Author Archives: Brian Lambert

Hillary Won the Battle, But Donald Could Still Win the War

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3In the 20 minutes it took me to drive home from a debate-watching party last night the “elite media” decided that Donald Trump badly lost the first debate with Hillary Clinton and that as ridiculous as he looked and sounded (the sniffing!) it wasn’t going to matter all that much.

In 2016 when everyone with a smartphone is a pundit and a publisher, citizen-satirists spat out some hilarious bits overnight. Like, for example, Donald Trump’s constant sniffing set to Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine”. We also got a re-visit of Rose O’Donnell’s Trump imitation, and her “Daily Show” “history of The Donald”. Not to mention, if sick jokes are your thing, scalding fact-check after scalding fact check. Not that, the cable heads reminded each other, either Trump or his people care all that much about facts..

Conventional wisdom this morning is that Trump was exposed to well over 80 million people, many of whom have never seen him one-on-one with a serious opponent who wasn’t pandering to the same low-information voter base. The jabbering mess that he was last night may move a few “educated white suburban voters” away from him. Either that  or away from the voting booth entirely.

Other speculation I’ve seen over the last eight hours suggests “independent-minded” millennials clinging to either Jill Stein or Gary Johnson may … may … decide that since Hillary didn’t come off like Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West they might, y’know like, go for her after all. Despite “all that crooked stuff about her”, almost none of which they can explain with any detail or coherence.

But as much as I thought Hillary did just fine — she can drop the “trumped up trickle down” line — I watched Trump and kept thinking, “This works for him. It makes no sense at all. But it sounds like the same gilded-Mussolini, tough strutting egomaniac that ‘his people’ adore.” What they saw last night was the same thing they’ve seen since the get-go. Namely, “The guy who is going to stick it to everyone and everything that has made my life the mess it is.”

My belief about that is based on what I have come to accept as a fact. Namely, that wonky policy stuff — nuclear triads, strategic alliances, pre-school baby care and all that liberal, nanny state think tank BS — matters far, far less to the average “Trumpist” than, “blowing shit up”, for lack of a better phrase. Trump’s is a grievance and resentment campaign. His people don’t want “change” so much as they want vengeance on everyone that FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart say have done them wrong. There’s nothing constructive, no “making America great again” about it.

As along as Trump keeps picking scabs and pressing hair-trigger emotional buttons like he did in the debate, with his visions of roaming gangs of gun-wielding immigrants turning Chicago into Aleppo, he won’t lose a single vote of the irrationally terrified, angry and under-informed. Or the “37.5% who will vote for a bag of cement with an ‘R’ painted on it”, to quote Trump-despising GOP operative Mike Murphy.

A year ago I said I could see a path to Trump actually winning (although I still don’t think he will). It was based on this simple math. If he rallies even 10% of the “low information” crowd who rarely if ever vote, and adds them to the “37.5%” who will vote for any Republican no matter if he is an “orange anus”, to quote Rosie O’Donnell, he becomes POTUS 45.

The gobsmacked “elites” (that’d be TV talking heads everywhere but on FoxNews, all Democrats but mainly Hollywood liberals, and anyone who went to college and reads books with multi-syllable words) continue to flounder about trying to explain why Trump hasn’t cratered. Theories abound. But one explanation that hasn’t been examined closely enough is Trump’s vernacular and speaking rhythm, its similarity to religion and advertising, and how effective that is with an audience almost entirely “informed” by TV and pop culture.

Allow me to quote from length, James Fallows in this month’s Atlantic cover story

***

“Donald Trump’s language is notably simple and spare, at every level from word choice to sentence and paragraph structure. Of a thousand examples I’ll use just a few.

In the second Republican debate, hosted by CNN and held at the Reagan library, in California, moderator Jake Tapper asked Trump to explain his ‘build a wall’ immigration plan. Tapper said that fellow candidate Chris Christie had called it impractical. How would Trump respond? He did so this way:

‘First of all, I want to build a wall, a wall that works. So important, and it’s a big part of it.

Second of all, we have a lot of really bad dudes in this country from outside, and I think Chris knows that, maybe as well as anybody.

They go. If I get elected, first day they’re gone. Gangs all over the place. Chicago, Baltimore, no matter where you look.

We have a country based on laws.’

Bad dudes. A wall that works. Gangs all over the place.

After the first GOP debate Jack Shafer, of Politico, ran the transcript of Trump’s remarks through the Flesch-Kinkaid analyzer of reading difficulty, which said they matched a fourth-grade reading level. One of Trump’s press conferences at about the same time was at a third-grade level.

 In political language, plainness is powerful. ‘Of the people, by the people, for the people’. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’. ‘I have a dream’. This is especially so for language designed to be heard, like speeches and debate exchanges, rather than read from a page. People absorb and retain information in smaller increments through the ear than through the eye. Thus the classic intonations of every major religion have the simple, repetitive cadence also found in the best political speeches. ‘In the beginning’. ‘And it was good’. ‘Let us pray’.
But Trump takes this much further, as he does with so many other things. Decades ago, when I worked on presidential speeches, some news analyst made fun of me for saying in an interview that we were aiming for a seventh-grade level in a certain televised address. But that is generally the level of effective mass communication—newscasts, advertising, speeches—and it is about where most of the other Republicans ended up when Shafer ran their transcripts through the analyzer. (Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker were at an eighth-grade level; Ted Cruz at ninth; and John Kasich at fifth.)

Another illustration: At a Fox Business debate in January in Charleston, South Carolina, Maria Bartiromo asked Trump about criticism from South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, also a Republican, that his tone was too angry. The transcript shows:

‘I’m very angry because our country is being run horribly, and I will gladly accept the mantle of anger. Our military is a disaster’. [The outlier word here is mantle.]

(APPLAUSE)

‘Our health care is a horror show. Obamacare, we’re going to repeal it and replace it. We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people. And yes, I am angry’.

(APPLAUSE)

‘And I won’t be angry when we fix it, but until we fix it, I’m very, very angry. And I say that to Nikki. So when Nikki said that, I wasn’t offended. She said the truth’.

This is the classic language of both persuasion and sales—simple, direct, unmistakable, strong.”

***

Trump’s sustained viability has nothing to do with any specific remedies he has for the end-of-days apocalyptic disaster he imagines outside our windows. He is where he is because he, and he alone of everyone running this year, speaks in a way — full of terse, resonant, “See Dick run” emotional cues — that an astonishing/appalling chunk of the population finds reassuring and inspiring.

Weird as that sounds.

 

 

It’s Time for the Press to Get Nefarious with Trump’s Taxes

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Last week the editor of The New York Times said he’s willing to risk jail to publish Donald Trump’s tax returns. Because he’s regarded as a serious guy in a serious job we should regard that as a serious promise. But it is also a call to hackers, IRS bureaucrats, former accountants and anyone else with access, legal or (more likely) nefarious, to do business with the grand Grey Lady on the single biggest untold story of this election.

the editor, Dean Baquet was at Harvard with Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, who was at first a bit tremulous about the idea of publishing a private citizen’s most comprehensive and revealing financial disclosure. I mean, people could get arrested! But as the conversation went on Baquet said, “[Trump’s] whole campaign is built on his success as a businessman and his wealth.” To which Woodward, perhaps steeping up his bravado said, “Some things you have to do. . . . This defines Donald Trump. . . . There’s a big hole here.”

Do you think? Trump’s appeal may be more rooted in his exploitation of age-old white grievance and resentments, but the “fact” he’s as rich as Croesus, or so he says, adds tremendously to the enthusiasm his various baskets have for him. Were he not living in a penthouse decorated in a style best described as “early Saddam Hussein” and not (currently) married to a former achitecture student-turned-bikini model and not fly around in his own 757, he’d be just another duck-tailed doofus gassing on at the 19th hole. But roll all that into one gaudy picture and you’ve got something that screams “Success!” to America’s perennially self-pitying white middle and lower classes.

Here, here, here and here are some good Trump tax-related stories based on what little can be discerned.

The ethical nut of this promise, this vow, from Baquet is that Trump has so blatantly and egregiously gamed the standard politician-journalism game that the only way to crack him is with what on the face of it is Edward Snowden-like criminality … and let the lawyers sort it out later, a la Daniel Ellsburg during the Vietnam war. And I believe he’s right.

Last Friday’s fiasco at Trump’s new hotel in D.C., where he played the national media for chumps by exploiting their live national coverage for an infomercial for the building goosed with a bunch of campaign-rally hosannahs from grizzled war vets before finally A: Conceding that Barack Obama was born in the USA, and then, B: Accusing Hillary Clinton of starting the whole racist birther BS, sent the press into a remarkable fury. Even CNN, directed by former “Today Show” exec Jeff Zucker, a guy who would stick viewers’ heads in a stopped-up cruise ship toilet knowing his target demo would watch it 24/7, expressed outrage over the incident.

Why, exactly, you ask? Certainly not because Friday was the first time Trump has “rick rolled” an audience. That’s SOP for the guy. The critical difference Friday was this: Trump made the assembled reporters and their colleagues and bosses back at the office look like fools. Or, chumps, as I say. Now, having juuuust a bit of experience with Le Grande Journalist Ego, reporters and editors are pretty thick-skinned about being called names — like “fool” and “chump” — but get really upset when someone shows a whole country how indisputably easy it is to make them look … well, foolish and chumpy.

So a guy the vast majority of the press regards as a fraud on one level or another plays them for a free commercial and makes them look ridiculous. What are they, can they do about it? The Times followed Friday’s fiasco with a “tough” analysis piece, saying, “He nurtured the conspiracy like a poisonous flower, watering and feeding it with an ardor that still baffles and embarrasses many around him. Mr. Trump called up like-minded sowers of the same corrosive rumor, asking them for advice on how to take a falsehood and make it mainstream in 2011, as he weighed his own run for the White House.”

But as most of the gamed-and-ridiculed press has come to understand, “tough” analyses, “strongly-worded” editorials and hour after hour of gob-smacked, incredulous talking heads are all gnat-bites on the hide of a creature long accustomed to nefarious behavior. None of it means anything, because none of it has any significant effect.

The only topic, the only single subject matter that carries any weight, that would pull down the (gold metallic micro-fibre) curtain and allow voters to see and assess Trump for what he really is are his tax returns. That is where The Story is, and pretty much everyone in the press, including FoxNews and Bretibart, knows it.

Which brings people like the editor of the New York Times and Bob Woodward — who’s colleague David Farenthold has fast-tracked himself to a Pulitzer for the most dogged and aggressive coverage of Trump’s finances — to say out loud 50 days before the election that the time is nigh for two wrongs to make a right. We are talking the Presidency of the United State here, not doping in pro sports or the machinations behind some gas pipeline.

If you’re going to break the rules you traditionally operate under — by soliciting, maybe even paying for Trump’s tax returns — you do it to properly, fully dissect a “non-traditional” (i.e. quite possibly criminal) candidate for the most influential office on the planet … and let the lawyers argue it out later.

And you do it now.

From O.J. to the Deplorable Appeal of Donald T.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3A couple weeks ago I hit Maximum Trump Wall. Too much stupidity too much of the time. So I took a break and caught up on some good TV. Bad mistake.

Tuning down the wall of Trump noise I filled late summer evenings binge-watching stuff I had heard was “must see” TV. (The Emmys are this Sunday.) On the list was, “The Night Manager”, an adaptation of a John LeCarre novel. Then “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” a dramatization of the case with John Travolta, Nathan Lane, David Schwimmer and Cuba Gooding Jr., followed by HBO’s “The Night of” with John Turturro, but most importantly, written by the great Richard Price. Finally, the major investment, 479 minutes of ESPN’s documentary, “O.J. Simpson: Made in America”.

