Republicans are currently led by a brazenly corrupt chief executive who was caught in a bribery scheme to benefit his personal and political career. The evidence is clear and overwhelming, but congressional Republicans are marching in lockstep defending their corrupt leader.
As this plays out, many cynical observers shrug it all off, maintaining that if a Democrat leader faced a similar charge Democrats would do the same thing Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are doing. They claim that “both parties protect their own, no matter what.”
They might want to ask Rod Blagojevich about that.
On December 9, 2008, Blagojevich, the Democratic former Governor of Illinois, was caught soliciting appointments in exchange for the right to name the replacement for former Senator Barack Obama. It was clearly documented bribery for personal benefit. Sound familiar?
The Democratic Governor’s actions were deplorable and corrupt. At the same time, Blagojevich’s type of bribery lacked some of the worst elements of the Trump Ukrainian corruption scandal.
After all, Blagojevich wasn’t endangering a foreign ally’s troops under attack from a sworn American enemy, as Trump did.
Blagojevich wasn’t directing a foreign government to interfere with our free and fair elections, as Trump did.
Blagojevich wasn’t illegally redirecting hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds approved by a large bipartisan majority of the duly elected legislative body, as Trump did.
Blagojevich wasn’t demanding the slander of a political opponent, as Trump did.
Blagojevich hadn’t launched a massive cover-up of evidence, as Trump did.
Still, Blagojevich’s form of bribery was despicable in its own right, so Democrats at both the state and national level acted swiftly to protect citizens from this corrupt leader.
Immediately after the charges against Blagojevich became public, state Democrats immediately condemned their fellow Democrat and called for him to resign, including the Democratic Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller, Treasurer, and Secretary of State.
At the national level, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, and Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin called for the Democrat to step down. The 50 members of the U.S. Senate Democratic caucus ordered Blagojevich to not fill the seat with himself or anyone else.
When Blagojevich named someone to serve anyway, the Democratic State Attorney General filed a motion with the Illinois Supreme Court seeking to declare the Governor “unable to serve” and strip him of the powers of his office.
Then the Democratic-controlled House quickly began impeachment proceedings. In January 2009, just one month after the Blagojevich crimes became known, Blagojevich was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House on a vote of 114–1. Only one Democrat opposed it.
Just twenty days later, the Democratic Governor was convicted by the Senate, with every Democrat voting in favor of his impeachment. Democratic legislators also disqualified their fellow Democrat from ever again holding public office in the state.
In other words, faced with a powerful chief executive from it’s own party engaged in attempted bribery to benefit himself, Illinois Democrats didn’t make excuses. They didn’t engage in blame-shifting “whataboutism” arguments. They didn’t shrug it off because no payoff had yet been made before investigators shut down the scheme. They didn’t put party over principle.
Instead, Democrats supported a swift impeachment and removal of their party’s top leader.
Democrats are far from perfect. But as Senate Majority Mitch McConnell and the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate begin their Trump impeachment trial, the contrast between how Democrats and Republicans have handled these two respective bribery scandals is clear and stark. The case of Rod Blagojevich reminds us that lazy “both parties are equally complicit in the face of bribery and corruption” assertions just don’t hold up.
I still don’t understand the purpose of Elizabeth Warren “letting it be known” that Bernie Sanders told her a woman couldn’t get elected president. If she wasn’t prepared to contradict him to his face and say, “That’s what you said, Bernie” in last night’s debate, why bring it up at all?
The story of Warren and Sanders having a private conversation in 2018 and Bernie saying what she claims he said pretty clearly originated from her campaign, yet her prepared response when asked at the debate brushed it aside and spun off into how Amy Klobuchar and her have never lost an election.
What am I missing?
It may just be a personal thing, but I’m appalled by people who engage in private conversations only to hit the PA system when what was said — between friends — serves their greater purposes. It’s a fundamental violation of “trustworthiness.” If you’re truly a friend, you retain that confidence … no matter what.
Warren’s too-slick by half non-response to being asked (essentially) if Bernie said what she said he said contrasts with Sanders’ response, which was a lot more digestible. Namely, that given Hillary Clinton’s three million popular vote plurality two years earlier, what sort of fool would ever say a woman couldn’t win?
There’s an interesting debate discussion to be had with the various candidates breaking down the particular pitfalls facing: the kinda doddery old professional DC animal, the billionaire(s), the really smart but pretty damn young gay dude, the you-can-smell-the-ambition-through-her-pores Midwestern Mom, the old socialist and the up-from-hard-scrabble-professor … who doesn’t seem as trusted a good friend as her advertised scruples would otherwise suggest.
I finally watched “Joker” the other night. It met my expectations. And now — after making a billion dollars at the box office — it’s been nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. So, what the hell, let’s blame Trump, or whatever it is that created Trump.
Two things put me off seeing “Joker” in a theater.
1: I don’t have much interest in purely fictional psycho killer movies. I mean “Psycho” was terrific. But it took its time getting to Tony Perkins. He wasn’t set up as the ghoulish, fully gratuitous lodge pole of the entire picture.
And 2: I generally despise comic book movies. To be blunt, they’re simple-minded and adolescent. Which is fine if you’re both of those things. But not being a 14 year-old, cos-playing fan boy, capes, tights and wall-to-wall CGI action fail to move me to anything other than boredom.
Yet here was, quite clearly, a cultural phenomenon. Literally millions of people turned out to see “Joker”, likely as attracted by its connection to Batman as I was repelled. Then word got out about how “brilliant” Joaquin Phoenix was as the genuinely mentally disturbed main character, Arthur Fleck, a hapless punching bag for pretty much everyone in his orbit. Plenty of critics said “no thanks” to the whole grim adventure. But prizes were nevertheless won at prestigious film festivals.
It’s been maybe 50 years since I placed any great credibility in the movie industry’s notion of “art” or “best”. When “Oliver!” beat out “2001: A Space Odyssey”, (which wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture), it was an early lesson for little, young me that the voters in the movie business are mainly about their business — who they worked with, who they know and like, who they want to work for — and not about the side of filmmaking that thoroughly invested in the interweaving of art and imagination.
Hollywood 2020 isn’t so different, even with all the attention and effort given to bringing in younger and more diverse voters. A truly good film like “Moonlight” was likely lifted up as much by the movie industry’s “woke” culture as the film community’s appreciation of its storytelling and craftsmanship. This “wokeness” was even more evident with last year’s winner, “The Green Book”. (The movie business was very hinky about lending too much weight and credibility to Netflix and “Roma”.)
And now, “Joker”. A billion dollar winner at the box office, and with serious adults talking about how it isn’t just a comic bok movie. About how it really has something important to say about our cultural moment. To which I say, “Like what exactly?”
That damaged-in-youth, mistreated-through-life “losers” are a potential danger to their families, themselves and us? While I find it hard to disagree, I fail to see the fresh insight into the issue in a movie that depends on a connection to a more or less dystopian comic book to find its place on the stage of our times.
Phoenix does startling work as Arthur Fleck, and will almost certainly win Best Actor. But I gotta tell ya, as someone who has spent more time than I should have watching movies and chatting up actors over the years, I’ve long since stopped thinking playing a nutjob is difficult work. For an actor, playing crazy is like a horse on the open range. The reins are off. It’s remarkably feeing. A patently crazy character has no connections to any familiar parameters with which audiences can judge good acting from bad. I mean, the guy’s crazy! An actor can pretty much take that anywhere he and the director want to go. There’s no good way to measure it as “real” or bona fide.
Along with the stunning box office numbers, my guess is that Academy voters see “Joker” as a tap into the Trump-era zeitgeist. (“Zeitgeist” being one of those words you always need to drop to convince readers you’re smarter than you are.)
Here, in Arthur Fleck, a piece of human detritus, someone both abused and forgotten in a fundamentally corrupt society, controlled and exploited by the uber-wealthy. (Enter young Bruce “Batman” Wayne and his mega-macher father.)
We’ve watched these sad wretches go homicidal. Hell, a guy like Arthur shot up a movie theater playing a Batman movie a few years ago in Denver. Therefore, if you’re keeping score at home, “Joker” is a provocative comment on our ugly, abusive times … or … maybe only if you really want it to be.
My view, slumped in my chair watching on iTunes, was closer to “slick, crass exploitation.” As someone somewhere has already written, “Joker” is a variation on “Taxi Driver” for an era that wants its cultural commentary reduced to the wholly literal simplicity of a comic book.
If a mirror to the era of Trump is something you’re looking for, “Bombshell”, has far more relevance than “Joker.” And if you’re a film lover looking for where “art” meets “best”, track down “A Hidden Life” … which hasn’t been nominated for anything … and has a lot to say about our moral obligations in an era of corruption.
Well, 2020 has certainly started with a bang, hasn’t it? For months I’ve been telling the (very few) who would listen to buckle up for this one, because “normal” has never been an option. Never mind duelling attack/counter-attacks with Iran, the simple fact of Donald Trump requiring re-election to avoid a torrent of criminal indictments guaranteed a long season of ever-compounding insanities.
So, since dystopian fantasies are all the rage in teen sci-fi and Hollywood, let’s imagine what the next 358 days might be like.
Mid-January: With Congressional Democrats denied access to any intelligence proving the existence of the “imminent attack” necessitating the killing of the Iranian general, the House opens hearings … and as usual is denied access to administration communication and officials, many of whom do however go on “Fox and Friends” to vilify Democrats as “soft on Iran.” Simultaneously, Nancy Pelosi continues to outrage Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson by not accepting Mitch McConnell’s conditions for a Senate acquittal trial.
Early February: ISIS forces, no longer constrained by American troops, re-constitute, attack and re-take a major Iraqi city. This follows a mysterious day-long black-out in New York City. With impeachment still in limbo and thousands more U.S. troops re-deployed back to the Middle East, Trump delivers his State of the Union speech amid large-scale anti-war/pro-coniction protests outside the Capitol and around the country. An organized mid-speech walk out by progressive Democrats leads to Trump to extemporize about “America-haters”, for which Laura Ingraham says he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
March: Simultaneous terror attacks on U.S. government targets in South America and Asia and a Trump Hotel in the Phillipines are all Trump needs to demand a large-scale attack on Iranian military and government targets in Iran itself. Several key Pentagon offcials refuse to obey the orders and resign. Their replacements carry out the bombings, which kill hundreds of civilians as well. Iranians close-ranks around the once-reviled ultra-conservative religious government. Meanwhile, the Democratic race, post-Super Tuesday, has boiled down to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, with Sanders the standard bearer for impassioned anti-war activists. Bolstered by long-delayed court rulings, Pelosi and House Democrats add new articles of bribery to impeachment charges. But the Supreme Court rules along straight ideological lines that White House officials do not have to obey House subpoenas.
