is worried about fake claims made by liberals, blacks (or Hispanics, or Muslims or Jews) against, you know, the real victims in this toxic Culture War. Who they? Pissed off, not too bright white folks, that’s who. He even rolls in “liberal bias” in the media to flavor the stew.

Zerwas wants a law criminalizing stuff like this much publicized episode where a TV actor in Chicago staged an attack on him by vicious, racist Trumpers as a publicity stunt. If only we didn’t have video of his buddies stocking up on mugger gear after being paid $3000 to play act the whole thing.

It’s batshit, of course. And the guy — Jussie Smollett (never seen the show he’s in or heard of him until now) — has pretty well toasted his career with this move, not to mention whatever he gets from the courts in Illinois. Stupidity knows no racial or ethnic boundaries.

But, contrary to the bold and righteous Rep. Zerwas, stunts like Smollett’s are not an epidemic that needs immediate legislative action. In fact, the only reason you make a (further) fool of yourself by standing up, in Minnesota, for crissakes, demanding action over the Black Guy in Chicago incident is to gin up a new round of “atta boys” at the bars in Elk River. By god, Mr. Zerwas, if you don’t do a single damn thing to fix the schools or roads out there, you can always tell your people you were on the front lines in the war against asinine publicity stunts!

Needless to say, our Orange Leader, lately raging anew about The New York Times and others in the press as “enemies of the people”, has yet to Twit a word about Sgt. Rock, the Coast Guard dude, and his long list of Democrats and journalists/media people he was preparing to slaughter … with his actual arsenal.

I very much doubt Mr. Zerwas will have anything to say, either. (I doubt he will ever be asked, since that would be too impolite for Capitol conversation.) Because for either Trump or Zerwas to condemn this latest locked and loaded sociopath would be like spitting in the face of the whipped up, saucer-eyed folks in the front row of their West Virginny rallies or Main Street meet-ups.

Basic rule of politics: Never insult the people you need to stay in office.

In raw Culture War terms, one threat is a stark, unequivocal reality with a horrifying real world death toll attached to it. The other is no threat to anyone, other than the way it is reprocessed and reformatted as an offense to a self-pitying racial majority.

 

Handicapping the Democrats 18 Months Out

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[Correction included]. Even if his name is not mentioned directly, every Democratic candidate entering the 2020 race is being measured and labeled on how much of a response they are to Donald Trump, or “Trumpism”. Which is to say, what degree of repudiation are they offering? Total? A bit here and there? Whatever they can get from “across the aisle”?

As of this morning Bernie Sanders, now 77 years old and grumpy as ever, is back in the hunt. Say what you will about The Bern, he isn’t shy about calling it as he (and most of us see it). Trump is a career low-life and criminal (laundering money for Russian gangsters to sustain his “brand” being the least of it), and establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are guilty as sin for greasing the skids for every absurd-to-vile thing Trump has promoted.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to throw myself on any bandwagon (or funeral pyre) this early in the circus performance. But I am telling myself to keep the radar up for what people like Yuval Harari think of as a fundamental breakdown of traditional politics. In other words, we could be seeing a large-scale disruption on the left in response to the disruption of the chaos and criminality of Trump and enabling Republicans on the right.

Put another way, it may be a feeling among comparatively well-informed and rational people who believe “the old way” is too timid and under-powered for the threats against decency and logic presented by Trumpism.

I can’t say how real it all is at the moment. But to mangle Gertrude Stein, there’s definitely some kind of there … there.

The wag-nerds on Nate Silver’s 538 podcast have broken down the Democratic field (as of last week) into a small handful of “lanes”. For example, our gal, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand are described as running in “the beer lane”, trumpeting mostly unexciting, traditional values that have satisfied collegial Democrats for decades. By contrast, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, are described as contenders in “the wine lane”, riling up the passions of mostly well-educated (and female) voters. That crowd can also be described as upscale, (in terms of smarts if not money) and extraordinarily upset with the numbskull, mysogynistic antics of the right as any specific policy position.

But then, by way of fine-parsing, 538 suggests a possible candidate like Beto O’Rourke, defies both of those appeals by splitting the difference with a “craft beer lane”. You know, lots of traditional stuff — blue jeans, rock’ n roll, drive through hamburgers, rural Texas, pickup trucks — all whipped together with a thick, rich hipster sauce of “stop the [bleeping] madness!”

As I say, I have no specific favorite in the hunt here 18 months or whatever before the next election. But I’ll do a bit of my own lane handicapping anyway.

In the “Forget About It” lane. Tulsi Gabbard. Too much conspicuous opportunism. Do four years of serious reading and get back to us.

The “Been There, Done That” lane. Joe Biden and Bernie. The Bud Light crowd loves you in Scranton, Joe. I get that. But the game has changed since you were in your prime, and that was 20 years ago. And Bernie: love ya too, man. But 77 is way past the “serve by” date in modern politics. Your job this time around is to keep goosing the actual contenders to keep the fire and faith.

The “A Little Too Cool for School” lane. Cory Booker. Kind of like what I say about people who want to be cops; the fact they want it so bad is the main reason to disqualify them. No human, much less any successful politician from New Jersey, can possibly be as immaculate as Booker purports to be.

The “No, Just No” lane. Kirsten Gillibrand. The creepy bane of the #MeToo movement. Way too many of the obnoxious “beliefs” she needed to play upstate have done a miraculously 180 since elevating to the Senate. Also, for so many reasons too obvious to mention: Michael Bloomberg.

The “If This Was 1956, Then Maybe” lane. Klobuchar. Being a darling of George Will, Republican colleagues and the Wall Street Journal editorial page doesn’t make my pissed-off little heart go pitter-patter. When you can’t quite say you’re in full favor of a medicare access for all on Obamacare I get an even worse case of morbid eye-roll. [*]

The “I Like What Yer Sayin’, Dude. But Yer Style Needs Some Work” lane. Sherrod Brown. Otherwise known as The Most Rumpled Man in the Senate. Unlike Amy delivering Minnesota’s 10 whopping electoral votes, Brown pulling in Ohio would be serious numbers in 2020. Wonk liberals know the guy and like what they hear. But it’s very hard to imagine any dispassionate independent spending 90 seconds listening to him.

The “You’re Checking My Boxes, Now Sell It” lane. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke. Harris has the feel of the front-runner, based on a near perfectly staged roll-out, and she’s got an interesting mix of prosecutorial dagger and pop-culture crede. Warren, while on the cusp of aging-out at 69, has demonstrated the mix of righteous indignation and legislative bona fides that play like sweet music to liberal ears. And O’Rourke has demonstrated a level of energy and charisma above and beyond anyone else out there.

But he’s got to, A: Decide, and B: Convince a whole lot of women like my friend at a dinner party the other night who announced to the crowd, “I’m never voting for another man!”

[*] The early version of this post suggested Klobuchar wasn’t on board with at least a public option into Obamacare, which she is. My mistake. (To many minds “public option” and “medicare access for all” are very nearly the same thing. But she’s being very careful here.)

 

 

 

 

When 40,000 Dead ISN’T the National Emergency

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Who said “national emergency”?

Among the horrifying, doomsday scenarios tossed up by — Republicans — over why Donny should not set a precedent over this “invasion” across the southern border was the possibility that in the future some (deranged, fanatical, Constitution-hating, tyrannical) Democrat would, you know, declare a national emergency and  … you’re sitting down, right? … demand … background checks … on guns.

The unspeakable horror! Talk about Nazi-style overreach! What would be next, gummint-mandated castration for all real American males? Might as well. It’d be the same dang thing!

With Trump at long last declaring his national emergency, which, as we now know, he “didn’t have to do”, he jumped on Air Force One for Mar-a-Lago and a long President’s Day weekend of intense, hands-on management of the invasion emergency. Excuse me, not “emergency”. I meant, “golf”. Hands-on the putter, not on the “emergency.”