The last one was where my strategy of Trump avoidance went completely to hell. “Made in America”, I’ve been telling (boring) people in the days since may be the single best thing I’ve seen on TV in years … “Breaking Bad”, “The Sopranos”, “Game of Thrones”, Frontline documentaries, you name it. Directed by Ezra Edelman, ( the son of children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman and Georgetown University law professor Peter Edelman) the film is the thickest, richest slice of modern America culture I can recall ever. As with all great filmmaking/storytelling it is Edelman’s perceptive sequencing of the mostly familiar story of Simpson, the murders and the court case into the context of the culture surrounding it all.

Re-visiting the Simpson story night after night, it all came back. The indemnified status of celebrities in modern America, a culture cynical of authority while simultaneously delusional about fame. The noxious racist police culture of Los Angeles, not significantly different than every other large American city, and the indifference of white America to it. The intense resentment and sense of grievance of blacks toward law enforcement and the judicial system. The appalling cynicism of lawyers supplied with enough money to tell a wholly implausible story that exploits grievance to maximum effect, and a media culture first and foremost committed to trading in the elements of any story that sustains the story viewers and readers want to hear, thereby enhancing the value of the media itself.

Trump avoidance was an impossibility.

With what is it now, 56 days until the election we have pretty well swept aside every issue other than grievance, resentment, racial animosity, celebrity and media self-service to explain Trump’s appeal. There is nothing more to it. There’s no “small government conservatism”. No “libertarian notion” ersatz or otherwise. There’s no economic incentive particularly. It’s not even so much a distaste for Hillary Clinton specifically, as it is a resentment of and grievance against anything that smacks of a culture/a class of people easily blamed for what are in fact personal failures.

About as I was wrapping up “Made in America” I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s feature in Mother Jones, “I Spent Five Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You.”

In a nutshell, Hochschild spends time shadowing a woman selling Aflac insurance to the desperately poor whites of rural Louisiana. The grand takeaway of the piece is this: After growing up in a culture that had long accepted sneering at shiftless blacks, people forever gaming the system for (fraudulent) welfare disability benefits, food stamps, public housing, whatever, these sad crackers have been slapped in the face with a new reality. Lacking necessary 21st century skills, family after family is unemployed, living by welfare threads and being hammered by opioid and other drug addictions. They have come to realize, even if they don’t want to say so out loud, that they are the new shiftless, hopeless-loser blacks. They are the people “respectable” society — skilled workers, white collar professionals, liberals and most of the media — has written off as lazy drags on society. Needless to say, they’re all in for Trump, who promises them they’ll be “great again.”

So yeah, these people are “the deplorables” Hillary Clinton was talking about in such an impolitic way the other day. And their grievances and misplaced resentments are among the long, long list of highly relevant questions Matt Lauer didn’t bother to ask Trump on that aircraft carrier last week.

I think I’ve said this before, but a saving irony of the Trump disaster (whether he wins or loses) is that it has fully dispensed and blown away the illusion that the United States is living in some kind of post-racial era. The virulent racism roiling just under the keel of Trump’s garbage barge is a startling reminder that very nearly half the country today, your work colleagues and neighbors, are comfortable with hostilities a lot of us thought subsided in the ’60s. Moreover, today’s “blacks”, in the form of under-educated, substantially unemployable, perpetually aggrieved whites have been convinced by their media of choice of something no real black of old ever thought, namely that they are entitled to more and better just because of the color of their skin.

 

 

 

It’s Trump Nation as Much as His “Joke” That Isn’t Funny.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2Here’s the thing, the audience for Donald Trump’s latest gaffe is more the problem than the joke itself, and neither are the least bit funny.

In the (very) best light, joking about “Second Amendment people” taking out their wrath on the opposition candidate for President, is the stuff of sad sack bar stool warriors four drinks into their cups. But a crack like that, to a hall full of … Donald Trump supporters … is about as close to yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater as you can get, to use the old saw about where the line of free speech lies.

The post-mortem on this astonishingly bizarre 18-month episode in American life will require several chapters just rise and to analyze the psychology of Trump’s core supporters. It’s already been well established that these people aren’t particularly ideological. Nor are they particularly religious. Hell, they aren’t even all that Republican, other than when they’ve voted over the past 40 years they’ve pulled the lever for Republicans the majority of the time.

But what they do believe in, and what has them by the throat pretty much every waking moment of their lives are two things before all others.

  1. A sense of existential despair for a quality of life their parents had and they haven’t been able to achieve.

And 2. A mulish, mutated determination to do something about it this time, by god.

Several studies in recent months have noted the startling increase in the mortality rate for under-educated, middle-aged-to-older white men. These gentlemen being essentially the only remaining demographic group among whom Trump’s poll numbers have held steady, and at unprecedented margins over a Democratic candidate. Put another way, they idolize the guy. These men are the precise sweet spot of Trump Nation. They are the crowd that packs his rallies for a sense of community and empowerment they usually only get from talk radio or their cronies at the bar … at mid-afternoon on a workday.

Alcoholism, drug addiction-related diseases, diabetes, suicide, you name it, it has spiked up among these people over the last generation, along with a general belief, shown in other surveys, that they feel — uniquely — that they have been unfairly victimized by immigration, affirmative action, globalization and conniving liberals. By contrast, mortality rates for blacks and Hispanics have declined, with both of those groups expressing generally more positive attitudes toward their standing in the world of today compared to that of their parents, 25-50 years ago.

“Deaths of despair,” is the indelible phrasing by Princeton economist Anne Case, wading through these facts overhanging the lives of white men who believe they’ve been cheated and grievously wronged by modern life.

Point being, creatures experiencing profound despair, never mind their ability to make caustic jokes at Moe’s Bar, are in effect psychological cornered, and therefore as unpredictable and potentially dangerous, to themselves and others, as any trapped animal experiencing a “do or die” level of threat.

It is also beyond obvious that this same, large, despairing group has a pathological relationship to guns, their precious Second Amendment rights being one of the very few means left to them to exert dominance in their lives. For all intents and purposes it is their primary religion.

So the problem with Trump saying what he said to his people is this: However life overwhelmed them, whether simple bad genetics or via an over-abundance of polluted role-modeling from lunkhead fathers to Hollywood “action flicks” to cheesy cop shows to their steady diet of junk information and pre-digested self-pity spooned out by the likes of talk show gurus like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, these guys are sad, despairing soldiers of a by-gone era and a lost war.

The problem for us is they are also the type to take inordinate pride in their manly readiness to make a heroic, decisive stand against a symbol of everything that has reduced them to so little.

They’re the crowd that finds Trump’s “jokes” inspirational. And that’s why they’re not funny.

Add Friendships to the Wreckage in Trump’s Wake

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3We might want to add personal friendships to the havoc Donald Trump is wreaking on the Republican party and the USA’s international reputation. Elections have a way of dropping a cleaver between next door neighbors. For example, you can’t believe the Blows across the street have put up a McCain-Palin or Romney yard sign. Have they lost their minds? But eventually Election Day comes and goes and things settle back to waving as you pass on the street and making jokes at block parties.

This time though … . There’s something so unequivocal about Donald Trump’s ethics and mental fitness that listening to someone, an acquaintance or neighbor, say they’re for the guy is like having a rusty spike driven into your mental data-bank. You’re not likely to forgive it. You’re certainly never going to forget.

In terms of deal-breakers, support for Trump is such a reckless display of poor judgment and contorted logic that it’s just not possible to shrug it off and ignore it. Trumpism leaves a permanent stain. Put simply, as a test of intelligence, by which I mean the ability to make rational judgments on matters of importance, support for Trump self-identifies you as someone indifferent (at best) to common sense and decency as well as a person comfortable with blatantly racist sentiments. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time stirring up a batch of gin and tonics for people like that.

As an old, not particularly enlightened friend once said to his (third) wife at a school fund-raiser filled with Filipino parents, “NOK, D.” (“Not our kind, dear.”)

Now I’m as guilty as anyone with the temporary cleaver thing. I can rant and fume with the best of them. But even in the case of George W. Bush, prior to Trump the least qualified, most intellectually lazy guy to run for President in my lifetime, I could process Joe and Sally Blow thinking he was a better bet for economic improvement and national security than Al Gore or John Kerry. The Blows were spectacularly wrong on both counts. But I could get to what formed their decision, albeit the fact that they always do the tribal thing and vote Republican probably accounted for 80% of their decision.

But cynical bigotry never entered into my assessment of their choice, or their fundamental values. White privilege, maybe. But a racist impulse? No.

I also get the rote tribal denunciations of Hillary Clinton as a “liar”, never mind fact-checkers like PolitiFact regularly rating her among the most honest of today’s national politicians. “Lying Hillary” is standard-issue competitive political “messaging”, especially important to today’s Republicans who quite literally have no coherent, detailed policy on any important public issue. (If you can think of one, e-mail me.) Whipping up Hillary hatred is pretty much their entire game this season.

Likewise, I get the psychological profile of the crowd packing into Trump rallies. Hell, I even pity them. If for no other reason than self-pity seems to be their primary emotional default. With that crowd the odds of the “knowing better” about a lot of things, not just politicians, are slim from the start.

But harder — make that “nearly impossible” — to understand and tolerate are traditional tribal Republicans supporting Trump so long after evidence of his bigotry-enabling rhetoric has become indisputable, and as I say, become a stain on the reputation of the party/tribe. These people, like the Blows across the street, are normally pretty confident of their savvy and quality judgment. My assumption is that while they’re much too Minnesotan to make a show of it, they count themselves among life’s winners. People who paid attention, worked hard and have put some separation between themselves and the spittle-flecked herd.

Until now.

Somewhere in their better-than-average educated, normally placid brains a snake has uncoiled and revealed their kinship with a crowd that is unabashed in their enthusiasm for dog whistle racial rhetoric and a career of managerial incompetence verging on fraud.

Way, way back the nuns at St.Joe’s in Montevideo taught me to forgive. There are worse crimes committed every day than showing yourself to be an agitated fool. But making a show of supporting Donald frickin’ Trump is like telling the world you’re so far around the bend you don’t give a damn who out there will never forget.

Bottom line: More gin and tonic for me.

