Impeachment Blahs?

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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.

The Lesson for Us from “Blue Jeans and Beer” British-style.

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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.

“The Irishman” and All the Roads That Lead to Putin

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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.

(Traditional, conventional biographers of the Kennedys regularly claim they can’t verify this sort of coziness with the mob. Never mind JFK canoodling with mob boss Sam Giancana’s special lady friend. But Seymour Hersh was a lot more confident in his sources.)

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.”

(Here’s a conversation between Pomerantsev and Vox’s Ezra Klein.)

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.

How effective is Trump’s Putin-ized disinformation? Here’s a couple items. 46% of U.S. miltary personnel say they think of Russia as “an ally.” This is mainly due to the heavily Republican make-up of the armed services, since once rabidly anti-Soviet Republicans in the era of Trump state media, are steadily increasing their belief that Russia is on our side.

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.

Another Reason To End Marijuana Prohibition: Public Health

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Minnesota public health authorities are close to concluding that the leading culprit in the rash of serious cannabis vaping injuries is an additive called vitamin E acetate, which apparently is used by elicit street producers to thicken and dilute the THC in illegally produced vaping cartridges.  The Star Tribune reports:

“The state’s findings were circulated nationally on Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has monitored the outbreak nationally and has reported 2,290 cases of vaping-associated lung injuries this year and 47 related deaths.

‘We now have evidence of vitamin E acetate in the lungs of Minnesotans and in illicit THC products from Minnesota during the outbreak,’ said Jan Malcolm, state health commissioner. ‘We have more work ahead, but every bit of evidence gets us closer to a resolution.'”

Assuming that Vitamin E is in fact the culprit, the obvious solution is to regulate the product to ensure that additive is no longer used.  Easy, right?

Not so fast. The problem with that obvious solution is that cannabis prohibition makes it impossible to regulate the safety of these illicit street products.

If we want to regulate marijuana-based products to keep consumers safe from dangerous additives like Vitamin E acetate, pesticides, molds, and fungus, we need those products to be legal so that they can be controlled by public regulators, just as we control other legal consumer products.

A while back, Republican Senate leader Paul Gazelka looked at this dangerous situation and somehow came to the opposite conclusion.

“Opponents of legalizing marijuana in Minnesota are seizing on the recent outbreak of vaping-related illnesses and teen nicotine addiction to urge caution on the cannabis front — even as advocates of legalization ramp up their campaign ahead of next year’s legislative session.

‘I hope this slows down the rush by [Gov. Tim Walz] and House Democrats on recreational marijuana,’ said state Sen. Paul Gazelka, R-Nisswa, the majority leader. ‘If they see the correlation, that might at least slow down the process.'”

Sen. Gazelka seems like a sincere, decent guy, but that logic makes no sense.  After all, if Sen. Gazelka learned that we have dangerous types of vehicles, insulation, ethanol, or stents harming consumers, would he back prohibition of vehicles, insulation, ethanol, and stents?  Of course not.  Instead, the sensible response would be to keep those products legal, but have public regulators monitor the products and require them to be safer.  Likewise, we need to make marijuana legal, so marijuana-based products can be regulated, tested, and required to be safer. 

So in addition to the social justice, fiscal, and logical reasons to end marijuana prohibition, we need to add another to the list.  Public health.

Disclosure:  In my public relations business, I have done work for one of two companies licensed in Minnesota to treat patients with cannabis-based medicines.  However, I’m not currently doing work for that company, and that company’s legal, regulated medicines aren’t a subject of these stories. I have never helped any clients advocating the end to marijuana prohibition. 

“Everyone Was in the Loop”

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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.

Just make sure Trump pays up front.

Top 10 Worst Trump Defenses, So Far

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“O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.” 
– Walter Scott

And so it goes with congressional Republicans defending President Trump’s indefensible arms-for-dirt bribery scheme. 

They can’t possibly defend it on the substance, because the substance doesn’t pass the smell test with 70 percent of Americans.  At the same time, they can’t fathom not defending Trump, because they live in fear that he might mean-tweet and primary them back to, gasp, civilian life. 

Therefore, they use a constantly changing array of truly preposterous defenses to get through the humiliating interviews they’re forced to do.  The defenses are maddening and highly entertaining, and these are a few of my favorites:

Top 10 Worst Defenses

Transparency!  Righteous congressional Republicans stormed a secure committee room and dramatically demanded public hearings! 