Simultaneous with Donny-in-the Garden yesterday we had news of yet another disgruntled citizen settling scores at his former place of employment. How? In the time-honored ‘Murican tradition of shooting up the place, killing five co-workers and wounding a bunch of cops.

Meanwhile, Minnesota peace officers up in tiny Nevis were dealing with something of the same. A family dispute at an in-home day-care center that erupted into Hollywood-style gunplay, including a chase with the totally legal conceal/carry perp shooting back and wounding a cop in a pursuing squad car. Grand total: three dead.

Also, still in the news, the rent-a-cop dude who shot up a school bus on the freeway here in Minneapolis because, wait for it, he “feared for his life”*.

This misplaced cowboy/too-many “action movies” bravado is so standard we’ve pretty much stopped asking any more questions about any of these incidents. But I’ve got a couple about the two here in Minnesota.

Specifically, this detail from Dan Browning’s Strib story on the Nevis shoot-out.

“Bryce Bellomo [the shooter] was well known in Nevis, a city of 400 residents. He was an award-winning taxidermist, volunteer firefighter, Boy Scout leader and baseball coach, the source said. Court records show that he had a permit to carry a firearm and was known to do so. Last March, he was charged with misdemeanor domestic assault and interfering with a 911 call in an incident involving his wife. According to court records, the couple had an argument and Bryce Bellomo forcibly took his wife’s cellphone and pushed her toward his vehicle, then drove her into the Paul Bunyan State Forest, where they got stuck. A SWAT team found them by pinging her cellphone and convinced Bryce Bellomo to walk out.”

Put another way, the constantly gun-toting Boy Scout leader had … a SWAT team … pull him out of a forest where he had essentially kidnapped and terrified his soon-to-be ex-wife … but months later, he was still packing his gun . Just in case, you know, he could defend himself against two women [the ex-wife’s sisters] messing with him outside a day-care center.

God forbid we have any kind of law that requires cops in a town of 400 to A: Take away the nutjob’s guns after a SWAT team has to track him down, and B: Stop him anytime they see him and shake him down to make sure he hasn’t re-armed.

Next, the school bus shooter, 31-year old automatic weapon-toting “security guard” Kenneth Lilly. The school bus episode is bonkers enough. (*”Feared for his life” is by now boilerplate law enforcement bullshit for every time they gun someone down in the line of duty. E.g. Philandro Castile.) But did you catch the story of Lilly’s previous gunfight?

This from a Libor Jany story in the Strib:

“According to a police report, Lilly said he was checking on his parents’ home while they were out of town and decided to drive to Shadow Falls Park at Summit Avenue and Mississippi River Boulevard late that night to view the blue moon. He met a woman sitting on the bluff and they began chatting. About 15 minutes later, they were approached by a man who asked to use Lilly’s phone, Lilly told police. He was reaching for it when Broadbent intervened, pointed a handgun at Lilly and the woman and demanded that he empty his pockets. Lilly “feared for his life and immediately lifted up his shirt which concealed a Glock 23 loaded with hollow point bullets on his right hip,” then fired four to five rounds at Broadbent. Broadbent was declared dead at the scene. Police seized the gun from Lilly at the scene. Upon searching him, they also found three Glock 40 magazines in his left front pocket, along with pepper spray, two pocket knives, a wallet, flashlight, cellphone and a set of car keys.”

Besides wondering how Lilly managed to whip out his Glock and pump four or five slugs into a guy who he says was already holding a gun on him, do any of you think it just a wee bit odd that a guy who wanders over to the riverbank to enjoy the moonlight and maybe meet a nice gal … is also packing three clips of ammo and two knives … in addition to the loaded Glock with hollow point bullets? I mean, that scenario gives a fresh luster to the old line about, “Is that your weapon officer, or are you just happy to see me?”

As I say these kinds of stories with these kinds of plainly unstable men (always) are so routine in the great and free US of A no one explores where these characters came from, or what explains their rage and paranoia? It’d be useful for some local feature writer to occasionally take a full dive into the back story of characters like the award-winning taxidermist/Boy Scout leader or young Mr. Lilly, the heavily armed rent-a-cop repeatedly “fearing for his life”. What were mom and dad like? What were theirsocial views when they talked with their friends, if they had any? What were their media influences?

But never mind. Our real national emergency isn’t the 350 million guns floating around this country, way too many in the hands of whack job solid citizens like the Boy Scout leader and the rent-a-cop. Or the 40,000 gun deaths every year. Uh uh. It’s the “invasion” of “millions” of rapists pouring across the Mexican border. Sean Hannity tells us so.

It’s an emergency so total and terrifying a guy needs a weekend of golf just to get his head around it.

 

 

The Real Cost of Trump’s Damn Wall? How About $448 Billion.

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To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, “People are sick of hearing about your damn wall.” So maybe Trump accepts this latest “border security deal” … or not. Who knows with him? What if Ann Coulter calls him a wimp again?

But what’s fer sure is that this farce has sucked up way — way — too much oxygen. You and I get that Trump needs a long-running, racist distraction to keep the crowd who wear their MAGA hats to church and formal occasions hootin’ and hollerin’ for him. But the rest of us long ago did the math and wrote the wall off as the blatant idiocy it is.

That said, I’m regularly surprised that so little of the reporting on Trump’s wall ever gets around to putting the real world price tag on this, uh, “idea”.

Very few reporters/pundits following the wall story ever factor in the cost of a nearly 2000-mile barrier, beyond the cash needed for construction … which would be a fraction of the cost of buying out property owners across the desert and down the Rio Grande.

How much could that amount to, you ask? Try on $448 billion for size.

An Atlantic article by Texas-based writer Richard Parker points out one of those teeny, tiny little details that neither Trump or his talk radio puppet-masters ever mentions. Namely, huge chunks of US border-land are owned not by pushover mom and pop tomato farmers, but seriously well-connected, well-heeled ranchers, who know a thing or two about making the gummint pay maximum value for anything it wants from them.

Says Parker, “If President Donald Trump ever gets the funding for his long-promised wall, he will have to plot a course through Texas. But he will never make it all the way through here, the 800-mile stretch from Laredo to nearly El Paso. There will be no ‘concrete structure from sea to sea’, as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons.”

Parker points out that where Texas has bought up any land from private citizens, costs for acquisition alone are running at $19.4 million per mile.

“I know this place,” says Parker. “I’m a Texan who grew up a border rat. And though I’m no cowboy, until recently I lived on a working cow-calf operation, and I know a few ranchers. Over the years, some have allowed me to hunt and fish on their land and treated me like family. So I can say this, generally speaking: Although many big ranchers and landowners backed Trump, they are conservative in the most traditional senses. They actually believe in small government, free enterprise, free trade, and private property. And nobody puts a wall through their brush.”

There are also several seriously heavyweight families who own huge chunks of property from Laredo to El Paso. People who actually know how to cut a deal … if you know what I mean.

Says Parker, “Here is the final, insurmountable barrier to Trump’s wall: money. The government has already paid nearly $1 million an acre for [a] six-acre plot in the Rio Grande Valley, potentially setting a precedent. If the Trump administration seized 700 miles of private land along the border, one mile wide—640 acres per square mile—the tab could come to $448 billion. Nearly 20 times the wall itself.”

So yeah. As you and I know. Stupid. A complete waste of time and money. But it’d be nice to hear the press routinely roll numbers like that into the national conversation about “the wall.”

A quick related story from a road trip down to the Rio Grande last summer.

Big Bend National Park is, well, big. And in the summer, really hot and really quiet. If you like deserts and quiet like I do, its beautiful.

So I’m merrily rolling along, 20, 30, 40 miles of two-lane all to myself. Windows down, loud music. Bliss, baby.