Hillary Will Be a Better President Than Bill.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2For the record, and for the gamblers among you, I’m sticking by my belief that Hillary Clinton will win the election in November by a minimum of 40 electoral votes more than Barack Obama in 2012. I think I first heard that number in an interview with Howard Wolfson, Mike Bloomberg’s deputy Mayor of New York. It sounded right six weeks ago and it still does today, Donald Trump’s post-convention “bump” withstanding.
Full disclosure here means saying I’ve never had a problem, certainly not a righteous, disqualifying problem with Hillary Clinton. I don’t have to hold my nose to vote for her. In fact, I have a kind of fondness for competent, wonky managers. When I was 25 I thought the most important quality in a candidate was the ability to, you know, “inspire”, to send a tingle of hero-worship up and down my spine. Years later I’ve grown to realize that it’s a lot easier to fake that than it is to actually get [stuff] done.
Hubby Bill was pretty good last night making the case for Hillary as “the best darn change maker” he’s ever known. Our boy gives a great folksy speech, no fancy $10 words. And he knows how to hold a room with pause, inflection and gesture. A natural, as the cognoscenti have always said. The Mrs?  Not so much. But I just don’t give a damn about that. That’s not what I’m buying.
In fact, as I’ve said before, I truly believe Hillary could be a better president than Bubba, who was, if you recall, was pretty good, at least when he wasn’t setting his feet on fire playing rock star with starry-eyed interns. She’s the disciplined one of the two, and she’ll arrive at the job with 25 years more experience in the mechanics of national administration, foreign policy and — perhaps as important — the tactics of neutralizing the infantile nihilism of today’s “movement conservatives” than he did.
That last point is not inconsequential. In fact it was central to my problem with Bernie Sanders. The way the game is going down these days, nothing moves until you hit the Republicans with a kind of stun gun and shake and bake your way around their obstruction. Obstruction being the only thing they’ve got. Impeachment withstanding, Bubba routinely outfoxed Newt Gingrich’s conservatives and Obama for the most part has managed to blunt the worst of their excesses, although with things like the government shut down and the failure of gun control post-Sandy Hook and a dozen other items, the consequences of nihilism are evident to everyone.
I never saw Bernie, god bless him, being up to that game.
But here again, Hillary, who is a better schmoozer than the cerebral Obama, and has much longer standing relationships with the few Republicans worthy of the term “adult”, may be better suited to the combination of one-on-one deal-cutting and hardball political tactics than Obama.
Not being a player on the DC social circuit, I am in no position to say for certain what the reality of the “real Hillary” is. But from what I read, and there’s plenty to read about her, the cartoonish picture of a shrieking, duplicitous harridan just doesn’t compute. Perpetually wary? Yeah, I see that. But story after story portrays her as more genuinely gracious than Bill, who, you know, being Bill kind of likes every moment to be about him.
Bubba’s long recitation last night of all the projects she’s launched and reports she’s written and negotiations she’s concluded should be taken with a full shaker of salt. He’s a master at gilding the lily. But the fact remains she has in fact devoted enormous amounts of time to all sorts of wonky, bona fide, not-so sexy but vital issues and, more to the point here, arrives at the White House with a far better-than-average understanding of how to get that stuff done than any incoming president in my lifetime. (Lyndon Johnson knew how to get stuff done. But Hillary’s got him beat hands down in terms of ground level social issues, certainly for women and children, and foreign policy. Plus, she isn’t a crude old bastard.)
Campaign-wise, I don’t know what she can do to damp down the perception of “crooked Hillary”. The GOP base is entrenched in their total war opposition to any Democrat, and the sense of her as “untrustworthy” has been marketed very effectively for a very long time by Bill and her career-long adversaries. The sad fact of a public life lived on the grand stage as long as the Clintons is that perception is as powerful as the bona fides of your resume.
But she isn’t naive to that either. Someone who has taken as many shots as she has and kept on truckin’ fully understands the game. She may not like it. Who does? But she inspires confidence that in a genuinely unique way, she understands how to blunt it and be productive.

Our Plague of Panicked, Terrified, Emotionally Unfit Cops

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Every time we have another of these police killings, like in Baton Rouge earlier this week and St. Paul yesterday, I find I’m asking the same questions of the cops involved. 1: How did this guy get hired? And 2: What sort screening goes on that someone this terrified and panicky is sent out on the streets with a loaded gun and an implicit license to kill?

All the deeply imbedded racial attitudes of white cops to minorities, mainly blacks, absolutely apply. The data, as President Obama reminded the country again in his remarks from Poland, are real and bona fide. The chances of a cop pulling me over for a broken tail light are ridiculously miniscule. The odds of me — a guy with serious authority issues, or so says my wife — being told to put my hands up before I even dig out my driver license are even far more implausible, and the likelihood of some freaked out cop pumping a half dozen bullets into me because I was reaching for my wallet are essentially zero. It’d never happen.

With blacks, as everyone knows, even pasty, cossetted white suburbanites, it is an entirely different story. And the only tangible explanation, something you can do something with in the short term — before purging 400 years of racial superstition and animus from the social system — is accepting that these cops are fundamentally terrified of the black men they are stopping. They are not properly vetted for their basic law enforcement judgment and they are not screened well enough for police forces to discern the instinctual level of fear … they bring to the confrontations they so often initiate.

The facts of the Philando Castile shooting in Falcon Heights may yet tell a completely different story from his girlfriend’s post-shooting Facebook video. If that is the case, I’ll revisit this rant and make apologies. But by all appearances we have yet another example of a guy, a cop, fundamentally unequipped, psychologically and emotionally, for the job he’s in. No one as plainly terrified and panicked as that guy should have a job carrying a loaded gun with, as I say, the implicit understanding that he will never be prosecuted for overreacting and killing someone.

I think I’ve written before that I fail to understand why any cop, especially suburban types, are brandishing guns with lethal ammunition. The number of times any cop in the country gets into a raging life or death Hollywood-style gun battle with some psycho is surpassingly small. In most cases of that sort the cops have a pretty good idea in advance who they’re closing in on. They could dig the heavy stuff out of the trunk and call in backup.

But making traffic stops and waving a loaded gun in some guy’s face? Give me a break. A gun armed with chemical darts, or even rubber bullets, which hurt like hell, would cover — guessing here — 99% of the “extreme force” incidents city cops deal with. More to the point, after, what is it? 560 of these cop killings this past year? The end result of another of these police freak out/panic/overreaction incidents is a citizen bruised and zonked out but revivable to make his case in court … instead of, you know, dead.

Our legions of (mainly) white cowboy gun nuts would no doubt recoil in horror at the thought of cops stripped of the ability to kill and ask questions later. But they’re nuts and that’s nuts, if only considered on the level of the enormous mistrust of police that is building not just among blacks but sane citizens of every variety. No cop can be as effective as he/she needs to be if a fat chunk of the population spots them on the street and regards them as some kind of emotionally unstable, racist powder keg.

The solution? Well, for one thing, and I’m serious about this. I suggest police academy psychologists, the people screening applications, take a particularly hard look at the sort of people who have a deep, obsessional interest in being a cop. That might be a clue to the type of person you don’t want it in uniform, packing a gun.

Maybe that is a red flag in basic police candidate screening. I don’t know. But if it is, I think they’re missing a few.

Everyone may have an example, but there’s someone we know in our social orbit who in no way shape or form should be in law enforcement and packing a gun on city streets. But he is. It took him a while to land a gig. But eventually he got hired on. Given the same set of circumstances — a black guy in his suburban neighborhood — he could easily be the Falcon Heights cop. At best, proper vetting would have stuck him in a desk job. But, well, beggars can’t be choosers. And small cities with small police budgets take what they can get.

It would probably help if the average cop were paid more than, say, a WalMart assistant manager, but that’s a whole other fight.  You know, precious taxpayer dollars being wasted on more gubmint employees with cushy pensions.

Last time I checked gun technology was pretty advanced. Lots of “cool” shit on the market for “sportsmen” and “enthusiasts”. Anything your Second Amendment-hugging heart desires. Building a police revolver that fired chemical darts isn’t science fiction.

And it might go a small way to re-shaping a sickening reality.

Hillary Survives Another Nothingburger “Scandal”

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3It’s a tough day to be Republican. But then most of them are this year, aren’t they? This thing with the FBI letting “crooked Hillary” off on that colossal e-mail scam … well, until someone starts shouting for a special prosecutor to investigate the FBI, that notorious den of lefties, men and women of conscience (and with nothing better to do with their time and our money) are going to have find another dead horse to flog.

Not that “e-mailgate” didn’t succeed almost as well as other ginned-up Clinton scandals. I mean it began with Benghazi and after throwing years and taxpayer millions at that mirage it begat e-mail servers. It was just like how Whitewater begat Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and impeachment, which as you remember was such a winning strategy for Republicans Bill Clinton left office more popular than St. Ronald the Daft.

The fact is that like Whitewater and Travelgate and Benghazi before it, the Republican attack machine never had a coherent theory of the crime with e-mailgate. Which is why it bored people and never caught on like, well, like hanky panky in the Oval Office. (Now if among Hillary’s e-mails had been some hot mash notes to Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger we might have had some fun.)

I mean, she used her own servers … to do what, exactly? Send military secrets to Al Qaeda? Sell off Texas to the North Koreans? What? Please tell me. Because I was never grasping the Constitution-tearing gravity of the situation.

“Well,” came the usual response, “we’ll never know. Because she won’t disclose everything. That’s the way the Clintons are. Clearly corrupt. Every time we accuse them of something they refuse to turn over all the evidence we need to make our case! Bastards! It’s like they don’t trust us! We have to Make America Great Again!”

This perpetual cycle of molehill non-scandals that … we the people have paid to prosecute … only to watch “the case” evaporate under the harsh light of actual evidence is of course central to the widespread perception that Hillary and Bill “can’t be trusted”. Never mind that if you ask “why can’t they be trusted?” the most frequent response is something along the lines of, “Well, because I hear they’re always in trouble over something.”

Somehow, maybe by adding a little video to this argument, from Kevin Drum Team Hillary has to turn the guns back on the firing squad.

For the record: Whitewater was a nothingburger. Travelgate was a nothingburger. Troopergate was a nothingburger. Filegate was a nothingburger. The Vince Foster murder conspiracy theories were a nothingburger. Monica Lewinsky was Bill’s problem, not Hillary’s. Benghazi was a tragedy, but entirely nonscandalous. The Goldman Sachs speeches were probably a bad idea, but otherwise a nothingburger. Emailgate revealed some poor judgment, but we’ve now seen all the emails and it’s pretty obviously a nothingburger. Humagate is a nothingburger. Foundationgate is a nothingburger.

Bottom line: Don’t let Donald Trump or the press or anyone else convince you that Hillary Clinton is “dogged by scandal” or “works under a constant cloud of controversy” or whatever the nonsense of the day is. That constant cloud is the very deliberate invention of lowlifes in Arkansas; well-heeled conservative cranks; the Republican Party; and far too often a gullible and compliant press. Like anybody who’s been in politics for 40 years, Hillary has some things she should have handled better, but that’s about it. The plain fact is that there’s no serious scandal on her record. There’s no evidence that she’s ever sold out to Wall Street. There’s no corruption, intrigue, or deceit. And if anything, she’s too honest on a policy level. She could stand to promise people a bit of free stuff now and then.”

I make no apologies. I have no great problem with Hillary. She’s pulling the gears on a huge, sophisticated, well-heeled and well-oiled political machine. Live with it. That’s the game in 2016 USA. It’s how you get elected. You want to change it? Me too. But it ain’t happening this year.

Moreover though, I tell anyone who cares to listen that I believe she’ll be a better president than Bill, who if you remember anything other than the stained blue dress, did a pretty good job of keeping the economy on the rails and US troops out of unwinnable foreign wars.

She arrives in the Oval Office with more experience on every imaginable level than anyone since maybe LBJ (problematic comparison), plus the full support of officers and staff from two successful Democratic presidencies and a whole lot less of Bill’s, shall we say, “impulse control” issues. She has also demonstrated masterful control over the Republican wing nut fringe, an enormous time, energy and money suck in D.C. these days, that must be persistently neutralized.

So there are plenty of rational reasons to trust her to competently manage matters here and abroad.

Not that the usual suspects will be screaming “scandal” and “special prosecutor” before she takes the oath of office.