April: After demanding NATO allies join the U.S. build-up of forces in preparation for a major attack on Iran. Only Montenegro agrees, at which point Trump announces the U.S. is leaving NATO, a decision Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh and Vladimir Putin hail as a “courageous, principled stance.” This is followed by a series of large-scale hacks, brown-outs and cyber-corruptions of major U.S. corporate infrastructure. An actual invasion is left in limbo.
June: Three oil tankers are attacked and sunk, blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices in the U.S. spike to $5.50 a gallon. In retaliation, Trump orders attacks on all major Iranian military ports. The U.N condemnas Trump’s “reckless adventurism”. Trumps withdraws the U.S. from the U.N. Democrats fume and “call for” restrictions on his war powers but are, us usual, ignored by McConnell’s Senate. Despite a fever pitch of anti-war fervor, and the deaths of dozens of U.S. troops in skirmishes in Iraq, Joe Biden wraps up the Democratic nomination under the familiar cloud of “inside power players” freezing out Sanders. Bernie’s supporters denounce the system and mount a write-in third party candidacy for him.
August: Full-scale, violent riots break out at Trump’s nomination convention. Several demonstrators are killed, hundreds injured in the police/security response. Sean Hannity suggests that demonstrators were actually “Iranian agents and sympathizers.” Water purification systems in over a dozen U.S. cities fail simultaneously. ISIS attacks and seizes a Carnival cruise liner in the Mediterranean and holds 3000 Americans hostage. The impeachment deadlock is broken when Pelosi and McConnell agree to two witnesses and limited questioning. Trump is quickly acquitted and Brian Kilmeade appears on the “Fox and Friends” set wearing a red, white and blue “exonerated” t-shirt.
September: After a 21-day siege, Trump orders a SEALs/Special Forces rescue of the cruise ship hostages. ISIS terrorists blow up the ship. Only a couple hundred passengers survive. Trump, riding hardened support among his base, who are filling is twice-weekly rallies in West Virginia and Alabama to over-flowing, declares all-out war on Iran to ecstatic cheering. Democrats demand a formal Congressonal inquiry and vote on war, but on the advice of Bill Barr, Trump declares he has “total power” to “protect America” and ignores them. It goes to the Supreme Court. Anti-war rioting becomes a constant feature in every major American city.
October: On a straight-line ideological vote the Supreme Court rules Trump does not need Congressional authorization for a war against Iran. Rioting takes place outside the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies. Trump nominates Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to replace her. McConnell orders a “fast track” confirmation. Polling shows Trump — who has refused any debate not moderated by Lou Dobbs — leads polling with 41% to 37% for Biden and 20% for Sanders.
November: Election day. Hundreds of computerized polling precincts across the country report hackings, breakdowns and “wildly erroneous” tabulations, yet Biden wins by two electroal votes. Trump though refuses to concede. The latest cyber attack cripples VISA and American Express, rendering them unable to process transactions. Washington D.C. endures a three-day power outage. Bill Barr meets with the Supreme Court to decide how to rule on the election melt-down. After more than a month of deliberating, marked by more demonstrations and rioting, the Court rules to void all election results. The decision about when to hold new elections is left to Congress. Pelosi and McConnell begin discussions … which linger well into 2021.
The 2020 elections are the most important elections of my lifetime, and potentially the most important in American history. Will we replace the most corrupt, bigoted, and incompetent President of our times, and his shameless congressional enablers, or will we go further down the road to authoritarianism and corporatism? That sounds melodramatic, but given what we’ve learned about Trump over the last three years, it’s not an exaggeration.
The stakes are high, so liberals need to step up their game.
This isn’t about trashing liberals. Liberals have done a lot of great things for America. At a time when all of these things were quite unpopular, liberals had enough vision, courage, and commitment to pass Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the minimum wage, marriage equality, civil rights, voting rights, environmental protections, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
But we grassroots liberals also can be also our own worst enemies. To win in 2020, we need to make five New Years resolutions to do better than we did in 2016.
STOP THE PETTY, PERSONAL ATTACKS. With hundreds of substantive reasons to criticize Trump and his lackeys, there is no reason to stoop to snotty attacks about personal issues like the President’s complexion, hair, waistline, hand size, penis size, verbal slips, and misspellings. The same goes for personally insulting his supporters.
Among the moderate swing voters who will decide the outcome of this election, those kinds of personal shots inadvertently create sympathy for Trump and others who don’t deserve swing voters’ sympathy. I get that they are cathartic, and sometimes tongue-in-cheek. But they’re also and self-defeating in the end, and therefore self-indulgent, so liberals need to get better at taking a pass on the personal shots.
STOP THE CANNABILISM.
Liberals also need to be mindful of Ronald Reagan’s 11th
Commandment, “thou shall not speak ill of other Republicans.”
I understand the temptation to wage civil war. My top presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, has already dropped out of the race, and my second choice, Cory Booker, doesn’t look like he will last much beyond Iowa. Having to go to Plan C is deeply disappointing to me. Having to go to Plan D, E, F, G, H, I, J, or K, a distinct possibility in a field this large, likely will be even more disappointing to me.
In the end, I realize that I am unlikely to be in love with my Democratic Party nominee. But if I can’t be with the one I love, honey, I’ll love the one I’m with. Unless we learn something dramatically scandalous about one of the Democratic candidates in the coming months, I’m pledging to myself that I won’t trash other Democratic candidates, vote for a third party candidate, or sit out the election. For a long time, I’ve even been making monthly donations to the eventual nominee, whomever that ends up being, via the Unify or Die fund.
All liberals should make a resolution to forgo intra-party cannibalism, because it greatly increases the chances that we have four even more catastrophic years with the most corrupt, bigoted, and incompetent President of our times. That can’t happen, so we all have to suck it up and pledge to support the candidate that prevails in the nominating process.
STOP THE SHINY OBJECT CHASING. We all know that President Trump is going to do and say hundreds of things before the election that are mock-worthy and outrageous, but probably are not issues that are going to sway swing voters or motivate non-voters. Every moment we spend talking about those side issues –say, a funny golf story, a boneheaded gaffe, a stupid joke at a rally, a silly exchange with an athlete or celebrity–is a moment we’re not talking about issue differentiators that are more likely to influence voting decisions.
What Trump actions are more deserving of our focus? His giving lavish, deficit-spiking tax cuts to the wealthy. His separating young children from parents and caging them. His taking birth control and other types of reproductive health care away from women. His blocking legislation to control pharmaceutical prices. His cowardly refusal to cross the NRA to support common sense gun safety laws. His erratic Russian-friendly foreign policy decisions in dangerous places like Iran, Syria, the Ukraine, and North Korea. His repeated attempts to repeal Affordable Care Act protections, such as preexisting condition protections for 133 million Americans.
Polls show those kinds of issues work against Trump with swing voters and non-voters, so those kinds of issues should be the primary focus of conversations at the break room, bar, barbeque, or online chat.
With such a steady stream of Trump’s outrages, it’s difficult to not take the bait from the ever-outrageous tweet stream. I’m far from perfect on this front. But we liberals have to get better about focusing on the issues that matter the most to swing voters and non-voters, and that means shrugging off a lot of the side issues.
FOCUS ON ROOT CAUSES. When deciding how to spend time and resources, liberals should also consider focusing on the root causes of Trump’s electoral success. For instance, rather than only supporting individual candidates, consider supporting groups like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight 2020 and the ACLU. Those groups are battling Republicans’ relentless voter suppression efforts aimed at people of color, which threaten to swing close elections to Trump and his political toadies now and for decades to come.
Ensuring that every vote counts and voting is easier will help progressive local, state and federal candidates up and down the ballot. It will help preserve our representative democracy for future generations. Supporting those groups isn’t as obvious to most of us as supporting parties and candidates, but it’s every bit as important.
SPEAK OUT EARLY AND OFTEN. Speaking out against Trump and Republicans in person and on social media is frowned upon by Americans who are “non-political,” ignorant, and/or in denial about what is happening to America. That can make speaking out about Trump unpleasant and exhausting. Goodness knows, no one relishes being called, gasp, “political,” and being accosted by trolls.
But in America today, we have politicians who are all too willing to separate brown-skinned kids from their parents and put them cages indefinitely. We have politicians trying to repeal health protections for 133 million Americans. We have a party that gave a massive, deficit-ballooning tax gift to the wealthiest 1% at a time when we have the worst income inequality since 1928 and record deficits. We have a President taking birth control and other reproductive rights away from women. If we don’t vote out this crew, we could easily have much worse developments on the horizon in a second, even more unhinged Trump term.
All of which is to say one person’s “politics” is another person’s life, livelihood, and rights. A while back, writer Naomi Shulman helped put this issue in proper perspective for me:
“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mother was born in Munich in 1934, and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves. When things got ugly, the people my mother lived alongside chose not to focus on “politics,” instead busying themselves with happier things. They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.”
I’m not saying liberals have be jerks and nags to their friends and relatives. We don’t have to be the turd in the punch bowl. In most cases, we should be calm, respectful, factual and measured when we speak out, even when the respect isn’t deserved and returned, because that’s usually the best way to win hearts, minds, and votes.
But we do have to speak out, because silence implies consent. As Martin Luther King famously said of another movement in another time:
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
The same is true of the movement to save America from Donald Trump and his Republican enablers. I’m about as conflict averse as they come, but unfortunately that excuse just is not going to cut it with so many lives hanging in the balance.
So my fellow liberals, this New Years Eve raise a glass of your favorite truth serum, and make some challenging resolutions that nudge you outside of your comfort zone. Your country needs you now more than ever.
I hear her saying it, but I’m not convinced “experience” makes all that much difference anymore. In last night’s debate, our senator, Amy Klobuchar, sunk her teeth into “Mayor” Pete Buttigieg, arguing in so many words that he hasn’t been around the Washington political circus long enough to be as credible as she is.