I pull over into a scenic overlook for a first view of the Rio Grande, still 10 miles off through the heat haze. I get out and stretch, taking in the sublime silence for a good 10 minutes … until, blub, blub, blub … I hear and then see this gargantuan King Ranch Edition Ford F-250 dripping with garish chrome pipes and Texas plates. It pulls over into my sacred silent space.

“(Bleep),” I say, “one of those dorks.” By which I mean your average, “My carbon footprint is bigger than your carbon footprint, gun-licking, MAGA-hat wearing chowderhead.” I make this immediate assessment based on my highly scientific, on-going demographic survey on how your choice of vehicle tells me everything I need to know about you.

Reverie ruined, I take off. For the border, 20 minutes further down the road. At the river itself, at majestic St. Elena Canyon, I park and begin the five-minute walk through the scrub and tamarisk out onto the mud flats.

As I walk I hear it again. Blub, blub, blub.

“Bleep.” But I keep walking.

I’m strolling back and forth on the flats taking pictures and soaking in impressions of the sheer canyon walls stretching away miles to the west and southeast when I hear the approach of footsteps slapping through the mud. … right up to within three feet of me. He’s a tall white guy in maybe his mid-Fifties. No MAGA hat. Just a Longhorns baseball cap, t-shirt, shorts and sandals.

I’m thinking, “Pal, there’s four hundred yards of open space here. Can’t you find some place else to go and not bug me with your no doubt shithead, ‘God bless ‘Murica’ bullshit? Or whatever it is you’re going to spout?”. But he’s running his eyes up and down the canyon until he stops and says — to me, I guess, since there’s no one else around, “Do you suppose that stupid fucker even knows there’s already a wall here?”

Dude! Fist bump!

Moral of the story: Appearances, and choice of vehicle, do not always tell the whole story.

 

Friend and Foe Drop the Hammer on Ilhan Omar

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Well, it appears the Democrats have dropped a five-ton “Zero Tolerance” hammer on my newbie congresswoman. That’s gotta hurt.

The reaction to Ilhan Omar’s tweets about Jewish money in American politics could not have been more swift and indignant or filled with any higher level of dudgeon. Another breath was not going to be taken without hearing her unequivocal apology … which she kinda offered.

Within hours of her glibly tossing out a reference to an old P Diddy song she (and all Democrats by association) were being condemned for “hating Israel”.  Minutes later she was being taken out behind the barn for a whoopin’ by Nancy Pelosi and every Democrat close to a microphone. Yikes. Bad day, madam.

To be clear, the dagger’s edge of the condemnation of Mar wasn’t directed at her complaint about money in politics so much as it was … the inference of the “trope” she banged out via Twitter. To everyone that mattered, any reference to the way AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) doles out cash in Congress is exactly the same thing as saying “Jewish bankers control the world.”

I’ve said “yikes” already, right?

Several things come to mind.

1: Public officials in general would be very well-advised to reserve Twitter for only the blandest pronouncements. For example: “Today is Mothers Day. Let’s all tell Mom we love her.” On Twitter (which, “When it isn’t kindergarten it’s a sewer”*) anything else leads to instantaneous re-re-interpretation, flame wars and grief. Stop trying to prove you’re more clever in 20 words and an emoji than everyone else and stick to a speech or policy paper when you’ve got something important to say.

2: A nuanced conversation about Israel is damned rare in the USA. The reasons include the often psychotic tribalism of both the genocidal dictators over there in the ‘hood, (Saddam, Bashir al-Asad) and our oil-rich Gulf allies. (That sound you hear is the bone saw carving up the reporters our gas station buddies don’t like.) That and the perilous position Israel is always in relative to those neighbors. That reality has a way of severely out-weighing the innumerable ways Israel makes its situation worse by being controlled by its arch-conservative religious “leadership”. Given that pretty medieval crowd, there’s not much chance puppet governments like Benjamin Netenyahu’s will ever stop piling more and more people into West Bank developments and rubbing Israel’s affluence in the face of the average Palestinian, penned in and governed by their own rotating cast of demagogues. (And forget about ever sorting out which is the chicken and which is the egg.)

3: Omar is part of the current Congress’s 0.6% Muslim representation, (1% of total US population.) By contrast, Congress today includes 31% Catholics, 14% Baptists and 6% Jews. 3% of 535 declared either “don’t know” or “refused”, so they might be our atheist representation. Praise be!) Point being, Omar’s in no position to do anything other than register an occasional (albeit much too glib) complaint about the US government’s near-total deference to Israel … and the wealthiest of the Middle East’s Muslims. (But hey … when that Palestinian rabble strikes oil, we’ll take their calls.) Omar’s a voice in the wilderness, and yet she’s getting hammered by friend and foe alike as though she’s winding up to lead a jihad. Proportionality isn’t much in vogue these days.

4: It goes without saying that virtually every Republican in Congress and the pundit-ocracy is a hypocritical fool when it comes to condemning “hate speech.” Somewhere, a few of them might have expressed discomfort with Trump referring to the cro-magnon, tiki-torch, in-your-face-anti-Semitic Nazi-bros in Charlottesville as some of the “good people on both sides”, I just don’t recall at this moment. But it’s unfortunate even a few Democrats don’t use this fleeting window in the news cycle to reinforce Omar’s underlying complaint about money — from wherever — steering US politics.

Unfortunately, Zero Tolerance within the herd means everyone stays on the same script in these moments of (Twitter-sparked) crisis.

So much then for making lemonade out of this outrage.

(*Me. Often.)

So Apparently Amy “The Mean Boss” is Not a Story in Minnesota

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As I begin writing this it 10 :27 on Friday morning, and we’re getting an object lesson in what is and isn’t news … in hometown Minnesota.

At this moment none of the major news organizations in the Twin Cities have said anything about The Huffington Post story on Amy Klobuchar (i.e. Amy’s a bad boss) other than pieces by Esme Murphy at WCCO-TV and Bob Collins at MPR, the latter generally sympathetic to the dilemma of female candidates having to be more “likable” than the usual brow-beating, desk-pounding male tyrants.

Now there are several possible reasons why the “local media” (to lump them all together) sees no value in so much as a bottom-of-page 22 two-paragraph item. Let me list them:

1: No local reporter or editor is yet aware of this story/accusation. They are not regularly following The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Bloomberg, PoliticalWire, The Daily Beast, Slate, Talking Points Memo, New York magazine  and … well, you get the idea. If this explanation is true and the local press corps lives in some kind of Minnesota-Only hibernaculum, well that does not speak well of them, does it?

2: No local reporter or editor sees any news value in this story. “It’s just crazy ranting on Twitter!” “The sourcing is anonymous.” “Huffington Post is bullshit.” All those arguments can be made, but how many times have the same reporters and editors — who require Twitter as much as oxygen — dropped in a story purely on the grounds that “it is out there”? Or, if The Huffington Post’s sourcing — which included several loyal Klobuchar staffers obviously concerned enough to rally to their boss’s defense and attach their names vouching for her management style — is good enough for Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, Esquire and New York magazine (and dozens of others) why isn’t it good enough for The Star Tribune, MPR or the Pioneer Press? All of them have/are running featherweight promotional stories touting her likely presidential announcement this Sunday.

3: Every local reporter, editor and publisher would be in deep do-do with not just Klobuchar, but her deep, wide and influential support base in Minnesota if they touch this story. So much as whisper that people “out there” are talking about Amy the Bad Boss, (which quite a few have described as “an open secret”), and good luck the next time you try to access the Senator’s office, or have a cozy drink with that influential kingmaker/benefactor who has always been such a valuable source of insider DFL gossip.

4: Speaking of “everyone already knows this” … . Any political reporter with two ears and a note pad has heard tales of Klobuchar’s “management style” going way back in her career … and is now dismissing it as … normal. As just the same sort of thing you hear about every political office. You know, near psychotic levels of second-guessing, in-fighting, mis-judgments, blame-placing and paranoia. Same old same old. She may be marginally worse than Al Franken or Norm Coleman or Rod Grams or Paul Wellstone (?!), but not enough to count for anything, not even a tiny item casually mentioning that a significant chunk of the national press has taken note of this and is undoubtably asking more questions, some of them possibly uncomfortable.