But when televised public hearings were launched a few days later, the same Republicans suddenly switched to demanding “an end to the media circus!” 

Hearsay!  This one was very hot this week.  Trump defenders demanded that they hear from someone who directly saw the bribery.  “Hearsay,” they say.

Of course, there are several problems with that.  First, the White House-verified call record clearly documents the bribery, directly in the President’s own words. It’s not hearsay, it’s Trumpsay.

Second, nonpartisan, decorated combat war veteran Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was on the infamous call, and he’ll be testifying soon.

Finally, Trump apologists also say it’s perfectly fine for Trump, Mulvaney, Bolton, and others, who do have firsthand knowledge of the bribery, to refuse to testify about what they observed. You can’t try to have it both ways and be expected to be taken seriously.

Whistleblower!  They’re outraged that someone blew the whistle on the bribery, and demand that he be publicly pilloried, even when the law says he is guaranteed anonymity and protection, and even after a long list of named, credible, nonpartisan officials are publicly confirming everything about which the whistleblower was whistling.

This initially might have had some political traction when the whistleblower was standing alone, but after all of this corroborating testimony, it makes no sense.

Incompetence!  This one is especially delicious. Lindsey Graham and others have continually asserted that Trump and his team couldn’t possibly have committed bribery, because, well, they’re obviously far too inept to commit bribery. 

“What I can tell you about the Trump policy toward the Ukraine, it was incoherent … They seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo.”


While incompetence is always a plausible theory when it comes to Trump and his team, corruption is actually the one skill Trump that very clearly has mastered throughout his life.

Also, the White House’s own call record plainly shows Trump’s bribery: After the military aid is mentioned, Trump immediately followed up with “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”

Failed Crime=No Crime!  Media darling Nikki Haley is among those who have said Trump is innocent of bribery because his bribery efforts failed after the bribery scheme exposed. 

Thousands of prisoners whose criminal endeavors were unsuccessful wish mightily that this was somehow a legitimate defense. It is not.

Impeachment=SERIOUS!  Many say that impeachment is only for serious offenses and this clearly isn’t a serious offense. 

I’m not sure I can think of a more serious example of presidential abuse of power than this: Illegally redirecting hundreds of millions of congressionally dedicated U.S. tax dollars to bribe a desperate foreign leader — who is under attack by Russia, a sworn enemy of the U.S., and has thousands of his troops’ lives and his nation’s existence on the line — to dig up political dirt on his opponent and interfere in an American election. 

That’s pretty much a greatest hits of impeachable offenses in that run-on sentence, and it doesn’t even mention the cover-up — altering and burying records, witness tampering, and refusing to honor subpoenas. Anyone who thinks that isn’t serious isn’t a serious person.

Tradeoffs=Normal Foreign Policy.  White House Chief of Staff Mick “Get Over It, He Did It!” Mulvaney is among many Republicans who shrug this off by noting that trade-offs are proposed all the time in the course of foreign policy. 

The problem, of course, is that when Trump said “I would like you to do us a favor, though” the rest of his White House-verified call record made it clear that the “us” in that sentence was actually “me.”  That is, the bribed “favor” wasn’t for America as a whole, it was for Trump’s personal political gain.

That’s foreign bribery, not foreign policy.

Corruption-Fighting!  While Trump has never shown any interest whatsoever in rooting out corruption in corrupt nations like Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or others that he regularly praises, his apologists swear that he is absolutely passionate about rooting out Ukranian corruption.  Right.

The White House’s call record showed that the only alleged “corruption” Trump mentioned was something that just happened to benefit him personally, not corruption broadly.

But Biden!  In a reprise of “but her emails,” this may be the Republicans’ favorite defense.  When their interviews are melting down, they spew unsubstantiated Biden corruption conspiracy theories. 

First, Biden’s effort to remove a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor was not corrupt. It was official U.S. foreign policy that was done in broad daylight, and was supported by allies around the world.

Second, if an American feels a fellow American has broken the law, the only acceptable response is to report it to American law enforcement officials, not to illegally redirect tax dollars to bribe a foreign leader to effectively play the role the FBI and/or CIA should be playing.

Democracy!  Many claim that impeachment is anti-democratic, since Trump was elected in 2016 and is up before the voters again in just one year. 