Amy, who is “from the Midwest” in case you haven’t heard her say it a couple thousand times, seems to believe this is an effective diminishing attack on the very young “mayor”. (She pushed the “mayor” business often enough to let you know she doesn’t think running a city of 120,000 compares well to representing a state of 5,000,000.)
But really? Experience? After Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016? In what world is experience still a primary criteria for the White House?
In 2008 John McCain was clearly the more “experienced” candidate. But raw charisma withstanding, astute voters didn’t have a hard time deciding whose fundamental judgment they found more appealing/reassuring. McCain’s long DC experience was pock-marked by dozens of examples of truly suspect judgment on key issues. In his case “experience” translated to “more of the same FUBAR.”
Klobuchar isn’t John McCain. But as hard-working and as tough a competitor as she’s proving to be on the campaign trail, I still have no sense that she has the quality of judgment to play the game as it has been designed and is being played by the likes of Mitch McConnell, Bill Barr, the Federalist Society and their vast network of very wealthy, influential benefactors.
At this point I can’t say for sure if Buttegieg does either. But he continues to display a depth and quality of thinking and judgment that suggests he understands pretty damn well how the country actually operates and what to do — and not do — to get where you have to be to make some changes.
The past few weeks — and again last night — “Mayor” Pete has been taking shots from the progressive wing for his coziness with … well, really rich progressives. This business about his fund-raiser in a California “wine cave” is bad optics in the minds of those applying the kind of sack cloth and ashes standard to progressive politics. But besides the (mild) hypocrisy of Elizabeth Warren poking him for snuggling with billionaires, he isn’t the one demonstrating bad judgment by accusing his rivals of something they all have done to one degree or another. (Bernie less than others.)
Despite their obvious tenacity, Warren and Klobuchar, both of whom are currently trailing the inexperienced “mayor” in Iowa, haven’t demonstrated to me at least that they have the fully-thought out perspective on American politics 2020-style. At least not as well thought out as, “a gay dude from Mike Pence’s Indiana,” to quote the “mayor”.
Huffington Post progressives and others seem to see Buttigieg as more somber and studious version of Bill Clinton. Another (white, though not straight male) too comfortable in schmooze mode with the tycoon class, and therefore less likely to ram through in his first 100 days all the major reforms the country needs.
They could be right. But what that ignores is that Clinton, for all his slickness, canoodling and all the dry tinder he laid at the feet of the rabid dogs of talk radio Republicans, produced indisputable improvements for women, the middle-class, science and international relations. (I’m open to the debate over welfare reform.)
Point being, as a “middle-laner” rightfully skeptical of promising voters all sorts of dreamy and wonderful things that have zero-to-no chance of so much as a hearing in a Republican Senate, Buttigieg is showing better judgment — certainly of the real world realities of 2020 America — than Bernie and Warren.
As for fellow “middle-laner” Klobuchar’s accusation that the “mayor” doesn’t have sufficient experience, those of us here in Minnesota, (which is in “the midwest” as you might know), are well aware that after 13 years as a solid, workman-like Senator, Klobuchar’s judgment has not produced the reputation of being an acknowledged leader on any of the biggest issues of our era.
The difference between listening to Buttigieg and Klobuchar talk about the country’s foundational problems is this: with Buttigieg you’re listening to someone who has impressively cross-referenced the demographics, the science and the raw vagaries of human nature and is making unique, well-considered and strategic distinctions between noble aspiration and pragmatism.
There’s an inspirational factor there.
While with Klobuchar, the sense is of someone with plenty of battle-tested experience, but whose judgment is regularly deferring to standard political positioning and protection.
One thing I always try to keep in mind anytime there’s an issue or event requiring more than an hour of the public’s attention is: how high is the entertainment quotient here?
Take impeachment, where for all the headlines, all the indignation on cable news and all the chanting at rallies like the one I attended last night in downtown Duluth, (+2 degrees, but “Hey, hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go”), there doesn’t seem to be the same pitch of fervor that I remember back when ’70s-era Republicans were telling us every president did what Richard Nixon did, so get over it.
A lump of beautiful coal for you, Donnie boy. Duluth. Dec. 17.
Good public entertainment requires juicy dollops of suspense, excitement, hilarity or prurient appeal. Mix and match as you see fit.
But other than Trump’s Stephen Miller copy-edited letter to Nancy Pelosi, the antics of Rudy, Lev and Igor and the fools-at-court blithering of Doug Collins, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz and other House Republicans, hilarity is in pretty short supply with this impeachment drama.
Likewise any prurient appeal. Especially if like me you’re still trying to bleach your neurons of the image of Donny having his way with a porn queen.
There’s been too much inevitability about this episode to really grab and hold an American audience. Going way back, everyone familiar with Trump’s career as a fraudulent real estate buffoon (of the casino-bankrupting variety) knew he was such a reckless fool it was inevitable that sooner or later he’d screw the pooch so badly he’d get himself impeached. We’re just amazed it took this long.
But now we’re dealing with the House’s long inevitable vote to actually do the deed, and that’s rolled in with the very high expectation that Mitch McConnell will cook the Senate trial into a quickie nothingburger putting a “fully exonerated” Donald on the road to reelection against a creaky, bumbling Joe Biden.
As loathsome a national embarrassment as Trump is nothing galls me more than the fact that there has never been even an hour of reckoning for Mitch McConnell. You know the system is in shambles when he flat-out says things like he said to Sean Hannity last week, about how he, the jury foreman, is tightly coordinating his trial duties with the defendant, right before, during and after he takes that oath to be impartial … and there’s no legal downside.
There are various ideas being floated to force a series of votes on things like the witnesses (Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, John Boltobn) Mitch doesn’t want anywhere near the trial cameras.
There’s even an interesting idea whereby Pelosi and Adam Schiff don’t even formally send the articles of impeachment to McConnell to begin a trial. They do this on the grounds that (pick one) McConnell has disqualified himself by his public remarks to Hannity and/or the obvious fact that Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, is still running around try to get Scorsese-worthy Ukrainian wise guys to invent a tale or two about those Biden bastards. In case you’ve forgotten, that presidential attorney Rudy who is being paid by his “translators” Lev and Igor, the former of whose wife recently came in possession of a $1 million check from a Russian gangster.
Point being, the plots to pollute the next U.S. election and obstruct Congress are clearly still going on. So … instead of a sham trial led by a guy who has said he’s in the bag for the defendant, Pelosi and Schiff hang on to these articles and announce they’re contining the dozen or so inquiries slogging through the Trump-crippled U.S. court system.
Wait long enough and the SDNY may spit out its case against Rudy, Lev and Igor … and Principal #1. Or maybe … really maybe … in June the Trump-toady Supreme Court will go all Nixon on him and compel him to release his tax returns.
Whatever. As effective as the Democrats have been in telling the story of Trump’s Ukraine scandal, the Senate trial, hobbled and gelded by Moscow Mitch, is going to need several twists of plot to go boffo at the box office.
Yesterday, a few hours after the Republicans declared themselves the “blue jeans and beer party”, Britain’s version of traditional liberals, the Labour Party, was torched in an election few thought would be as damning as it was. By this morning the pundit class was warning America’s Democrats that a Labour-like smackdown was in their future if they didn’t apply a few British lessons to 2020 and the fight with Donald Trump.
The basic admonishment is as usual not to “go all crazy socialist” and follow the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren off the cliff.
The landslide victory lead by Boris Johnson — a kind of Donald Trump with a shelf of books he’s actually read — was, if we follow British exit polling, due to — wait for it — rural and blue collar voters, i.e. ale and blue jeans, turning against dull, snoozy, give-away-the-farm liberals. Particular animus was directed at Labour’s astonishingly off-putting leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a guy who seems destined for historical infamy for his fecklessness and incompetence over the past couple years. (Corbyn immediately resigned as Labour leader, and may well have already slipped out of the country in disguise. (Joke!)
I won’t pretend to be an expert on British politics and Brexit, but I have tried to keep up, and have devoted hours of car travel listening to the London Review of Books podcast, “Talking Politics”, with it’s collection of Oxford-Cambridge intellectuals straight out of a Kingsley Amis novel. The fact that the hosts and their learned guests have never been able to make sense of all the political maneuvers possible in the context of Brexit made it easier for me to follow, in an odd way. Hell, everyone’s guessing! (But mainly, the show is just so damned British.)
What I have taken away is that yesterday’s crushing Labour defeat had at least as much to do with Jeremy Corbyn as it did with any wholesale rejection of “wild, Socialist agendas.” (The Brits may not be as sane and stable as we give them credit for, but they like most of the “socialism” they’ve got and don’t regard it as a dirty word.)
What the smarter observers of British politics also recognize though is the virulence of anti-immigrant thinking that produced the Brexit vote in 2016 certainly contributed to the Conservatives’ epic win last night. This understanding comes with constant reminders of how Russian meddling via social media in 2016 (and possibly since) has, as here in the colonies, fired-up and sustained anti-immigrant sentiments, mainly among the less-educated and rural folks.
One line of thought is that if Corbyn had turned the Labour party into an emphatic “Remain” party, devoted to killing off Brexit once and for all, he might have rallied a coalition of all those who think of Boris Johnson as, well, Britain’s blonde, vulgar buffoon and national embarrassment.
But Corbyn had spent most of his career railing against Europe and a variety of other hopelessly out of touch ideas and therefore had no credibility on the issue foremost in everyone’s mind. Put another way, the guy was an absolute putz. A soon to be legendary example of precisely the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The kernel of truth though for American liberals is that the immigrant issue — the “others” taking over the America we are entitled to — an issue regularly re-inflamed by a reckless bigot in the White House with 63 million Twitter followers and supported — enthusiastically or not, it doesn’t matter — by the entire Republican eco-system, is a very big problem sitting on the tracks ahead.
Combined with the inevitable hysterical cries of “Socialism!” any Democratic candidate is going to have a tough time breaking the fever of … less well-educated, blue collar and rural voters, mainly of the male persuasion. As in Britain, those folks are more comfortable with rolling the country back to the way it was 30-40-50 years ago than “browning things up” with an welcoming influx of “others.”
This scenario suggests that the Democrats 2020 are going to have to play that careful middle ground old school Republicans always see as best for them, and not go crazy with someone like Sanders or Warren.