As I’ve said before, whether Klobuchar is the harridan anonymous sources claim is not something that concerns me much, on a wholly selfish level. As long she does most of want I want done, she can lock her staff up in public stocks, hang them in gibbets and/or demand they clip her toe-nails. I don’t care.

But as nasty as politics is on a good day, presidential politics are like the Russians overrunning Berlin in 1945.

Closer to the political dilemma for Klobuchar, “mean bosses”, like sex with interns, is something everyone believes they understand and has an opinion about. If this becomes an identifying characteristic of Klobuchar the candidate it’ll be very difficult to overcome.

As for our local press, I’m yet again reminded of a chat I had with old pal David Carr a couple years after he landed at the New York Times. I was ranting about some study showing how little the general public knew about the financial stress on newspapers and how the whole business was being eaten away by private equity vipers … and Carr interrupted.

“Brian,” he said in the avuncular, vaguely patronizing tone he adopted in his later years, “no one cares about newspapers. I can write a column about some paper and all I get is crickets. No one cares.”

This “Nothing to See Here, Folks” Klobuchar episode may have something to do with that.

 

From Blackface in Virginia to Amy Klobuchar the Mean Boss

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Along with, “What the hell is the deal with blackface and Virginia?” the question of, “What is forgivable behavior?” is getting a serious workout at the moment.

I’m generally in agreement with Mother Jones’ writer Kevin Drum’s “20-20 Rule”. That is to say, stupid things you said and did before you were 20, or that happened more than 20 years ago grant you some kind of leniency. (I’ll get to Brett Kavanaugh in a minute.) I mean, if the stupidity of callow youth was a capital crime, I’d be on Death Row.

The key is — how do you handle it as an adult?

In the matter of Ralph Northam, Virginia’s remarkably clueless governor, you couldn’t handle it much worse. Admitting, then denying, then admitting again over the course of 48 hours pretty much convinces everyone you have no talent for the public stage and should seek work in tele-marketing. Then, based on the fact that Northam is in the job because of a heavy majority of black voters who now see him as a hopeless doofus at best, he’s got to go.

Next we have Virginia’s attorney general who has also admitted he painted his face for a costume party — he went as rapper Curtis Blow — 35 years ago. That guy at least had the smarts to compose a thoughtful letter of shame and apology. One of his problems, in terms of keeping his job though, is that he’s already called for Northam to resign … for doing the same blackface thing.

(Better psychologists than me will have suss out the appeal of black face with privileged white southern boys. But my guess is it has something to do with poking at taboos in ways you can only do if you live in a bubble culture where no one will ever think to call you out.)

Next we have the “rising star” Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, a black guy FWIW, accused of forcing oral sex on a date 15 years before he was in office. As with Kavanaugh, the accuser is now a woman in high professional standing who makes a detailed case against him. Moreover, like Dr. Blasey-Ford, she had to be convinced to throw herself into the social media hellscape that comes with accusing powerful men.

The Democratic party’s “zero tolerance” policy on sexually aggressors, which is to say, “guilty if accused”, makes it impossible for Lieutenant Governor Rising Star to survive this thing.

Despite what we hear from the likes of Kirsten Gillibrand, I’m not a big fan of “zero tolerance.” Eventually it undermines women’s demands for equality and justice. But I’ve come to believe that “zero tolerance” is an overreach that we’ll all have to live with for a while, or at least until, maybe 15-20 years down the line, there’s actual gender equilibrium in politics and corporate America. In other words, Mr. Rising Star Lieutenant Governor, demanding a “full investigation” is futile. It did nothing for Al Franken and it won’t do anything for you.

Here then is where I remind everyone that the “investigation” into Brett Kavanaugh’s teenage stupidity was cut off by his Republican protectors simultaneous with him behaving — today, as an adult, interviewing for a lifetime job of incalculable influence on 330 million people — like a privileged white brat indignant that anyone would ever have the temerity to question his bubble-cossetted honor.

The short response to anyone defending Northam, Virginia’s attorney general and The Rising Star is the same as it should have been to Kavanaugh. Namely, “We can do better than you. You’re replaceable. Next!”

Now, into this churn we drop our own Amy Klobuchar’s burbling problem of mistreating her staff, for many years, and not being exactly who/what she purports to be.

Klobuchar will almost certainly announce she’s running for president. She has a very deep well of support from every group she needs here in her home state. But this picture of her as some kind of raging harridan should not be dismissed lightly as just a pre-announcement shot across her bow. Why not?  Because of how it may play nationally, among the millions who don’t yet know anything about her.

Yeah, it’s true women in authority carry a greater burden to be “likable” than men. That shouldn’t be the case, but it is. We haven’t evolved past that mattering.

That said, the issue with Klobuchar could — could, I say — become whether her smiling, measured, ever-temperate public demeanor is a kind of fraud. “Phoniness” is a hobbling accusation against any public figure.

And to repeat what I said a couple of days ago. I’m OK with voting for her for president if she gets the nomination, or again as Senator if she doesn’t. I don’t really give a [bleep] how miserable a boss someone is as long as they vote my interests. Sorry if that horrifies anyone.

All I’m saying here is that Klobuchar may soon find herself in somewhat the same position as the cast of goofballs in Virginia, in that she may have to both concede fault and ask forgiveness — for behavior happening today, well within The 20-20 Rule.

 

 

 

Amy Klobuchar for Attorney General 2020

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Take it from George Will, Amy Klobuchar is what Democrats need now. As reverse barometers go, George is at least a couple ticks up from Alex Jones. But still … .

I have no great special insight into the honorable senior senator from Minnesota beyond living in the county for which she was chief prosecutor for a while, the state she represents and spending a couple days a few years back kicking around the Iron Range for a magazine profile on her. And, shocking full disclosure here, I’ve voted for her twice and would again if she gets the Democrats’ nod for President … against any Republican.

That said, I’ve always had my issues with her. Call them quibbles, if you like. Not the least of which is that I am not at all certain her (very) old school Humphrey/Mondale “Let’s All Reach Across the Aisle and Have a Bake Sale Together” approach is exactly the most appropriate or effective message right now. And that comes attached to the other quibble that Ms. Klobuchar has made a reputation for herself of never sticking her head up too high in the crossfire of our culture trench warfare.

Well-cossetted conservative institutionalists like Mr. Will see that behavior as a demonstration of wisdom. But — funny thing — I see the same behavior and think, “Expedient calculation.”

To his credit, Mr. Will, (with whom I’ve had lunch a couple times on his book tours) has been virulently anti-Trump from the get-go and is the rare conservative intellectual who can both spell correctly and regularly produce 15 paragraphs of coherent thinking.

The problem is that his thinking is invariably focused on reproducing more of the white, male, bow-tied status quo that has A: Generally ruled the country since Dwight Eisenhower, and B: Allowed his Republican party to devolve into a clown show led by charlatans and fools like Rush Limbaugh (the true intellectual leader of modern conservatism) and Donald Trump. Put another way, Will very much prefers a Democratic opponent the Republican party knows how to define and campaign against. As in: all tradition and nothing revolutionary.

There’s no question that Klobuchar is smart and hard-working. She’s also very good at retail politics, whether chatting up locals at diners in Bemidji or small town bankers and business owners in Grand Rapids. She’s got game. (And unlike, say, Mark Dayton, she seems to genuinely enjoy human interaction.)

But I’d feel (a lot) more enthusiastic about her if only once I’d her express heartfelt indignation over the on-going Trumpist travesty — which began welling up in earnest with the Tea Party revolt back in ’09 and ’10. (There’s also the little nagging question in the back of my head when I read that Klobuchar has the worst rate of staff turnover of any of the 100 US Senators. What is that all about?)

