Why Trump Can Win it All, and I Mean “All”

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterI missed the Hillary and Bernie show last night, partly because I am still fighting off the depression of last Thursday’s “No, I Am More Apocalyptic Than Thou” Republican shoot out, in particular the moment when I realized that Donald Trump could win it all, as in become not just the anointed candidate of The Doomsayer Party, but POTUS 45.

The argument is this: After six months of doing presidential campaigning his way, traditional courtesies and decorum be damned, Trump is at worst as strong as he’s ever been, and all others, with the exception of Ted Cruz, are demonstrably weaker, to the point of irrelevance. Moreover, Trump continues to demonstrate a quality — a talent — none of the other Republicans possess, least of all Cruz, which is  … wait for it … likability.

In a pond of alternately flailing lost causes (Kasich, Christie, Bush) and panicking empty suits (Rubio), Trump has not only maintained his cool, but continued to flash an everyman sense of humor as well, or at least sustain a style of rebuttal the infamous, mythical “average voter” not only relates to but is familiar with, thanks to our pervasive pop culture. Sure, to prissy, wine-sipping elites like me his standard comeback of, “Who cares what you say? You’re a loser” seems beneath the dignity of a President of the United States. But I’m not the crowd that could put Trump up on the south steps of the Capitol Jan. 20 2017.

Trump’s game, and so far he’s succeeding at it, is to rally millions of your and my fellow ‘Muricans who haven’t voted in probably 25 years, and even then Ross Perot didn’t have anything like Trump’s pop personality appeal. The psycho/sociological specs on this large herd of regularly untapped voters are pretty well known. They’re not ideological. They’re not particularly religious. They’re certainly not evangelical unicorn people. But they are pissed off. Chronically, and pretty much about everything, certainly everything that reminds them that for one reason or another they’ll never be “great again”, never mind that they never were.

These people, fueled by a vast methane-like sea of resentments, are indisputably ill-informed. But so what? Their vote counts as much as yours and mine.

So, if the first choice comes down to Trump or Cruz, it’s, IMHO, a no-brainer. Cruz’ palpable vibe is that of a fer de lance, a truly dangerous untrustworthy snake with no redeeming personal qualities whatsoever, other than that he’s not Hillary Clinton or a pathetic, mumbling nob like Jeb Bush. If this heretofore untapped crowd slides off their bar stools and turns out to vote — and that’s the question Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina will begin to answer — they go with Trump, a guy who cracks lines they laugh at instinctively, as he confirms that the whole country has gone to shit, 99 times out of 100 over Cruz.

Then … the great revolutionary dynamic becomes this: Does that same crowd — chronically angry and ill-informed — feel a mojo they’ve never before felt in their lifetimes, a pleasurable tingling sensation that says, “My time has finally come”?

A time to pull the damn rug out from all the self-serving, prevaricating, “smartest kids in the class” who have deprived them of their, well, self-respect to put a fancy phrase on it, and install someone totally different? Someone who sees, or at least describes a world exactly as they see it, full of thieves and killers, and with whom they feel entirely comfortable, in part because he’s already so familiar to them by virtue of having been on TV most of their adult lives?

The choice then is Trump, as the official Doomsayer Party nominee, still taunting, confident and funny or Hillary Clinton, yet another one of them, and who cares if she uses the other rest room? 99 out of 100 at that point becomes 100 out of 100.

A Trump coronation by the Doomsayers will energize Democrats like no other election I can think of, not even Bush in ’04, which we all thought was ours to lose, and we did. (Thank you, Ken Blackwell and Ohio.)

My theory is that Trump has the potential to tap a bloc of voters — this would be the “rarely-if-ever” vote crowd — far larger than Clinton, even with with the full Democratic coalition of liberals, minorities and every catalyzed woman. Trump after all, and let’s be honest about this, is this year’s “transformational candidate”. Hillary is nothing of the sort. Never mind the pantsuits.

Moreover, Trump has the enormous advantage of not being tethered to anything more than a fleeting whiff of fact-based reality. Nothing he says has to be true, at least as you and I know it. It just has to feel right … to millions of people who have been waiting for an engaging character who sees the world exactly as they see it.

Trump does not have to lay out a single tedious position paper, demean himself with one “Hey look, I’m a manly dude out hunting in fresh-off-the-rack camo gear” photo op, or even really press all that much flesh with the people who want him so badly.

Ask yourself, what line of attack could Clinton or any institutional/Beltway/political lifer make on Trump that hasn’t already been leveled and that he can’t shrug off — to the utter delight of the crowd I’m talking about — with another variation of, “Well you say that because you’re a loser.”

For some reason, the potential in this reserve of until now disaffected, apathetic voters reminded me, as so much in ‘Murica today does, of this snippet from Richard “Boyhood”, “Dazed and Confused” Linklater’s under-appreciated film, “Waking Life”, a clever, dream-within-a-dream concept full of questions about the primary conflicts of life.

At one point our REM-drifting hero has a drink with University of Texas philosophy professor, Louis Mackey, who asks him, ” … which is most universal human characteristic? Fear … or laziness?”

Trump has the line on both.

 

 

Characters from the Not So New West

AMMO AND ME“I never learned anything listening to myself talk.”

Me.

(Although I probably heard it from someone else).

 

A road trip is one of life’s simple pleasures. Get in the car with only a vague notion of where to go. Take it as it comes. See what happens and who you meet.

Over the recent holiday week I took a 2000-mile spin up from Phoenix around central Nevada and back, veering through Death Valley in hopes of shaking off the high plains chill. I had no explicit intention of feeling out Trumpist America. But I have an affinity for the truly unaffected, or at least the unconsciously unaffected, although that’s a bit of an oxymoron. Point being: Spend enough time around media and PR types and you develop an appreciation for people who say whatever is on their minds, cautious, delicate, socially-strategic parsing be damned.

Here are vignettes of a few characters of the new west.

Gene and friends. Manhattan Bar. Manhattan, Nevada.

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You get to Manhattan by turning east off Nevada 376, a 120-mile long north-south parallel to the stunning  Toiyabe Range, the longest range in the state. The winter snow made the range, arcing over the north horizon,  look a couple thousand feet taller. Maybe seven miles up the hill you reach the town, such as it is, years past its brief prime in the silver business. Keep going further up the hill from Manhattan and you get to Belmont, which is literally off the grid. Generators provide all the juice. Another 20 miles up 376 is Round Mountain Mine, a truly gargantuan gold mining operation with tailings bulldozed up high as a 30-story building.

In the Manhattan Bar a tired old lab had staked out prime real estate on an oily piece of carpet remnant directly in front of the wood-burning stove, which was putting out an impressive blast of BTUs.

Gene, the guy in the white shirt in the photo, asked where I was from, then asked, “Why are you here?” “To see the Statue of Liberty”, I said, which made the rest of them laugh, even though I’m pretty sure they hear that a lot. Or at least whenever some rube wanders up the hill.

Gene told me he had just moved to town from Seattle. “My wife’s from here, and I caught on with the mine”, grading the giant pit he said.

“You liking it?”

“Yeah. It takes a little getting used to. Not a lot to do. But I like being outdoors, hiking and walking the mountains. And the money’s good. Nothing to spend it on, either, so it adds up.”

“So you a hunter? I ran into a bunch of kids back in Caliente all stocked up for a week up somewhere hunting elk.”

“Nah. Not my thing.”

I told him about a dead coyote I found while I was taking pictures of the abandoned bar at Warm Springs. The beast was feet from the steaming sulphur spring, making me wonder if it was so desperate it drank the water.

“Nah, somebody shot it. They shoot everything around here. I was up past Belmont a while ago and I came across a pile of coyotes, stacked by the road. Maybe 20 of them.”

“Twenty? What do they pay a bounty on ’em?”

“Nope. People just shoot ’em. I don’t get it.”

***

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Gail and Victor. Owners of the International Serbian Bar. Austin, Nevada.

 

Austin is a forlorn mining town 7000 feet up in the Toiyabe Range on U.S. 50, a.k.a. “The Loneliest Road in America”. Appropriately, there was no one in the cafe or bar either the night I arrived in town or the morning I left. Just them and me. Even if there was another place open, the giant “Make America Great Again” banner hanging off the second floor porch and the “Silent Majority Stands with Trump” signs plastered everywhere the eyes settled told me I had to have a burger and beverage with whoever was responsible for all that.

Turns out it was mostly Gail. Her iPad is her constant companion and she bought the banner for god knows how much off some Trump website. When I said, “You know, Trump’s got plenty of money. He should have sent you one for free.” She said, “I don’t care. I wanted one now.”

She cooked a burger that Shake Shack back in Vegas would have charged me $12 for, after I stood in line for 45 minutes. I could tell Gail was stifling a torrent of opinions, but I wanted to get at least one beer in me before hearing how a buffoonish billionaire living high above Fifth Avenue way, way back in New York City was going to make her … great again.

“Damn cold, isn’t it?” said I. “The car thermometer showed 2 degrees coming over the pass.”

“Yeah, and some billionaire is making it that way.”

“Uh, what? Really? Who?”

She started tapping on the iPad. “He’s been doing stuff in the sky. I read it. Tests and rockets to change the weather, making it colder.” Tap tap.

“Really? Well, there are drones everywhere.”

“His name is … ” tap, swipe. “Bill … Gates.”

He’s changing the weather? Bill Gates? From Microsoft?”

“Oh, is that who he is?”

“Well, I don’t know. Is that what it says there? What are you reading?”

“Just a thing I like. It’s got a lot of good information.”

She wouldn’t tell me what site she was getting this news about Bill Gates Controller of Weather from, but pretty obviously it was the same one that was telling her and husband Victor about Muslim terrorists’ plans to take over the country right after the government confiscates all the guns. I met Victor the next morning. He’s a wiry, taciturn guy in his mid-Sixties, or maybe mid-Fifties. His meaty leathery hands suggest he probably has restored the 1863 building all by himself and as a side job repairs refrigeration units around the sprawling county. We sat at the counter and he ordered the same breakfast I did: Two eggs over easy and toast.

While Gail seemed more the proselytizer of the two, Victor played the deeply suspicious, war-weary savant with a (very) dark cautionary tale for every topic you could suggest. Like for example getting Historical Preservation status for his building, with the ornate bar that he says was cut apart in England 150 years ago, floated around the horn to San Francisco, then disassembled again and trucked up into the mountains during Austin’s boom days.

“Then they own you. We’ve talked. But those [Historical Preservation] people get involved and it’s not yours anymore. You can’t do anything to it. Can’t paint. Can’t change a light bulb.” Somehow this soon led to a tale of being a 12 year-old kid back in the old country and sitting at an outdoor cafe drinking coffee with a relative when Communist troops showed up and started machine-gunning everyone in sight.

“He told me, ‘Open that manhole and jump in. Now!”

The message? Never trust any government and stay ready to shoot back.

***

Greg De La Posa. Middlegate Station. U.S. 50. Nevada.

Middlegate

Greg

 

 

 

Middlegate Station is on the old Pony Express route. We’ve milked a lot of tourist shtick out of an episode of history that barely lasted a year. Every stop along the route, which more or less follows U.S. 50, is chock full of Pony Express tchotchkes. But since I collect refrigerator magnets I was a happy chump.

Greg helps manage Middlegate in some way and the empty stool was next to him. He was on the phone ordering supplies from Fallon, over by Reno. At the other end of the bar, which featured a stripper doll on a miniature pole, were four twenty-somethings in heavy duty hunting gear. They were trying to impress the cute-enough bartender that they were so badassed they were going to need “two bottles of Jager” to do the serious shootin’ they had come to do. Oddly, the only other vehicle out front was a wimpy looking Chevy Equinox. They weren’t going up country in that thing.

Once we had semi-sorted out his “hired hand” role around the bar, Greg, who could be anywhere from 45 to 70, told me he was adopted Sicilian. “My folks came over from the hill country.”

“Tough crowd, the Sicilians,” I joked. “They love a good feud.”

“Damn right. Especially with other Sicilians.”

When I asked to take his picture, explaining it was just a thing I did with characters I met along the way, he stood up, walked behind the bar and pulled down a big, glossy coffee table book. It was in German. Underwritten by National Geographic, it was the photo essay of guy’s solo bicycle trip across America, including U.S. 50, Middlegate Station and Greg, looking 15 to 20 years younger.

“Long ways from anywhere out here,” I said, nursing my beverage.

“Yeah, I guess. But it’s one of those places interestin’ people pass through. Like to say they’ve been here.”

That might have been a compliment. Not sure.

***

 

Russ and Diane. Chili Burro Bar. Beatty, Nevada.

 

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Beatty is barely a reason to stop if you’re driving from Vegas to Reno. Some cat pretty well owns the whole town as I was led to understand. In the summer, tech guys from Audi and BMW rent out garages in Beatty for next years’ models they test in the heat of Death Valley 30 miles west down Daylight Pass. They leave behind a lot of top quality tools for the local school’s shop classes rather than ship them home. And they drink a lot of beer at the Chili Burro.