How Would “House of Cards” Handle The Donald Problem?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Not that any Hollywood screenwriter since Terry Southern could imagine a spectacle as bizarre and farcical as this. But I’m watching this week’s Trump meltdown, which is an extra melt you didn’t think possible after last week’s meltdown, and the sight of the ever loyal Republican herd trampling itself to avoid even mentioning (on camera) their party’s “presumptive nominee’s” name and thinking, “What would ‘House of Cards’ do with a toxic liability like The Donald?”

Amid chatter that Trump’s poll numbers are intolerable and predictions of a god almighty November gut punch to the conservative agenda, (you know, more guns, not so many gays and social service cuts for Hispanics), there are whispers of rules changes at the Ultimate Warcraft Nutzapalooza in Cleveland next month. One idea would free all of the delegates 17 candidates brawled over all winter and spring and allow them to vote for whoever they damned well please. The problem with that is besides setting off a civil war with Trump’s (not exactly rational and stable) people, a.k.a. every other Republican’s base, the Grand Old Party has no one to offer as a replacement. Well ok, maybe Ted Cruz, who would certainly leap at the opportunity and very likely send the party to an even worse defeat than Trump.

So … what to do?

Clearly something fully above board and traditional and proper is out of the question. No GOP wiseman is going to step up and say, “This guy is a [bleeping] disaster. I’m not going to support him.” Not even John McCain, who needs Trump’s pitchfork crowd to win reelection in Arizona. One reason is that there aren’t any “Republican wisemen”. Or there are they’re as rare as coelecanths and never expose themselves to sunlight. These are modern Republicans after all, i.e. salesmen and huckstersl.

But if life were to imitate Hollywood, the plotting would go something like this:  An envelope would be handed to one of Trump’s bouncers. Either Corey Lewandowski or Paul Manafort. Maybe by someone who bumps against them in a crowded elevator, slipping the envelope into their pocket and vanishing away when the doors open.

After first inspecting it for anthrax spores, the envelope would be opened. The message inside would be specific and blunt. It would lay out in unequivocal detail not just Trump’s  personal tax information, but incident after incident of his long history of financial fraud, leaving no doubt of that all such information will be disclosed, exposing him to not just reputational ruin, (I know, far too late for that) but full, bankruptcy-inducing criminal and civil prosecution as well. In short, catastrophic blackmail. His only option? Concede to demands freeing his delegates. Accept the inevitable defeat that follows on the convention floor and the nomination of someone else, Cruz or some other skin crawling replacement, and walk away.

But come on. That’s way too bureaucratic and not all that much fun. Worse, Trump’s still around. God knows who the guy’ll take down with him out of pure spite?

So, then there’s the option of him claiming to have experienced a severe health incident. Perhaps a heart attack from all those McDonalds lunches. The blackmailers would agree to support this fiction, under certain conditions. A tweet would go out that the presumptive nominee collapsed in the royal boudoir, leaving it to fervid imaginations that he clenched up while having world class sex with the super sexy Melania. He would be private jetted off to Mar a Lago, given “the greatest” cardiac care the world has ever known and remain essentially under house arrest recuperating until the day after the election.

Of course, were this a “House of Cards” script and Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) orchestrating the plot, Trump would simply be a dead man.

The Donald would be slipped a toxic hamburger patty, go into cardiac arrest, maybe midway through one of his feverish apocalyptic fantasies about blood-sucking Muslims, and croak right there on “Fox and Friends”, before the nation’s startled but mostly relieved eyes. Because, as Frank (a Democrat, you know), would explain in one of his distinctive, fourth-wall breaking asides, the only way to truly escape the hell of someone like Trump, is to inflict upon him a total, indisputably final, (un)timely demise.

Only with the deathly bolus of The Donald irrevocably removed from the party body, could the Republican  leadership apparatus — the Koch brothers, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, and heavyweight donors like John Menard Jr. — be free to replace him with their anointed champion, which, given the way those guys operate could be anyone from Ted Cruz to the Sham Wow guy.

Now, if you, playing script doctor, want to replace the super sexy Melania with Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) locked in a deeply connived love nest with The Donald, I could buy that. I just can’t picture Claire touching a greasy hamburger patty.

 

 

Who Shaped the Orlando Killer More? His Father or ISIS?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2I’ll leave it to others to make some kind of grand distinction between “terrorism” and “hate”. As though one comes at us only from “others” while the latter is homegrown. But following the first flow of information about Omar Mateen and his homicidal spree in Orlando, the description that fits best is that of the son — the spawn — of an intensely conservative, intolerant, controlling father. Father Mateen is strange old man who comes off as a strict paternalist, a man with righteous delusions of importance, maybe grandeur, far, far beyond his achievements in the world. All of which — guessing here — shaped his son the mass murderer into something universally familiar here in the USA, and in rural Yemen, in upscale Saudi Arabia, and everywhere else. Namely, a young man in his physical prime (mis)educated in the belief of his superiority and entitlement.

Always eager to play to a familiar, preexisting narrative, our commercial media and most of our politicians have leapt to emphasize Mateen’s declaration of support for ISIS. As though that one statement, (made, we learn this morning, in a phone conversation with cops while hold up in the nightclub’s restroom) is sufficient evidence of a purposeful, dedicated allegiance to grand religious/cultural war. I’m sorry, but I doubt it.

The psychologically misshapened, of which Mateen seems a prime example given his parentage, his abuse of his ex-wife and fear of/anger toward gays, have always been a common feature on the human landscape. The facts of his broader ethnic heritage seem far less significant than the specific forces that raised him.

If you choose to blame the strains of religiously-rooted cultural conservatism that pretty obviously contorted Mateen, you have to apply the same lens to the likes of dozens of other mass murderers, men with Christian surnames, who have brought their perversion of vengeful justice to bear on black churches, Planned Parenthood clinics and federal office buildings over the years.

We may never know, but Mateen’s declaration of support for ISIS, seems much more like an afterthought, a desperate final grasp for grandiosity. A reach for an even more provocative, inflammatory ring as he realized death awaited him on the other side of a thin rest room wall.

The saner view and response to this tragedy will be to resist the knee jerk shrieks that, “ISIS is coming to slaughter us all” and therefore we as a nation must gear up for counter-jihad in Middle East and accept that unstable young men like Omar Mateen, molded by demonstrably deluded parents (usually controlling fathers) are a universal problem, (always have been), and that at its core a declaration of support for a rampaging army of similar young men isn’t appreciably different than Tim McVeigh’s allegiance to the white militia movement of Dylan Roof’s to the South’s confederate heritage.

The warped and insane routinely seek legitimacy with a higher cause.

And the “Republican establishment” is who, again?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Frankly, I don’t know how anything, much less anyone, can survive the next five and a half months. After spending most of last summer, fall and winter assuming/hoping Donald Trump would slither back under his gilded rock, we now have accept that he not only isn’t going away, but he’s going to be louder, cruder and more reckless than ever … because he’s convinced that’s what “his” Republican party wants.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has to figure how to sell competent management (zzzzz) through news cycle after news cycle dominated by the next ludicrous-to-offensive thing Trump says and the herd media loves to cover pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. Personally, I’m confident Team Clinton, arguably the best-oiled political machine of the last generation, already knows how it’s going to play the game ahead. But that doesn’t mean the vulgar absurdity of Trump will abate in any way.

Among the innumerable ironies of the past month or so, as Trump achieved inevitability and “presumptiveness”, are the persistent eulogies for the Republican party. It’s as though the GOP “establishment”, which I’m not sure but I guess means the Bush Family, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Grover Norquist and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, was this cherished national treasure, a font of high-minded enlightenment guiding the masses with unimpeachable Socratic logic and rewarding the faithful with effective, far-sighted governance and benefits of indisputable value to the forever “hard-working” middle class.

What a colossal crock. After Romney augered in four years ago, I wasn’t the only one who said that if the “Grand” old party truly wanted to remain relevant in national elections it had to make a handful of serious changes. There was the “Hispanic problem”, which in truth is also a problem with pretty much every other minority group as well. There was also “the woman problem”, even though the Mittster did pretty well with white women. But most of all, IMHO, there was the need to be something more than a careerist messaging apparatus for anti-government “public servants” and actually, truly, genuinely do something for the middle class. Hell, the party itself said essentially the same thing, with the exception of, you know, that doing something part.

But because modern conservatives have been in the sales game and out of the doing something game for so long, bloviating about “freedoms” and “Constitutional rights” and “limited government” while incessantly licking the boots of the donor class that keeps them in office, they have no street cred with the crowd Trump tapped in to. Other than gun rights, Trump’s people have about as much of a focus on Constitutional freedoms as a diabetic bonobo. But damn! They know what they despise.

More to the point, the “messaging” they were getting injected with every day had nothing to do with the Bushes or even the Wall Street Journal. Their “establishment”, the real Republican establishment, was led by Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, a pack of self-serving entertainers pushing a much more digestible product. Namely, “Everything is [bleeped]. We are the ultimate authorities and the only people you can trust. And, you are the real victims of the DC con game.”

McCain’s top advisor in 2008, Steve Schmidt, recently went off on a rant about exactly this.

In small part he said, “[Mark Levin] is series-A round investor in the demise of the conservative movement in the Republican Party. He, very famously, a woman calls up his show and has the gall to just disagree with Mark Levin, who calls himself the great one. Talk about a narcissist. Talk about self-aggrandizers. Mark Levin asked, ‘Do you have a gun in the house? Go find it and blow your brains out’. This is the tone that has emanated from talk radio and this cancer has spread and that tone has infected the whole of the party. And so this moment that we’ve arrived at, where there’s been a severability now between issues and conservatism, and the test of who is the conservative in the race is who has the loudest voice of opposition.”

(As for bona fides, never forget that it was Schmidt in 2008 who signed off on Sarah Palin.)

A lot of liberals I listen to are smug in their belief that that kind cloddish rage has appeal only to the usual low-information, angry white (aging) male crowd. But the fact is Hillary Clinton’s high “unfavorable ratings” are directly connected to the same dynamic. The woman has been accused of one scandal after another since 1992. From Travelgate, to Whitewater, to Benghazi to this e-mail nonsense, all of it stoked and relentlessly marketed by the same entertainment “establishment”, (with the Bushes, McCains, Romneys and Wall Street Journals happily nodding along).

Point being, when I hear ardent progressives and marginally liberal people both talk about Clinton’s “untrustworthiness” I have to ask, “What do you mean, exactly?” And after valid stuff like her Iraq vote and coziness with Wall Street, the bulk of the examples are utter crap, like Whitewater and Benghazi. False reality, junk facts and manufactured outrage force fed by conservative entertainment “messaging” like milk to credulous veal calves. But so much of this “message” has been shoved down the public’s throats for so long, it has become a DNA marker in the body of the general public, conservatives, liberals and agnostics alike.

“There must be something to it. They always talk about it.”

So follow the dots: The cynical fecklessness of the Republican establishment class meant it kowtowed to its entertainment mouthpieces. Those mouthpieces cultivated an enormous audience of lazy-minded cynics. Those cynics, after 25 years, have now ridiculed and booed the “establishment” off the stage in favor of an actual TV performer-celebrity. That performer is, big surprise, another self-serving populist demagogue. A character who manifests, mainly, not any grand issues or policies, but rather the disposition the GOP’s target audience acquired from their regular habit of tuning in to be reassured they were right to feel sorry for themselves.

Well done, establishment conservatives.