Reading Will’s column — picked up by the Strib — it’s readily apparent who among the possible Democratic field he fears most.

As George begins his column lauding Klobuchar, “Surely the silliest aspirant for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination is already known: ‘Beto’, aka Robert Francis, O’Rourke is a skateboarding man-child whose fascination with himself caused him to livestream a recent dental appointment for — open-wide, please — teeth cleaning.

“O’Rourke’s journal about his post-election recuperation-through-road-trip-to-nowhere-in-particular is so without wit or interesting observations that it merits Truman Capote’s description of “On the Road” author Jack Kerouac’s work: That’s not writing, that’s typing.

“When Democrats are done flirting with such insipidity, their wandering attentions can flit to a contrastingly serious candidacy, coming soon from Minnesota.”

Characters like O’Rourke and the (fresh and invigorating) flavor-of-the-moment, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (i.e. “AOC”) have to deeply unsettle traditional thinkers like George Will. Why? Because they are working off a far different playbook they can’t be quantified as easily as someone like Klobuchar who reliably hopscotches within the chalk lines of the traditional game. Ms. Klobuchar is never a threat to rile — as Ned Beatty said in “Network” — “the primal forces of nature.”

Never mind the polar vortex. Hell itself would have to freeze over before Amy Klobuchar ever got in the face of a Howard Schultz, Michael Bloomberg or Silicon Valley tycoon with calls for a return to a 70% tax rate on billionaires.

The Democrats have an interesting array of talent queuing up for the Big Job. But I look at some of them not as Presidents — someone with populist charisma delivering a persistent, uncluttered message affirming the primacy of empirical reason in science, social services and foreign affairs — but as cabinet officers restoring lawfulness to the various agencies.

In that context: Amy Klobuchar for Attorney General 2020.

 

Dear Lord, Spare Us Another “Pure” and “Principled” Third Party Alternative

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That Coffee Shop Billionaire for President thing isn’t going too well, is it? It seems the “extremists” on the far left aren’t too keen on yet another hopeless vanity candidacy like, you know, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.

On “60 Minutes” Sunday night Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced his interest in an independent run for president. By Monday, at a book event in New York City, a guy in the audience was yelling “egotistical billionaire a**hole”” at him. And that was about the nicest thing anyone had to say.

Schultz of course has no chance of winning. Only spoiling.

As vain and deluded billionaires go he’s a bland stiff, with no appetite for the kind of buffoonish, hyperbolic demagoguery that got Donald Trump elected, (thanks to the Russians and the electoral college.) But, as we’ve seen twice in the past two decades, vanity candidates have peeled away just enough votes from “flawed” Democrats (I’m still waiting for the first “pure” candidate) to hand the country over to two wholly incompetent characters — George W. and Trump.

In case you’ve forgotten, those squandered Nader-Stein votes have saddled us with a multi-trillion dollar war we didn’t need to fight, staggering levels of new debt, a ransacking of environmental and consumer protection regulations and a cratering of our reputation as a country that while pretty damned screwed in many respects, was at least more reliable about science and democratic allies than, you know Turkey or Honduras.

The psychology of chronic “righteous” voters, people who routinely pull the trigger for characters like Nader and Stein is less interesting than it is dismaying. The irony, in my experience, is that such people rationalize their vote in terms of “principle”. Namely, that nothing will change unless people like them — unusually moral and uniquely informed — don’t “vote their conscience.”

And obviously, through one lens, they’re right. They voted for Nader and Stein and we got lots of change. In addition to all that spendy war and economic mayhem stuff, were the “principled” Nader votes of 2000 switched over to dull, ponderous, compromised-by-Clinton Al Gore we would have had 19 years more years to do something about climate change. (Maybe we could have invested the trillions that weren’t borrowed from the Chinese to chase Saddam Hussein around Iraq.)

The 2020 campaign has begun and there are already more Democrats waving their hands than I can count. Most, like the messianic Mr. Schultz have no chance. But the top tier of current and likely Democrats is interesting.

Elizabeth Warren is, IMHO, too old, but a valuable factor in pushing the debate. Kamala Harris is getting gushy reviews for her launch, and she has my attention. Never mind if she once canoodled with Willie Brown. She impresses me as someone with the skill set for this moment — a moment where not just Trump but the entire ethos of the “movement conservative Republican party” has to be not merely defeated, but obliterated. As in: lopped off at the knees, bayoneted, burned, buried and covered with salt. The whole crowd, from Trump to Stephen Miller to the Freedom Caucus to Rush Limbaugh and FoxNews is that bad.

I don’t get that same essential vanquish-the-barbarians vibe from Julian Castro, the honorable congress lady from Hawaii, Kirsten (#YouToo Al Franken) Gillibrand — or waiting in the wings — Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker or Joe Biden.

Here’s the thing. Democrats have to put up a populist candidate.

Translated: Someone who understands what the dimwits who thought Trump was a better option than Hillary Clinton are thinking and (extremely important factor here) can talk their language. An educated variation on what Trump does with his MAGA rallies and with his racist moron whispering. The Democrats’ days of tossing up a wonky career bureaucrat who sounds like he/she has never smoked a joint, gone to a rock concert, eaten fast food because it tastes good or had an impure thought are over.

“The people” want someone who not just “shares their values” but has plainly “experienced their values”, including the ones they enjoy the most.

Invested liberals, like me and maybe you, don’t need TeenBeat populist charisma in our elected leaders. But the sad, undeniable fact is that in our celebrity-saturated culture, where millions of voters pay little-to-no attention to who is actually, truly doing something for them, people vote based on the “feel” they get from candidates. The feeling that he/she is “just like me”, as so many sad goobers said about cartoonish frauds like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.

Maybe Beto O’Rourke has the full toolbox of talents. All we know about him at the moment is that he ran as an unapologetic progressive in (bleeping) Texas, that he poured incredible energy into it without a serious screw up, talked at the retail level like a guy who once played in a goofy rock band and ascended to the level of a pop idol by the time he lost by 3% … in (bleeping) Texas.

That’s what the Democrats need, in someone else, if not him.

Nevertheless, being a hopeless skeptic, I have little faith that the “righteously principled” who saw Nader and Jill “Here I am in Russia dining with Putin and Michael Flynn” Stein as the best option for our times are scanning the horizon for the next “pure” independent who will bring us all real change … again.

 

 

A “Deal” Allowing Trump to Just Resign Ain’t Gonna Cut It.

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Amid all the other noise there is a growing line of thought that Trump’s only escape from “all of this”, meaning the sledge-hammers Robert Mueller, Adam Schiff ((now head of the House Intelligence Committee) and others are about to drop on him, is “a deal” whereby he resigns and is allowed to chopper back to his faux-gilded penthouse scot-free.

That ain’t going to cut it.

Based solely on what we know now — before Mueller, Schiff and other committee heads show their hands and reveal the totality of Trumpism in all its squalid, gruesome detail — Trump’s kakistocracy. (“noun: kakistocracy: government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state) is easily the worst corruption of “American values” in the country’s history. Put simply, conspiring with a foreign adversary (Russia) to win an election is leaps, bounds and moonshots beyond Richard Nixon conniving with a bunch of rich cronies and third-rate crooks to defeat his political enemies. It’s not even close.

More to the point, Schiff, in every public appearance, telegraphs both that he knows damn well that Trump has been living on Russian mob money for decades and that enough is a-[bleeping] ‘nough. Hell, everyone with a soul and a brain attached has had enough. Not only does this disease have to be staunched, it has to be eradicated from the biosphere.

The Trump Era not only has to be brought to a quick and emphatic end, a permanent historic stain has to be attached to it. A stain that denies anyone — even the most ignorant and pathetic goober — the possibility of “reconsidering” the true history of this moment.