Years ago I dropped the only quarter I’ve ever gambled into a slot machine at a ratty casino on the main intersection. It’s now a hardware store. The Big Dude, I forget his name, owned that place and has since thrown up the Stagecoach Hotel and Casino, where in what counted as a low moment of the trip I ate breakfast in a Denny’s.

The Chili Burro is something else. It’s about as big as the average suburban garage and, I was told, has made some BuzzFeed list of “America’s 12 Best Dive Bars”. In fact, it’s kind of cozy. A tall German kid and his stunning black girlfriend were huddled in a corner, maybe thankful they weren’t at the joint next door, where 30 or 40 bikers were throwing up a lot of noise and smoke.

“Sit over here with us,” said Diane, the better half of a friendly, happy hour-loving couple. In his 40s, Russ was part of the Iraq invasion in ’03, and then talked himself into six months at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Since all I know about the poles comes from movies I told him about a documentary I had seen where these guys had to sno-kat out from McMurdo to a weather station across the bay. In summer it’s a 10-minute jaunt. In winter it took six hours. He had been there.

Diane worked “for the government” for 35 years until the day someone explained just how much her annuity would pay her. “I quit on the spot,” she laughed, taking another swig of beer. The two of them, she says, “Use Beatty as a base. We have places up north of Austin we go to a lot and other places around the country.”

Pleasant “normal” folks. We joked with another patron in wall-to-wall squeaky clean camo about his hunting rig, a $60,000 pickup, tricked out for the back country, and what that worked out to per pound of elk, or coyote.

About then Russ mentioned in passing, and with a laugh, that “You know, Beatty may be the safest city the country.” At first I didn’t pay it any attention. But on second thought, “OK, I’ll bite. Why is that?”

“Well, I’ll tell you why. Because we’ve got 300 permanent residents here in town, 3000 registered guns and over two million rounds of ammunition.”

***

Eli. Furnace Creek Ranch. Death Valley.

1451443588211Eli asked if he could sit next to me at counter of the 49er Restaurant. He works for the park concessionaire and was stopping in on his morning off to razz the waitresses and line cooks.

He played high school football back in Springfield, Mass. and was one of those (rare) guys you can have what seems like an intelligent conversation about … football with, if such a thing is ever possible. He had a pretty good breakdown of the NFL play-offs, including the part where the Vikings have, “too one-dimensional an offense. Bridgewater has talent. He’s calm. You can see he’s learning. But he isn’t there yet, and may never be a good passer. So right now it’s too much Peterson.”

After a while I told him the story of Beatty being “the safest city in America”. He shook his head. “It’s crazy man. But that’s what it’s like out here. That’s the way it is. That isn’t unusual. You been to Pahrump? [60 miles south]. It’s where you go to disappear.

“I tell you, last week I had to go over to North Vegas to a Kirby vacuum cleaner store to get some vacuum bags. Vacuum bags! I find the place in this strip mall and when I walk in I see this skinny little old lady. Couldn’t weigh more than 90 pounds, and she’s got not only a .45 in a holster on her hip, she’s got a damn Doberman on leash. Are you kidding me? In a vacuum cleaner store!”

Bob. Texas Spring Campground. Death Valley.

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After a cruising some of my favorite haunts in the park, including a long walk out on the enormous salt pan, I rolled back to my campsite well past sunset. As I unpacked a few items from the car a shape emerged out of the darkness. I could make out an extended hand. “My name’s Bob, I’m camping over there”, pointing to a cobbled-together trailer with gear spilling out all over into a tamarisk-like tree. Clearly, he had been there a while. Nearly a month, it turned out. Built the trailer/camper himself. Drove down from Alaska. Had a dirt bike for day trips. (Had another stashed in Bulgaria waiting for him to ride it again next summer.) Heading to Tucson eventually and some relatives he wasn’t all that wild to see.

But before that, before he really said anything after, “My name’s Bob”, he launched into the story of the ex-EMT driver from British Columbia who had been camped where I was.

It seems that after a week the EMT guy came over and told Bob the reason why he was solo camping in the desert, 1200 miles from home.

“The guy’s on duty and he gets the call there’s a drug overdose or something at a local hotel. A guy is passed out. So he roars over there and goes charging in through the lobby with his equipment and everything. But this is a small town and the people at the desk know him. They yell something like, ‘Uh, Bill … Bill ...’ trying to get his attention. But he charges on by up to the room where the OD’d guy is laid out on the floor.

“What he finds is this dude in a Superman costume. Big ‘S’ on the chest, cape, boots, the whole thing, but with the crotch cut out of the tights and his dick hanging out. The guy’s out cold. It’s a drug deal.  But then, out of the corner of his eye he sees his wife, spread-eagled naked and tied to the bed. And now she’s screaming at him, ‘Untie me you idiot! Untie me!’. Turns out she’d been boinking not only Superman, but every guy in the EMT unit. So that’s why he was out here in the desert.”

While the part where the hotel staff wouldn’t have untied the naked woman on the bed in the time it took the EMT guy to arrive didn’t compute, as introductory tales told by a dark figure in a desert night go, it was pretty damned funny. I opened a bottle of Pinot Noir. He cracked a bottle of whiskey, we drew up folding chairs and sat, in the 40-degree darkness, under a deep black sky and talked for another three hours, the Milky Way ablaze overhead.

“Up in Alaska there are three different Republican parties. I’m not shitting you, and each one is more motherfucking batshit than the last one,” was one of Bob’s many memorable lines.

The other was after I told him the story of Gail and Victor, the Trumpers up in Austin, the heavily-fortified folks in Beatty and a couple other tales of irrational fear and suspect wisdom I had come across in the past few days.

“Yeah, you know, there is no end of crazy out there, and I’m as guilty as anyone of getting pissed off at it. People tell me I’m too direct. My ex-wife told me that, too. But you know what? After a while, after you listen to all the crazy ass shit they say and what they believe, I still think most people are doing the best they can. Really. It’s the best they can do. Maybe they’re just not very smart. Maybe their parents were fuck-ups. Maybe they never had anyone in their life who pointed them at what was real and what mattered. They never learned any better. So they’re going through life … .”

“Playing with what they’ve got.”

“Yeah. They’re doing the best they can with what they’ve got.”

 

 

Why Do Big Newspapers Still Allow Ugly, Racist Comments?

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterOne of the things that comes with a writer’s territory is a story that never gets published, for reasons that are not entirely clear. This is one of those. The topic of public comments on newspaper web sites is interesting for a number of reasons, among them the way anonymity may (or may not) encourage truly ugly racial invective, something you’d think a large newspaper with a sense of civic responsibility would seek to avoid whenever possible and at the very least edit out prior to publication, particularly in times of racial tensions, such we’ve seen here in Minneapolis this fall.

Anyway, as I say, this media column didn’t pass muster, so I’m  posting it here. Because I believe it’s a discussion worth having.

IT BEGINS:

Anyone even remotely familiar with the internet is aware of and frequently appalled by how quickly any “discussion” among website commenters, especially a big city newspaper’s site, degenerates into juvenile name-calling and worse. It was definitely worse recently when Star Tribune readers piled in on what was, ironically, an uplifting story by John Reinan about a Muslim family’s successful home-owning experience with the help of Habitat for Humanity.

Rather than embrace an opportunity for some holiday season good-will-among-men, the Strib’s commenters immediately, predictably, descended into all-too familiar hostility and racist epithets. (The Strib has removed that particular comment thread.) The waves of vitriol, mainly against the family featured in the story, led Abdi Mohamed, the homeowner to respond with a letter to the Strib several days later.

“I don’t think this awful name-calling would have happened had we had American-sounding names,” he wrote. “We have always considered ourselves American, by any measure, and have been good citizens, paying our fair share of taxes and volunteering in our community. But my faith as a Minnesotan is shaken. I have been calling Minnesota my home for the last 17 years, and my kids were born right here in Minneapolis. My take from the readers is that ‘you don’t belong here in America’.” Dozens wrote in in support. But very soon a minor flame war broke out even on that thread over one anonymous commenter’s admonition to Muslims like Mohammed’s wife, to “lose the costume.”

In other words, all-in-all, real edifying, high-caliber stuff.

Comment sections have an undeniable voyeuristic appeal. Commenters say things most of us would never imagine ourselves saying, much less in public. Our reaction varies between snorts of derision, guffaws and utter dismay.

The conventional argument in favor of comment sections is that they offer an unfiltered vox populi. Like it or not, delighted or horrified, this is what your neighbors are thinking. The question though is this: Is there a point where reader comments become too ugly and cruel that a large public entity like a daily newspaper has a civic obligation to turn them off? Does an important community asset like the Star Tribune have a responsibility to re-assess its attitude toward commenters and draw a line at the point where a vicious, repugnant and — key word here — anonymous few hijack the paper’s social media heft to incite others to spasms of racist verbal attack?

In a perfect world someone among the Strib’s top editorial echelon would offer an answer to this question, or more specifically, as I asked, “What is your best argument for keeping the Star Tribune’s comment policy as it is?” Unfortunately, calls and e-mails to editor Rene Sanchez, Sr. Managing editor Suki Dardarian were not returned. Only Asst. Managing Editor Eric Wieffering responded, and then only to confirm that Strib editorial management had no interest in discussing the topic. So much for an informed, civil dialogue.

If the topic ever does interest them we’ll revisit it. Until that time the conversation is this: The Strib might strongly consider adjusting its comment policy and following the lead of either us here at MinnPost or, failing that, Popular Science, (or USA Today, or The Wall Street Journal).

Recognizing the near inevitability that anonymous commenting will quickly degenerate into a battle of flaming trolls and grossly under-informed invective, MinnPost’s policy from the get go requires commenters to, A: Register and post using their full, real name and, B: Submit to moderation. No doubt the policy seriously diminishes the quantity of comments. But the upside is that commenters maintain a dramatically higher level of civility while arguing their ideological points. If they don’t they’re deleted before they are published.

A case may also be made that a full-disclosure, moderated comment forum provides a safer harbor for the articulate if fainter-hearted souls who recoil at the thought of being assaulted in public by some unidentified CAPS-LOCKING!!! troll.

Or, if moderation, which would require a pretty much full-time employee, is a step too far, the Strib may consider the path Popular Science took two years ago and disconnect the comment option entirely. At the time, the venerable tech and DIY magazine essentially threw up its hands at the way anonymous commenters regularly hijacked discussions of god-knows-what, — hyper-sonic jets graphene or climate change — with rants about Barack Obama … the Kenyan Muslim terrorist sympathizer.

Said Suzanne LaBarre for the magazine, “A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to ‘debate’ on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”

LaBarre referred to a University of Wisconsin study on the peculiar psychological effect anonymity has on people, on-line commenters in particular. Among the findings, which come as no surprise to anyone who follows this stuff, the loudest and most active of the anonymous commenters were also those in least possession of accurate information about a given topic and yet the most certain — defiantly certain — of their point of view. (Her central point was that the study also showed how ugly, defiantly ignorant comments had the effect of eroding casual readers’ trust in the accuracy of the story itself.)

Writing about Popular Science’s decision, Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker a month later added, “Multiple studies have also illustrated that when people don’t think they are going to be held immediately accountable for their words they are more likely to fall back on mental shortcuts in their thinking and writing, processing information less thoroughly. They become, as a result, more likely to resort to simplistic evaluations of complicated issues, as the psychologist Philip Tetlock has repeatedly found over several decades of research on accountability.”

Konnikova also cites a couple studies suggesting that the most vitriolic of the anonymous crowd are, thank god for small blessings, given less credence by the sum of all readers. But the response to that, from a large broadly-marketed community entity like the Star Tribune, should be a concern for the effect vitriol has the smaller, shall we say, “most impressionable” fraction of their audience.

Over at the Pioneer Press, editor Mike Burbach found time and sufficient interest to return the call and refer me to Jen Westphal, the paper’s Deputy Editor for Digital News and Social Media. She explained that the PiPress, while requiring registration with a valid IP and e-mail address making the commenter known to the paper, still permits anonymity as well post-publication moderation, which is to say someone at the PiPress steps in only when alerted to egregious behavior.

The Star Tribune policy appears to be much the same, although as I say, no one in the paper’s editorial management or its digital services department would discuss it. Clearly though, given the ugly flame wars that break out with depressing regularity, no one is moderating/approving comments prior to publication.

There are also filters a the PiPress, Westphal says, for certain key words — the usual cussing — and the obvious racial/ethnic invective. But otherwise vox populi rules.

“We used to use Facebook commenting,” she says, “which theoretically required them to use their real name, even though there are ways to get around that, too. We used it for about two years, I think. But we found it didn’t help with what you’re talking about. People said things just as bad as when they were anonymous.”

Coincidentally, Facebook was under criticism this past week for prohibiting anonymity. “Vulnerable communities” demanded a special exemption, to avoid being targeted by trolls.

Facebook consented, but reiterated it’s policy. “We require people to use the name their friends and family know them by. the company said. When people use the names they are known by, their actions and words carry more weight because they are more accountable for what they say. We’re firmly committed to this policy, and it is not changing. However, after hearing feedback from our community, we recognise that it’s also important that this policy works for everyone, especially for communities who are marginalised or face discrimination.”