The obvious problem with that defense is that Trump is using tax dollars to bribe foreign officials to rig said election. With foreign interference potentially rigging the election in favor Trump, stopping him through impeachment could be the only real option for Americans to hold him accountable.

Bonus Round

Oh wait, that’s ten? Already?  I can only have ten?  Well, if I could have more, I’d add this one to the list. 

Less Outlandish!  The Republicans’ lawyer Steve Castor half-heartedly tried this breathtakingly moronic defense:

“This irregular channel of diplomacy (conducted by non-government official Rudy Giuliani), it’s not as outlandish as it could be, is that correct?”


Well, yes, Mr. Castor, I guess it might have been slightly more outlandish if the bribery had been carried out by a nude Roger Stone sporting a Carmen Miranda-style fruit hat, but…  

Good grief. When “not as outlandish as it could be” is the best your high-priced lawyer has, it’s pretty safe to say you’re in deep doo-doo.

In Their Partial Defense

Probably the most political palatable defense would be “bad, but not quite impeachable.” That defense is not the least bit substantively defensible, but it at least has a little political traction. After all, the matter of what is considered impeachable can be a bit murky and saying “bad, but…” at least shows Republicans are not shrugging off the whole thing.

But the thin-skinned authoritarian won’t allow his toadies to utter the “bad, but” part, so they are left to humiliate themselves for our entertainment. Pass the popcorn, please.

Artificial Intelligence and Our “Cold Civil War”

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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.

Who are they going to blame then?

Probably not Sean Hannity or Devin Nunes.

Edina Surfs the Blue Wave

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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.

The Sweet Spot and Dan Barreiro

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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.

The Death of Deadspin and The Pleasure of the Text

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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 in “Stick to sports, damn it.”

Here’s Deadspin explaining what happened then.

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.

It Has Always Been, and Still is About Russia, Stupid.

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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.

The Gun is Smoking and the Shootin’ Has Just Begun

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Happy day after “Smoking Gun Day.”

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.”

Desperate Klobuchar Puts Cheap Shots Over The Truth

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Throughout her career, Senator Amy Klobuchar has always stuck to political “small ball,” refusing to use her carefully hoarded political capital to fight for the proposals that will take patience to enact, but will make the biggest difference for struggling Americans.  The Star Tribune explains:

But as Klobuchar pursues the pragmatic politics of constituent service and bipartisan dealmaking, she faces some frustration on the left, particularly among gay activists and environmentalists who see her playing it safe in the middle of the road.

“There are big, fundamental system change issues we have to address,” said Steve Morse of the Minnesota Environmental Partnership, which has battled Klobuchar over climate change legislation and her support for a new Stillwater bridge over the St. Croix River. “Dealing with swimming pools is good and important to families, but it doesn’t change the big drivers of our society.”

So, last night it was hardly surprising to see Klobuchar taking cheap shots at Senator Elizabeth Warren over Warren’s championing of for Medicare for All, which will obviously be challenging to pass in the near term.

“The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is whether it can actually get done.”

Bam!  Klobuchar is likely high-fiving her (ducking) staffers this morning.  She’s in the news!  She’s finally relevant!

But from a progressive standpoint, here’s the fatal flaw with Klobuchar’s lifelong approach to leadership.  Once upon a time, the following things were all considered by moderates like Klobuchar to be “pipe dreams not plans,” or things that Klobuchar would not deem worthy of a fight because, in their day, they didn’t immediately have the votes to pass:  Medicare, civil rights, voting rights, minimum wage increases, and marriage equality, to name just a few. 

Those things just happen to be some of the crowning policy achievements of the modern Democratic Party, and they never would have been enacted if progressives with political courage hadn’t fought for them at a stage when the votes weren’t there.

Senator Klobuchar’s biggest problem isn’t that she has a sordid record of being immature and cruel to staff, as disturbing as that is to those of us who believe that character is revealed by how you act when no one is watching.  Klobuchar’s even bigger problem is that she will never be the kind of courageous leader who fights the most consequential fights for ordinary families, when the fight is not yet politically advantageous to her in the short-term.

As for Medicare-for-All, 247 independent economists recently are on the record countering Klobuchar’s criticism that Senator Warren’s approach will cost too much.  Those economists find that Medicare-for-All will cost Americans less than the current corporate-driven system protected by Klobuchar, not more.