I’d like to disagree with that. But it gnaws at me. The hyper-liberal “Twitter-verse” (e.g. Jon Favreau and his “Pod Save America” buddies) make passionate and convincing arguments for large-scale reforms of American courts, immigration policies, climate change action and on and on. But I constantly ask myself if they see and hear the same confusion and indifference that I hear from possible voters every day, the “blue jeans and beer” crowd now supposedly so infatuated with good old boys like Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell?
The electoral trick may lie in stealth. In the candidate smart enough, skillful energetic enough to hold and strategically articulate ideas about significant reform — like, you know, restoring ethics and Constitutional primacy post-Trump — without allowing “mass immigration!” and “Socialism Now!” to become his/her message and therefore identity.
By the time that happens though the “United Kingdom” under Boris Johnson may already have lost Scotland and Northern Ireland to conservative incompetence British-style.
At three and a half hours you could easily fit two different full-length movies into Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.” But in some ways that’s what he’s done as he guides us through the highest-profile crime and corruption of America’s last 75 years.
The first two hours of “The Irishman” play like a geriatric re-mix of “Goodfellas”, with the director’s trademark voice-over narration as wise guys are met and whacked. The last 90 minutes though is something far different.
Scorsese settles a pall of guilt and remorse over the story as he assesses the wages of sin on Robert DeNiro’s lead character, mobster Frank Sheeran, as well as the few others that haven’t been dispatched by some edict from “above.”
In our “current moment” it is impossible to sit through “The Irishman” and not have some awareness of how little has changed and how, as the saying today goes, “all roads lead to Putin”, arguably the singular mob boss of our era.
Frank Sheeran’s version of mob and Teamsters Union history since the ’40s, with him as a key player, up to and including the still-unsolved “disappearance” of Jimmy Hoffa is something you take only with a 20-pound block of salt. But the underlying history of modern America — the notorious crime family empires of New York, New Orleans and Chicago — old man Joe Kennedy’s deals with the devils while building his pin-striped, Brahmin empire is all there in the history books. Not that Americans deeply invested in our exceptionally pure and righteous nature ever pay much attention to it.
Scorsese lays out the story of Kennedy tapping his mob “acquaintances” to tip Illinois and the 1960 election to his kid, JFK, as part of an agreement to blow Fidel Castro out of Cuba and reclaim the mob’s lucrative casino operations (and god knows what else). Only things didn’t go as planned.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was a botched farce. The mob not only didn’t get their casinos back, but in an outrageous double-cross, as mob bosses like Giancana and New Orlean’s Carlos Marcello saw it, JFK’s kid brother, attorney general Bobby Kennedy, simultanous with his long-running attack on Hoffa, launched an all-out war on the American mob’s top leadership, to the point of literally grabbing Marcello off the streets of New Orleans and dumping him Guatemala.
Put simply, the mob didn’t take that well.
At a critical point in “The Irishman”, Joe Pesci as middle-tier mob leader Russ Bufalino leans in to De Niro/Sheeran, who is reluctant to accept what has to be done with his friend Hoffa, and says in a whisper, “If they can kill the President of the United States they can kill the president of a union.”
In American mythology the sleazy corruption of goons and goombahs never sets up in the foundational horrors of our history. It’s all been Hollywood-ized. Organized crime characters are just colorful rogues with big, raucous families and a lot of gun-toting enemies. Two plus two never quite equals four. Real world mob corruption and violence is never taken too seriously. Why? Because we’ve been taught by slapdash grade-school history books, cheesey Hollywood melodramas and pulp hagiographies that human nature for some reason operates differently where the Stars and Stripes flutter overhead. It helps us feel superior to everyone else.
Like the Russians, for example.
A couple years ago, before Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin became unabashed dance partners, I read a book, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible”, by Peter Pomersantsev. A native Russian raised in London, Pomerantsev returns as a TV producer to Putin’s Russia and, a bit like Martin Scorsese, leads us on a tour of a culture all but completely subjugated by crime and corruption, a society rotting out from its core and so diseased by disinformation from mob-controlled state media even its intelligent citizens have resigned themselves to a society where “nothing is true.”
To drive my point home, as Trump’s impeachment heads to the Senate, it’s vital for prosecutors and responsible media to build up and sustain the significance of Putin to Trump — the steady, substantial flow of life-sustaining “investment” in Trump by Putin-controlled oligarchs (i.e. upper-to-mid-tier mob bosses) — and how Trump, (unlike Bobby Kennedy), has regularly and reliably re-paid Putin’s investment. By, for example, weakening NATO and Ukraine, campaigning for the lifting of sanctions that would restart a vast and critical flow of oil money into Putin and his “family’s” pockets, and by accelerating an American disinformation culture to the point that confused citizens refuse to see anything unusual in gross corruption.
It’s a startling how close we’ve come to being a country like Putin’s Russia, where in effect, “nothing is true”, not even that that we see and hear with our own eyes.
The last 90 minutes of “The Irishman” peel back the swagger, the sense of power and invincibility, and force its central character to finally accept what he has done, what he has created and destroyed and what it all has earned him.
The grand and great US of A needs a moment of stark reckoning to see clearly what its appetite for implausible exceptionalism has created … right here and right now.
Well, other than the hotel guy who paid Trump $1 million to play “Ambasador to Europe” confirming that, yup, there really was a “quid pro quo” and what’s more, “everyone was in on it”, it was a pretty good day for Trump Nation.
But they still want to meet the whistleblower.
Everyone has their takeaway from Gordon Sondland’s day in the headlights — a day that, like John Dean, will be remembered for a very long time. Mine is that he’s one smug bastard. And, like Mick Mulvaney, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe, he’s another guy who is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is Further, a guy who better be praying to whatever god or golden idol he worships that no one ever puts him in a room or on a phone line amid a conversation about “Burisma” equaling “Joe and Hunter Biden.”
The fact Sondland claims that never in his long, illustrious career as Ambassador to Pretty Much Everything, (that’s a grand total of 17 months and counting), did he ever figure out that Trump and Rudy Giuliani meant “Biden” every time they mentioned “investigations” and “Burisma” is — how to put this? — undigestible bullshit.
Beyond that though his willingness today, finally, to roll Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and John Bolton into the legal sausage makes my hardened partisan heart sing sweet hallelujahs. There are others, but only a few other threesomes who deserve a public outing as much as they do.
Donny found his Sharpie again …
Bolton — pretty much your textbook raging ideologue, but maybe not fully a criminal — clearly knew what was going on and now has to ruminate on what history will say about him, you know a deep-thinking, “principled conservative”, if Sondland and god knows who else paints him into Donny and Rudy’s boneheaded extortion plot. He signed on with Trump, but he didn’t sign on I’m guessing, for felony stupidity.
I repeat again, the truest words ever spoken about the Age of Trump is the title of Rick Wilson’s book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies.“
The betting is that Bolton will soon see the wisdom of getting his version into the official record, even if it means cutting into sales of his forthcoming book on the fiasco. (Like Donny Jr., I’m sure the “bulk sales” machinery is already being greased and gassed.) Common sense he will now agree to testify, whether the courts “clear” his subpoena or not. But as we saw vividly again today, common sense is not exactly a foundational talent with the Trump crew.
Pompeo and Pence though, I feel certain, will ride the S.S. Trump down the full 1000 fathoms.
One little thing that keeps nagging at me as the list of “in the loopers” metastasizes. Who exactly advised Trump to emphasize to Sondland, “no quid pro quo”? I just don’t think Trump came up with that on his own. It’s the sort of legalized verbiage you get from a “looped in” attorney, like perhaps … John Eisenberg, the National Security Council Legal Advisor, and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs appointed by … wait for it … Mike Flynn. Eisenberg being the guy who ordered the infamous July 25 call notes locked away in a super-secure server. That guy “stinks”, as Popeye Doyle and others in the movies are fond of saying.
If anyone reading this is a practicing defense attorney, you might want consider joining the caravan headed to D.C. There’s a hellish amount of good-paying work there for the taking.
While watching all six-plus hour of yesterday’s impeachment inquiry hearings I was continually struck by Carl Bernstein’s recent assertion that the U.S. is now in what has been describing as a “cold civil war.” (A mere eight months ago he was only saying we were close to “ignition” of said war.)
There are probably a dozen or more ways to describe this conflict: Liberals vs conservatives. Elites vs. real Americans. Urban vs. rural. Professionals vs. amateurs. Serious vs. silly. B-students and higher vs. C- and lower. But at some point this new civil war can be distilled to something closer to: Fact vs. fiction.
Some Things That Actually Happened vs. Some Things That Didn’t.
How else to you describe the contrast between the open and shut case of presidential extortion presented by Adam Schiff and the Democrats with the scattershot, “Oh hell, let’s spitball this” hodgepodge of guffaw-inducing nonsense thrown up by Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan? (What? “Nude pictures” of Donald Trump? What?)
Okay, yes, we understand that even Nunes and Jordan understand that Trump did it. And that it isn’t “heresay” when you’ve got first-hand witnesses. And that their only viable line of defense is to cloud up the story with a torrent of strange names lacking any bona fide connection to the extortion at hand, all in hopes of selling the idea that every government everywhere is such a sewer Trump was merely honoring a long, sordid tradition.
But the question, to Bernstein’s point, is who are they selling this sewage to? What sort of people would ever even begin to believe, to use just one example, that Trump was vitally concerned with corruption in Ukraine because, (after he said he was considering recognizing Crimea as Russian territory), a few Ukrainian officials said mean things about him on social media in 2016?
The short answer of course is that they’re selling this and every other absurd, baseless concoction to a remarkably lazy-minded (and large) constituency. The side of the civil war eager to accept that the Ukrainians have the actual physical server containing Hillary’s e-mails. That a Politico story about a few Ukrainians’ outraged over Paul Manafort’s role in gross corruption tipping Democrats off to that fact “proves” the country was aligned to undermine Trump’s campaign … and on and on, including of course the Trump-hating whistleblower and those nude pictures of Donny.
Try as I might to be generous, the constituency for this flagrant claptrap just is not very bright. Or, put another way, it’s a crowd, an upswelling or revolution you might even say, of people adamant that they know a lot but who have plainly — plainly — done way too little to actually know what is true and what is not.
As I’ve suggested many times before, this fundamental laziness explains a lot about why these very same people feel “left behind” in a fast-moving 2019 world.
In that context — and without going all science-fictioning here — the outlines of the divide in this new “cold civil war” become even clearer and more ominous.