If Your Privacy Isn’t Yours, Whose Is It?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Are you as amazed as I am at the indifference so many people have to their own personal privacy? Practically every day there’s another revelation of prying, “data-mining”, bogus security “filters” and the astonishing trade going — with your personal information. Where you are. Where you go. What you buy. Who you call and text. All of it literally making billions for the tech giants — Google, Facebook, cell phone carriers — while they heavily promote themselves as benevolent giants “bringing us together”.

As someone native to a small town — bucolic, Mayberry-like Montevideo — I grew up accustomed to listening to Mom and Dad grumble about so and so at church, at the Sunday morning-for-pancakes restaurant, at the clothing store that once prospered on Main Street. Nosey busy-bodies constantly working the gossip mill for news, the badder the better, about everyone else in town. “Why didn’t they mind their own business?” Naturally, Mom and Dad were as unconditionally interested in chatter about everyone else … as everyone else. Who doesn’t love gossip? “I heard Donny was so plastered Saturday night they had to carry him out of the club” . Nevertheless, they were as annoyed as hell when they were the primary subjects. Human nature. It’s a beautiful thing.

As a kid I probably took an unhealthy attitude toward “my business”. Being also Catholic, with the sword of eternal fiery damnation hanging over every “impure thought”, mortification came far too easily when word got out of my clueless, hopelessly-bridled carnal fascination with cute little Peggy or Patty or Mary or … well, the list went on.

Anyway … last week I wrote a column for MinnPost on Al Franken’s most recent inquiries into the privacy raiding and trading practices of big tech companies. Namely, Clear Channel billboards and Oculus Rift. Here’s the post. (Please read it, or at least click and pretend you read it. MinnPost likes the traffic.) I won’t reiterate everything, except to say that the ability of these companies to grab, sort and sell damn near every bit of information about you is way … way … ahead of laws to prevent or control it. (And unlike Big Gubmint, feared by every paranoid Tea Party rancher feeding cattle for free on public land, these companies have a powerful profit incentive to play with your business.)

After a couple Franken staffers backgrounded me on what the Senator was up to and why, some effort was made to get Al on the phone for a few minutes. That never happened. So after a couple weeks, I said, “[Bleep] it. Here’s a handful of questions. Pretend it’s him talking and kick something back to me.”

Most of the Q&A is in the published MinnPost piece. But for some reason, what for me was the central question was edited out, probably because it was the one question to which Franken didn’t offer a response. (His answers to the other questions qualify as predictable boilerplate.)

The deleted section was this:

 

Finally, in terms of a kind of ‘grand umbrella’ piece of legislation, has anyone proposed a law establishing an individual’s full proprietary rights to their personal information? By that I mean establishing that every person must be given, A: Notification that his/her information has been collected. B: Must agree to allow it to be sold/transferred/traded. C: Is notified as to who it has been transferred, and D. Is offered even a micro-payment remuneration for each transfer?

On that one his office sad they were not aware of any such legislation.

The reason I asked it is that it seems to me, watching this astonishing proliferation of technologies Hoovering up personal information … and then trading and selling it … the time really has come for a kind of Constitutional amendment-like declaration of individual privacy rights. I mean, the situation – if controlling the outflow and exploitation of your personal information is important to you (and it isn’t to many, I accept that) — will only get worse, rapidly and exponentially.

Did you catch this on “60 Minutes” last night?

Had I got Franken on the phone, the follow up question to that last one, would have been asking him to speculate on political blowback from the tech industry, in the case of Silicon Valley giants, an enormous and reliable source of cash for Democrats.

It would be a demonstration of Lincoln-like political courage and suicide for Al Franken to purpose legislation requiring, say Google or Facebook, to directly notify everyone whose information they collect, get their explicit approval (i.e. “opt in”) and then remunerate each and every one of us every time their GPS logged us parked in front The Smitten Kitten and sold that information to Latex Fantasies of Hong Kong Limited.

The bottom line questions are really pretty simple: Do you own you? If not, why not? And if not, why should anyone else?

What Does “The Press” Know About Trump’s People, Really?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3It appears “the media” has decided we’ve achieved “Peak Trump”. Over the past week coverage of the most fascinating politico-cultural phenomenon of the last generation — at minimum — has turned resoundingly sour and nasty. Conventional wisdom is that this has everything to do with the most recent run of Trump loutishness, beginning with the, uh, unflattering photo of Ted Cruz’ wife, followed by the campaign manager’s “arrest” for yanking the arm of a female reporter and then the business about punishing women who have abortions.

God knows the guy deserves everything he’s getting. But since Trump’s been at this kind of stuff since last summer (and let’s not forget his birther phase), the sudden turn of the NY/DC press establishment is kind of startling. The operative journalist group think explanation is that they are of course merely reporting “what’s out there”, and at the root of what’s out there is Team Trump’s cloddish attitude toward women. I mean, the guy’s a pig! A misogynist! And apparently … We just noticed!

Another (very) possible explanation, because it coincides so neatly with the turn in tone you hear in everything from the evening news, to cable pundits, including FoxNews, is that the press establishment is reacting New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s recent “mea culpa” for the way he and the rest of his journalistic peer group have played “lapdog” for Trump’s ratings-goosing, ad revenue-spiking carnival act.

Said Kristof in his Sunday March 26 column:

“An analysis by The Times found that we in the news media gave Trump $1.9 billion in free publicity in this presidential cycle. That’s 190 times as much as he paid for in advertising, and it’s far more than any other candidate received. As my colleague Jim Rutenberg put it, some complain that ‘CNN has handed its schedule over to Mr. Trump’, and CNN had lots of company.”

It may be pure coincidence that the very week following Kristof’s self and peer flagellation the tide of coverage turned so resoundingly negative. But I suspect otherwise. It was the Times. It was a Sunday, and what Kristiof said was dead-on. Trump has been great for business. Full stop.

The counter to Kristof’s argument largely centered around the amount of Trump coverage that was “unfavorable”. The fistfights at rallies, the “mine’s bigger than yours” quality of GOP debates. All the crap. “We reported that bad stuff, too!” The problem with that defense is that a show biz creation like Trump truly does flourish in a world where all publicity is good publicity. (Shorthand: “All pub is good pub.”)

By another coincidence, last Tuesday I was talking with Chris Worthington, now the head of Minnesota Public Radio’s soon-to-premiere investigative unit. He of course had read Kristof’s piece and his takeaway was the part where Kristof says:

“We failed to take Trump seriously because of a third media failing: We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated. … Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.”

Fundamentally, says Worthington, the story of Trump is the story of his voters. Who they are and why they believe what they believe. There is something to that, if only that were the essence of the coverage.

But on the subject of guilt, Kristof was also guilty of being too polite. (He works at The Times, y’know.)

It’s true “middle class” journalists, and people like Kristof and the celebrity anchors on CNN, MSNBC and Fox are comfortably beyond “middle-class”, and don’t spend a lot of time interacting with the country’s economically distressed. But I’m not convinced economics are a primary motivating factor of Trump’s appeal. Oh sure, he rails on about “terrible trade deals” and jobs some U.S. company has shifted off to Mexico. But I suspect it’s much more his “us against them” theme that grabs and sustains enthusiasm for his cause, and that doesn’t have all that much to do with anyone’s cash on hand, really.

More to the point, besides being busy and operating in a competitive business environment where group think powerfully influences editorial decision making, it’s the rare professional journalist who has a lot of spare time to listen to and dig deeper into the resentments of people who, as I’ve said before, don’t have reason to be complaining as much as they do. A single mom living on welfare? Sure. A laid off coal miner with black lung? Of course. A 40 year-old, high-school educated white guy driving a two year-old pickup, regularly hunting and drinking with his buddies? Not so much.

Traditional media makes regular, good faith effort to report on and demonstrate sympathy for the travails of people living under obvious social and economic oppression. What they have a harder time explaining — much less implicitly sympathizing with — is the plight of a fairly large chunk of the American population that believes it is entitled to more than it has ever made an effort to earn.

Very ironically, two of the best and most lacerating takes on this population have come from the conservative end of the spectrum.

Here’s Kevin Williamson in The National Review. Sample quote: “Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget [conservative hero Edmund] Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.” Or, put another way, Trump’s blame-placing people are their own worst enemy.

Then, over at The Weekly Standard, in a piece on GOP insider’s insider Mike Murphy, writer Matt LaBash says, “I’d like secure borders, more tightly controlled immigration, and would love to see manufacturing jobs come back as much as the next guy. But what about our own culpability in the nation’s decline? The technologies we so ravenously consume as our jobs get automated or algorithmed out of existence. We pretend as though character doesn’t count, then wonder why we get so many characters. We buy cut-rate Chinese goods at Walmart, or better still, on Amazon Prime, so we don’t have to put down the Doritos bag and budge from our easy-chair rage-stations as our passions get serially inflamed by Sean Hannity telling us how great we are and how hard we have it. Our consumption of everything seems to be increasing — of carbs, meth, anger-stoking shoutfests — even as our producers seem to be disappearing. Maybe we have unimpressive politicians because they’re our representatives, and we’ve become grossly unimpressive ourselves.”

Republican insiders specialize in sleight-of-hand class strategies that rarely if ever benefit the Doritos-munching rubes who never the less vote for their candidates. But “the media” which is now portending Trump’s demise is generally too polite to explore the reality these guys have been dealing with.

Revenge on the Revenge of the “Unmoored”

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Prior to Tuesday night’s results, which all but officially certified a Donald Trump v. Hillary Clinton smackfest  … for the next seven and a half months … the news item I found most heartening was the anarchist/prankster/hacker group Anonymous announcing it would be devoting its full energy to derailing The Trump Express, a mission it described in terms fever-eyed missionaries used to use for smoting the Prince of Darkness.

“We have been watching you for a long time and what we’ve seen is deeply disturbing. You don’t stand for anything but your personal greed and power. This is a call to arms. Shut down his websites, research and expose what he doesn’t want the public to know. We need you to dismantle his campaign and sabotage his brand.”

The thing of it is, the Anonymous folks will not be alone. Far, far from it. Given the relentless, exponential growth of social media, with hundreds of new, mocking, guerrilla videos being posted every day, any two characters running for president in 2016 would be targets for an unprecedented bombardment of ridicule. But with Trump, a Twitter-addicted, internet-trolling, infomercial-like charlatan taking control of … The Party of Lincoln … we are about to witness an astonishing convulsion of high(er) tech sabotage and satirical mockery.

The atmosphere, with a candidate as ludicrous (and dangerous) as Trump has never — ever — been so ripe for an open competition of can-you-top-this pranks, righteously dirty tricks and street theater. It is already well beyond anything that we could have imagined nine months ago, when we were convinced this was going to be yet another dusty, deadly dull Bush v. Clinton affair. And, as the treacly old song goes, “We’ve only just begun.”

So … I want to be on record saying how genuinely wonderful and entirely appropriate all this is going to be.

Trump likes to say he’s shaking up the game, and he is. He has. But, [full Trump voice here], I absolutely guarantee you, he is not prepared for the cosmic bombardment of derision that will rain down on him from now until election day.

The number of low-information authoritarians throwing themselves at his feet seems impressive in the current GOP primary vacuum. But those “angry” folks are neither a majority or among the country’s shall we say most facile wits. Even Trump himself, for all his show biz theatrics, strikes me as fundamentally literal-minded, with a very limited feel or patience for satire, especially at his expense, especially when it comes in the form of a million daggers puncturing his phoniness and bigotry.