In the letter, the economists underline the savings of the multi-payer insurance system in the United States, especially compared to other countries. “Public financing for health is not a matter of raising new money for health care,” the letter states, “but of reducing total health care outlays and distributing payments more equitably and efficiently.”

Economic analyses by the Mercatus Center and the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, for example, have projected the Medicare for All would reduce total national health care costs by hundreds of billions of dollars each year while simultaneously guaranteeing safe, therapeutic health care for every person in the United States.

Senator Klobuchar is smart and does her homework, so she understands this truth.  She also understands that if the votes aren’t immediately there for Medicare-for-All, Democrats will adjust, and try to enact Medicare-for-All-Who-Want-It or Obamacare improvements until the votes for Medicare-for-All do exist. She knows that’s how legislative strategy works.

But Klobuchar, hovering at just 2% in an average of national polls, is obviously desperate.  So last evening, she went with a self-serving cheap shot over the truth, and advocated the easy policy path over the more impactful policy path.  To Minnesota progressives, that sure sounds familiar, which may explain why she is running in fourth place in her home state.

LeBron James Clanks a Free Throw

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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.

So it’s sad to see him, of all people, fumble and bungle a response the NBA’s “issue” with China.

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.

“Cops for Trump”

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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.

And What If Mitch Has Finally Had Enough of Donny?

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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.

No Clintonites, We Shouldn’t Refight the Last War

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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. 

The Atlantic describes the development:

“…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 railing against 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.

Bullock has also said fossil fuels will remain part of the nation’s energy portfolio for decades to come and dismissed the idea that the nation can wean itself off dirty fuels within the timeframe some are calling for.”

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.

Trump’s “Are You [Bleeping] Kidding Me!?” Moment, Episode 3216

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Frankly, I could give you a dozen other reasons why Trump should have been impeached months ago. But if this latest WTF! moment — where he’s (apparently) “promising”/i.e. threatening to withhold US military support to Ukraine (a leverage against Donald’s pal, Vladimir Putin) unless Ukraine coughs up some dirt Team Trump can use against Joe Biden — is without question the great rotting egg of Trump in-the-White Houe corruption. It’s an abuse so flagrant and impeachment-worthy that if that if it isn’t the tipping point for Nancy Pelosi to fire the impeachment starting gun nothing ever will.

And I say that as someone who has appreciation for Pelosi playing the calendar — the months between now and Election Day 2020 — strategizing to deliver a maximum blue wave while simultaneously thwarting the shameless mendacity of Bill Barr and “Moscow Mitch” McConnell. But now, with Trump (apparently) caught red-handed corrupting foreign policy for rank personal political purposes, Ms. Pelosi truly has no other choice.

She can expect the volume of outraged (regularly contributing) liberal voices to rise to an air raid siren pitch for her to consent to the Full Monty of Trump trials. (My apologies for the imagery.)

Part of Pelosi’s concern about pushing impeachment to the forefront, and thereby making it effectively The Only Story Anyone Talks About all through the election cycle — screw health reform, climate change, etc. — is that it would alienate voters (blue collar whites, mainly) who think DC never gets around to doing anything for them. To translate that thinking: Pelosi worries voters who never pay any great attention to the details of politics and never will, will digest Trump’s impeachment as just more of the never-ending DC food fight and stay home — or vote for next year’s Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.

The counter argument has always been that No Impeachment makes Democrats look timid and ineffectual (yet again), this time in the face of the most flagrant presidential corruption and incompetence in US history. If you don’t have the cojones to impeach Donald [bleeping] Trump, a manifest fool, you might as well strike impeachment from the Constitution.

Liberals will flock to the polls to exorcise Trump next November no matter what. But lacking an aggressive counter-attack on Trump, their faith in and fervor for Pelosi-like establishment Democrats is going to seriously dissipate. Much of Elizabeth Warren’s appeal is big time structural change and a head-on fight against corruption.

I have also emphasized that Pelosi isn’t playing impeachment chess so much with Trump’s band of White House nitwits, (good god, Rudy Giuliani) as she is with McConnell and Barr and the judges — a disproportionate number on appellate courts — those two Federalist Society warriors have squeezed into service. Each with very real power to ram a wrench into every subpoena Democrats issue.

Finally, there’s the fact that Senate Republicans remain so terrified of Trump’s base, the star-spangled twits, bros and goobers hootin’ and stompin’ at his backwoods bund rallies, voting to convict him in a trial remains the equivalent of self-immolation.