Over the past couple years I’ve become fascinated with the quantum advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the warnings about it from people with thoughtful, first-hand experience, not only with what AI may (likely) do to human society but … how soon it will happen.
An algorithm-driven world, where our personal preferences and antipathies deliver more (and steadily more virulent and intoxicating examples) of those preferences is already well upon us. Think your Facebook feed, the rabbit hole of YouTube where every new video is weirder and more provocative than the last.
As noxious and culturally contorting as that is today, with precious few people fully understanding how this stuff works, its sophistication and application is increasing … rapidly.
One effect, say people like writer-philosopher Yuval Harari, is a further hardening of the tribal bubbles we see so much of today. And that is bad enough.
But, he and others also forsee the stark divide between people fully appreciative of facts — of science and sociology, etc. — and those ignorant of reality adding to the creation of a class of what he describes harshly as a “useless” citizens. People, who because of their ignorance of relevant knowledge are of little to no value to the people, companies and institutions propelling a pretty Darwinian society based on algorithms, machine-learning and other forms of AI.
In his book, “Homo Deus” (i.e. “Man God”), Harari notes that where cultures until now needed vast numbers of people of no great talent to populate armies and operate factories, neither is true today. Machines are already doing all that better, more reliably and less expensively. Ask any American auto worker, if you doubt it.
The “civil war” point then becomes clearer.
The appeal today of the Trump-era GOP’s sewer of nonsense and hysteria may be rooted in class and racial animus — the “left behind” feeling ever more marginalized and “disrespected”.
But let’s project — as Harari and others do — ten to fifteen years into the future, when the perpetuated ignorance of this large bloc of citizens leaves them even less relevant and employable.
It’s not like they’re going to hold the next Bernie Sanders rally at the Edina Country Club, (“The ECC” to us in the ‘hood), but I’m here to tell you, your father’s Edina is fading away like the old man’s canary yellow Olds 98, ill-fitting chrome trim and all.
Amid all the “Blue Wave” news after Tuesday’s elections — with a Democrat knocking off one of the least popular governor’s in the country, Matt Bevin of Kentucky, and Democrats taking full control of the legislature in Virginia, few paid much attention to the school board elections here in Edina, where, for the record, all children are exceptional and entitled to the privileges of enviable zip-coding.
While ostensibly non-partisan, once the seven candidates announced, it took the social media grapevine about a morning to figure who was on what side … and who had any tolerance for the Center of the American Experiment, the local, well-heeled conservative “think tank” that has spent the past few years trying to convince us Edina-mites that by failing to choke off the in-flow of kids from, you know, those other places, crazed socialist liberals were degrading the quality of the education of those children who, you know, belong here.
The basic charge, more or less, is that Edina’s children, their bright, pure minds open and eager for the tools to achieve, are instead being subjected to “liberal indoctrination” from teachers rolling in too much touchy-feely “empathy”, likely in response to the modest influx of kids whose ancestors worked on the plantations of our Scottish-English-German forebearers.
Those others you see, not being hedge fund traders or tech entrepreneurs by genetic stock, simply don’t test as well as our cherished off-spring. They’re a statistical burden. Also, given too many others, our children might waste valuable childhood networking time socializing with people who will, let’s be real, never qualify for an American Express Centurion Card.
The net effect is that this … this … caravan of immigrants … brings down the test score curve and sorely diminishes Edina’s standing among all American high schools. A standing that has already eroded from the top .001 of U.S. schools to only the top .005. The horror! The degradation of our precious property values! My god, they might as well roll a double-wide on to the lot next door!
The lead face/name of this elegantly cynical fear-mongering has been Katherine Kersten, best known for her years defending 1950’s-style Edina Country Club white male ethno supremacy in the Star Tribune.
Point being that soon after the slate of names appeared last summer even those of us currently without children in district schools, (our two precious and entitled little achievers chose to attend Minneapolis’ Southwest High to hang with their grade school buddies), sent our antennae up. We were looking for clues for who among the candidates was or was not on board, or playing “fellow traveler”, with Kersten and the Center of the American Experiment’s dog whistle racist “test score” bullshit.
So, finally getting to the lead … I am extraordinarily happy to report that none of the three winning school board candidates owe any fealty to Kersten and her swamp of sour, dime-deep thinkers. It was a wipe out. All instead were endorsed by Education Minnesota, (an anti-American cult of “jack-booted socialist thugs” if you’re a right-wing media fan).
One of the defeated candidates was Lou Nanne. No … not that Lou Nanne, hockey legend … but his grandson, (although happy to let anyone confuse him for the famous old geezer). Nanne the much younger made very little headway with Edina’s new blue moms by arguing that the time had come to start issuing guns to Edina’s teachers. (I didn’t hear this out loud, but the reaction was kind of along the lines of, “Dude, this is Edina, not Big Lake or one of those Sixth District free fire booyas.”)
With DFLer Dean Phillips flushing out UnitedHealth/Medtronic/St.Jude bag man Erik Paulsen in the 2018 Blue Wave, and liberal women — Rep. Heather Edelson and Sen. Melisa Franzen, representing this end of God’s Greenest Acres — the picture is getting dimmer and dimmer for any Republican, much less anyone so foolish as to play any note of lunkheaded Trumpism.
As we saw in the suburbs of Cincinnati and Louisville Tuesday night, college-educate suburban woman have had about enough of what the Republicans have been selling since 2016. Not to make dangerous generalizations, but I like to think such women are a bit more attune to role modeling than your average hyper-competitive tribal corporate warrior husband.
And — speculation here — those gals have reached something like maximum revulsion/disgust/mortification at the model of “leadership” Donald Trump has been embodying — and Republicans have been defending — for America’s youth … whether entitled, pre-school networked, esteem-enhanced and mostly white … or not.
A couple days ago I swapped vehicles with #1 son. (Because I’ll be damned if I’m going to wedge a pressure washer into my car, which at least gets vacuumed more than once a year.) With ignition came Dan Barreiro of KFAN sports talk radio in mid-soliloquy.
As I pulled out of the driveway two thoughts came to mind. 1: How long it had been since I heard Barreiro’s show, and 2: Why I lost interest in it.
His topic of that moment, and again this was just him alone on stage, was how Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian expert deposed last week in the Trump impeachment inquiry, was being routinely lionized for his military career and combat veteran status. Barreiro’s point was essentially that laudable resume and chestful of medals withstanding, it’s possible some like him, though not necessarily Vindman himself, could still be a lying scoundrel. Point being, “the media” was engaged in yet another exercise of herd-think, equating appearance and pedigree with truthfulness.
By contrast, Barreiro quickly pivoted to say, liberals and “progressives” (a word that came with a tone of “here-we-go-again” disdain), people like Hillary Clinton, had no problem impugning the integrity of people Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, herself a military veteran.*
Where Barreiro went after that I really can’t say, because by the time I was merging onto Highway 100 I had hit the new Sturgill Simpson CD and was moving into a better realm of consciousness.
I might have held that moment of zen-like bliss if I hadn’t heard, a couple hours later, of the latest Republican messaging strategy and how neatly it fit with new polling that showed a large minority of voters explaining away Donald Trump’s Ukraine transgressions on the grounds that, “They all do it.”
Now, full disclosure, I know Barreiro only as an acquaintance in the very short time I worked down the hall from him at what was then KTLK-FM. This was over a decade ago now. But even then Barreiro was established as the #1 act in afternoon drive. I haven’t seen radio ratings in years, but I’ll believe it if anyone tells me he’s still #1. And, for what it’s worth, he’s not a bad guy. He’s smart, and unlike some other local radio titans, not dripping with self-loathing issues.
His show worked because he folded a facility for sports rumination/fulmination/exasperation in with the more relevant news of the day, like politics. Unlike the long, long list of pandering, bloviating radio hucksters, Barreiro’s shtick was/is: “I’m the Sanest Guy in the Room.”
But … there’s always a thing, and here’s that thing.
Success in commercial radio is powerfully, unequivocally linked to the First Rule of Show Biz, i.e. “Give the people what they want.” It’s a rule predicated on knowing who those people are. And if you’re building a succcessful career in sports talk radio, you have no reason — none — to believe you’re audience is deeply, vitally interested in politics, political scandal and matters of government morality. They’re tuning in to hear why the Vikings screwed up Sunday’s game, why the Pohlads will never drop $30 million on a pitcher and whether P.J. Fleck’s brand of hucksterism might be the real deal.
If you the host have a few minutes to dissect the day’s headlines, well go ahead, but get back to Kirk Cousins before the next commercial break. And, while you’re at it, don’t feed us any of that crazy lefty shit.
If you can imagine a scale where zero (heh) is as far left you can go (“crazy progressives”) and 100 is as far right as you can imagine, (Alex Jones and InfoWars), the sweet spot, ratings-wise, for a guy like Barreiro is somewhere between 60 and 65. It’s a Goldilocks zone where the liberals are always kind of “nutty”, too “radical” and “out there” and forever juiced up on “conspiracy theories”, and where prominent Republicans, while laughably self-serving — I give you Donald Trump — are never up to anything worse or more nefarious than anyone else.
Which is to say … “They all do it.”
The sports talk radio audience is, in my experience, a group of people, vast majority male, who are either politically indifferent/agnostic or conservative by default. Default being the result of the discomfort they feel around “politically correct” “elitists” always who are always “talking over their heads.”
So, and here’s the offense: you give those people only what they want to hear, which is a 2019 variation on Ronald Reagan’s sunny cynicism: “Government is not the solution, government is the problem.” It’s an eagerly digestible trope amplified now for 30 years by Rush Limbaugh, et al. A ratings winner. You may win no big liberal audience, but why worry? Liberals are not a reachable audience to begin with. They just don’t spend much time listening to football nattering.
What you are doing though — and in fairness to Barreiro, he engages in a less virulent extent than many, many others — is re-fueling the basic, lazy-minded, deeply-held cynicism that “they all do it”. They’re all corrupt scoundrels. Everyone knows that. They’re all out for themselves. None of them care about you. Liberals especially. So it’s a waste of time trying to sort an of this out.
Or … why get so worked up about whatever they’re saying about Trump? It’s just the same old same old.
As a commercial radio strategy it’s gold. But, and I’m serious here, on a moral level it is appallingly cynical and a not inconsequential driver in the dumbing down and perpetuated ignorance of a sizable chunk of the voting age population.