Sad Westphal at the PiPress, “We prefer to keep comments, at least for now, things can always change, and we have talked about it, because we still see them as a valuable forum for public discussion. It’s the best place a normal resident of St. Paul can go to discuss parking meters on Grand Avenue or whatever.

The flare-up over the Reinan story erupted simultaneous with racial tensions spiking in Minneapolis following the terror attacks in Paris and the police shooting of Jamar Clark. Far too much demagoguery was already in the air. Which is why it is fair to ask whether responsible establishments with broad and deep community roots, like a daily newspaper, are reexamining the role they play in churning the cesspool.

Essentially: Why offer a venue for adding fuel to these fires?

None of which is to say that if the Strib pulls the plug on comments, vitriolic anonymous trolls will slink away and observe some kind of monastic silence. There are literally millions of other websites where they can and do collect. Fringy places where they can huddle and out-vitriol each other and whoever stumbles in. But those sites aren’t hosted by an organization of professional journalists, a company speaking to and representing hundreds of thousands of reader/citizens more interested in information than hyperbolic attack.

What Not to Do in Response to Paris.

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterBy the sound of the usual drum beaters you’d think 2003 was 1200 years ago not just 12. After the attacks in Paris the other night you’ll be relieved to know that once again the solution to this problem is “relatively easy”, certainly if you’re listening to someone, a wandering minstrel candidate for example, who doesn’t really have to do anything.

Eight guys with machine guns and suicide belts creating horror and havoc in big, pleasant city Westerners are both familiar with and care about, (i.e. not Baghdad or Beirut), is qualitatively different. Therefore, just like 2003, our pathway to peace is obvious. Invade someone. Syria in this case, maybe a part of Iraq too (again). Kill the dictator. Assad. And ISIS. Wherever they are. And take over the country. Then, although this tends to get all boring and nuancy, restore all the usual government functions like courts and sewage systems and Departments of Motor Vehicles and then, after a while toss the keys to some reasonable people and book a flight home.

For the life of these deep thinkers, they can’t understand why Barack Obama and his hand-wringers wasted seven years crippling us with socialized medicine and strangling off the innovation of Wall Street instead of killing Muslims, somewhere, anywhere. Hell, it’s gotten so bad a guy can’t take his date to the movies in America without the fear of being machine-gunned down by some maniac.

Oh wait. Sorry. I had my psychotic terrorists confused there for a second.

I have to remember. We’re only talking Muslims here. THEY are the ones (the only ones) who want to come here and kill us.

Lacking any kind of productive ideas from the conservative intelligentsia (sic), all of whom, like a chorus of wind up toys, are chanting for a re-run of “shock and awe” and “nation-building”, serious-minded adults who can remember all the way back to the dim twilight of 2003 have to apply a set of (very) hard-learned lessons.

For example:

A: Precisely like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, what ISIS wants more than anything is an apocalyptic war with the infidels. That’s us. Or really anyone who let’s women drive cars and practice total patriarchal control. And that would be a war,  preferably in a place where ISIS can most easily marshal a constant supply of fresh recruits. In 2003 the Bushies gave al-Qaeda everything they wanted plus a wet kiss, by not only coming to war in the Middle East, but by storming into the wrong country, oblivious to the centuries-old tribal insanities they were setting loose.

B: Whacking a dictator sounds like great fun, but replacing him with something better means accepting — at best — a couple decades of civil war, suicide bombings, insurgent whack-a-mole and ruinously expensive corruption on an epic scale, with no guarantee, ever, that “good guys” will eventually settle in and keep the water and electricity flowing, much less allow girls to go to school. And who gets handed the check for this?

C: The cry of “war!” plays well to arm chair commandos watching FoxNews. But fighting an “apocalyptic cult” like ISIS, which can cause more hysteria with eight guys invading via the AutoRoute in rental cars from Belgium than holding an entire city of two million people (Mosul, Iraq) argues less for a coalition of 100,000 crusaders charging across the sand into Damascus then another Orwellian step up in cyber-spying. And not just on 22 year-old jiihadis pissed-off by the loose morals of the West, but their oil rich/Saudi benefactors funneling money to them, very likely via sacrosanct Swiss banks. There’s no fist-pumping fun in nerds somewhere voiding a bank account.

But even if you know and accept all this, and aren’t fear-mongering for votes in a Republican primary, the horror in Paris … this horror in Paris … is going to require a more aggressive response to ISIS and religious radicalization.

A proper sequencing of tactics demands first weakening both ISIS on the ground and its world-wide supply and training network by attacking their revenue/quartermaster stream. I have no doubt Team Obama is well aware of this. But getting richer-than-Croesus Sunni sheiks to comply with American foreign policy goals is the stuff of fantasy. Their tribes are going to outlive any tribe in D.C. Leverage on that crowd will require a very deep and broad financial/intelligence coalition, meaning the Chinese as well, if not the Russians, too. Good luck with that.

Then, American liberals, weighing the alternative of yet another recklessly prosecuted ground war favored by the usual chickenhawks — take a bow Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio — may have to accept a heightened level of racial profiling, if only as a consequence of better intelligence-sharing with Western Europe. Personally, I’m certain this is already going on, with the FBI and others under the strictest orders to be as circumspect and low-profile as possible. But it’ll have to get tighter.

Finally, someone should start encouraging Americans to grow a little perspective and toughen up, before something happens here, again.

Our heavily-armed homegrown terrorists are regularly slaughtering more of us in schools, restaurants and movie theaters than any ISIS fanatic could ever dream of, and we accept it as a price we must pay for our freedom. (That of course would be the freedom to imagine that like some B-movie hero we’ll be the guy with the conceal-carry permit who riddles the fanatic with bullets, saves the day and gets the girl).

If we can avoid hysteria over the semi-weekly rampages we endure here with such unsettling equanimity in the Homeland, we need to remind ourselves to react with the same dispassion when eight guys in rental cars roll over the Canadian border and do a Paris number on The West Village or Yankee Stadium.

Thank God for Rand Paul in Milwaukee

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterMy favorite moment in last night’s Republican debate/barnstorming reality TV show, was Rand Paul butting in after one of Donald Trump’s rants about how the Chinese are always winning … because Barack Obama has turned America into such a pathetic no-class loser. It was a question about the Trans Pacific Partnership that got him whipped up. Wiley damn Chinese vs. Loser Americans who can’t negotiate a good deal. A Trump staple.

But then Paul, who was once the average adult’s idea of a delusional whack-job, piped up and suggested the Fox Business News panel, which included Gerard Baker, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, (you know, every shrewd businessman’s first source for the complete story on money and the bastards beating them to it), that it might be useful to pint out that the Chinese aren’t even a part of this deal.

Oh.

But as much as I was hoping for an Emily Latella moment from Trump, it was not forthcoming. What we got was, be thankful for small favors, a little filler commentary from Paul on the fact that the Chinese actually aren’t all that wild about this TPP thing either, since it’s greasing the skids for more trading between us and other folks around the Pacific. (This would argue in favor of the TPP if you were a serious China hater.)

Now, not being an international trade expert, all I knew about the TPP was what I read in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And frankly, as Trump was ranting the best I could come up with was a niggling ring tone that something wasn’t right with his argument. But come on! After three and a half of these trips to Toon Town, I have something like an air raid siren going off in my head every three or four seconds over “things that don’t sound right”. Giant damned air horns howling that what I just heard is utter bullshit of a nuclear order. After that, “niggling” kind of gets lost in the reverb.

Here’s a small sampling of fact-checking on last night’s BS.

So yes, I was grateful when Sen. Paul reminded his opponents, the Fox Business panel, and everyone scoring at home about this teeny, tiny little Chinese detail.

Being in the news biz what immediately went through my head was why none of the Fox money mavens had butted in and corrected Trump? He had been ranting for a while. I mean, if I was vaguely aware of this critical detail just from reading Mr. Baker’s paper you’d think he’d be a little faster on the draw having, you know, published it.

Baker did follow up with a classic Wall Street Journal explainer about how even though the Chinese aren’t involved there are fears they’ll still exploit the deal to their advantage. But that’s only if the Senate passes it, which everyone in Milwaukee agreed would be, you know, yet another episode of liberal-induced Armageddon. Right after … Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, “amnesty” of illegal immigrants, ISIS, the gutting of our military, Hillary Clinton’s pant suits and every regulation ever authored by anyone under Barack Obama. In other words, a kind of serial Armageddon, you understand. (When you’re talking to the Republican base you can’t invoke too many Armageddon scenarios.)

Fox Business is being credited for a more composed debate than CNBC two weeks ago in Denver. And, frankly, some of the questions were pretty good. Like Maria Bartiromo, (aka “The Money Honey”) putting this one to Carly Fiorina.

 …in seven years under President Obama, the U.S. has added an average of 107,000 jobs a month. Under President Clinton, the economy added about 240,000 jobs a month. Under George W. Bush, it was only 13,000 a month. If you win the nomination, you’ll probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?

Heh.

Naturally, Fiorina, who previously urged everyone to watch a sickening abortion video … that doesn’t exist, completely ignored the question and hammered home instead her pet Road to Armageddon messages, most of which can be avoided by a three page tax form and a green room chat with Vladimir Putin.

(BTW, didn’t you love it when Trump said, “I’m the biggest militarist on this stage”?)

Point being, somewhere along with asking these fearsome socialist slayers if they’re a “comic book version of a presidential candidate” (glib, but not all that far off the point) and hitting them with actual facts on job creation, (implicitly proving that the U.S economy invariably performs better under the active governance of Democrats), there’s a place for aggressive follow-ups.

Bartiromo et al injected quite a few, “Too be clear, sir/madams” last night trying to pull an actual answer out of the bombardment of stump speech messaging. But they never got so rude as to, you know, demand an answer and/or correct a flagrant blast of bullshit.

Which is why Rand Paul, who has clearly decided, “What the hell, I’m letting it fly” was so valuable last night. Like his old man, Paul is 85% crackers and 15% rational. That lesser percentage covered a lot of the timidity of the Fox Business moderators. Like that shot at slippery little Marco Rubio — such an adorable weasel, you just want to pinch his cheeks — about adding another $2 trillion in tax credits and military spending (for hard-working ISIS-fearing American families, you isolationist bastard!) … without even trying to pay for it.

Since Paul’s chances of winning a million bucks on FanDuel are better than out-Armageddoning the likes of Ted Cruz, Rubio or Fiorina, I propose dropping him out as a candidate and in as a moderator for the next debate, which, damn it anyway, is a whole month from now.

What am I’m going to have to do until then? Switch back to “Naked Dating” for my reality fix?

The GOP in Colorado, Out-Played by the Royals.

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterI’m committed to this thing. I swear it. But when the 2015 Republicans debate it’s a tough choice. Baseball or group psychosis? This crowd puts on a show more like “Jersey Shore” without the spray-on tans and tattoos (although who really knows?) than a stale civics class. You know something genuinely weird and over-the-top will happen. It’s practically guaranteed.

So yeah, a guy feels kind of conflicted. On the one hand the World Series (with my second favorite team, the Kansas City Royals). On the other hand, Mike Huckabee and the rest of the scenery-chewing crew? I mention Huckabee, the minister, because he fears that after Barack Obama the country we’ll be leaving to our children will be nothing more than “charred ashes”? So you see the dilemma. Grit and hustle or apocalyptic fantasy? Which will be more entertaining?

The Royals are simply too much fun to watch to spend anything more than commercial breaks with the Republicans, allegedly debating economic policies last night in Boulder. Maybe I just got lucky, though. Because between every inning when I flipped back to CNBC — the business network blistered by Ted Cruz for being another miserable example of running dog liberal loathing of freedom, motherhood and unfettered capitalism — something gloriously nutty was going on.

One time Ben Carson was defending his tax plan, which, being a super-Christian, is really more like a tithe, you see. 10% from everyone. You’re down to your last dollar? The Lord wants a dime. When moderator Becky Quick, who is kind of cute besides being pretty up on her facts, pointed out the multi-trillion dollar debt this alone would ring up, Carson, the scientist who believes in neither evolution or climate change and isn’t an economist either, calmly said that wasn’t true. And besides, he said, his real plan, a flat-tax scheme with no “deductions or loopholes”, would be closer to 15% … which as Quick correctly asserted would still be multi-trillion.

Now, I love a good flat-tax fight. And I think just about everyone other than John Kasich, who decided shouting was the go-to strategy for a Mile High debate, hyped some variation on “cleaning up the tax code”, which of course is TrickleDownSpeak for, “Give Me and My Sugar Daddies More Room to Roam”. (My favorite response to the flat-tax/”no deductions” spiel: How many restaurants — run by “hard-working Americans” — would go out of business the next day if everyone and their dog wasn’t deducting “business lunches” from their returns?)

During another break in the action, with Johnny Cueto mowing down the Mets, I caught Trump being asked about some shot he took at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Naturally, Trump flat-out denied he ever said anything of the sort AND accused the moderator (and by extension all of the press) of making it up. The problem with that being that the quote came off his own website.