One of this country’s most reassuring resources is our vast, fathomless pool of pomposity-mocking skeptics, professional comedians, satirists now multiplied by an uncharted universe of amateur snarks and miscreants; each of them eager and capable of claiming 15 minutes of fame by sticking the day’s most viral knife in a character — The Donald — who is an absurdist comic’s wet dream.

This assault is already well underway, but will explode now that Trump is a 99% certainty. The barrage — I guarantee — will also make collateral damage of Trump’s brawling, chanting, sucker-punching, saluting masses. They may be proud now of their association with a “movement” that has lifted up such a “strong leader”. But they too are about to endure/suffer an intensity of social shaming and disapprobation far beyond anything they’ve experienced before, no matter how badly they think they’ve already been victimized by all those “others” Trump has them rallying against.

Within a very short time their open support of Donald Trump will be the cultural equivalent of scrawling, “Kick Me, I’m a Racist Fool” on their own backs.

In the long run, this relentless shaming and ridiculing of a large chunk of people who already feel “unmoored” from fast-evolving modern society, (to use a trendy word), probably won’t go over so well. Their likely response to being constantly publicly ridiculed will be more anger, not less. It’s not hard to imagine more bare-knuckled, physical eruptions of the culture wars Republicans have been cultivating for the last quarter century.

But every haymaker-flailing goon in a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap becomes instant fodder for a 1000 comedy riffs, skits and viral videos.

Bottom line, the “unmoored” are unmoored for a reason. The “whys” and “hows” of their perceived mistreatment may be varied, but the basic fact remains they haven’t adapted to the world they’re living in. The 21st century simply moves faster and thinks faster than they do. They are people who habitually misjudge what is and isn’t in their best interests. And for that there are always social consequences … blowback that in this case will only get worse the more overt they get about who they’ve foolishly put their faith in this time around.

Along with The Donald they are about to experience a hellfire of ridicule and scorn beyond anything they thought possible.

The Donald’s Primitive Appeal

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3With Trump-mania continuing to build, a lot of time and energy is going in to trying to understand why. Not among his most enthusiastic supporters, of course. Those folks, the ones proudly and completely without irony offering Nuremberg-like salutes pledging fealty to The Donald, seem to be pre-introspection. In their own odd way they’re hippie-like in the “If it feels good, do it” approach to tribal leadership.

Elsewhere though there’s plenty of cogent analysis of Trump’s basic, and I do mean “basic”, appeal. One of the best I’ve read is this piece by Amanda Taub on Vox a week or so back. (Hat tip to PM for recommending it.)

Taub writes about fresh research on the appeal of authoritarian personalities by several teams of socio-psychologists, serious professionals building on numerous previous studies that established the significantly greater, almost instinctive respect conservatives have for authority — group consensus, workplace bosses, police, the military, cultural and government leaders in general — than liberals.

Or as Taub writes, “ … a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.”

And, “Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians’ fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.”

The problem with most previous surveys is that they began in an unambiguously political context which likely led interviewees to shade their responses so to appear more or less authoritarian-minded, depending on how they felt they might be judged. More to the point, it was hard to get an honest answer to questions like, “Do you fear Muslims?”

The beauty — the elegance — of these new tests, and some are based on work began 25 years ago but largely ignored until recently, is the way scientists masked the intent of the survey by asking subjects about their philosophy of … parenting.

Sample questions:

  1. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders?
  2. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
  3. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
  4. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?

As the article lays it out, the parenting line of questioning proved far more accurate in identifying people with latent authoritarian impulses — the desire to be protected, guided and feel part of a conforming mass. Beyond that the correlation with Trump’s devotees, who are clearly something beyond traditional authoritarian-minded conservatives, was even more startling.

“The third insight came from [Vanderbilt professor Marc] Hetherington and American University professor Elizabeth Suhay, who found that when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians.

But Hetherington and Suhay found a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.

Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.”

It’s a long read, but I think a valuable one for anyone trying to comprehend the appalling spectacle we’re all watching.

By coincidence I’ve been reading “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari, a reexamination of biological and social evolution, very much rooted in primitive concepts of personal safety, tribal unity, resistance to change and suspicion of “others”. The takeaway for me, not that it offers any great consolation for the sight of thousands of well-protected, reasonably prosperous Americans pledging fealty to a TV celebrity, is that the evolutionary process of survival of the fittest — in this case the success of those best able to manage irrational fear — is at minimum, a process thousands of years from completion.

The two-to-five thousand years of global-scale human interaction doesn’t even yet amount to a blink of the evolutionary eye. While the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and today’s cyber revolution have/are forcing radical adaptations (i.e. evolution) on us sapiens, slowly diminishing our primitive fears of any/every new tribe intruding on our hunting ground, there’s no good reason to believe we aren’t still hundreds-to-thousands of years away from the demise of the last over-active, primordial amygdala.

As I say, there’s no great comfort in considering this thesis. But in the face of something as primitive as Donald Trump any kind of explanation helps.

You’re Mad as Hell. I’m Happy for You.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Every family has its classic stories. Legendary face plants and screw ups. Moments of never-to-be-lived down buffoonery. Hell, recalling such things is practically what families are for. Everyone has leverage on everyone else. It isn’t possible for anyone to stay all high and mighty for longer than it takes a spouse, a sibling or a child to “remember that time when you … .”

So … .

Quick story: A few years ago, after a hiking trip, I’m checking in for a flight at the Phoenix airport. Eyeing my backpack the ticket agent asks, “Do you have any gas canisters in there? Anything flammable?”  No, I tell her, thinking to myself, “How much of a rube do I look like? Gas canisters. Right.  Let’s go, Toots. Chop, chop. I’ve got better things to do than stand here answering your official list of stupid questions.”

“Anything that has been used with gas?”

“What? What do you mean, ‘used with gas’?”

“Like a stove, a camping stove.”

“Well, yeah. But there’s no gas.”

“You’ll have to take it out. It can’t be in checked luggage.”

“There’s no gas. It’s just a piece of metal you screw into canisters. But there are no gas canisters.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll have to remove it.”

With that my demeanor, uh, deteriorated … rapidly. “Removing” the screw-in “stove” meant unpacking the entire backpack right there on the floor in front of the counter, clogging the aisle and slowing down the 20-30 people behind me. Pretty soon there are empty water bottles, metal cook kits, spoons, dirty socks and underwear heaped on the terminal floor as I drilled down to the stove.

Finally I come up with the thing. A piece of inert metal the size of a manual can opener. I hand it to her, and with as much snot as I could lay on a line say, “Here you go. No gas. No canister. No nothing. It’s a piece of metal.”

She holds it to her nose and announces, “I can smell gas. This can’t fly. You’ll either have to forfeit it or mail it back to yourself. [For $25].”

Without belaboring a lot of other not exactly mature details, pretty soon — because I know my rights, dammit! — I’m demanding her name, her superior’s name, the airport commissioner’s name and stopping juuuuuust short of dropping a few highly politically incorrect stupid/corporate drone epithets on her.

She doesn’t budge. But she does however press the button for security, which shows up in the form of three burly guys on bikes, who tell — not ask — me to gathering my belongings and step out of line.

Off to one side the oldest of three, a muscular ex-military guy looks me in the eye and says, “I’m going to need you to calm down.”

Truth be told, he alone could have taken me. But with the two younger dudes, a physical defense of my precious Constitutional liberties — it’s in there somewhere: “Thou shalt not be jacked around by [bleeping] dimwits” – was not an option.

But I do whip out the gas-less, canister-less piece of metal and waggle it in his face.

“You know what this is?”

“Yeah, it’s a camping stove. One of those screw-in things.”

“Right. And there’s no gas here is there?”

“No.”

“So what in the [bleep] is the logic of this?”

He pauses, looks at the two younger dudes, then over his shoulder at Nurse Diesel behind the counter, leans in to me and says, ‘There is no logic to this. But that doesn’t mean this could not end up being a very bad day for you if you don’t settle down’.”

This is just a very long set-up to an observation (okay, a complaint) about our popular culture of outrage. Specifically, what a misplaced, counter-productive, self-pitying waste of energy it is, especially for middle-class Americans who by any measure have things pretty damned good these days.

A lot of Donald Trump’s appeal is believed to be rooted in the “rage” and “anger” felt by white Americans who feel marginalized by government, the media and the super rich (other than Donald Trump, of course.) But on closer inspection most of these people are getting along fine or at least well enough that they shouldn’t be nearly as whipped up and pissed off as they say they are. Not many of them are homeless, or getting stopped and gunned down by the cops for broken tail lights. But being “mad as hell” is a great act. It feels cathartic. It attracts attention and pity for their plight, which as all sorts of surveys are showing, is really rooted in crudely filtered resentments of … people in far worse predicaments than they are.

It’s nuts. But in a cultural moment when “outrage” is a standard commodity for sale on reality TV shows, political pundit panels and talk radio, getting in on the act in your own personal way seems like a serious and (very ironically) sophisticated thing to do. “Hey! Look at me! Look at how pissed I am! You should take me seriously! Hell, I should be on TV!”

These are the people I’ll charitably describe as the knuckleheads. The Trumpists, feeling their moment in the raging sun. But theatrical rage is also evident, and arguably even more misplaced among today’s liberals and progressives.

I’ve long had a pet theory built around the notion of “Stress as status”. People, usually in a business environment, who exaggerate and wrap themselves in the stress and tension of their job as a way to A: Extract pity from others, and B: Legitimize their emotional responses to routine workplace disagreements. The more stress you demonstrate, the more serious a person you are.

Liberals at this moment have good reason to be concerned about Donald Trump and his swelling “movement idiocracy”. It is phenomenal. But for the time being it is contained within a Republican party that has been pandering to racial and class resentments since 1968 and is now getting it’s face blow-torched off by the inmates. (It really does remind me of a prison riot.)

By the starkest contrast, the Hillary-Bernie “fight” has been as civil and responsible and mature as anything you’d want to teach the kids in a high school government class. Trump may very well win the nomination. But who can imagine Team Clinton being as feckless and clueless about demolishing Trump as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio? And the reaction of blacks, Hispanics, women and other rational adults to seven months of Trump’s act? Please.

Point being, there is only suspect status in rage. Mainly, people just adjust and keep their distance from you. In a glutted market for anger, rage is actually kind of boring. It’s a tired cliche. Composure is a more salable long-term product.

And I say that as the guy who would have been a lot better off giving the Phoenix ticket agent one of my patented long, silent, dismissive stares and handing over the camp stove, than throwing an indignant scene.

So as the man said, “I’m going to need you to calm down.”

BTW: The punch line to the Phoenix story comes after I walk across the terminal to some office and lay out $25 to mail the $25 gizmo to Minnesota. As the clerk rings up the charge I ask, “Just out of curiosity, how is this thing getting back to me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, does it go on some super secure flight or something, you know like in a lead box?”

“No man, it just goes with the regular mail on the plane.”

“You mean like the same plane I’m going on?”

“Yeah, probably. That’s what they do.”

P.S.  Yeah, it’s a new mug shot. December in Furnace Creek.

There’s Only One Connection Between Bernie’s People and Trump’s People

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Brian_LambertNew Hampshire is now in the past and if we agree on nothing else, let’s settle this: Bernie Sanders’ people and Donald Trump’s people have nothing in common … nothing that is other than the realization that we’re all chumps in an epic con game.

Beyond that, in terms of what they really understand about The Big Con and what actually has to be done to pull the plug on it, we’re talking a gulf as vast as, oh I don’t know, the difference between an episode of “Duck Dynasty” and a “Frontline” documentary.