While the sight of Trump (along with Jared and Ivanka ) in an XXXL orange jump suit bunking down with Big Louie would be profoundly satisfying (and legally appropriate), the far more practical resolution of this epic national disgrace is mandated financial and reputational ruin. Specifically, via a “deal” requiring the complete destruction of Trump’s fraudulent “empire” and, as I say, a permanent stain attached to his name.

For a while now I’ve been thinking of Marino Faliero.

Who? Faliero, a 14th century character, was the 55th Doge (i.e. elected leader for life) of Venice. For 1000 years 120 different men ruled as Doges of Venice, a city-state that enjoyed a damn nice run as the capital/nexus of commerce throughout the Mediterranean. As those things go, Venice was fairly enlightened. A kind of representative democracy prevailed. No women in office of course, and constant rule by rich, bejeweled white guys. But things were a lot worse all over the rest of the known world.

Faliero though led a coup to overthrow Venice’s long-standing quasi-democracy, was caught and executed for it. Even better, in the Great Hall

 

in the Doge’s Palace, a magnificent room encircled by portraits of the 120 Doges, Faliero’s portrait was not only taken down, it was replaced with a black shroud on which are written the words, (“This is the space reserved for Marino Faliero, beheaded for his crimes”).

If you visit Venice today you can see that blacked out frame. Enlightened Venice showed the world what you do with the monumentally corrupt.

I’ll pass on the beheading part. But unmistakable vilification and condemnation is what is needed here with Trump. And I’m not being hyperbolic.

Also … I truly believe we’ll get something close to it. Trump has no way out of this berserk shutdown stand-off, which as we all know is just a distraction for having no way out of the hellstorm coming from Mueller and people like Schiff. (Both of those characters, along with the hundreds of attorneys flooding Schiff’s office with resumes, have to see themselves as ascending to the pantheon of bona fide national historical heroes for ridding the country of Trump … and Stephen Miller … and Betsy DeVos and … well, it goes on as far as the eye can see.)

To my point here, I strongly suspect they [Mueller, Schiff, etc.] see both the need and the opportunity to place a stamp of moral revulsion on this episode. A “deal” allowing Trump to resign can only come with the most severe financial and personal penalties. Such a draconian “deal” would serve as a warning to the  “competent Trump” (same fealty to the wealthy, less open stupidity) “small gummint conservatives” will inevitably try to push toward the White House.

Also, a wholly ruinous “deal” — in which Trump would be allowed to live out his years eating fried chicken on the stoop of his double-wide in Immokalee, Florida — would serve as a powerful, unequivocal sign to allies and the rest of the world that the United States has regained its senses, acknowledged the deviancy we briefly allowed to subvert us and delivered a humiliating rebuke to the offenders.

Popular culture alone will ensure permanent historical ignominy for Trump and the gasp-inducing stupidity and corruption of Trumpism. MAGA hats are already emblems of racist ignorance. And I can imagine a day when the number “45” is reflexively associated with a kind of mongrel sociopathy.

But official government action will be what really hangs the shroud over the memory of Trump.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make Trump Eat a “Truth Sandwich”

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At this moment, a few hours before Donald Trump takes yet another chunk of free network airtime to, most likely, shamelessly lie about a World War Z-like horde of terrorists laying siege to our southern border Twitter, the pundit class and TV executives are debating how to handle this.

In the good old days, before talk radio cynics dictated terms to Presidents of the United States, this was a pretty easy call. Whoever he was, POTUS got on the network tube and made his case. Times had changed though by the time Barack Obama was denied free time in 2014 … to talk about immigration issues choking government function. (Obama. Immigration. So boring. Can’t interrupt “The Bachelor”!)

But — startling news flash — there’s nothing ordinary, or usual or traditional about Donald Trump, and giving him another ten minutes to stoke rage and hysteria over a problem (the hordes of terrorists) that doesn’t exist, comes damn close to allowing a fool/madman shout “fire!” in a crowded theater. Nevertheless, very much like local news outlets, network executives are (still) extraordinarily worried about being called names by rabid Trumpists for not playing fair with their leader, the great flabby white hope of their foundering low-information sub-culture.

What to do?

I’ve long thought there was everything to gain by putting any Trump speech on a five-minute delay and then running a fact-checking banner under him as he preened and bellowed.

For example: “I was only given a small loan by my father. Maybe a million dollars.” [In fact, Trump was given over $400 million dollars by his father, most if not all through extremely suspicious tax avoidance schemes now under investigation.]

Like that. It’s pretty easy.

At Vox today, Sean Illing, a reliably intelligent character, interviews George Lakoff, professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkley. Lakoff  adds another layer to how to handle shameless, pathological liars practicing mass distortion. He calls it “The Truth Sandwich.”

Fundamentally, Lakoff believes the media should spend more time ignoring Trump than reacting to every coarse, corrupt, stupid and illegal thing he says. But journalism circa 2019 is a Twitter-based activity with no ability to resist herd activity and group-think.

So Lakoff recommends “the truth sandwich” for purely theatrical, cynically political stunts such as Trump slinging bullshit tonight.

“Journalists could engage in what I’ve called ‘truth sandwiches’, which means that you first tell the truth; then you point out what the lie is and how it diverges from the truth. Then you repeat the truth and tell the consequences of the difference between the truth and the lie. If the media did this consistently, it would matter. It would be more difficult for Trump to lie.”

I don’t about making it “more difficult” for Trump to lie. He will lie as long as he has a pulse. But it would certainly mitigate the networks’ problematic decision to give him (more) free airtime.

Basic concept: Assert the truth first. Then let Trump lie.

It would be valuable, for example, for Lester Holt to appear on our screens two minutes before Trump and say something like, “The President tonight is likely to refer to the influx of terrorists through the southern border as a rationale for building a wall he promised his supporters Mexico would pay for. Now, having never negotiated with Mexico, he insists American taxpayers must pay for the wall, which polls show only 25% of the public believes is necessary. If taxpayers don’t pay Mr. Trump will continue the government shut down he himself ordered and about which he has said, and I quote, “I will own”. The shutdown currently affects 800,000 mostly middle-class Americans — some of them TSA agents now calling in sick because they aren’t being paid  — and soon to affect thousands more landlords, vendors and contractors as effects spread out. For the record, a report by Mr. Trump’s government says that only six people attempting to cross the Mexican border in the last six months matched names on terrorist watch lists, and we have no accounting whether they were actual terrorists or were simply caught in bureaucratic error. Either way, six is not the same as 4000 as Mr. Trump, Vice-Present Mike Pence and others in his administration have been claiming in the most alarming tones. Moreover, 41 people were stopped at the Canadian border. But no one in the Trump administration has ever said anything about building wall to keep Canadians out. Finally, while Mr. Trump is demanding $5.7 billion to re-open the government, he was given $1.3 billion last year for ‘border security’ and has to even bother to spend the bulk of that money. Now … the President of the United States.”

Illing goes on to argue that Trump’s base — aka Gooberus Americanus — is so completely sealed off from objective news reporting they’ll never eat a “truth sandwich” even if NBC, ABC and CBS serve one up on avocado toast.

He then asks:

Sean Illing

Why do Republicans seem to be doing much better in terms of framing the debate?

George Lakoff

A lot of Democrats believe in what is called Enlightenment reasoning,and that if you just tell people the facts, they’ll reach the right conclusion. That just isn’t true.

People think in terms of conceptual structures called frames and metaphors. It’s not just the facts. They have values, and they understand which facts fit into their conceptual framework. You can’t understand something if your brain doesn’t allow it, if your brain filters it out in terms of your values.

Democrats seem not to understand this, and they keep trying to employ reason as a persuasive vehicle. I wish Enlightenment reasoning was an accurate model for how most people think and judge, but it isn’t, and we better acknowledge that fact.”

Enlightenment thinking. On the great evolutionary scale, not everyone is there yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since We’re All Adults Here, Let’s Remember Everything about Bush 41

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The eulogies for Bush 41, (the father of W*, y’know), are getting a long run this week, to be capped by Wednesday’s state funeral in D.C.. And as usual with passing leaders, the reflections are heavy on hagiography.