At this point in RepublicanLife I’ve waay overworked the image of fact-checkers “melting down”. Gotta come up with something new. But even in snippets between innings, last night’s talk with all those numbers and Carly Fiorina, whose voice produces a strange, twisting contraction in my groin area, still selling the triumph of her Compaq-Hewlett-Packard merger/tenure, smoke had to have been billowing from Google’s search engines. You know thousands scoring at home were furiously looking for how any of the plans hyped put more cash in the pockets of “hard-working” Americans than “Wall Street bankers”.

And, before I cut back to the Royals’ big fifth inning rally, I had to wonder: Was I the only one baffled by the likes of Fiorina (of the $23 million golden parachute fame after laying off 30,000 “hard-working Americans”), Jeb Bush, Cruz and all these other boot-strappers railing against the ruling class? Would someone like to do a search on how many of these populists are either living off either their own family’s tax avoidance scams/investment earnings or those of some Daddy Warbucks puppet master? I mean, (I ask again), “Who buys this act?”

With the Royals in full command I caught one other fascinating moment. It was one where Mike “charred ashes” Huckabee I thought was actually making sense. Somehow he got on to the big drivers of health costs in America, citing diseases, specifically cancer and diabetes (i.e. obesity) and how, by God, we have to do something! So OK, no Republican is ever going to propose anything so French and outrageous as using taxpayer money to fund research to eradicate diseases that kill taxpayers. That would be rank Socialism. But still, as far as he went, Huckabee was actually making a valid point. Maybe the first in his tortured career.

But it was the reaction from the audience that fascinated me. The crowd had cheered wildly when Marco Rubio, (and Lord how I hope he’s the slick and sweaty suit they eventually push forward), took his obligatory shot at the liberal media. “Yeah baby! You tell ’em, Marco! Those bastards always calling us crazy and saying we’re detached from reality! Bias! Don’t tread on me! Watch the contrails! Where’s my gun?” It was like that was what they came for. Screw all this decimal point stuff.

And cancer and diabetes.

To Huckabee’s little speech … nothing. Crickets. “WTF does THAT have to do with the liberal media and Hillary Clinton leaving the USA! USA! USA! in charred ashes? Get back on the bus, man! You’re sounding crazy!”

Which is to say, not crazy enough.

In stark contrast to the Republicans, the Royals are winning because they almost never strike out.

Benghazi Committee vs. Hillary: Talk About a Fool’s Errand.

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterWhat do I know about political strategy? Somewhere along about the second hour of the latest interrogation of Hillary Clinton over Benghazi … Benghazi!BENGHAZI!!!, I turned to my dog, who looked about as interested in what was going on as the average voter. “I don’t get it, Lou. I would have opened with the blockbuster new revelation, the killer detail, the smoking pipe bomb that would have her sweating, ‘like Dan Quayle on ‘Jeopardy’, as we used to say. But they’re two hours into this and they’re talking … e-mails. This Gowdy guy couldn’t possibly be so stupid that he’d let the lights go up on this circus without bringing something new to the show, could he?”

Well, Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, may not be stupid, but he pretty clearly found himself in the position that having pandered for a year to his Tea Party base he couldn’t figure out any way to pull the plug on the lifeless corpse he was required to roll out on national TV, showing off a kind of Tea Party “Weekend with Bernie”, without any intentional laughs. He had no other choice than to put on whatever show he could, so he can go back to South Carolina, look the tri-corner hat crowd in the eye and say he brought the fight to the devil incarnate.

You knew it was a resounding disaster, certainly for the ambitious Mr. Gowdy, when his close-ups showed him slathered in Nixonian flop sweat by the time he gaveled the thing to adjournment 10 hours and 59 minutes after it opened. At least his faux hawk held up.

If you’re a Republican outside the Freedom Caucus psycho ward you had be shaking your head and reaching for the Jim Beam before lunch. All you could possibly see, knowing that Gowdy had nothing, much less anything new, is that Ms. Clinton would not only prevail against GOP’s clown car of interrogators, but that their easily foretold failure was only going to strengthen her for the 13-month run to the White House.

The conventional (Freedom Caucus) wisdom (sic) was that given enough time, the tea cup Torquemadas on Gowdy’s committee would either force Clinton into at least one juicy, viral 5-second gaffe or reduce her to a babbling Socialist, troop-hating ninny. Because, you know, she’s Hillary Clinton, someone who has never before in her long career ever had a tough/stupid question put to her or been forced to sit in front of cameras and smile patiently at a panel of filibustering buffoons. Of course they’d break her! She’s never seen the likes of Gowdy or Jim Jordan (leader of the Freedom Caucus) before! By the glory of God and our guns we’ll show her what freedom’s all about!

Talk about a fool’s errand. You got nothing. She knows it. She’s been at this game for 25 years. You’re still trying to find the Capitol rest rooms. What could possibly go wrong?

Until Hillary oversees the indictment of Goldman, Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon she won’t be my dream candidate. But as long as mastery of The Game and serenely swatting down mosquito logic — keep biting until it bleeds — are criteria for high office, she’ll do just fine.

Lord, what a pathetic farce that was.

The Sadly Not-So-Unusual Case of Lambert vs. AT&T

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterWant to hear a good AT&T customer service story? I’m not promising this compares with some of those classic Comcast bits, but it does have the value of being personal as well as depressingly familiar to everyone who has lost hours of their life complaining about extraordinarily bad service and Big Corporate charge-gaming.

Long story pretty short:  A few days before a dozen or so of us flew down to Panama for our son’s August wedding I was directed to an AT&T store that I was told specialized in setting up international calling plans. Twelve miles and 20 minutes later the clerk is walking me through the options. $60 month gets you 50 cents/minute calling. $30 gets you $1/minute.

I tell him all we really need is texting ability. Just to keep track of everyone and not waste a lot of time sweating on tropical street corners for people who are lost and/or delayed. No problema he tells me. Texts are free. “Free”, you say? Well then we’ve got a deal. With no further qualifications, warnings or cautions, I sign up and leave fully expecting to text or call (for a buck a minute) to my heart’s content as we mill around Panama City.

Damn, I think, I am one seriously high-tech bastard.

Morning #1 in Panama. Nothing works. Calls to my wife’s phone on the desk next to me. Nothing. My sister-in-law downstairs. Nothing. Brother-in-law at a hotel. Nothing. To AT&T tech support back in the States … something. But they have no idea what the problem is. They promise to take it up to their super double secret tech squad and call me back. Which they do … to say they still can’t figure it out, but I should maybe try adding the 1+ international code … or just a 0 … or nothing at all … every time I try to make call.

This goes on for over two hours until they promise to call back again … and of course never call.

Although I’m unable to contact anyone in our travelling party I am able to contact the rental condo-owner in Texas and a cab driver in Panama City. Texting is about the same. Nothing to anyone we’re with, but a couple cellphone shots make it to a sister in Ohio. Did I mention even my AT&T voice mail is in accessible?

Point being, it’s a fiasco. Since I was quite proud of avoiding precisely this kind of mess by signing up for AT&T’s international plan prior to leaving Minnesota, I’m enduring a lot of jokes at my expense. Along the lines of, ‘Yeah, you’re the go-to for tech, Brian. You da man.”

Eventually we all download WhatsApp which promises to connect everyone via data service … which of course starts the meter spinning on AT&T’s international data-use rates.

Service so erratic as to be useless. We lose hours unable to connect with people who are waiting to hear from us, and on and on.

Cut to a week after we return. I call AT&T customer service to walk them through the farce, demanding explanations for why this was so appallingly bad. On the Richter/Comcast scale of my customer service rants I reined this one into about a “five”. No Joe Pesci-like swearing and threats of violence. But enough pitch-of-peeve so they know I’ll cancel service if they don’t offer some kind of compensation.

Eventually the AT&T agent, out of the blue, offers a $100 credit. This catches me mid-rant, spittle still forming in the corners of my mouth. “$100?”. Uh, okay. How are you going to do that?

“We’ll credit it on your next bill,” says the voice of the person whose name, e-mail, phone, blood-type and next of kin I fail to get before I hang up, a bought-off, calmed-down customer he personally will never speak to again.

Thirty two days later I get a text notifying me that my latest bill from AT&T is both ready to view … and has been paid, thanks to auto-pay. The total? $314 and change.

I feel blood in my nostrils and I’m on the phone with AT&T customer service within five minutes. Several versions of “WTF?” and, “Where’s that $100 credit?” later and I’m informed … you guessed it … there is no record of the promised $100. But what they do have is a very long list of calls proving that I had all the service I needed in Panama.

“You can download the bill from our website,” they say, which may be true except that of course the website isn’t accepting/recognizing either my number or AT&T’s four-digit pass code.

Back in the car. Twelve miles and 35 minutes later (rush hour traffic) the clerk at the “international specialist” shop prints out four pages of calls, texts and data. I tell him that just eyeballing the thing we’re looking at easily four or five times the number of calls and texts that we ever used. “You’ll have to call customer service about that,” he says.

Back home, after 10 minutes of magnifying glass and annotation work it’s pretty obvious that I’ve been charged for dozens of calls to people in Panama with us that never went through. Texts too, most likely. And better yet, while the out-going calls to AT&T tech support, to complain about the lack of service we had paid to get were “free”, the calls back from AT&T’s super-duper techs, telling us they had no explanation or solution for why we weren’t getting any service … were billed to us at the rate of $1 minute.

But finally, and only at this point, after literally a dozen or more interactions with AT&T retail/customer service/tech support do I get the two clarion trumpet “full disclosure” moments that explain everything.

The agent matter-of-factly tells me, “Well, we don’t ever promise [international calling] will work”, and, oh, by the way, “Yes, you are charged for placing the call or text.”

Excuse me, what? Are you saying you’re charging people for calls that you don’t even connect? That we’re paying simply for dialing the number?

“Yes, and you were told that when you signed up for the plan.”

By this point the sarcasm in my voice was dripping, kind of like the hideous space monster in “Alien”.  “Uhhhh, no. No one ever at any point, until this moment, ever told me that the system might not actually work, much less that I’d be charged for the act of dialing the number. Moreover … mam … what fool would ever buy your international calling plan if those two key details were disclosed to them upfront, in their friendly neighborhood ‘AT&T international specialist’ shoppe?”

“Well,” she said, and I loved this, “they should have told you.”

(Because I’m into an OCD-psychotic episode with this crap, I’ve since walked in to three other AT&T stores in the Twin Cities and “inquired” about international calling plans, specifically asking if I’m charged only for calls that are connected. The response each time: “Oh yeah, of course. Only if you’re connected, of course”.)

When I tell her that as (damned) annoying as all this is, I’ll let it go for the $100 credit I was promised a month earlier, she puts me on one of those holds to talk to yet another “specialist”. Most likely she just hit “hold” and filed her nails for three minutes. But she comes back to inform me that after “carefully reviewing” my account the specialist will not agree to the $100 credit or any other credits of any kind. Basically, it’s my fault for not knowing how the game is played.

A friend visiting the house while I’m going through this says, “You have to get to a supervisor in their retention department. Customer service has no authority to do anything.”

The next … and final call … is back to customer service, or almost. After going through the whole ID, pass code and reexplanation thing … I’m disconnected. (And despite calling, you know, a telephone company, which has my phone number, do you think anyone calls back? Hell, what was the last time any customer service, other than Apple, called back after you were disconnected?)

Back again … ID, pass code, re-tell the story and demand (demand, I say!) to talk to a supervisor, pronto! I’m put on hold until “Daunte” gets on the line. Now, knowing that it reflects badly on low-level customer service reps when they have to call in a supervisor, and considering every other facet of this tale, I don’t think it’s cynical to imagine the first rep hitting “hold” and turning to his buddy “Daunte” in the cubicle next to him and asking him to “play supervisor with the nutjob on line 8”.

The finale:  “Daunte” carefully reviews the file notes and declares AT&T to be utterly blameless in this incident and under no circumstances will the company offer any sort of compensation.

“Do you, Daunte,” I ask, “want to keep me as an AT&T customer?” fully expecting him to say something like, “Oh god, man! Yes! If you leave, our stock price will disintegrate. Me and Abner here in the next cubicle will be out on the streets, living in cardboard boxes, or worse, taking customer service calls for Comcast! Shit no! Don’t go, man! I beg you! Have mercy!”

In reality “Daunte” says, “That’s your choice.”

My choice, two hours later, was to switch back to T-Mobile and run down to the bank and sign papers putting a stop/disputed payment on that last auto-pay to AT&T. When, not if, they make a principled stink about not being paid for services rendered, I’ll take them to small claims court where one of their “assistant regional junior VPs for international special-ism” can explain with great clarity and a straight face how, without prior disclosure, AT&T charges customers for services they fail to provide.

… where are my pills, dear?

Pope Francis and Scott Walker: Contrasts in Leadership

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterWe have quite the contrast in leadership theories and styles going this week what with the Pope landing one day and Scott Walker quitting the race for President the day before.

i remember well the affection US Catholics had for John Paul II and demonstrated with Woodstock-like crowds for his visits here. I was at the gathering in Des Moines in 1978 and have never, before or since, seen 200,000 people in one place without a single beer can in sight. You can credit any Pope’s popularity to the unique quality of his office. A religious leader, of a billion people, regularly preaching peace and harmony. Unlike government leaders he doesn’t have to pander and strategize for reelection. Nor does he ever have to commit resources to battle, unless of course in the case of the Vatican you count covering up and fighting sex abuse scandals and regular, multi-billion dollar banking “irregularities” as a kind of warfare.