I’ve watched way too much punditry over the past week, yesterday and last night in particular. And amid the flood of exit-polling data and the sage analyses of anchor desks groaning with marvelously well-remunerated players of the DC-media establishment, I was amazed at how little discussion there was of a key statistic that keeps leaping out at me. Namely, the education level of Trump’s core supporters and how he dominates the field among people with a high school diploma or less.

Says ABC: “Voters who haven’t gone beyond high school were Trump’s best group by education; he won 45 percent of their votes. His support fell as education increased, to 21 percent among voters with a post-graduate education – still highly competitive even in that group.”

That single fact goes a long ways to explaining the much more frequently discussed 66% of Republicans who like The Donald’s idea of closing the borders to all Muslims, which is linked to other gob-smacking numbers like the 60% of Republicans who think Obama is a Muslim and not an actual citizen, not to mention Trumpists’ irrational level of fear of rampaging terrorists. For whatever the reason, the pundit class chooses not to make so much of that startling 45% number, much less dwell on it as they should.

No doubt they’re terrified at the thought of calling Trump’s people “stupid”. I mean what would The Donald say about that in his next live call-in interview … after his last call-in interview 15 minutes earlier? Moreover, The Donald’s people watch a lot of TV, and what TV performer dares call their viewers “stupid”.

The thing is there’s a more nuanced and interesting discussion to be had than just saying, “Trump’s voters are dolts”. To be sure they are unsophisticated and largely ignorant of critical facets of reality, but drooling morons? No. What they seem to me is a very large chunk of the American population that has never paid a lot of attention to why things are the way they are, much less who is responsible for making it that way, and — this is the part that Democrats are going to have understand and twist to their advantage if Trump makes it to November — this is a group of rare-to-never voters who mainly consume information that comes saturated with entertainment value. They need sugary frosting on everything.

I suspect these are the kids we all remember from high school, the ones who only perked up in class when something was funny, or easy. The stuff that was “boring”? Not so much. (I should know. That was me in Algebra.) Which of course goes a long ways to explaining their predicament in life today. Honest? Most likely. Hard-working? I don’t doubt it. Good neighbors? Yeah sure, friendly enough. But disciplined enough to exercise critical thinking in their own best interests? No way.

Everyone has noted that Trump’s people carry no white-hot ideological torches. All that standard Republican blather about religion and “Godliness” and “My Lord above”? It’s a big “whatever” to them. Having been “educated” primarily through pop culture, and by that I mean commercial radio and TV, they have developed an appetite, an addiction you might say, to the entertaining, politically incorrect ear candy spouted by celebrities and stars. People who are bona fide success stories, omnipresent larger than life characters who never fail to dominate their environment and enemies.

The fact that show biz acts like Rush Limbaugh and Trump “win” by a carefully calculated design that avoids genuine confrontation, isn’t something this audience notices particularly. The bigger point is that these guys talk like winners and live like winners. (They can buy all the cool stuff advertised on TV). Plus, they have mastered the art of using a vernacular this particular audience understands.

And this audience understand it because it is essentially the same language they use. And that’s because … to keep the perpetual wheel turning … they picked it up from pop culture.

So when Trump gets up in front of an auditorium of the faithful and calls Ted Cruz a “pussy”, the crowd howls with delight. Sheeeeeit! It’s like night out watching a stand-up comic at the nearest casino. And the guy’s a billionaire!

Weirdly, all this seems “authentic” to the Trump faithful. But I doubt the notion of authenticity is tied so much to Trump personally as it is that what he’s saying and the way he is saying it sounds so familiar to them. I mean, it’s their grievances and grudges blasting back at them … in their own words, from the mouth of a super rich, super-famous star. It’s a long-sought confirmation that while they’ve been dealt a shitty hand, they’ve been right all along.

In no way though does this describe the Sanders crowd. Yes, they too smell a grand, grotesque con. But they see, as the Trumpists don’t, the symbiotic connection between the conniving elite and the hapless chumps who routinely vote to keep them in power, sometimes by not voting at all.

Sanders’ authenticity on the other hand is, well, “authentic” and as much about him as a person as his message. In terms of critical thinking in pursuit of their best interests, Sanders’ people correctly assess The Bern as honorable. There is, as I’ve said before, a lot of misty-eyed idealism about what President Bernie could actually accomplish in a Quixotic fight against Wall St., UnitedHealth, Pfizer and on and on. But his appeal to his followers has nothing to do with pandering to chronically low levels of accurate information.

All that said, I repeat something from a few posts back. Roughly 48% of eligible voters never bother to show up on election day. That describes a big chunk of the crowd hooting and howling for Trump right now. If he gets 10% of them to vote in November we’ve got serious problems.

Whoa! An actual debate.

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Brian_LambertWell, that was actually interesting. And not because it was a night filled with hysteria and off-the-leash narcissism.

In case we’ve forgotten what a “substantive debate” sounds like, Bernie v. Hillary Thursday night in New Hampshire was a refreshing reminder. Two people arguing stuff that matters … most … right now … and not trying to out hyper-ventilate the other guy in imagining bloodthirsty, color-other-than-white terrorists gunning us down in our pickups on our way to Wednesday night prayer service.

Predictably, the morning after pundits are seizing on Hillary’s “artful smear” line against Bernie, by which she was plainly trying to coax him into saying directly that she’s taken bribes from Wall St. The line didn’t play well. Sanders is simply too honorable and too defiant (some might say “courageous”) in his attack on the country’s most dominant minority (the super-super wealthy) for a shot like that to land with the feel of validity and with any sticking power, especially from Hillary Clinton. I seriously doubt she’ll go there again.

And not because her kissing-cousins relationship with Goldman, Sachs and the rest of the .1% mob will go away … ever. But because Clinton, as she demonstrated again last night, both adapts well to the combat of politics and has plenty of fight in her. And I say that as two good things. The Clintons are unrivaled in their facility with the machinery of the political game, which is one reason Bubba not only swatted back the Gingrich Revolution in ’94-’95, but survived impeachment and left office with an approval rating higher than dottering St. Ronnie.

I keep imagining what the first Clinton years might have been like if they knew as much about neutralizing Republican cynicism as they do now and had no interest in compliant interns.

Someone was saying this morning that the Sanders phenomena is much more about the message than Bernie himself, and that sounds right. You could swap Bernie out with anyone saying the same thing and be in pretty much the same level of contention. But it helps that Ol’ Bern comes off simultaneously as fair-minded and mightily pissed-off.

Certainly until the general election, Hillary will be on serious defensive for her “establishment” (i.e. there’s no way in hell you can call this “progressive”) pas de deux with our 21st-century robber barons. (And this new crew gives guys like Andrew Carnegie and J.D. Rockefeller a bad name). That’s her punishment. The hope has to be that she is aware of how much she has to prove she has not been bought off, as so many suspect.

I thought Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow, who did a very good job with both the line and quality of questions and their willingness to play back and let Bernie and Hillary have at it, missed at least one juicy follow-up.

After Bernie reiterated his familiar charge that Wall St. today — still paying off billions in fines for fraudulent behavior — is really, let’s call it what it is, a massive on-going systematic fraud, Todd and Maddow should have turned to Hillary and asked, “Madam Secretary do you agree that Wall St. as it functions today is a systematic fraud?”

Personally, I would have gone a step further and asked, “Madam Secretary, do you believe JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon should be indicted for fraud?” But that’s just me.

Todd, and certainly Maddow, might have also pursued a line of questioning along these lines: “Senator Sanders, your essential message, talking of a revolution, has demonstrated substantial appeal. But you seem to gloss over the steadfast opposition the current Republican majority has to literally everything a Democratic president proposes, and that includes minor policy shifts they themselves have previously championed. Aren’t you showing a rather blithe disregard for the size and virulence of the opposition to the enormous and fundamental changes you’re proposing, to the banking and health insurance industry in particular? Your reluctance to lay out how, with minorities in both houses, your plans could survive such a torrent of opposition leaves many people deeply concerned you have not fully accepted the probability of that scenario.”

I’m still waiting for a convincing answer from Bernie on that one.

Still, by way of stark contrast, the debate’s focus on financial corruption and that disease’s impact on middle-class Americans was like sucking in a chestful of pure oxygen after the relentless freak-outs and idiocy of the Republican brawls. Everyone’s sense of real-time security will improve immeasurably when we get a license-to-indict grip on our supremely entitled class.

Bernie’s limitations vis a vis Hillary though were dramatically apparent when the topic turned to foreign policy, a range of issues pretty much on the periphery of his appeal. There was no comparison. There’s simply no one in this race or in any race since Bush 41 who rivals Clinton on first-hand understanding of who’s who in the world and how to handle the best and worst players. The question of course remains, facing the next international crisis, does she go with the option that is best or Halliburton et al, or follow Barack Obama’s much less trigger happy strategies?

(The crowd selling Clinton as an inveterate war-monger, primarily for her Iraq invasion vote, is engaging in its own brand of hysteria.)

Not being a believer in perfect candidates, Thursday’s debate was a satisfying confrontation of two sets of valuable virtues and vices, aspirational and idealistic vs. pragmatic and battlefield savvy.

Bernie v. Reality

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterFor the past week the trending buzzword for Bernie Sanders has been “reality”. As in: “Is Bernie out of touch with reality?” “Bernie’s ability to win is not connected to reality.” And, “Revolution in 2016 America is not a concept rooted in reality.”

If he weren’t about to throw a serious scare into Hillary Clinton, who is sort of Reality-Plus, or Reality-Minus, depending on your enthusiasm for her, no one would bother to think too long about Bernie Sanders setting up as Our Guy. I mean, Bernie as the one sent out to do battle with all the massed forces of the Wall St. kleptocracy, Big Pharma, UnitedHealth and all the other richer-than-Croesus “managed care insurers”? Not to mention chilling out every panicked authoritarian convinced “total war” with someone now is the only way to keep rabid jihadis from stepping off the 7 bus and cutting all our heads off. Until recently not too many of us actually stopped and considered Bernie Sanders being that guy.

Like a lot of the people I hang around with, I get a big smile on my face whenever I hear Bernie laying into the 1%, which as he is quick to point out is really the .1%.

“[Bleeping]-A right, Bern!”, I yell back at the TV, scaring the dog.

In terms of isolating and drawing big, bold neon-colored circles around the fundamental issues, no one comes close to Bernie. He’s absolutely right. Income inequality in the USA is off the charts, at least for an alleged democracy. The system is rigged. Big money has bought off not just Congress but most of the conglomerate media as well, to the point that at this moment, there is, truly and genuinely, no effective resistance or counter-narrative to the most affluent forces in the country accumulating even greater control over our supposedly free markets, government and culture.

Other than the issue of how to best achieve effective gun control, which has to be a federal system, I don’t really disagree with Bernie on anything. Medicare for all. Check. Free tuition for higher education. Check. And on and on.

My problem — my “reality” dilemma — is that I haven’t believed in the one-man revolution theory in a long, long time. Every empirical piece of data you can gather and pretty much every historical touchstone you can summon tells us it It is a physical, sociological, intellectual impossibility for one man (or woman) to make sweeping, radical, revolutionary change in the way the United States does business.

Can one person crank the rudder another 5 or 6 points starboard or port? Maybe. But even that’s easier if it’s a conservative “trimming big government” and cutting taxes for big donors than a Democratic Socialist handing the fat cats a big new tax bill and adding to the authority of government.