For me the answer to that has always been a matter of sequencing and timing — which may turn out to be Pelosi’s game all along. Namely, never give McConnell’s craven Senate caucus a chance to vote. Stage hearings — along the lines of the Corey Lewandowski farce last week — steadily all through the election cycle, laying out more and more (and more) details of Trump’s clown car kleptocracy until — oh, sorry Mitch, no time left on the clock — it’s Election Day.

Does that mean enduring 12-15 more months of an ugly, rancid, hyper-partisan, pigs-in-the-slop brawl right through priaries and conventions and fall campaigns? Yeah, but we’re going to get that impeachment or not.

Does anyone seriously expect anything about the coming year to be precedented and polite? People! It’s going to be insane. You know it and I know it.

Trump long ago went to cornered rat tooth and nail. He knows he’s looking at jail time and financial ruin if he loses the next election. Given a clear existential crisis for a reckless sociopath, I don’t see how Democrats have any option other than girding up and fighting the war they’ve been presented with on much the same (albeit it smarter) terms.

It’s an all-in game. Indisputably.

As Donny Waits for the Sheik to Tell Him Who to Shoot …

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From the moment he “won” on November 8, 2016, I’ve tried to imagine what America’s intelligence and military leaders would do if reality TV host Donald Trump gave an order for a full-fledged, consequences-be-damned attack on some country. (Shooting off $120 million worth of cruise missiles at a mostly empty Syrian airfield doesn’t compare.) Today, we’re closer than ever to finding out.

My geezer buddies and I were observing a fall tradition hiking the Grand Canyon last week, only to emerge to find Trump “locked and loaded” and apparently waiting for the Saudis to tell him who to shoot and when. The Saudis are very major customers of Trump Inc., so the leader of the free world has obligations to the people who pay his bills, and those are just the obligations we know about.

Frankly, I haven’t heard a convincing explanation for what Iran has to gain from sending drones to blow up some Saudi oil facilities. The only scenario that fits is basically a variation on Osama bin Laden’s (highly successful) strategy to draw the United States into a land war in the Middle East and inflame a new generation of jihadis.

But since we’re talking Trump here — a guy who is bored with briefings and quite likely has never read a book on Middle East history or diplomacy, and calculates everything based on how friendly someone is to his bank accounts — all he needs to be convinced is a reminder of the favors he owes his “investors.” In this case that would of course include noted bone saw artist, Mohammed Bin Salman.

The U.S. military and the vast American intelligence apparatus though are a whole different species of animal. The betting line would be that given an order the militarists and spy world careerists will salute and charge into any breach their commander orders. It’s what they’re trained to do. Certainly the military, anyway.

But I have to think — naively, perhaps — that everyone with any sophisticated judgment of character long ago concluded that Trump is, to quote Rex Tillerson, “a [bleeping] moron” and a highly compromised one at that. Watching him insult their work and value to Vladimir Putin’s face was galling enough, but conceding and cooperating with such an abject fool — for the permanent historical record — doesn’t strike me as something they’re eager to have on their resume.

Trump, who is notoriously gutless about firing anything face to face — note pretty much everyone dismissed from the White House by tweet — is probably hoping the Saudis don’t demand he drop some “shock and awe” on Tehran. I mean, tracking all that rocket activity could really cut into his golf time. And in truth, he may be spared that dilemma by Sultan Bone Saw’s concern that a bigly war with Iran’s air force could quickly demolish much of the rest of the House of Saud’s oil production/cash printing macinery. That would be a serious bmmer. Money (i.e. subsidies to its citizens) being the primary way the Saudi tribe keeps control in their grim, corrupt desert theocracy.

The situation has got a lot of people talking about why exactly the United States owes Saudi Arabia anything? We’ve been handing them billions of dollars a month for well over 75 years — both before and after 15 of their spoiled brat off-spring flew jets into buildings on 9/11 and murdered 3000 Americans.

The old guard Saudis were bad enough and young Mohammed Bin Bone Saw appears to be worse. His coziness with Jared Kushner and the financially bungled Kushner Properties, Inc. withstanding, the Saudis have all the resources they need to fight it out with Iran if that’s their idea of righteous retribution. (And for the record, I still need a lot more cnvincing it is was Iran behind the drone strikes.)

Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that Trump has a “special relationship” with the Saudis that goes well beyond pumping gas into American SUVs. The general publc may be a little foggy about this, but real generals and the wonky spy nerds are certainly not, and up to some point at least that crowd has to decide whether to attach their reputations to kill orders from a bought-off buffoon.

Zinnia and the Art of Environmental Maintenance

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Guest post by Noel Holston

I’m writing this for my granddaughter, but I’m not telling her. I don’t want her to be scared.

Zinnia is 7 years old. She’s small for her age but otherwise precocious. She reads above her grade level and trampolines like a jumping bean. Other kids her age may make “yuck” faces at sight of spinach or broccoli, but Zin already relishes oysters, kalamata olives and “stinky” cheeses. Her favorite bedtime lullaby is “The Sounds of Silence,” which I thought was beyond precocious until her dad explained that the Simon and Garfunkel song is featured in her favorite movie, Trolls. She’s watched it so many times, she knows it by heart.

In the early 1990s, long before Zinnia was born, I was starting to worry about the impact of the greenhouse gases we were belching into the atmosphere and the plastic litter that we sent floating down the rivers and into the seas.  I wrote a song about our dangerous notion that we could consume and pollute all we wanted and then, if things got really bad, just fly away.  It began:

The planets and the stars

Will not be ours

Except, of course, to dream on

For all our Star Trek fantasies

This island Earth will be our home

Our space-travel capabilities have improved in the intervening years, but we still haven’t found a destination planet enough like our big blue marble to aim for or developed the means for even a re-con  party to get there.

In the meantime, we’ve created a floating plastic garbage patch twice the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. We’re experiencing record high temperatures. Hellish fires are raging from Brazil to Siberia, and hurricanes and typhoons are growing in size and intensity. Hurricane Dorian left much of the Bahamas looking like a land fill.

As if these inconvenient truths aren’t troubling enough, we know from credible scientific research and computer modeling that if we don’t significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the annual average global temperature could increase nine degrees Fahrenheit or more, compared with preindustrial temperatures, by the end of this century.

The year 2100 seems a long way off. Most of you who are reading this won’t be around when that new millennium is rung in. I surely won’t be. But Zinnia and my other grandchild, Jackson, will be around to suffer for our short-sightedness and stupidity. So will millions of other kids here and around the world.

 Zinnia is just beginning to figure out what she wants to do with her life. Maybe she’ll become a cross-fit trainer like her mom or a podcast producer like her dad. Maybe she’ll be a doctor or a chef or a scientist or a maker of animated films like Trolls. Maybe she’ll have kids herself.

I want her to have those opportunities. I want her to be living on a planet at least as beautiful and diverse and healthy as the one I grew up on – and, if at all possible, better.

No challenge we are facing or issue we are dealing with today is more important than our acting like responsible, caring adults and implementing every measure we can imagine to limit further physical deterioration of the only planet we have.

Not gun control or reproductive rights. Not Latin American immigrants or North Korea’s nuclear weapons.  The environment. Our environment. Our incredibly complex, life-giving, life-sustaining, shared environment.

We need to do this whether we believe we’re God’s appointed stewards or simply because we recognize it’s stupid and suicidal to foul our nest. Pick your rationale, but make reversing damage to the Earth a personal and political priority.

We were making encouraging progress not that long ago, prioritizing cleaner energy sources, discouraging pollution, setting aside nature preserves both land and sea. Now, under new “leadership,” we are in spiteful retreat. Our president didn’t even bother attending the climate change panel at the recent G-7.

There are those among us, including some rich and powerful people, who insist that the dire warnings of scientists like those who compiled the Fourth National Climate Assessment are a hoax or an anti-capitalist plot. The former claim is an absurdity that would require a conspiracy of millions of scientists who’ve never met. The latter ignores the commerce to be engendered and the profit to be made from cleaner industry.

If the scientists turn out to be wrong, we will still be living a cleaner, healthier world as the 21st Century speeds along.  If they’re correct in their predictions and we’ve allowed our leaders to shirk their responsibility, we and our children and grandchildren will be facing a rising tide of misery.

I would accuse the deniers of playing Russian roulette with our little ones’ lives, but that analogy overestimates the odds in our favor.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He’s a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” which is scheduled for publication fall of 2019 by Skyhorse.