But the vibe around Francis does seem different. That one line, uttered on his plane to a question about homosexuality, “Who am I to judge?” was an enormous breakthrough in papal credibility, certainly with thousands of mostly fallen away Catholics made jaded and cynical by the Church’s refusal to reform and reimagine itself for a century other than the 14th.

As one of those who gave up on association with the church 30 years ago, mainly over the ridiculous misdirection of resources — into endless property enhancement and nowhere near enough to issues related to poverty, as well as the Church’s medieval attitudes toward women, many of which continue to this day — I admire and appreciate what Francis is saying on climate change and income inequality, but remain skeptical on the question if he can actually turn the hidebound Catholic bureaucracy.

But at least his message is inspiring.

Which is not something I’ve heard many people say about any of the current Republican presidential candidates, much less the recently departed Mr. Walker.

While the Pope is using his popularity and influence to appeal to the better angels of our nature, respecting and tolerating differences and accepting sacrifice as a means to retain the health of the planet, Walker and his GOP competition are playing a truly obscene game of one-ups-manship trying to convince the angriest and least tolerant among us that they’ll be more merciless than the other guy (or woman) in pounding Muslims back into submission, blocking off any solution to climate change that involves pumping one less ton of coal or oil carbon into the air and returning the 30 million or so lower-end Americans to emergency room care and imminent bankruptcy rather build out from the Affordable Care Act..

And yet all of them waaaay over-play their Christian card with appalling regularity.

But Scott Walker … . The schadenfreude over this guy’s implosion is truly palpable. Campaign pros can argue over why his popularity fell off a cliff. How much was do to the Trump circus. How much was due to “anti-insider” sentiment, yadda yadda.

It should be enough to say, with great confidence, that once out in the harsh light of day, Scott Walker proved himself to be exactly what many of us thought him to be since he first popped up on the radar. Namely, an extraordinarily cynical, utterly self-serving career politician with little to no interest in “public” service as you or I know it, nor even any any interest in properly educating himself on basic government policy and every interest in exploiting every twist of the rules of the political “game” to his personal advantage.

And without ever being either brave or clever about it.

I remind everyone that Walker’s big moment, his war on (some) public employee unions in Wisconsin was something he dropped on those middle-class Americans completely out of the blue. Had he ever once mentioned it during his 2010 campaign (and real bravery would have been laying out there day after day as a primary objective) I’d cut him some slack. At least then the Cheeseheads would have known exactly what they were buying. But nada. Not a peep. And then he flat-out lied, repeatedly, saying at times that he had and the press simply hadn’t paid it any attention.

Walker was/is another lug out of the Tim Pawlenty mode, a genuinely sociopathic personality capable of calmly and emotionlessly rationalizing no end of discomfort, calamity and cruelty to others as an acceptable price for achieving the greatest goal … their own personal advancement.

I could go on about Walker’s tight, chummy connection to the executives of the M&I Bank (now BMO Harris) and their laundering of Tom Petters’ scummy deals, his sub-servience to the four … four … patrons who provided the bulk of the $20 million in his Super PAC war chest, his sell-out to pretty much the same type of robber barons in the recent Milwaukee basketball arena deal and the gutting of the University of Wisconsin system to paper over the staggering deficit accumulated under his “guidance”. But that’s the past. The guy has another three years to wreak even more havoc on Wisconsin, unless his keepers abandon him now that he has no greater viability.

And so, as Pope Francis prepared to address Congress tomorrow night and demonstrate what leadership sounds like when disconnected from naked, unambiguous personal ambition, Walker left his little press avail yesterday without taking any questions and after making the preposterous assertion that he was leading … by quitting.

I like to say there’s a special place in hell for people like Walker. But over the years I’ve learned that people like him, fundamentally mean-spirited, selfish and manipulative, are already living there.

GOP Debate #2: Sobriety is Your Enemy

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterI watched the whole thing. Do I get an award? A ribbon? Another half dozen stiff drinks?

Actually, anyone who played the buzzword bingo drinking game during last night’s three-hour Chicken Little FearFest/GOP presidential debate would have blown a .55 by the 30-minute mark.

“Terrorists”. Glug.

“Limited government conservative”. Glug.

“Ronald Reagan”. Glug.

“They want to kill us.” Glug.

“Repeal”. Glug.

“On the first day.” Glug

“Radical liberal … .” Glug.

“Strongest military the world has ever seen.” Glug.

“Ronald Reagan.” Oh what the hell, finish the bottle.

Consensus thinking, the specialty of TV punditry depending on who their target consensus group is, seems to see Carly Fiorina as the big winner, and, once again, Donald Trump as the clear loser, a word he reserves only for less “really, really rich” others. Personally, I doubt that Trump will suffer much in the opinion of the really, really white and pissed-off crowd that has loved him up so much this summer … unless the vibe gets out that he is in fact not a “winner” but somehow, a loser.

As the rankest of amateur socio-psychologists, I maintain the view that “Trump people” regard themselves as losers, victimized losers to be sure, but bona fide entitled, exceptional Americans dealt a foul, unfair hand by “multi-nationals”, Hollywood liberals, Muslim presidents and assorted other uppity (pick your sub-group). As a consequence they seek out associations with “winners”, which in their mind is anyone who is on TV a lot, has gobs of dough and can call everyone else playground names with impunity.

But that “winner” thing is kind of like a digital TV signal. In other words, it is really great until you walk one step further and it’s gone. If Trump’s “winner” vibe cracks, which I think is inevitable, his true believers will jump ship in a split second, turn and truly believe in the next guy/gal who, like muttering Steve at the end of the bar, can call someone a horse-faced skank and make the rest of the midday crowd snort and cackle.

The Fiorina thing is actually kind of interesting. Clearly, the tri-corner hat paranoids aren’t interested in “insiders”. (And God help me, when Jeb Bush tries making the case for himself as an “outsider” how do you not just douse your self with gin and light a match?)  Fiorina may be the ultimate personification of the sociopathic corporate Dragon Lady and like Mitt Romney, the face (sorry) of the “entrepreneurial class” that has bayoneted the dreams of Trump’s white nationalist crowd. But she is a woman, and she is without question built to prosecute and endure a long, gruesome campaign. Her prospects for a match-up with Hillary Clinton strike me as far better than anyone else on the stage last night, including Jeb! (no last name, please.)

In fact, in a twist of irony, a rise in Fiorina’s fortunes, (including but not limited to the one she grabbed as part of her Hewlett-Packard golden parachute), might be an asset to Ms. Clinton. The theory being that with a Fiorina ascendancy Democrats would have to stop and seriously assess how many women-who-just-want-a-damned-woman voters they’ll lose if the Republicans, for chrissake, beat them to the punch with a gal on the top of a national ticket.

Other than that last night had a weird familiarity. Like dangerous, nonsensical characters in a recurring dream, I couldn’t get past the sense of having suffered through all this many times before. For instance, I suffered what I think was a brief seizure when Scott Walker again claimed to have balanced Wisconsin’s budget AND, having gutted the state’s college system to pad over that pesky $2.2 billion deficit, stared into the camera and touted his commitment to education as the key to “real job growth”, (glug).

Lord, I despise that guy beyond anything rational.

 

 

 

 

 

 

FoxNews Debate: God Help Me, That Was Some Sick Fun

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterOk, I admit it. I was rooting for Donald Trump last night. Not because I think he has a clue about anything relevant to you and me. But simply, purely, because as long as he holds center stage he guarantees the belittling light of farce will remain fixed on the entire Republican field. Without him more people might be tempted to take the likes of Scott Walker seriously, to name only one prime example.

When the debate wrapped last night and the Dramamine began wearing off — no point risking stomach distress from the whiplashing motion sickness in the white caps of so much illogic and shameless bullshit — I clicked over to the liberal enclave, MSNBC, for their take on the circus.

First came Chris Matthews, wetting himself over the performance of … Marco Rubio (!?). Then came Chuck Todd with his focus on FoxNews’ opening salvo — asking for a show of hands on who would abide by the party’s eventual nominee and then Megyn Kelly’s long question/indictment of Trump’s catty shots against women over the years — both clearly designed to knock The Donald, no friend of Rupert Murdoch, back on his heels at the get-go.

Trump, a creature of show biz catfighting, gave as he got and I strongly suspect rose today at least as strong as he was before the curtain rose last night. Why? Because his “people” don’t give a damn about “political correctness”, as he argued. Nor do they care all that much about gay marriage or immigration or the Iran deal, or any of the other alleged hot button issues touted by the political class. Mainly, Trump’s people are just pissed off, pretty much at everyone, on the not exactly deeply-examined grounds that “those people” have been screwing them over and are responsible for the condition of their lives.

Of course there’s no logic to their embrace of a ravenous, self-serving billionaire who plainly doesn’t know a thing about foreign relations, national security or public policy. But logic has very little role this early in any election season and almost none at any time in the modern conservative freak show of vanity candidates.

I seriously doubt your average Trump supporter believes for a second he’ll win anything. ot thNe nomination, much less the presidency. All they want for the time being is an entertaining performer who makes the other guys (and gal) look like the scripted stiffs they are.

The night before the debate I had a long happy hour with former right-wing talk show host Jason Lewis. (There’ll be a Q&A with him on MinnPost.com in the next couple weeks.) Over the course of three hours Lewis did say one interesting thing. (That’s a joke.) And that was that Trump’s immunity to criticism has everything to do with the fact that his demeanor powerfully conveys the attitude, “I don’t need this.” He may want it, like another gilded trophy (or wife). But “need it”? No. Certainly not in the sweaty, grasping, cringe-inducing way of a Rick Santorum, Chris Christie or Mike Huckabee? No way. Not even in the cynically calculating way of a life-long lapper at the taxpayer teat like Scott Walker. Lacking desperation, he exudes a scent of confidence the others can only fake.

The “I hate them all, because they’ve done nothing for me” crowd likes and admires and wishes they were a guy who could say, “Take this job and shove it” … and then fly their private jet back to their “classy” Palm Beach mansion. That crowd’s nihilistic fantasy is that Trump or the next guy/woman like him, will torch the system and, if nothing else, bring all the elitist douche bags down to their forced-to-shop-at-WalMart level. (And yes, do note the irony in that “elitist DB” business.)

But don’t take any of this from me. My assessment of winners and losers last night, Trump aside, was that … Rand Paul and John Kasich stood out, in a positive way.

Paul of course suffers from the same pathology as his father, Ron. Namely, the “Five Minute Rule” as the great Charles Pierce describes it. Both Pauls start in on some topic, usually military adventurism, and you’re thinking, “That makes sense. This guy isn’t quite the whack job I thought he was.” But then, almost exactly at the five-minute mark, just when you’re this close to buying into the hype that these guys are on to something they turn and take a headfirst dive into a 20-foot tub of Libertarian bat guano.

Like this one: ” ‘I think you don’t have a right to happiness — you have the right to the pursuit of happiness’, Paul, an ophthalmologist, said in a 2009 Kentucky town hall meeting. ‘[I]f you think you have the right to health care, you are saying basically that I am your slave. I provide health care. … My staff and technicians provide it. … If you have a right to health care, then you have a right to their labor’.”

WTF?

Kasich, despite the wooze-inducing claim that he was responsible for the Clinton economy of the 1990s, at least came across as a guy with touch of authentic empathy for the 47% crowd.

Ben Carson looked and sounded like a stand-in for a real candidate, like those seat-fillers they have at the Academy Awards show who zoom in when the stars have to take a potty break. Mike Huckabee, “a loser”, as Trump would say, with “no chance” seemed angrier than usual, and no more coherent. Ted Cruz was pretty much overlooked and typically tedious when he did speak, basically echoing the party line that his plan for America is to: A: Repeal everything Barack Obama has touched, and B: Head back over to the Middle East and really kick some towelhead ass this time. Because, you know, it worked out so well when Dick and W* did it.

Jeb Bush, the scion, brother-of and presumptive candidate once Trump flames out or goes independent rogue, came off like a sheet of taupe wallpaper. Like a bond salesman terrified he’ll say the one wrong thing that’ll scotch the deal, which in this case is his entitlement to the job. Beyond that, I’m sure there are millions of Floridians who had no idea Jebbie had transformed their pestilential wonderland of causeway McMansions and meth-head rednecks hiding under double-wides into a goddam Utopia of freedom and gummint service.

Chris Christie? Please. Rubio? Slick, telegenic as hell and as vacuous as a Fox & Friends host. And my boy Scott Walker? A guy who makes me worry because of the profound, visceral, rabid skunk-in-the-backyard repulsion I have for him? Even in this crowd he stands out if the contest is for the most smug and practiced liar. Hell, I’m still cleaning up the mess that shot out my nose when he declared he had balanced Wisconsin’s budget. You know, the one with the $2 billion deficit?