Now, again in fairness to Barreiro, I haven’t listened to entire show of his in probably a dozen years and I heard less than five minutes of this one. So I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt wait and for someone to tell me that …
As a shrewd judge of human nature, at least in terms of athletes and big time sports management, Barreiro saw Trump for the long term, ludicrous fraud he was as he ramped up for his run in 2016
… and that he admonished his large drivetime audience repeatedly to see Trump’s Obama birth certificate “issue” for the naked racism it was
… as were his repeated attacks on Muslims
… and that there are no “fine people” on the Nazi side
… that the Clinton Foundation actually provided tangible benefits to the poor and desperate while Trump’s foundation had to be shut down for farcical corruption
… that the Mueller Report didn’t exonerate The Donald
… and that, no, “everybody doesn’t” run a hamfisted bribery con on a foreign government, holding up military aid for a bogus investigation of political rival, and then lie about it constantly
… and so on, and on and on.
Barreiro rolled in the accusation that Clinton had said the Russians were grooming Gabbard to be an “asset”. The New York Times, the AP and other organizations ran corrections soon after that story broke noting that Clinton actually suggested the Republicans, not the Russians, were doing the grooming … for Gabbard to run as a Jill Stein-like third party candidate.
Everyone who worked for Deadspin quit yesterday. If you’re not familiar with Deadspin, very little of what follows may interest you. But it should.
Ostensibly a sports website, part of what is left of long-ago Gawker Media, Deadspin was, for me at least, pretty much a daily must-read. Not so much because of what its writers had to say about sports, but in spite of what they were required to say about sports. Fans like me reveled in Deadspin because it was home to a lot of damned good and very entertaining writing, most notably that of the site’s indisputable star and Minnesota-native, Drew Magary, who has also quit.
Why the exodus? Well, mostly for a numbingly familiar-to-the-point-of-cliched reason. Several months ago, you see, Deadspin was bought up by a crew of – wait for it — private equity “investors.” We’ll call them “vultures.” In this case known as Great Hill Partners.
In the interests of quickly maximizing their profit margins, Great Hill installed new management and the leadening editorial horror began soon thereafter.
Instead of encouraging and amplifying what made Deadspin irresistible — imaginative, free-wheeling, provocative commentary in which sports were treated like a facet of the much broader cultural landscape and not some walled-off, brain dead island where the wide, weird world never intruded — Great Hill Partners was determined to, uh, “focus” directly on sports. And just sports.
As if anyone anywhere was pleading for another site “focused” on why the Cleveland Browns are so bad again this year. Or how Alabama might win another football championship. Or who the Yankees will gobble up off the free agent market. What the Great Hills brain trust saw as a sure winner money-wise was exactly the kind of symbiotic boilerplate “coverage” every other daily sports page, local sports talk station and sports website belabors every goddam day and goddam minute of the goddam year.
Here’s a sample — from Deadspin writer David Roth — of what Great Hill Partners wanted stopped and why it suddenly finds itself without a staff.
“When Trump went to Game 5 of the World Series and was booed and jeered and subjected to a personalized version of the same idiot chant that America’s sourest grandparents and most goal-oriented small-business fascistsdelight in doing at his rallies, the codependent relationship between our broken politics and busted media blossomed into a public display of affection. The incident itself was unremarkable and unsurprising in itself. People jeered and booed Trump because Trump is historically unpopular, and because jeering and booing have historically been popular ways of getting that message across. Even a crowd of monied sports fans and establishment D.C. mutants could not turn down the opportunity to tell one of recent history’s most repellent figures how repellent they found him. It’s an exceedingly rare opportunity, too, because Trump is a priggish and buttery germaphobe who eschews not just the demeaning rigors of retail politics but any occasion at which he might be treated with less than absolute servility and adoration.”
And here’s Magary — who also writes for GQ and will not be out of work for long — in a epic rant days prior to the 2016 election.
“[Trump] will never answer for his crimes, and there’s a frighteningly large portion of the electorate that will always love him for that.
And so I’d just like to say to that portion of the electorate: Fuck you. No, seriously. Go fuck yourselves. I’m not gonna waste any more time trying to convince you that you’re about to do something you’ll regret forever. I’m not gonna show you old clips of Trump saying rotten things. I’m not gonna try to ANNIHILATE Trump by showing you records of his hypocrisy and greed. I’m not gonna link to a John Oliver clip and be like, “THIS. So much this.” Nothing’s gonna take down Trump at this point, so I’m not gonna bother. No no, this post is for ME. I am preaching to the sad little choir in my soul here. … Trump is human waste. He is the worst of America stuffed into a nacho cheese casing, and he is emblematic of the kind of arrogant, flag-waving, trashy, racist moron that the rest of us have to DRAG kicking and screaming into the 21st century: Cliven Bundy, Sean Hannity, Kim Davis, and on and on and on. Trump voters are the people who have spent the past decade or so voting insipid obstructionists into office, sending death threats to anyone who even mentions the idea of gun control, demanding 100% tax cuts on millions of dollars they can only daydream about making, and getting suckered in by any Oil Party candidate waving a NO GAYS flag. Fuck them. These are needy hillbilly loons who are just as starved for attention as Trump himself.”
(Magary’ annual NFL pre-season breakdown, “Why Your Team Sucks” were invariably classics.)
So yeah, Deadspin was kind of “sports-plus.” Sports covered and commented on in the context of everything happening today, and without apology.
And I say that as someone who enjoys sports, but grinds my teeth any time I have to pretend that sports matter. They don’t. They’re a game. An entertainment. A distraction. What matters is all around sports, in the minds … somewhere … of most of the fans in the stadiums or on the couch. Despite what some color commentator might say sports are not quarantined off in a psychological cell block immune to what … well, to what’s happening on the planet outside the ballpark.
What’s emblematic in the death of Deadspin-we-as-we-knew-it is the pervasive blandifying of journalism in so many other forms. In the trade there’s something known as “service journalism”, a form of the media art in which everyone seeks to get along and make each other happy. Advertisers buy advertising and publishers, editors and writers produce provocation-free copy to enhance the appeal of that advertising. I refer you to almost any local business magazine, city magazine and “consumer-oriented” website. (I’ve written for them all. )
The bleed-over from those examples of what used to be known as “advertorial content” into “real journalism” is a belief that the criteria for quality reporting — on any topic — is that it be as provocation-free, as “fair and balanced”, as predictable and quotidian, as rote and humor-free as the private equity vultures demanded Deadspin be … or else.
The fact that it’s not particularly enjoyable to read is amost what proves its bona fides.
In some dystopian fantasies a mad scientist experiment goes awry and every organism on the planet is reduced to the same grey mush. I’ve thought of this bumping into the occasional Star Tribune reporter. There’s this eery Stepford quality to the younger ones. Each speaks, in casual conversation mind you, with the same semi-robotic, self-consciously moderating vernacular, careful to say little to nothing, and never anything funny. Which alas, is how they also write. Grey and bland.
(The irony there is that in my experience at least, these young reporters have clearly been hire to fill a widely diverse range. Racially, gender and sexual orientation-wise, they’re different. But in terms of their diversity of thought-processes and the ways they collate information … they’re virtually identical.)
A few weeks ago I was watching the “Special Features” end of a DVD of one of my favorite movies, “The Conformist” by Bernardo Bertolucci. In an interview, Bertolucci was talking about the occasional odd bit of comic physicality his male lead, Jean-Louis Trintignant, would throw into a scene.
At first Bertolucci couldn’t see himself using that particular take. Trintignant’s character is a haunted man, not particularly humorous. But, says Bertolucci, as he edited the film he was eventually reminded of French critic/philosopher Roland Barthe’s, “The Pleasure of the Text”, and the idea that serious work needs the element of pleasure — the touch of humor, hyperbole, vulgarity even — to make it more accessible and vital to the reader or audience.
Rather than a liability, the “inappropriate” is essential.
I hadn’t thought of Barthes since college. But the “pleasure of the text”, the willingness and ability to draw in and hold an audience, sometimes with the unlikely and unpredictable, sometimes with the outrageous and profane, is what made Deadspin (we knew it) so unique and so valuable.
In the interest of generating Must See TV I’m delighted to see that House Democrats, i.e. Adam “Shifty” Schiff and “Crazy” Nancy Pelosi, will allow staff/lawyers to question witnesses when the impeachment inquiry hearings go public next month. This at least mitigates the numbing tedium of 20-30 Congress-types preening and fulminating for their five minutes in the international spotlight.
Tight, cross-referenced questioning by practicing attorneys will help Schiff and Pelosi lay out a fuller, more comprehensible story of what the hell has been going on, simplifying things for the easily-distracted and confused general public.
Put another — simpler — way, the carefully strategized and coordinated (re-) questioning of people like Ambassador Bill Taylor, former Ukraine Amnbassador Marie Yovanovich, veteran Russian expert Fiona Hill and yesterday’s witness, Lt. Col. AlexanderVindman — and others — holds great potential to pull the many, varied elements of the Trump corruption saga into a tighter focus, a focus that has always begun and remains on … Russia.
Schiff in particular has long been hip to the all-important “compromised” factor involving Trump and Russia. Namely, as Schiff repeated constantly in the months prior to the Mueller Report, Trump’s money-laundering for Russian gangsters has been a fundamental staple of his personal finances. He owes Putin a lot.
Not a stupid fellow — unlike fellow Californians Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes — Schiff has long expressed confidence in the remarkably well-documented if not as yet fully confirmed story of Trump’s deep indebtedness to Putin-approved gangster “investment” in projects all over the world, from Panama to Azerbaijan to Soho (Manhattan). (My apologies for the much-abbreviated list.)
Full confirmation of that corruption — the remaining 2-3% of the story that isn’t demonstrable today — awaits acquisition of Trump’s tax records or interrogation of Trump’s Deutsche Bank handlers — the folks who doled out Russian gangster money to Trump via Deutsche Bank’s “private banking” operation.
The current Pelosi-led strategy to avoid confusing the issue with all that — weird Russian names, off-shore accounts, spy vs. spy vs. spy covert ops and such — is completely understandable.