But come on. Pulling the control, the profits, the share-holder value out from under UnitedHealth and Cigna and the others? Essentially dismantling them? And not just “breaking up the big banks” but larding them with serious levels of unavoidable taxation to fund free-tuition and infrastructure repair? Am I really supposed to wonder if one guy, and in this case a cranky 74 year-old, can pull this off in four years? A 180-degree financial revolution? In the United States as it is today, if it took less than 100 years without a counter-revolutionary firestorm it be would be a miracle.

I just don’t see it. I wish I did. But I don’t. Life doesn’t work that way. It never has. Anywhere.

The “primal forces of nature”, as Mr. Jensen explained to Howard Beale in “Network” are simply so big, so vastly more influential and, as public-companies, so deeply integrated into middle-class dreams for an RV and a few winters in Florida, that President Bernie Sanders would first have to have a Congress as progressive as he is to achieve even his most modest proposal, like improving veterans health care or some small beer like that.

And that’s the key to “Bernie reality.” As it is currently elected and convened, Congress has one overriding goal, and that is to hustle and shill for enough money to stay in office. Anything it ever does for middle class voters is strictly a happy, residual accident. Bernie’s entirely admirable progressive agenda, his fervid revolutionary dream, requires that that equally progressive Congress to be there when he arrives, and that ain’t going to happen. Citizens United and gerrymandering are years if not decades away from being gutted and replaced with something, you know, democratic.

Further, many of the people most eager for Bernie’s revolution have a bad habit of taking Congressional elections off. They get whipped up every eight to twelve years, and then fade off when the one-man revolution fails to single-handedly dethrone the royal families in the first couple weeks. And this crowd isn’t all dewy-eyed college kids. It was striking to listen to adults my age grumbling and throwing up their hands over Barack Obama within a year of his first election. The naivete, from allegedly intelligent adults, that one guy could swiftly transform everything they despised into gems of unblemished purity was startling to behold.

Startling, but utterly familiar to any student of human nature.

So what then? Cautious, triangulating, incremental Hillary Clinton?

Well, I gotta tell ya, when you look at Mitch McConnell controlling the Senate and Tea Party holding the House hostage and the banks and corporations controlling controlling all of the above, not to mention the banks and corporations controlling most every other Democrat too, (including Clinton), there’s something to be said for a couple more rounds of Obama-style pragmatism. Something to be said for someone who is (way) smarter than the raving Tea Party lunatics and wily enough about how the game works to balance the feudal greed of JP Morgan Chase, K Street and UnitedHealth with the goals of progressives, labor, women and minorities.

The reality of Bernie’s revolution is pitched warfare, which is fine and righteous and noble, but a lot better idea when you have a good chance of victory.

I wish it were different. But right now Bernie doesn’t have enough firepower on the front line.

When Sarah Met Donald. The Transcript.

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterBy sheer good fortune we have been able to obtain a transcript of Donald Trump and Sarah Palin in an Iowa hotel suite prepping for her endorsement speech a couple days ago. Some editing has been required.

Trump: Sarah! Hello! Welcome! You’re looking fabulous, just terrific. Why is at all the smartest women are also the best looking?

Palin: Well thanks, thank you. (Sound of cheek kissing.) I’m just so thrilled and ready to you know fight and talk and get out there and say all the stuff that …  .

Trump: Yeah. Terrific. And I like the shoes by the way. Jimmy Choo, am I right? Melania wears Jimmy Choo. He’s the best. Classiest, smartest designer out there. Knows what women want. Like me. I have a deal for his stores in all my best buildings. They’re all the best, obviously, my buildings. But some don’t have stores … .

Palin: You know, I don’t know if now is the right time, but I was going to ask you, I might need, you know, to spiff up my look a little if we’re going to be out there and on TV a lot. We will be on a lot, right? The McCain people, they were a lot of fuddy duddies as you know, but  … .

Trump: They were losers, just say it. Come on! It’s you and me. Losers. Those people understood nothing about winning. Nothing. If they flipped a coin a hundred times they’d lose a hundred times. Pathetic. Really pathetic.

Palin: Oh fer sure, fer sure. And they never listened to me. I told them, “Go big! Go bigger! Don’t be such a bunch of scaredy cats. Strut your stuff. A wink and a wiggle, you know?” Heck almighty, I learned that covering hockey on Alaska TV. There’s a reason they call it show biz, am I right?

Trump: (Chuckling). When you’re right, you’re right. And I only put people on my team who are right. All the time. If they’re wrong they’re gone. I don’t apologize for that.

Palin: But what I was going to say is McCain’s people … .

Trump: Losers … .

Palin: Fer sure. But they put aside a little, you know, a little allowance to freshen up my look. Just a little. Not much. Because, you know, the people who come out to see me expect to see something other than dumb-o, baggy pantsuits and tacky old lady jewelry. Democrat looking … .

Trump: We’ll see what we can do. I know some people at Lord & Taylor … .

Palin: Bergdorf Goodman?

Trump: We’ll fix it. This is first class, all the way. It’s the only way. Second class might as well be steerage. I expect my people to look like winners. But listen, I’ve got TV thing with “Fox & Friends” here in about 15 minutes, so let’s just get a taste of what you’re going to say at the “reveal” today, OK?

Palin: Okey dokey. Todd and I put something together on the plane coming over here. (Sound of paper crinkling.) I thought I’d open with … .

Trump: Listen, Sarah. I think you’re terrific. You know that. You and I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t. I only bring in terrific people.

Palin: The terrificest!

Trump: Right. But the thing is, we don’t do, you know, speeches. TelePrompter stuff.

Palin: Like our Hopey Changer in Chief … .

Trump: Exactly. The crowds coming to see me, and I get the biggest crowds. We could rent football stadiums and I’d still be turning people away. Except it’s too cold out here today so we’re indoors. But they like it spontaneous, from the soul. People don’t think of me as a big soul guy, but I’m the biggest. I saw a poll just the other day … .

Palin: So … no speech?

Trump: No, no. But just say it. Get up there and do your thing. Go, what is it you say you go again?

Palin: “Go again”? Oh, you mean rogue? Go roguey?

Trump: Right. Rogue. We’re not doing the same old thing. There’s no win in same old same old. Look at my numbers. They never go down. Only up. I do an hour, just telling people what I know.

Palin: Like how His Majesty the  Obama-issar has messed everything up so bad.

Trump: Exactly. Who needs a speech? Everything’s a mess, a total disaster. That’s what people want to hear. A complete disaster. Nothing but losing. Terrible stuff everywhere. Killers. Thieves. So, and I have to get a little makeup on before this Fox thing, so just give me some of that rogue stuff and I’ll give you a little feedback. You’ll be great. Don’t worry about it.

Palin: Who does your hair? I think I need a cut and blow out … .

Trump: So hit me with it. Give me your best shot.

Palin: (Sound of standing up.) OK. Just hear me roar? Right?

Trump: Like the baddest lion on the Serengeti.

Palin: Oh, I love Italy. Todd and I went there on a cruise one time. I had a linguini … .

Trump: Let it fly. Be the best you you’ve ever been.

Palin: OK. So this is after I come out and we do the little kissy huggy thing and everyone stops all their clapping and cheering and applauding stuff, OK?

Trump: Great.

Palin: OK … . (Deep breath.) Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Wow! It just so terrific and awesome to be back here with you. I love South Carolina … .

Trump: Iowa.

Palin: Oh, sorry. Iowa! The other one had the flag thingie, right?

Trump: Right.

Palin: OK, so all the cheering stops and I start by saying … let’s see. Go strong right from the getty-go, right?

Trump: Right. You’ll be great. Just let it fly. Right from the gut.

Palin: Right. (Another deep breath.) So Iowa, are you ready to put a chill, a chill as cold and icey as the weather outside, so cold your snow machine doesn’t start on the first try, into the snobby, elitey people who sit there in their comfortable chairs, which are so high up in big cities, way way far away from a Sam’s Club where they’re too good to be seen shopping for things you like to shop for, for your family, which you’re trying to protect from the ISIS’s terrorists who want to cut off your children’s heads but can’t as long you still have the right to be a militia for yourself and your family with the guns you have, which it says right there in the Constitution you have a right to buy and own, without you know, any fancy-word talker that used to be an organizer of, you know, communities in Chicago, where people are always being shot with guns that they wouldn’t have shot if you had guns to shoot back at them back first?

Because I am! And Mr. Trump, Donald, here is too, because we know what you want. Because we are just like you specially when I go outside my house in Alaska, where I hunt a lot to protect my family, for moose that aren’t “endangered” like the scaredy-cats in Washington and in the New York Times are always saying, but are lots and lots everywhere you see, and which I see from the helicopter when me and my beautiful, at least I think he’s beautiful, husband Todd, go out and look at the beautiful country that is being taken from us, with all our rights, by the same people who made you pay for Obamacare with its death squads that tell you when the government says you have to die and when you can’t get pills for whatever is your problem, which is a lot of things after eight years of hopei-ness and changei-ness, especially how, you know, when it means you can’t drill baby drill on the land your forefathers made and the government, this elitey government in Washington but that is really all from Chicago, where gangsters shoot decent people all the time, says you can’t graze on even though you live right next to it and … .

Trump: Uh, OK. Good. I like it. I would say maybe slow down just a little. A little pause to let it sink in a bit. I do it on “The Apprentice” all the time. Pause for effect. It makes the audience, and mine was yuge by the way, all the time, NBC begged me to stay, it makes them eager to hear what you say next. They’re hanging on that next line. And, also, even though this is Iowa, which is not, you know, down South, give it a little Southern kick, something that’ll tease the ear just a bit when the media, which always plays everything I say, runs this in Georgia and places like that. Southern fried. Paula Deen. Just a little. Try it.

Palin: Southern?

Trump: Just a little, and churchy, too. You know, Jesus this, Jesus that. The Bible. Old time religion. Just a little. For flavor. But be hip. Young and Southern.

Palin: Okey. I can do that. (Another breath.) And what is also true even though y’all never hear those other folks, who aren’t like you or me or the good old boys that ride their snow machines with Todd and do all that huntin’ on Sundays after church but before the big games come on is that the Bible, what the Great Creator up there even farther north than Alaska has always said, even back before Hollywood started fillin’ our kids minds with all that loosey goosey talk about sex and hippy hoppy stuff is that you got to have codes, codes like Jesus had and we all have but the media doesn’t have because Jesus is a dirty word to them when they’re eating their expensive bagels on top of the Empire Building looking down on all of us like they do, like they don’t want to get their fingers dirty eating good old home-cooked chicken, that has been fried and tastes really good if you have to get up early and protect your family for a living the way the Lord said in the Bible, in the Book of Leviciousness, where if they poke you in the eye, like ISIS, you poke them in the eye, too. Maybe even poke them out.

Voice off: Mr. Trump Fox is ready for you.

Trump: Listen, I think you’ve got it, Sarah. This is terrific stuff. Really terrific. See if you can work in something about pickup trucks and dogs, like you did with McCain, and we’re good to go. Did I tell you you look great? I don’t know how you do it. But all my people look great. I only hire people who look the best. The best. The best people look great. Its not difficult. Why some people can’t I don’t understand. And it’s the only thing I don’t understand. But thanks for coming in. These Fox people need me. It’s a favor I do them. They’d have no ratings if it weren’t for me. So, see you at the rally, OK?

Palin: Gee thanks, Donald.

(Sound of Trump moving away).

Palin: Could you call your people at Bergdorf … ?