In general I won’t quibble with the assessment that 41 was a decent guy (mostly), unfailingly polite to friends and foes (until his people weren’t), respectful of government traditions (as far as that goes), prepared to take a hit to correct a problem before it turned into a crisis and a far (far) better role model for the country’s youth than the shameful vulgarian currently squatting in the Oval Office.

In other words, as the Republican presidents of my lifetime go, he was up there with Dwight Eisenhower in terms of competence and ethics. But hagiography is a lazy, mush-headed exercise in any situation and certainly when the deceased has been a major international leader. As an adult no longer guided by fables and fairy tales I believe it’s better for all concerned to roll the warts, the blunders and the occasional hook-up with sleaze merchants into the historical narrative.

I’m always amused at how the media’s fulminating “small gummint conservatives” seem never to recall a Republican in the White House since St. Ronald of Hollywood. Until he died this past week how many times in the past year have you heard any pundit or politician even mention the name(s) of either George H. W. Bush or his son? It’s like they never existed. There was only Ronald, who should be on Mt. Rushmore, (perhaps carved over Abraham Lincoln) and then we jump to … well, most of them are still pretending Trump is a closet Democrat.

But here’s a shocker. I had no time for Reagan. Him launching his 1980 general election campaign with a speech lauding “states rights” (i.e. white nationalism) at the Neshoba County Mississippi fairgrounds, seven short miles from where the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers barely a decade earlier, would have been disqualifying enough, if he hadn’t already played the feckless toady during the House Un-American Activities hearings on The Hollywood Ten. After that you can move on to his presidency. Refusing to lift a finger to control the AIDS epidemic, (that gay crap don’t play with the “states rights” crowd, so bleep ’em). And then jump to Iran-Contra and the usual Republican legacy of an astonishing run-up of debt and gutting of social services.

Reagan was a doltish tool for the ruling class who could read a script and tell a joke. Hence: The Great Communicator … to the Neshoba County-like, “states rights” base.

My regard for Bush 41 would be different today had he not preceded Reagan’s “states rights” strategy by renouncing his support for civil rights legislation being pushed by Martin Luther King (and Lyndon Johnson) in an effort to win votes in Texas in 1964. Playing the racial animus card for personal political game is always and forever a bridge too far. You want to change your attitude on taxes or pothole repair? Knock yourself out. But no truly moral human being ever … ever … inflames racial antipathies to get elected to a better job.

But then comes the 1988 campaign, which starts out with selecting … Dan Quayle, a Sarah Palin-like cipher — as his VP choice. (I was there at that moment next to the levee in downtown New Orleans.) Dude, you and John McCain … you lose serious points from the get-go for really bad, un-presidential judgment.

And it gets worse in ’88 by hiring on the D.C. “lobbying” firm of Charles Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, and giving them a long run of leash to pull every sleazy, race-baiting trick they could think of against Mike Dukakis, including Lee Atwater’s notorious “Willie Horton ad”.

The retch-inducing shamelessness of that was, like Bush 43’s attack on John McCain as the illegitimate father of a black child during the South Carolina primary in 2000, all too typical of how the brahmin-like Bushes campaigned. Naked, cynical attacks on the street level under-girding a lofty, statesman-like pose from the podium.

That of course has been and still is from page one the Republican playbook, ever since “states’ rights” resentment-mongering guaranteed them white “working class”/”silent majority” votes over 50 years ago.

So yeah, in a very imperfect world where no human is ideal, and where as Bob Dylan says, “behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain”, Bush 41 was better than others. Maybe though just by being less reckless with the truth and less indecent than what we’re enduring now.

All that says though is that the bar is pretty damn low.

 

 

 

Cohen Pleads, Deutsche Bank is Raided, Witches Darken the Skies!

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As blessed as we are to live in interesting times, today is more interesting than most. Why? Because from the get-go everyone following the Trump Criminal Farce has been saying, “Follow the money”. And what do we have today? Glad you asked. Today we learned that authorities have raided Deutsche Bank in Germany on the (extremely) probable cause of having engaged in long-term, widespread international money laundering.

I know, you’re as shocked as I am.

Put bluntly, the only bank on the planet, (not chartered in Moscow or floating on a sea of Russian money), that was willing to loan money to Donald Trump received 170 unwelcomed guests this morning, most of them wearing badges. We already know that Robert Mueller had subpoenaed records from bank, where Trump is rumored to still owe as much as $480 million, a number roughly equivalent to the amount of the fraudulent tax scam handouts he received from his father before going bankrupt … several times.

But that is just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Serious people who have followed Trump’s finances long ago relieved themselves of any doubt that his real estate “empire” is based on decades of money laundering, and that a good deal of it has come via Russian gangsters. (Incoming House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff mentions money-laundering every time he’s interviewed, which is a lot.)

Moreover, Deutsche Bank is very likely the most prominent player in the entirely unsophisticated fraud Don Sr. and the Trump siblings have been living off for the last 20-odd years. (Cherubic multi-tool statesman Jared Kushner reportedly owes the same German bank $285 million. His records have also been subpoenaed.)

What’s always been even more interesting is that Trump wasn’t getting money from the normal commercial lending arm of Deutsche Bank, but rather the company’s bank-within-the-bank, its “private bank”, where the identities of actual depositors (dare we speculate that they might be very large-scale international criminals?) are hidden from prying eyes.

So … Deutsche Bank has been raided, simultaneous with Michael “I’ll take a bullet for Mr. Trump” Cohen pleading guilty after telling Mueller everything he knows about how Trump was planning to build/finance “the tallest tower in Europe” in Moscow … as he was campaigning for the [bleeping] White House in 2016.

So yeah, all in all, a very interesting day for everyone still capable of being gobsmacked by the total, flagrant corruption of this hapless crowd.

But … maybe the most interesting thing about this raid on a gargantuan international bank is that it happened at all. I mean, in my advanced addled state I may have forgotten the time 170 agents raided Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Financial, Bear Stearns or Citigroup back in 2008 (or ever.)

While the astonishing frauds revealed in the Panama Papers is reported to be at the root of today’s episode, you gotta believe the German authorities had dead certainty that their case was made before they charged through the doors. (Likewise, I assume Deutsche Bank’s top executives made certain they had a firewall around their reputations. I see two lower level bankers have been ID’d as scapegoats for sacrifice.)

Outside of the Kremlin itself (or the House of Saud) giant banks are the most impervious institutions the world has ever seen. Fantastic sums support fantastic legal and lobbying firepower that few governments dare risk taking on in a frontal attack.

Trump’s handler, Mr. Putin, is of course a central character (albeit a step or two removed) in the Panama Papers. And there’s no indication that Mueller’s investigation has any role in this business.

But, the possibility that Mueller’s team — of career financial fraud experts, who have been pouring over Deutsche Bank records for months — may have something to do with this is way too tantalizing to dismiss as another crazy notion.

The end game approaches. Look up! The sky is full of witches in panicked flight.

 

 

 

 

 

Our Boy Donny, Now Wearing the Scent of a Loser

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As of dawn Wednesday November 7 we entered the “Donald Trump is unequivocally a loser” phase of this tragi-comic farce. You and I have known this for a long time, going back to his multiple-bankruptcy days in Jersey casinos. But now it gets more interesting. A lot more interesting. Because now his world leader peers and heretofore gutless Republican leadership have hard evidence that the guy is not only the fool they always knew him to be, but a toxic fool teetering on the brink of what is likely an extremely fast and inevitably crushing downhill slide.

Even Trump knows this, I truly believe.

Look at it this way: he’s a character, a “brand”, built almost entirely on gross exaggeration, absurd misrepresentation and outright fraud. He’s never been what he claimed to be, only what some of the media and public wanted him to be. (The serious New York and national press have been fitful at best in assessing their responsibility in the co-creation of the Trump myth over all his years as a ubiquitous, gaudy socialite.)