But as raw entertainment? As a combination of non-sequiturs, magical thinking, fear-mongering, denial and misdirection? Great stuff! Two thumbs, way up! Show biz gold, baby!

And really classy.

Where Do I Get a Ticket to Kepler 452-b?

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterThere’s nothing like an American political campaign, especially one dominated by the rolling freak show of our “new conservative movement” to make you wonder if intelligent life exists anywhere in the universe, including here.

Thank God then for Stephen Hawking and the NASA teams responsible for the Pluto fly-by and the discovery of “Earth’s twin”, Kepler 452-b. They didn’t quite drown out the buffoonery and cynicism of Donald Trump-Scott Walker last week. But if you were so inclined it was quite pleasurable to ignore the clamor of their toxic grifting and let the mind wander, imagining truly advanced civilizations and what they might think of us.

Among the most interesting people I’ve ever and had the chance to talk with is Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science-fiction writer, best known for co-authoring the screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which was drawn from his short story “The Sentinel”. in 1984 Clarke flew halfway around the planet from his home in Sri Lanka to do publicity for “2010: The Year We Make Contact”, an instantly-forgotten sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic. By no means a typical Hollywood type, Clarke arrived for interviews at some Beverly Hills hotel looking like an Iowa mortician. Black suit, white shirt, black tie, horn-rimmed glasses and the demeanor of the guy who makes certain the deceased is returned to the earth with due gravity.

One of Clarke’s many classic quotes is his response to being asked if we are alone in the universe? “Two possibilities exist,” he said, “either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” He also said when asked what we might expect from contact with an extraterrestrial society, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I had only 30 minutes or so with Clarke, and there didn’t seem to be much point in wasting it getting his reaction to the noisy, formulaic sequel to a truly audacious film that left no intelligent viewer with an option other than to contemplate our modest accomplishments — standing upright, conquering to survive and traveling beyond the pull of our own planet.

I doubt the news about our “twin”, Kepler 452-b, 1400-light years away, would have surprised Clarke much. Terrified or not, he found it it difficult to believe, based on the astonishing immensity of the universe that we were all that unique in terms of complex organisms or all that advanced, given the relative youth, 4.5 billion years, of Earth and the Milky Way. Organisms in other parts of the 14 billion year old universe could have hundreds of millions of years head start on us.

I do think Clarke, who died in 2008, would have been delighted to hear of Hawking’s collaboration with a Russian billionaire to re-start a long-term radar search for signals from another civilization, likely a “mega-civilization”, a culture likely generations, millennia or more advanced than ours. He was generally appalled at the priorities of so-called social leaders. (The fact that a single football stadium in one obscure Midwestern city cost more than we invested in the Pluto mission would have been to Clarke a prime example of barely post-amoebic thinking.)

One part of my conversation with Clarke centered on why any truly advanced culture would have an interest in us? And if they did how they would go about looking us over? This of course was the gist of “The Sentinel”, in which millions of years in our past a probing civilization, perhaps assessing Earth’s position in the so-called “Goldilocks” zone in relation to our sun, drops down a kind of cosmic tele-prompter, sparking the decisive leap one species makes toward sentient thought … and then a fire alarm (on the moon) to alert the civilization that one of the species it has incubated is one the move.

I was pleased that Clarke agreed with me that it made no sense at all that a “mega-civilization” (he didn’t use that term), would visit this planet in any kind of mortal form. No little grey men like in bad Hollywood or Japanese sci-fi. No bizarre, multi-tentacled deep space octopi like out of a comic book. Robotic probes alone, and most-likely the size of molecules rather than city-wide flying saucers could tell culturedeep space s capable of spanning  everything they needed to know about life on this rock. That is if at hundreds of thousands or millions of years of development beyond us they had any interest.

Clarke’s argument, in various books, in the script for “2001” and in conversation in Los Angeles is that immortality is probably a primary initiative for any self-aware species, and that following the logic we saw in HAL the computer and see today in any number of the artificial intelligence advances made since his death, the process of separating consciousness out of and away from the frail, mortal carbon container we evolved in would be Job One.

In the “acid trip” sequence of “2001” there’s a shot of seven shimmering crystalline objects, generally regarded as Kubrick and Clarke’s depiction of “mega civilization” life forms. When I asked him if that was in fact the point of that shot, he smiled and said, “I don’t want to say. It’s more fun to imagine.”

So what then? Having transferred consciousness from flesh and blood (or whatever chemical stew might work on other “goldilocks” planets) to a form immune to the ravages of wind, fire, war, radiation and time, what interest would such a form of being have in us? Why would we be of any particular interest at all? We’re probably flattering ourselves that we’re exceptional. Most likely we would be no more interesting than plankton in a tidal pool. Ours would be an existence to be acknowledged, at best. But nothing more.

More likely, Clarke thought (and wrote in several novels, although maybe most provocatively in “Childhood’s End”), such a culture would practice a form of dispassionate benevolence, offering cues to lower life forms (us) for sustaining evolution, but taking no active role. (They’re a bit more involved in “Childhood’s End”.)

One commentator writing about Hawking’s endeavor reminded readers to do the math on Moore’s Law, which says computing power, in terms of transistors on a CPU, doubles every two years. You can find people who say we’ve reached a limit and that that isn’t going to happen. But since the number of transistors in a CPU has increased from 37.5 million in 2000 to 904 million in 2009, we’re kind of in range. Point being, by 2050, at this rate, our own technology will seem like magic to us today.

And that’s 35 years. For the sake of this discussion, add six zeroes. 35,000,000 years. Then try and imagine what “life” looks like. Most likely we wouldn’t recognize if it was standing next to us.

Now back to the plankton we know as Trump, Walker and the others vying to lead our civilization.

 

 

 

 

Out on the Fringes: Bernie and The Donald

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterThe next time you hear someone blither on about how “both sides” are equally to blame for how colossally [bleeped] up government is, or how the “extremists on each side” have driven them to distraction with their hysterical gibberish, remember this moment in time, and remind them. The “fringes” of each wing, right and left, are currently in full display and it couldn’t be easier to judge the nature of wing-nut “extremism”, if making a reasoned judgment were actually ever the point.

Out there on the left fringe/extreme is Bernie Sanders, a sitting U.S. Senator chronically PO’d at the way his party and the political system in general is forever grabbing its ankles for any big money influence that knocks on their door. To listen to the nuance-free argument of the “both sides do it” crowd, most of whom give off the odor of dime deep apologizing for the status quo, Sanders is a dangerous if not senile radical, barely more coherent than the rumpled drunk railing at a parking meter. Again, that gives them credit for ever once listening to what Sanders is saying, which I sincerely doubt they’ve ever done.

Nonetheless, Sanders is the current face of the “left wing extremist”, replacing people like Michael Moore and, oh I don’t know, Bill Maher or anyone who writes for The Daily Kos.

Meanwhile … 180 degrees to the right, among a dense herd of loudly-braying like-thinkers, we have … Donald Trump, currently nudging up in the polls of likely Republican voters with his “really classy” rants about drug-dealing, raping Mexicans, Obama’s birth certificate, his torrent of law suits and absolutely anything else that will earn him free TV time.

Candidates like Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee are just as silly, and Scott Walker is far more sinister, but Trump is the guy of the moment telling the modern conservative base exactly what it wants to hear. He’s the guy with mojo in the polls, to the point that his comrades-in-candidacy are attacking him, and (I sincerely believe) putting pressure on Republican National Chairman Reince Preibus to call Trump and tell him to “tone it down” … and then go on national TV and tell political junkies that he … told Trump to tone it down. (Sort of like The Doomsday Machine in “Dr. Strangelove”, you defeat the purpose of such a call if you keep it a secret.)

As far as I know, no Democratic leader has as yet called Bernie Sanders. Mainly because Bernie, as “extremist lefties” are wont to do, has not made genuinely screw-loose, racially-offensive charges against anyone, much less an ethnic group composing 15% of the population. Nor has old, frazzled-looking Bernie made a habit of absurdist fantasies about birth certificates or hired dozens of chumps off the street to wear campaign t-shirts and shriek his name as he glided down a gilded escalator. (I could get into hairstyles, but in fairness to Bernie I’m guessing he spends a lot less time getting his bouffe looking camera-ready.)

Now, I’m not saying either gentleman has even a remote chance of winning their party’s nomination. Trump is playing this summer’s version of The Loudest Fool, because every available metric tells conservative candidates that they can not sound too unhinged, hysterical or racist if they want to fire the imaginations of the GOP’s almost exclusively white, exurban-to-rural base. But as the real Big Lebowski tells The Dude, in the end, “The bums will always lose.” And Trump most certainly will, leaving the field to Jeb or, don’t think about this before you go to sleep, Scott Walker.

The (very obvious) point here is simply that the left extreme’s avatar, Bernie Sanders, is by the starkest of contrasts, making entirely reasonable complaints about the way we govern ourselves, if anyone can say “govern” without laughing. What is “appealing” to the “extreme left” bears no resemblance to that which excites the “extreme right”. Your classic lefty may be smug, sanctimonious and a simmering pot of righteous contention. But he/she isn’t willfully ignorant.

Personally, I don’t know where exactly I disagree with Sanders. (The exception would be leaving gun control to the states. A set of federal regulations is the only way to apply even a modest level of sanity.) His criticisms of the system and the Clinton’s coziness with the most cancerous elements of the system are entirely well-founded and fair. The crowds he’s drawing and his rise in the polls are a reflection of the large (but not large enough) appetite among liberals for, at the very least, a vigorous discussion — with Hillary Clinton — over what exactly she would do to re-align the distribution of wealth in this country and how, exactly, she would clamp down on our pay-to-play political game.

Bland, conventional thinkers, whose first order of business is truckling to customers pretty much like themselves, are simply too lazy to make qualitative assessments of “fringe” characters like Sanders and Trump. They certainly aren’t going to explore Trump’s appeal, beyond “telling it like it is”.

Characterization is so much easier. Even better: Counter-balancing characterization.

If Only We Really Were Terrorized

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterAs President Obama was preparing to give yet another eulogy for a mass murder by one of his constituents word was coming in of ISIS maniacs chopping the head off a man in France and slaughtering dozens of people on a beach in Tunisia. I’ll let you guess which of the two killing sprees will be universally described as “terrorism” and which has not.

Oh sure, since the Charleston church slaughter, there has been the usual attempts by the usual people to attach the “T” word, with all its emotional weight, to this latest incident of psychopathic gun play. But it hasn’t stuck, and it won’t the next time a white male American maniac — who may or may not have been given a high-caliber revolver and a few 40-bullet clips of ammo by his father for his 21st birthday (a rite of passage into American manhood) — exercises his Second Amendment rights in a grade school, a church, a movie theater or (wait for it) a football stadium.

Americans are now so inured to these mass shootings they have all but completely lost the ability to shock or upset us. Despite the vastly more likely possibility that we will be gunned down by some pathetic nitwit armed with a small arsenal he bought off the internet or out of some guy’s trunk in a WalMart parking lot, the freakout fear factor about “terrorism” simply doesn’t register. Who among us even thinks about it as we buy a ticket to “Jurassic World” or settle in for a show biz sermon at some mega church? The answer is: Practically no one.

Terrorism of the kind that makes us demand elected leaders “do something about this, now” applies only to dark-skinned foreigners. Scrawny white creeps spraying innocent folks with bullets are merely, “disturbed individuals” who skipped their meds. So instead of freaking out over how people like that can buy assault rifles and all the ammo they want, the conversation, abetted by a media terrified of upsetting conservative gun fetishists, turns instead to … the Confederate flag. A symbol rather than a lethal reality.

Contrast the impassive response to our bi-weekly mass murders to the number of people you know or hear about who devote time every day digesting and imagining the horrors of ISIS jihadis running amok in Times Square or the Mall of America.

Point being, one could be described as a rational fear. 300-plus million guns, no end of mentally disturbed time bombs lurking in every city and suburb and no real restraints on their ability to arm themselves any time the urge compels them vs. organized fanatics on the other side of the planet.

Of course, when, not if, some “ISIS inspired” nut job actually does kill someone here, the ensuing media meltdown — think of CNN and FoxNews with their hair on fire — will insure that everyone connected to a TV set is scared witless by the return of terrorism to our shores. At that point, more billions will be spent and more Constitutional freedoms gladly shucked away to prevent anything of the sort from happening again.

Meanwhile, while we wait for the first beheading in Disneyland or some other strategically chosen symbol of American infidel-ism (I’d skip Las Vegas, personally), we will calmly observe, with appropriate head-shaking and mutterings of practiced dismay, the regular and routine slaughter of our fellow innocents by characters who look pretty much like us.

Some of the stunted response to this self-inflicted terror comes out of sheer resignation. Gun control forces have accepted that given Republican and blue dog Democrat control of Congress and their fealty to the NRA, no good will ever come of pushing for tougher legislation. Post-Sandy Hook, red states generally loosened gun restrictions while blue states enacted only marginal new controls. Congress, as usual, was an embarrassment.

As Ronald Reagan used to say, “Government is the problem.”

Until someone or some influential entity figures out a way to castrate the NRA, to the point where the quivering fence-sitters dare to vote against gun nut interests and survive their next election, nothing will change.