Having been handed a vividly clear and re-re-re-re-re-corroborated tale of a flagrant, mob-style quid pro quo shakedown of Ukraine, the Democrats have no good tactical reason to cloud public comprehension of the matter with chatter about Oleg Deripaska, Dimitri Firtash and Semion Mogilevic. The latter being the Don Corleone of Russian organized crime and one of the two men, Putin being the other, to whom Firtash would report. Ukrainian oil gangster Firtash being the guy (he posted a $174 million bond as he fights extradition to Chicago for a bribery charge) who has been bankrolling the two Ukrainian goombahs — Lev and Igor. Those two being the farcical duo Trump’s “personal attorney” Rudy Giuliani has been cavorting around with as he tries to convince someone (either Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity will do) that the Ukrainians and not the peace-loving Russians are the true guilty party in that U.S. election interference stuff. Interference that, if not wholly responsible, was without question directed at putting Donald Trump in the White House.
And so … well you see how quickly the Mario Puzo-deep chain-of-characters narrative roars off into the weeds.
As I’ve said before, unless you follow this story with true, nerd-like obsession, its easily to bewildered. But the point here is that it appears Schiff and Pelosi understand this, and are setting up a public process — a TV spectacle — that cleans up the messy storyline and focuses in, for the easi(er) comprehension of reasonable people, on Trump’s latest but hardly worst act of corruption.
Whether this makes a whit of difference to Senate Republicans or Trump’s base, I have no idea. But as bad as the Taylor-Lewis-Yovanovich-Vindman testimonies have been behind closed doors, nothing gets better when they tell the same stories on national TV. Which is to say and I believe in tipping points. The moment when the craven, mostly-clueless Republican herd makes a 90-degree turn away from the cliff and suddenly sees great, indisputable merit in replacing Trump with a “true conservative”.
Larger point being this: I have faith that Schiff and Pelosi, armed with a deep from the get-go understanding of the entirety of the Russian compromise of Trump, have the means, motive and opportunity to roll Mike Pence (and certainly Mike Pompeo) into this fresh, tight narrative.
Even better for my and your viewing pleasure, the World Series will end tonight and we won’t have to click back and forth between Alex Bregman and Alex Vindman.
When it’s all said and done — and it’s a dead certainty that after Ambassador Bill Taylor’s presentation yesterday that something will be done — one the greatest ironies of the Trump era will be how much the demise of his tabloid reign of blunder and vulgarity was the result of him being led around by the exact same kind of wildly implausible right-wing fantasy theories.
We’ll debate for years how much Trump actually believed this latest one, about how the nefarious Ukrainians and not the “very strong and powerful” Russians — were the real culprits in the election meddling of 2016. Not that it even matters if he even thought it was true. But the fact that Rudy Giuliani, working off the FoxNews/talk radio playbook, managed to convince Trump this was an angle with real marketing possibilities, says everything about Trump’s strategic acuity and his sense of the gullibility of his base.
Functionally illiterate in terms of understanding the Constitution and basic rules of presidential behavior, Trump has lived by the sewer-dipped sword of “sigh and gasp” inducing right-wing lunacies. From Obama’s birth certificate, to immigrant invasions, to Hillary’s e-mails and on and on … and on and on, his presidency, if we can even call it that, has been a ceaseless hopscotch back and forth from every bit of ludicrous nutjobbery belched up by conservative America’s most paranoid and cynical circus performers … a profitable shtick fueled by a shrewd assist from Vladimir Putin’s troll farms.
And now Trump is about to die, or at least be impeached, by that same tabloid-crazy sword.
If you’re Trump, the scariest words uttered by anyone in the moments after Taylor dropped his hand grenade on the “no quid pro quo” defense was Mitch McConnell saying, “I don’t recall any conversations with the president about that [Ukrainian] phone call.”
It’s always likely, of course, that Moscow Mitch was lying. He places no great value in public truth-telling. But by in effect saying, “The President is on his own on this one”, McConnell is signaling that the door is fully open to letting this impeachment thing go where it may.
Not that McConnell himself — up for reelection in Kentucky where at last glance he had the lowest approval of any incumbent Senator in the country — would ever vote for conviction. But if you’re someone way smarter than Trump, you’d be explaining to POTUS, when he isn’t getting political advice from “Fox & Friends”, that McConnell is signalling that he will not require his nervous Republican Senate colleagues to vote in lockstep for Trump’s acquittal.
I continue to believe that McConnell is actively considering a Mike Pence presidency. Due diligence requires as much from him. And that he will accept Pence — i.e. allow a Senate conviction of Trump — provided he’s confident the electoral blowback from Trump’s deranged Second Amendment/evangelical/racist base will be minimal, or at least less bad than with Trump on the ticket again in 2020.
That said, one of McConnell’s key tasks when — not if — Pelosi hands him the articles of impeachment, will be to protect his most vulnerable members. Maine’ Susan Collins (second only to McConnell in terms of miserable home-state popularity), Cory Gardner in Colorado, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Martha McSally in Arizona — all up for reelection in 2020 — certainly understand the risk in putting their names to a vote acquitting a now demonstrably corrupt and incompetent Trump.
I have no idea how exactly Mitch will avoid a vote. But based on our long, sordid history with the man, you know he’s got his Federalist Society brain trust working on any permutation, truncation or contortion of the Senate trial process that gets him out of Trump and on to Pence with the least damage to his precious majority.
There are a few trusting souls who believe Chief Justice John Roberts will not put up with a historic dump of McConnell treachery. But me, I prefer to expect the worst.
Anyway, with Ambasador Taylor’s assiduously documented smoking gun, the game of impeachment is fully afoot. Which means it is time … again … to turn to the great Bette Davis …
“Fasten you seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
I really don’t know a damn thing about basketball. But I for sure know that LeBron James is up there among the best known and respected people … on the planet. The guy has Muhammed Ali-like cred with the population of this pale blue dot.
If you’re not following this, a week ago an executive with the Houston Rockets tweeted support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators. Personally, I found that startling enough. Sports executives are notoriously reluctant to say anything remotely controversial politics-wise. (The NFL as usual being the worst of the bunch.)
Anyway, as soon as that tweet went out the shit-storm descended. The executive in question, clearly feeling (intense) pressure from the league and owners and everybody making a merchandising buck off the NBA, quickly rescinded the tweet and backpedaled into deep mumble-mouth.
The reason of course is money. Gobs and untold gobs of money. There’s a body of deep-thinkers who believe the NBA, as popular as it is, has maxed out the American market, and it’s current popularity in China has the league’s marketing gurus thinking they have a juicy angle at a market … three times the size of the USA. And that folks, is a consumer base corporate America treats like the sacred host of God Himself, something you never screw with … ever … in any way.
The trouble is of course that the NBA, a league composed of mostly black players and supported by a huge black fan base, has been commendably open in its defiance of the racist stupidity of Donald Trump, with players — including LeBron — and prominent coaches fairly regularly barking back at Trump for his persistent vulgarities.
Point being, there’s no real downside to that. Trump’s a fool and the league has earned poins for daring to say so. It set us up to expect better from the NBA.
China though, with literally billions in the offing, is a whole different matter. LeBron to this point in his storied career has done everything and more you could ask of a mega-superstar. He’s been generous with his philanthropic work and, despite railroading out a few coaches and teammates he didn’t care for, he’s been a model performer, an unequivocal leader.
The point here is that no one — and I repeat, no one in modern pro sports — has more cultural capital than LeBron James. The demonstrators in Hong Kong aren’t out there complaining about trash collection or pay raises for pubic employees. They’re putting their lives on the line for the quintessential American notion of freedom. It really is as basic as that.
China, it’s glitzy towers and sprawling factories pumping out instantly disposable crap for Walmart (and Target and Best Buy and … ) withstanding, is a crude, brutish autocratic disaster and should be persistently reminded of that fact by everyone doing business with them. (Needless to say, Trump hasn’t made any effort on behalf of the Hong Kong demonstraors.)
What LeBron should have said is, “I too support the pro-democracy demonstrators of Hong Kong. The NBA, through which I have become a wealthy man, would not have risen to its status under a repressive government like China’s. Free men and women, especially men and women of influence, have an absolute obligation to speak out in support of democracy wherever we see it under attack, which it is in Hong Kong today.”
The bulk of mainland China’s population lives behind tightly restricted media inputs. Think FoxNews for 1.4 billion people. State TV portrays the Hong Kong demonstrators as “terrorists” and could quickly concoct an explanation for why the NBA has suddenly become a menace.
But here’s the thing. These state-sealed media bubbles are getting more and more porous. People within them who know and care have ways of finding out the truth, and in turn admiring and respecting allies for their full freedom.
The NBA’s mega-Chinese payday may take a near-term hit. But its standing with every democratic society and every pro-democracy fan and non-fan in the world will only increase by being brave enough to risk that payday by doing and saying what’s right.
As I sit here sharpening the points of my pitchfork and adding a couple quarts of fuel to my XL Tiki torch, in preparation for tonight’s Trump rally downtown, I’m reminded again of the angriest and funniest book written so far on The Trump Degeneracy.
“Everything Trump Touches Dies”, by longtime Republican campaign strategist/hit man Rick Wilson, is a pitiless, acid-tipped dagger assault on Trump and every know-nothing tribal toadie who ever signed on to the reality TV huckster’s bald-faced racism, corruption and incompetence. Sadly, that’s a sub-set of people that now includes at least a portion of the Minneapolis Police Department. (Wilson gets off a hilarious, coffee-out-the-nose line every other page.)
Whether some of Minneapolis’ finest are actually stupid enough to show up downtown tonight wearing their “Cops for Trump” t-shirts, (it is a bit chilly), it almost doesn’t matter. The fact that their union president, Bob Kroll, everyone’s caricature of a right-wing thug cop, has made a point of his and his “brotherhood’s” full-throated support of Trump is all that matters.
I mean the t-shirts could just as easily read: “Cops for Career Criminals”, “Cops for Shameless Racists” or “Cops for Any Fool Who’ll Stick it to the Libtards.”
Over the past couple decades a few groups in particular have seriously degraded their credibility with the general public. Along with (white) evangelicals blind to the sexism, racism and sewer-level morals of Trump and his ilk, American cops have done a startlingly effective job of discrediting their profession and the pretense that they are politically neutral public servants.
A couple days ago I was listening to (yet another) Ezra Klein podcast, this time with New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell on the event of his latest book, “Talking to Strangers.” At one point Gladwell dives into the serious problem American cops have properly and reliably interpreting the demeanor of people they stop and confront. (Gladwell emphasizes that far too many of the stops are for reasobns that amount to “ticky tack bullshit”.) The case of Sandra Bland, a thoroughly innocent Texas woman stopped (mainly because she was black, let’s be honest) and who later hung herself in jail, is a key drama Gladwell explores.