Not being utterly stupid, Trump — as we know from his estranged biographer — has always been keenly aware of being stiff-armed by New York’s truly wealthy and (somewhat less flagrantly) corrupt. His thin-veneer aristocratic stylings far too gauche for the city’s truly wealthy and well-bred. Everything about him, his self-baked celebrity status, the licensing of his name, his TV career has been dependent on his “brand” of being “a winner.”

But “a winner” he is not anymore, and everyone can see that. The only crowd clinging to the myth is he himself, his family (maybe) and his base, i.e. MAGA Goober Nation. Deep within FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh world, I suspect even they know what’s gone down.

This is new. We haven’t been here before. Republicans, for example, had no choice but play along as long as he was demonstrating an ability to drive goobers to the polls and win elections. But politics, especially among the most craven and cynical, which describes Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to a “T”, is absolutely merciless when your mojo evaporates and you lose the scent of a winner. Friends can’t abandon you fast enough.

And in Trump’s case, combined with what may end up a 38-39 seat Democratic wave in the House and Senate losses in Arizona, Nevada and Montana, the scent of loser is settling on him like a wool coat downwind from a Nebraska feedlot.

International leaders — political animals all of them — are as familiar with a loser’s scent as anyone here in the States. Where until last week they had to play along and patronize Trump the Fool as America’s guy at the table, not knowing how long the clown show was going to last, they now know Robert Mueller and House Democrats are going to lay siege to the Trump Myth and expose it for the unsophisticated fraud it has always been. That reality makes Trump not only eminently ignorable as a peer, but a rich target for moral opposition, as France’s Emmanuel Macron did in his anti-nationalist speech — to Trump’s face — last weekend.

Most importantly, and worrisome, Trump himself now knows the jig is up. His behavior in the past week, at that press conference, outside the White House under the chopper blades, tweeting about California’s wildfires and blowing off WWI memorial events in France screams of a guy in the throes of a humiliation that he is defenseless to stop from consuming him … like a wildfire, you might say.

His Republican “friends”, having seen what playing cozy with Trump did for them in every precinct with a population density greater than 10 cows per square mile, have no reason at all to take any more bullets for him or block juggernaut investigations, even if they could.

Point being, until now we haven’t seen Trump-backed-into-a-corner recklessness. We soon will.

All Trump has today is the right-wing media and his base.

And both of them will drift away as they get sick of all the losing.

 

 

A Few Mostly Kind Words About Pat Reusse

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I don’t usually bother writing anything about sports, or sports writing. That’s because as marketplaces for hot takes and punditry go sports is at least as glutted as politics … but without the saving grace of relevancy to something more important than mere entertainment and distraction.

That said, I do like sports. And follow them. Always have. Baseball in particular. (The play-off series between the Red Sox and Astros should be the best of all of them this year.) And, I like pro football, something I say somewhat ashamedly, given everything we all know about the NFL. On the other hand, I know next to nothing about hockey and only kick into basketball gear in March when the Kansas Jayhawks, recipients of thousands of dollars of Lambert tuition cash, make a run at a title.

All that said, for many years I have been a regular reader and fan of Star Tribune sports writer Pat Reusse. Especially the cranky, pissed-off, had-it-up-to-here Reusse we can read this morning as he rakes Timberwolves superstar Jimmy Butler and coach Tom Thibodeau over the coals for Butler’s pre-meditated, maximum media exploitation tantrum at a recent practice session. (Bottom line to that little drama: Butler doesn’t want to play for the Wolves anymore.) What I (and many others) like is that Reusse both has and regularly deploys a license few other columnists on any beat enjoy in this town.

For the record, Reusse and I have crossed paths over the years, but that’s it.

He came to mind often as I inhaled the latest book by New York Times writer, Mark Leibovich. Normally encamped in DC reporting and commenting (acidly) on the vanities, delusions and perfidy of our ruling class (both government and media), Leibovich cadged a book deal to check out the NFL at the highest levels. The result, “Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times” is a unique, delicious and frequently hilarious vivisection of a class of bizarre-to-dysfunctional characters, namely NFL owners and NFL management, constantly obsessed over and “reported” on by literally thousands of professional writers. (There are a lot of good reasons why “Big Game” has not been mentioned on any NFL telecast.)

Journalism has long been divided into two camps. 1: Beat writers who rely on regular access to sources in order to feed news (or “nuggets” as Leibovich likes to call breathless sports minutiae) to their editors and readers. And 2: Columnists who are charged with applying something like accountability to pretty much the same stories, usually by writing cranky, dyspeptic things about failing coaches and athletes. The twain does not often meet, and truth be told, most mainstream publications, print or on-line, are still highly reluctant to print everything a writer knows for damn certain about the characters they cover. It’s a game of mutual benefit, you see.

Truth be told, most sports and just about all business writing can be filed under the heading of “Service Journalism”, where the intended effect is to sustained a comfortable, symbiotic relationship between source and publication.

Reusse’s decades of service to the local sports scene and his deep entrenchment in the culture, from obscure utility infielders to high-profile owners gives him unusual sway over nervous editors. He can say things no one else can. That relative lack of managerial fetters is essential to his standing with intensely skeptical readers who know — from first-hand experience how watered down, neutered and homogenized most “coverage” — in sports, business and media — really is.

As my old pal David Carr used to say when I asked him about the new world of access that opened for him when he signed on with The New York Times, “Shit, everyone returns your call when your last name is ‘New York Times’.”

So it was with Leibovich, who not only has his calls/e-mails to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, superstar quarterback Tom Brady and dozens of owners returned, but goes on to spend significant time with them. On the sidelines, in (one of) their multi-million dollar mansions and occasionally even while they’re in the company of their latest 14 year-old girlfriend, they talk to Leibovich. (“Fourteen” is not an accurate number when describing Patriots owner and major Trump supporter Robert Kraft, but you get the idea.)

The great, satisfying beauty of Leibovich’s writing is how he fully exploits the rare access he’s been allowed and doesn’t hesitate to drop the accountability hammer. Hell, he relishes it. (Garden variety writers and editors accept the neutered, half-a-story-is-better-than-none access protocol, because they’d be shut out of executive suites and clubhouses — and all those revealing post-game interviews — if they actually told the public what an asshole, fool or drunk so-and-so really is.) But then Leibovich doesn’t have to worry about coming back to cover jock world probably ever again.

Not that Reusse has had unimpeded free reign, mind you. His most fully-formed perspective of Zygi Wilf and the NFL’s shakedown of Minnesota politicians during the run-up to building our billion-dollar sports temple (U.S. Bank Stadium) didn’t appear in the Star Tribune, which, notoriously, was constantly boosting the project/taxpayer giveaway through every channel available to it. Reusse’s most, uh, “acute” commentary was quarantined over on his KSTP radio blog.

To let Reusse, arguably the paper’s most influential columnist in terms of shaping public opinion, rail on, Leibovich-like, right there in the Star Tribune’s own pages was unthinkable. Fully informing the public and lacerating the NFL for its ham-fisted extortion threats, local politicians for their comical, beyond parody, star-struck jowl-rubbing with Goodell when he made a rajah’s visit to Minnesota would have seriously undercut the paper’s Prime Directive. Namely, to build a stadium at whatever the cost and thereby guarantee the presence of a team — the Vikings — that drives the sale of millions of copies of the Star Tribune each and every year. (Reusse may have concurred with the quarantine, I don’t know.)

We can all live with the standard, fawning, half-the-story access reporting when the issue at hand is just some ego-crazed ballplayer ranting at teammates. But it sets (really) serious when that kind of coverage assists in sucking millions of taxpayer dollars away from other far, far more relevant services to build a stadium for, as Leibovich says, a sports league as rich and unchecked as any international cartel.