All in all it’s a case of how we’d be better off if we really were “terrorized”.

 

Damn, We Love Our Badassery.

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterMy nominee for the quote of the week has to go to Waco Police Sgt. Patrick Swanton. Reacting to the Sons of Anarchy-like shoot-out between rival biker gangs in front of a local “breasteraunt” that left nine dead, eight injured, something like 170 weapons scattered about and as many bullet holes in bodies, buildings and vehicles as an ISIS jihadi attack, Swanton, a Texan let’s remember, remarked, “This is one of the worst gun fights we’ve ever had in the city limits.”

Key words: ” … one of”.

Not “the”.

Merely, (“… one of”).

‘Murica. Where nine dead in an OK Corral gunfight between thug gangs in an Anywhere USA strip mall still doesn’t rate as “the worst”. And where thanks to misinterpreted gun laws, lobbyists and powerful feelings of personal inadequacy we keep well-armed militias on the highways and in parking lots terrorizing innocent shoppers popping into Cabela’s to restock their ammo before grabbing a lunch of burgers and fries with a side of large-ish jiggling boobs.

I’ve been more embarrassed for this country. There was George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 and “Rocky” beating “Network” for Best Picture in 1977. But the scene in Waco was such a stunning convergence of so many of the elements that make us a morbid laughing stock to the rest of the First World you really have to give yourself a few minutes to absorb it all.

I mean, after you’ve digested the particulars I’ve just mentioned; the gangs of free-roaming thugs, the quantity of weaponry they’re always carrying, the booby-bistro setting and the first line casualties, you move on to the high likelihood that just like every other over-the-top gun rampage we’ve endured this one too will be quickly forgotten (which in a way is to say “forgiven”), because the media, which pays no real attention to organized crime until it explodes into view in an episode like this, is far more comfortable covering the crises of Bruce Jenner and the buffoonery of Ted Cruz than getting sideways with people who would actually … kill them. (Not that I’m blaming them. I’m just saying that’s reality.)

Then, just for icing, scroll through the pictures of the Waco aftermath. Were the only cops and bystanders allowed on the scene the morbidly obese? Did you have tip past 300 pounds to get through the yellow tape? Does that particular strip mall have a requirement that you be at least 150 pounds overweight before you’ll be served? Or is it just Texas? Frankly, I’m astonished there weren’t more deaths by diabetes than gunfire. But that’s the land we love.

Forgetting the usual gun debate, since it is abundantly clear after the the Sandy Hook massacre that the only legislative response we will ever in response to our own home-brewed terrorism is to make it easier for psychos to buy guns, let’s just make a comment on the male and intensely ‘Murican need to project … badassery.

The Waco thugs — and do note that the usual right-wing pundits are not deploying that loaded phrase on 99% white biker gangs — are flat-out criminals, running drugs, guns and women pretty much as they please, with the biggest threat to their bottom line coming from other gangs, not the FBI or local (grossly over-weight) police. The Bandidos even have the phrase “we’re the people your parents warned you about” as their club motto.

They are, put another way, a bunch of psychos.

So, walk me through the psychological gear links that make aging urban desk jockeys so eager to emulate the look of these feral lunks? And I’m not talking people riding motorcycles. I’m talking the whole black leathers, do-rag, probably-packing, flash-me-in-Sturgis, has-to-be-an-unmuffled-Harley crowd. Certainly there’s a conscious association the bond salesman/weekend Bandido is making to the celebrated criminal class. Why?

The claim will be that it’s all a bit of ironic fun. Another tribal thing for (mainly) guys who’d blow out a knee or rotator cuff if they engaged in anything more fraternal and physical than cruising all day on a 900-pound motorcycle. But, come on. The sense that you’re (still) a threat (if you never were to anyone but yourself) is fundamental to the faux biker ethos, just as it is to the gun fetish crowd. It’s the cheapest imaginable buy-in to a veneer of warrior masculinity. Go to a store. Try on some chaps, a vest and a bike and … voila! … one dangerous dude. Or so you hope the chicks will think.

It’s be ridiculously, laughably adolescent if the white collar wannabes weren’t lending a form of credibility to their criminal/mostly Aryan role models.

But that’s what we tolerate in the land of the free, over-armed and over-weight.

 

Finally:  We had some technical issues with WordPress here at “Wry Wing” lately. But we’re better now.

Save the Planet … with Fourth Generation Nukes

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterMy suggestion for Earth Day is that liberals in particular reexamining their attitude toward nuclear power may be one of the best things they can do for Mother Earth.

President Obama is down in the Everglades today drawing attention to the fact that climate change and continued growth in south Florida, up and down both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, is pumping salt water in and sucking fresh water out of the state’s porous limestone base at a rate that will soon leave that rainy, spongy area in a predicament nearly as perilous as the American Southwest is facing in its current historic drought.

“Water and nukes?” “What’s the connection?”

Glad you asked.

But first, let’s emphasize that while no new nuclear plants have been brought on line in the United States since Three Mile Island, significant advances have been made in how to generate nuclear power, to the point that a comparison between what is known as Generation II nuclear plants — the hulking, multi-billion dollar monstrosities at Monticello and Prairie Island here in Minnesota — and Generation IV plants largely on drawing boards around the world is kind of like comparing glowing rotten apples to nectarines.

Most liberals, in my experience have simply closed their minds to nuclear power on the grounds that A: It always produces toxic waste that lasts thousands of years, B: Can melt down in any terror attack or natural disaster and kill thousands in the surrounding area, or C: Is an energy source that can only be built by the same greed head bastards who have polluted the atmosphere and wound us into god knows how many international conflicts with medieval sultanates and lunatics around the world.

The third issue there — lining the pockets of the likes of Koch Industries — is still a factor, but the first two are no longer anywhere close to relevancy as too many otherwise sophisticated people believe they are. In fact, Generation IV nukes have the ability to consume, i.e. “clean up” all the existing waste sitting in concrete casks and once planned for centuries of internment at Yucca Mountain north of Vegas.

Don’t believe me. But read this from James Hansen, arguably the godfather of climate change, the man who brought the issue to the world’s attention almost 30 years ago and is still a respected thought-leader on how to actually reduce the impact of this human-exacerbated disaster.

Says Hansen: “In all countries first priority should be energy efficiency, which has tremendous potential. After that comes renewable energies and improved low-loss smart electric grids. Everybody hopes that will be enough, but I cannot find real world energy experts who believe that is likely in the foreseeable future, even in the United States. This is all the more true in India and China, which are even more dependent on coal and have faster growing energy demands.The current fleet of (2nd generation) nuclear power plants is aging. The 3rd generation plants that are likely to gain construction approval soon have some significant improvements over the 2nd generation, using less than1 percent of the nuclear fuel, leaving the rest in long-lived (>10,000 years) wastes. If that were the end of the story, I would not have any enthusiasm for nuclear power. However, it is clear that 4th generation nuclear power can be ready in the medium-term, within about 20 years. Some people argue that it could be much sooner – however, the time required for its implementation is of little importance. The reason that 4th generation nuclear power is a game-changer is that it can solve two of the biggest problems that have beset nuclear power. 4th generation uses almost all of the energy in the uranium (or thorium), thus decreasing fuel requirements by two orders of magnitude.”

For a slightly more pop and more easily-digestible version of what Hansen says and the current reality of 4th generation nuclear power in reducing carbon emission, dial up the 2013 documentary “Pandora’s Promise” on Roku or Apple TV.

Fellow liberals have mostly ignored the startling advances in nuclear power generation in the belief that the world’s energy demands can be met, in our children’s lifetimes at least, by an aggressive commitment to solar, wind and geothermal power. But while substantial advances are being made in all those technologies, each would have to experience truly exponential growth, and immediately, to provide anything close to the amount of fossil fuel that is going to be burned over the next 50 years powering advanced and burgeoning economies and … providing water to climate change-ravaged regions of the planet.

A vast new supply of electrical power — for desalinating sea water — could be a viable long-term solution to Florida’s dilemma, the so-called “mega-drought” currently effecting California and most of the heavily-populated desert Southwest, along with innumerable other regions around the world. (Additionally, the infusion of an immense, almost entirely “renewable”, source of electric power could radically accelerate the transition to electric-powered vehicles. Not just pricey Teslas, but cheap scooters and vehicles for Third World economies, thereby offering a substantial, secondary reduction of carbon emissions.)

Obviously, in an era when half the American legislative system has nothing to offer but juvenile obstruction there’s no reason to get our hopes too high that anything far-sighted will occur in our remaining years. But the cynicism of one end of the political spectrum is no reason that supposedly more open-minded progressives shouldn’t at least drop their blinders and educate themselves on what is both possible and pragmatic.

 

The Return of Randy the Ombudsman

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterWriting for MinnPost.com I recently waded back into the lack of ombudsman at any local news organization, by which I mean someone – anyone – who regularly explains what in the hell the newspaper, radio or TV station was thinking when they ran Story X or ignored Story Y.

In an age when no healthy skeptic has reason to take anyone at their word, an ombudsman, someone who does the ‘splainin, as Ricky Ricardo would say, would be a bona fide value-added service. Or so you’d think. (On the other hand, if you’ve actually got something to hide, setting someone loose to ‘splain how completely clueless you were when Story X went down is probably not a good thing and stonewalling may be a prudent move.)

Well, it turns out fortune has smiled on Twin Cities media and what still passes for their newsrooms. After a multi-year hiatus, when his seasonal bear-baiting and booya service occupied his every waking hour, an old friend, Randy is returning. It seems he has hired on his cousin, Leonard, to scour northwest Wisconsin’s highways and ATV trails for booya meat, leaving Randy with several more hours a week to gather his thoughts at Douglas County’s finest road house, the Dry Dock Saloon, right off Highway 35 – and practically underneath the giant microwave tower.

We hadn’t seen Randy since the Dry Dock aborted its $10 All You Can Drink Wednesday special. But a week or so back, on Taco Night, we found him there, nursing his sixth Spotted Cow and found him entirely agreeable to resuming his freelance ombudsman work, not only for the Star Tribune, but the Pioneer Press, MPR and every Twin Cities TV and radio station that hasn’t bothered to explain themselves in forever, which is all of them.

The deal was pretty straightforward as media negotiations go. In exchange for covering his Spotted Cow and taco habit, Randy would ‘splain everything that needed ‘splainin’, until all questions were answered or he fell off his stool, whichever came first.

All in all Rand’ looked pretty good, especially considering the nasty frostbite he got after getting lost in the state forest, with flu-like symptoms, after the big Moose Junction Booya in early March. Thank god those dudes heading for their meth shack found him just before dawn.

By way of priming the pump, I hit Randy with a few ombuds-like questions that had been sent my way on the off-chance that we would reconnect.

Maintaining a strict one Cow to every three for Randy ratio I tossed out the first question.

 

“Randy: I see some East Coast university has proven that the media has gone all-in on Al Gore butt kissing and has started ignoring “climate realists” like me. The survey says a lot of these half-bankrupt daily rags are refusing to run letters  clear-headed folks write pointing out the millions of flaws in this global warming bull [bleep] hoax [bleep]. I’m a big supporter of local businesses, even lefty apologists like the Star Tribune — being an east side guy, the Pioneer Press fits my style of thinking a lot better. But I’m worried. Is this second-class citizen thing for people like me spreading to Minnesota? I mean, hell. You want to see my plowing bill for the driveway last year? It snowed! Thank god TV stations are still holding the line against this liberal snake oil.” Signed, SSH, St. Mary’s Point, MN.

Randy says: Well here’s a news flash for you: The big time media types have people who go outdoors for them. Their idea of “climate” is an air-conditioned tennis court. I haven’t tipped a Cow with one of those prisses since I can’t remember when, unless they snuck into the Moose Junction party uninvited.

So they think they can just willy-nilly up and decide that a hoax is not a hoax and some of the best scientific minds BP and Exxon have ever hired are making [bleep] up? Well, excuse me! They can try it. They can pull all this “peer review” crapola and say some nerd in Iceland is out there with his slide rule measuring glaciers, but you and I, people who buy our groceries and clothes from real stores, like Menards and Fleet Farm, have a way of reminding the pencil necks in their swank newspaper offices how their bread gets buttered. If the Star Tribune or that other one start going ‘New York’ on us, we’ll remind them pretty quick what happens if you don’t give real Americans equal time on this science-y [bleep].”

“Randy: I’m a huge Vikings fan. I took out a second mortgage on my trailer to get my personal seat license for end zone seats at the new place and I am so stoked for that first kick-off. But here’s the thing, neither of the papers in town gives anywhere near enough attention to the second-biggest season of all. You know, screw baseball, basketball and hockey. We’re talking mock-draft season! That sweet spot time of year, from mid-January until late April, when great football minds speculate 24/7 on which can’t-miss 21 year-old The Purple will draft to guarantee them a Super Bowl win for the new People’s Stadium. But where real papers used to give mock drafts a good two or three ages pages a day, the locals are slacking off. If I get one piddly story a day, I’m lucky. If this doesn’t change, I’m getting one of those app phone things, just as soon as my credit improves.” SidH, Golden Valley.