He dives into the rippling effects of The Kansas City Experiment, an early ’70s protocol that did prove successful in driving down crime in tough neighborhoods. Key was a more intrusive, predictive brand of policing that had the person-to-person effect of treating every police-citizen interaction as a criminal erncounter.
Gladwell
‘s larger point is that the “Minority Report”-like concept of stopping crimes before they happen has seriously mutated over the years into the kind of militarized, nakedly-racist profiling now seen in dozens of “cop-involved” killings across the country. I refer you to Philando Castile here in Minnesota, an interaction that also involved the average not too well trained/inexperienced cop’s role as a revenue-producer for his municipality.
Gladwell points this out as well as a key part of the perversion of police work in recent years. (Over the last 14 years of his life Castile was stopped by cops 46 times, resulting in several thousand dollars of fines. You’re free to check it out and decide how “ticky tack” most of these stops were and ask if any white guy in a Mercedes would have been stopped even once.)
Bad as all that is, Kroll and company’s unabashed, in-your-face-pointy-headed-liberal-wusses “Cops for Trump” move reasserts to every Minneapolis citizen the high likelihood that the cop cruising down the street is carrying a heavy baggage of greivances, along with a badge and a loaded gun. Far from being apolitical and color blind, “Cops for Trump” strongly suggests a fellow traveler/sympathizer with not just appalling corruption and criminality, but what history will eventually conclude is the most open and unapologetically racist Presidency since, well, since Andrew Jackson.
By so shamefully linking themselves to Donald Trump, Bob Kroll’s Minneapolis cops have significantly accelerated the death of their own legitimacy.
Watching the shock wave rippling out after what should be Donald Trump’s fatal blunder, I keep wondering how close we are to Mitch McConnell at deciding at long last that Trump is no longer a useful idiot?
The fundamentals of McConnell’s support, (with McConnell being the most prominent face of establishment conservatism), remains what it has always been. Any intelligent, calculating conservative — in politics or business — can see clearly that America’s demographic trend lines are not moving in their favor. The USA will soon be a minority majority country with more and more citizens refusing to vote for, much less protect the oligarchic ambitions of rich white guys.
The great backstop to this inevitability therefore is stocking the U.S. court system with hundreds of conservative-to-right-wing judges who will reliably thwart liberal legislative goals designed to realign the country’s wildly out-of-whack economic balance.
And to date McConnell, in mitered-tight coordination with the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal club — Bill Barr, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh being among its most celebrated members — has done a superb job. With Donald Trump sucking up all the attention the media has to give, McConnell and Barr’s re-fitting of the country’s judicial system has gone on with very little notice and resistance.
In the wake of this week’s Trump meltdown(s) we’ve heard more about how Capitol Hill Republicans “loathe Trump”, and how if the vote could be taken in secret, without their names attached, 30 GOP senators would vote for impeachment. Allowing the usual 50% for hyperbole and bullshit, this rings true.
Trump has been a useful dunce. He’s inattentive to policy, bored by “intellectuals” and think tanks and, as we see with this self-inflicted Ukraine fiasco, all but entirely focused on his personal needs. In other words, up to this point, he’s been a nearly ideal fool, easily manipulated by characters like MCConnewll who truly understand the long-term demographic peril facing the Republican party and are skilled at manipulating the bureacraciesa most critical levers of power.
But now … McConnell has to be reassessing this relationship.
Trump appears to have blundered so badly, so flagrantly, and in a way so easily understood by the general public, that Moscow Mitch has — has — to be running separation scenarios. It’s simply due diligence.
Trump has always been expendable to McConnell (and Barr, et al) if they could do it without infuriating Trump’s base. (Please note that for once I’m not referring to them as slack-jawed racist goobers.) That’s still a tricky move. But with the control they already have over the court system, McConnell and Barr could effectively throw Trump under the bus simply by lifting the myriad obstructions they’ve planted.
By allowing subpoenas to take effect and permitting key witnesses to testify — given that impeachment is a clear “legislative purpose” — and letting the Democrats’ case proceed they could argue to Trump’s low-information voters that they resisted as best they could. “But those damned radical Democrats just built up too much of a head of insane steam and (illegally) railroaded the process!”
Better yet, they could maneuver in a replacement for Trump appealing enough to the base and far, far more appealing to traditional Republicans repulsed by Trump’s vulgarity and corruption.
And no, I don’t mean Mike Pence. Pence is what he appears to be, a vacant stooge. In that way he would be every bit as easy to manipulate as Trump. But he possesses not even a scintilla of charismatic attraction for “the base.”
Far better — McConnell’s dream — would be somehow replacing Trump with the scariest proposition of all, namely, “competent Trump”. A candidate every bit as reliably retrograde and autocratic as Trump, only vastly smarter and therefore capable of functioning — of doing McConnell’s will and protecting conservative power for another generation without a popular majority — in a manner that presents the public face of a thoughtful adult, not a scatter-brained teenager without impulse control.
And who might that be? Among all the names regularly churning among conservative deep thinkers (sic), Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton strikes me as Candidate #1. His style of corrupted intellect — in the vein of Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan and that ilk — could reliably sell and deliver everything McConnell and stegosaur Republicans believe they need to maintain power as places like Texas and Arizona and Florida tip blue.
Sci-fi scenario: Pence resigns for “health reasons” and is replaced by Cotton sometime in the spring.
Far be it for me to give Donald Trump any advice, but Donald, if you’re listening, I hope you’re not so stupid you believe Mitch McConnell has your back come hell, high water and catastrophic election defeat.
The Generals really do love to refight the last wars, don’t
they?
Aging generals reliving the glory days of Bill Clinton’s political wars are advocating for the blueprint that worked for Clinton in 1991. That is, they want Democrats to nominate a moderate Governor from a red state who offers a modest agenda, namely Montana Governor Steve Bullock.
“…there’s a distinctly Bill Clinton–esque sensibility to many Democratic Party veterans urging Bullock to stick with his presidential campaign, despite his failing to make the September debate stage and remaining, at best, in the margin of error of most polls. They see another popular, moderate governor of a small, conservative-leaning state who started his campaign late and is being written off, and they don’t just feel nostalgic—they feel a little déjà vu. They insist they are not being delusional. Paul Begala, the former Clinton strategist and current CNN pundit, earlier this week went on Twitter to encourage people to donate to Bullock’s campaign.
For several reasons, nominating Bullock would be a mistake.
WRONG IDEOLOGY. While Bullock offers a modest moderate agenda that fits the Clintonites’ dusty blueprint, survey research is showing that America is much more progressive in 2019 than it was in 1991. In fact, Vox recently reported that University of North Carolina James Stimson says America is more liberal than it has been in six decades:
“Public support for big government — more regulation, higher taxes, and more social services — has reached the highest level on record in one of the most prominent aggregate surveys of American public opinion.
“The annual estimate for 2018 is the most liberal ever recorded in the 68 year history of Mood,” (Stimson) wrote. “Just slightly higher than the previous high point of 1961.”
Similarly, The American Prospect recently published a long list of recent poll findings from a variety of polling firms showing that Americans overwhelmingly want liberal policies, not a re-run of Bill Clinton’s cautious “third way,” “triangulated,” Dick Morris-shaped policies.
WRONG PROFILE. Like Bill Clinton, Steve Bullock is a white male, which in 1991 was pretty much the only profile for presidential candidates that anyone could imagine being effective. But Barack Obama broke that barrier, and the electorate is much more diverse in 2019 that it was in 1991. The Democratic party is even more racially and ethnically diverse than the nation as a whole, and much more female-heavy. CNN explains:
Over the past decade, the electorate in the Democratic presidential primary has grown more racially diverse, better educated and more heavily tilted toward female voters, an extensive new CNN analysis of exit poll data has found.
Party strategists almost universally expect those trends to persist, and even accelerate in 2020, as minority, white-collar and female voters continue to recoil from President Trump. Just two of the demographic groups most alienated from Trump — white women with college degrees and African-American women at all education levels — could compose as much of two-fifths of all Democratic primary voters next year, the CNN exit poll analysis suggests.
Those trends are not exactly crying out for Democrats to nominate yet another white male. To beat Trump, Democrats need a nominee who can appeal to women, and generate historically high turnout from traditionally under-voting groups, such as people of color and young people. A moderate white male is hardly the ideal profile to inspire those key voting blocs.
WRONG GUY. Performance matters, not just profile, and Bullock’s performance has been underwhelming to the electorate. The reason Bullock is no longer on the debate stage is because he simply didn’t stand out to voters when he was on the debate stage. Therefore, even in relatively moderate, white Iowa, Bullock is polling at a paltry 0.07 percent.
While Bullock and the Clintonites like to lecture progressives on the importance of choosing an “electable” candidate who can beat Trump, electability is best shown, not told. Bullock seems like a decent guy, but in sharp contrast to Bill Clinton, he simply isn’t proving that he can excite the electorate.
WRONG AGENDA. Finally, the Clintonites are wrong about nominating a moderate because our 2019 problems require much bolder solutions than our 1991 problems required. For instance, at a time when the planet faces an existential climate change crisis, we can no longer nibble around the edges. We need major changes as soon as possible, and the biggest obstacle to those changes are powerful oil and coal lobbyists and donors.
Facing this stark reality, Governor Bullock remains true to Montana’s Big Coal and Big Oil, as Huffington Post reports:
“(Bullock’s record as Governor) includes protecting the state’s coal industry and railingagainst Obama administration greenhouse gas limits and a moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands. He supported the development of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and blasted President Barack Obama for his decision to block the project in 2015. He voiced “deep concern” about the Obama administration’s proposed hydraulic fracturing regulation in 2013, aimed at better protecting water resources.
Climate change isn’t just any issue. Scientists say we have about a decade to dramatically change course before we hit a catastrophic tipping point. With the planet in crisis, Begala and the Clintonites should think twice about pushing the most pro-fossil fuels candidate in the field.
Whether driven by ego or inflexible thinking, the Clintonites recycling their simplistic “nominate a moderate red state Governor” formula is a bad idea. Bullock had his shot. Now he should drop out of the overcrowded presidential race and head home to win Democrats a Senate seat.