Randy says: I hear ya on that, dude. Football is the only true American sport. I know because I see more ads for trucks and beer watching football than anything else. Hell, what do they advertise on soccer games? Panty liners? These people are short-shrifting real Americans and real men by not running more mock draft stories. If they need more experts they can come up here. Leonard and I’ll give ’em something to write about. If they buy a couple rounds.”

Randy: I don’t know much about TV news but i used to think it was all about getting good-looking gals out in front of house fires, car wrecks and yellow police tape. But lately I see stuff like a couple dudes running off to some resort and partying with the locals. Sometimes they even run these stories about some local bait shop or boat motor repair joint, which I used to think they called “ads”, but they seem to doing for free. What gives? Or maybe I should say, “How do I get them to come up here and plug my bear-baitin’ business?” I could tell those boys a couple hundred good stories. P.S. Those guys aren’t poofters are they? I ain’t never seen hair like that around here.” Leonard, Foxboro, WI.

Randy; Jeezus christ, Leonard! You done driving Pioneer Trail like I told you? I heard AJ clipped a doe out there last night. That meat’d still be fresh enough. But to what you’re sayin’; as I understand it these TV folks aren’t getting anywhere near the dough your Don Shelbys were getting. So they gotta work in some perks anyway they can. If this means they grab a few days fishin’ or personal water-crafting up here in God’s country, I’m all for it. Plus, who says that ain’t news? I mean if they stayed down in the Cities what would they cover? Little kiddies making Easter bunnies? Some new, toity restaurant? People get tired of that hard news crap after a while. A couple brewskies by the lake sounds a lot better.”

If you have a question for Randy the All-Purpose Ombudsman, send it to:

brianlambertmn@comcast.net

 

or, write it on a coaster and leave it on the bar at the Dry Dock.

Frat House Group-think, from Oklahoma to the U.S. Senate

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterNot being a big “joiner” — no bowling league will have me and the Elks Lodge want too much in dues — two nearly simultaneous events this past week reaffirmed my long-held belief that the truly wise man follows his own path.

First, those Oklahoma frat boys. When I was in college, during the height of the anti-Vietnam counter culture, nothing was less cool than a fraternity. Country club prep houses for kids too self-absorbed and weirdly rule-bound to notice or care that the times were a-changin’. A duller crowd you couldn’t invent, even if a lot of flashy girls turned out for their parties.

Mainly though it was the tribal mindset, the appalling group-think required to gain entry to … what? A band of brothers who might some day rule hedge funds that could single-handedly crush a Third World nation? Or, more likely, the possibility of exchanging a secret handshake with an insurance agent selling you your first homeowner policy? The thrill didn’t register. Worse, the thought of acquiescing to the herd mentality that required you to run naked through a girls’ dorm with a propeller on your head while singing “Wild Thing” didn’t strike me as particularly, well, dignified.

Clearly, I was an outlier. Post counter-culture, the Greek culture has come roaring back, or ranting back as was the case with the astonishing numbskulls on video from Oklahoma, who at least have the excuse that they are a bunch of liquored-up kids. (Over dinner last night my wife and I agreed that short of John Wayne Gacy does anything reflect worse on your parenting skills than a kid leading a “no n—–s” singalong? Jesus!)

Human history is littered with examples of the extreme downside of tribalism, the need to belong to a group that you believe gives you more power than yourself alone, the feeling of affirmation, the certainty that if so many others who look like you are doing it must be okay. It’s no great consolation that the young are most susceptible to the allure of malignant group-identity.

So, second example, what can you say about 47 Republican Senators who … sign their names … to a letter to the Great Satan-hating Ayatollahs of Iran urging them, tribe-to-tribe, to resist a deal impeding their nuclear ambitions? These aren’t stupid kids, and as far as I can tell none of them were drunk at the time they signed on, although there’s no guarantee a few of that crowd aren’t on high-powered dementia medication.

The letter of course was the inspiration of newby Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a 37 year-old Harvard man with deep Tea Party roots and ambitions far beyond Razorback-holler. (Over the years, local bloggers, the Powerline lawyers, have regularly soiled themselves promoting young Mr. Cotton as a “true conservative”, i.e. tribal warrior). It goes without saying that as a dragon-breathed Constitutionalist (or whatever) Cotton’s master plan is far more about himself than saving the free world from a bad deal on nuclear tubing.

Cotton is following the well-marked path of other archer-than-arch conservatives like Michele Bachmann, Ted Cruz, the entire House class of 2010 and every foghorn on talk radio. Go big. Go loud. Go half-insane. The people who will send you money and push you forward as their next savior will be delighted far beyond reason. They will give you license to go forth and smite the infidel libtard tribes until not so much as a lame dog walks among their burning huts.

There’s no downside whatsoever for Cotton. But what can you say about … John McCain, a guy already stamped by history as have demonstrated some of the worst judgment of any top-level politician of his era? (Sarah Palin.) How does he explain, I mean truly explain, attaching his name to something so nakedly self-serving as Cotton’s letter?

The suspicion is that like the muddled-head frat kid egged on by the house’s alpha-party animal McCain piped up and added his voice to, you know, prove he too is worthy of the tribe.

Ladies, It’s Time You Got Tough with Hillary

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterAre we having another deep doo-doo deja vu Clinton moment, or what? Suddenly it’s 1998 all over again. If only the economy was nearly as good.

So it seems Hillary Clinton, presumptive next president, played by her own rules and kept her State Department e-mails (more or less) hidden from official prying eyes. That is except for government types who received her e-mails. Those are still on the big server system, accessible to every EOH (Enemy of Hillary) who wants to root around and prove she personally armed the terrorists who killed the ambassador in Benghazi.

Now … obviously … this is a (big) deal because she’s Hillary goddam Clinton, with an empty six-lane freeway in front of her leading to the White House. If she wasn’t we’d still be obsessing over that stupid dress thing. Whether this outrage(!) actually has legs, which is to say if the conservative outrage machine can sustain it for 18 months, remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt it, since Es of H have a bad habit of picking the wrong horse to saddle up their righteous indignation. See: Whitewater, Benghazi.

But this email flap is another reminder that liberals might want to demand a hell of a lot more from Her Regency before the coronation. Personally, I’ve never been comfortable with the acclamation route to big power. I like candidates who have had a scare thrown into them, people who have been forced to explicitly defend and/or adjust their thinking and promises based on aggressive examination from E’s and F’s alike.

The current Hillary-Jeb match-up is so embarrassing. Clinton and Bush. Again. We look like a goddam banana republic, alternating between owners of the two biggest estancias every eight years. It’s bad enough we have to endure a system at both the national and state level where millionaires (of both parties) essentially buy themselves a job, usually guaranteeing that their previous stakeholders have primary access to their souls. It’s so damned unimaginative, if nothing else.

More to the point, as many have written before, the Hillary ascension, with no Plan B, strikes me as recklessly perilous. Even if the jowl-flapping buffoons of modern conservatism fail to make “Email-gate” stick, where are we if something truly grave happens to our one-and-only roadblock to Bush III, or President Scott Walker? Tomorrow is promised to no one. Hillary may not get hit by a bus, but not being the springiest of chickens, her health could fail, or we could discover that she really did plan the Benghazi attack. What then?

Given a choice between female candidates, I’d much prefer Elizabeth Warren. (Hell, I’d prefer Warren over any other Democrat, x or y chromosome, off the top of my head.) But a Warren candidacy would ignite the most godawful firestorm of coordinated, multi-front, big money attacks this back water oligarchy has ever seen. She’s despised and feared that much by Wall Street. And frankly, I doubt she’s prepared yet for that level of intensity of defamation. Hillary on the other hand seems quite cozy and well-triangulated among the Goldman Sachs and Citigroups of the world.

Liberal women in particular seem all but unanimously united in their support of Hillary, which is understandable to a point. After 240 years of alleged democracy, a woman president is waaay overdue and Hillary clearly has more experience and retail savvy than any plausible male on the scene. (Sorry, Joe Biden. Ain’t never going to happen.) That said, it may be that the women rushing to carry Hillary’s sedan chair up the White House steps are precisely the people to be grilling her most intensely on how exactly she intends to transform this country’s financial regulatory system, which is so tightly inter-locked with campaign finance, which is to blame for the obscene, truly Guatemala-like corruption and waste of DC?

There are a half dozen other good questions, but getting Her Highness on record, explicitly and in detail on that point alone would be a damned valuable start.

And if (not when) she answers, don’t put up with any of the usual Clinton-ish legalisms.

 

 

 

This Just In: Bill O’Reilly Full of [bleep]

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterMaybe the strangest thing about the still unfolding “Bill O’Reilly is a bullshitter!” story is that anyone with their wits still about them ever thought he wasn’t.

It is ridiculously entertaining to read David Corn’s Mother Jones piece, and now yesterday’s howler about Bill knocking on the door of a key JFK assassination figure at the very moment the guy inside blows his head off with a shotgun. Gripping stuff if not for the recordings of O’Reilly on the phone … from 1200 miles away. I mean, there’s a hilarious Ron Burgundy aspect to O’Reilly’s uber-manly tale of dragging an injured colleague to safety amid a murderous police rampage in Buenos Aires when in fact the “riot” was barely more than a routine demonstration, no one was killed and no CBS employee reported so much as a twisted ankle or required any level of medical attention.

I’d add that this is the stuff of full-on parody if it weren’t for the fact that Stephen Colbert built a career doing exactly that. (Can you imagine the delirium Colbert’s writers would be in with this run of red meat?)

Comparisons to Brian Williams’ self-immolation miss the central difference here pretty badly. Williams was employed with the explicit understanding that he was credible, trading only in the facts as best as NBC could report them. Bill O’Reilly is the key mouthpiece in Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes’ enormously profitable political campaign masquerading as a news organization. Williams’ viewers were justifiably disappointed to learn of his bizarre embellishments. O’Reilly’s viewers, I strongly suspect, do not care in the least what he has embellished or flat-out invented, as long as he continues to attack Murdoch and Ailes’ and their designated enemies.

With that in mind it’ll be easier to understand why FoxNews not only isn’t going to “investigate” O’Reilly’s superhero imaginings, and is instead gleeful at a fresh opportunity to attack the “guttersnipe liberal media” and threaten straight news pinheads with bodily harm. It plays directly into the fascinating psychology wherein ardent zealots confronted with information that unambiguously contradicts their beliefs double down on their erroneous thinking rather than concede and align themselves with reality.

Prediction: O’Reilly’s ratings will spike over the next month.

This incident brings two things back to mind.

1: Liberals take FoxNews far too seriously, and I fully admit my complicity on that point. For years I’ve fulminated myself into apoplexy at Fox’s shameless absurdity and cynicism, convinced that the network was an aggressive form of cancer soon to terminate all higher brain function among the credulous masses. But somewhere after the 2012 elections, when all of Fox-think was revealed to be astonishingly incompetent at both campaigning and campaign analysis, I settled down. Their bona fides, such as they are, are all but completely limited to an old, embittered demographic of rapidly diminishing electoral significance.

Here’s Frank Rich not long ago on the topic.

I suspect the irrelevance of FoxNews to the 300 million Americans who are not lapping it up 24/7 has something to do with Jon Stewart bailing on “The Daily Show”. FoxNews as a punchline is a settled, cliched commodity.

2:  Blogging colleague Joe Loveland passed this on yesterday. It’s the annual Pew survey on America’s most and least-trusted broadcast news operations. In the realm of what we’ve come to expect the survey’s authors write:

“Fox News is both the most trusted and least trusted name in news. 35% of Americans say they trust Fox News more than any other TV news outlet, followed by 14% for PBS, 11% for ABC, 10% for CNN, 9% for CBS, 6% each for Comedy Central and MSNBC, and 3% for NBC. It leads the way because of its continuing near total support among Republicans as the place to go for news- 69% of Republicans say it’s their most trusted source with nothing else polling above 7%.”

Think of that. 69%. Pretty well proving Murdoch and Ailes’ show biz genius at giving their people the campaign message they want.

But in the context of Bill O’Reilly’s naked bogus-ness, it also explains why he’ll suffer no reputational damage. Fox’s world is designed as an “us v. them” battlefield. O’Reilly is the high profile field marshall under constant attack from common enemies. To support Bill without equivocation is to be a loyal soldier.

Contrast that, as Joe pointed out, with the dismal all-in loyalty liberals have to their alleged message-bearer, MSNBC.

“It’s interesting that while Fox News and MSNBC are often thought of as equivalent, Fox News is by far and away the most trusted source of GOP voters while MSNBC is only tied for 4th among Democrats.”

The underlying point here is that liberals and conservatives affiliate with and consume partisan messaging in vastly different ways. Other psychological studies note conservatives’ far higher levels of trust in authority, e.g. Bill O’Reilly, and liberals’ elevated levels of skepticism toward leadership/herd thinking. One group embraces the minister-to-parish relationship. The other tolerates it in small doses.

Second prediction:  Bill O’Reilly will soon reveal that it was he who shot Osama bin Laden and to thunderous applause will vilify any left-wing guttersnipe who says otherwise.