“It’s Just … So … Stupid.”

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Brian Lambert

Trump's bond with GOP deepens after primary wins, FBI search | AP News

I probably shouldn’t, but given our common moment here in October 2024, I occasionally allow myself to luxuriate in a dreamy reverie. About what, you ask? Well … about a day when I don’t have to give Donald Trump a single thought. Not so much as a second of my attention. A day when — like magic — he is simply gone. Ignored and fully forgotten. And the constant grinding idiocy stops.

That would be a day when I don’t have to react to the astonishing stupidity of claims that migrants from “Haitia” are eating cats and dogs in Ohio. That the vice-president of the United States waved 13,000 serial killers into the country, and that such momicidal maniacs are now everywhere in the country, slashing throats and raping women, (or, who knows, maybe even cats and dogs … I mean … people are saying.)

A day when I don’t have to listen to red-faced BS about children leaving home for school in the morning and returning a different sex in the afternoon … because surgeries were forced on them by that same vice-president. Or that the government, (controlled top to bottom by the vice-president) is spending taxpayer money giving gender-changing operations to prisoners. And that the current government is either, A: Geo-engineering hurricanes to strike only Trump voters, and/or B: Letting Trump voters and only Trump voters rot in their flood-ravaged houses while giving out millions of rescue dollars to … well, those 13,000 migrant/serial killers, I’m assuming.

The fundamental question to all this is pretty much what it has been since Trump metastasized in to our consciousness 10 years ago. Namely, “How Stupid Do You Have to Be to Believe Any of This?”, or, even you think it’s just a long-running act of morbid performance art, “Why Would You Think Someone Saying This Shit, Hour After Hour, Day After Day, Should Hold the Fate of the World in His Hands?”

Right now, a month before the election, it’s so bad the current President of the United States had to go on national TV during a monster hurricane and deny that the government (his and the vice-president’s government) is not controlling the weather, i.e. aiming hurricanes at Trump voters. Said a semi-incredulous Joe Biden to the American public, “It’s just so stupid.”

But that’s where we are. In 2024. In what is arguably the most technologically advanced society the planet has ever known. A society that has robots rolling across the cold deserts of Mars and has commenced what may well be the greatest evolutionary leap in the 4.5 billion year record of life on this generally unremarkable rock, namely Artificial Intelligence.

Which brings me to the latest book by one of my go-to guys for educated thoughtfulness, Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian-philosopher., perhaps best known for his 2015 book, “Sapiens.”

AI and the future of humanity | Yuval Noah Harari at the Frontiers Forum - YouTube

This one, titled, “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI” argues (among many things) that more information is not necessarily a good thing, in terms of contributing to a more rational society. He points out that in the first decades after Gutenberg’s printing press the “knowledge-seeking” world did not consume high-minded scriptures so much as lunatic tomes about witch-hunting and a lot of other stuff that appealed to (very) fundamental fears, superstitions and human’ primordial fascination with simplistic notions and mysticism.

Here’s a particularly good longer-form interview with Harari.

Few things infuriate the Trump base more than suggesting they suffer from some form of inadequately-evolved mental dysfunction, some entirely natural, physiological twist of brain engineering that invariably incites their appeal for … well … superstition, mystical thinking and fear-stoking nonsense. But that may very well be the case.

In evolutionary terms we are not even a blink of an eye further evolved from the alchemy and witch-hunting hysterias of the 16th century. Our amygdalas, left frontal lobes and limbic systems aren’t significantly better tuned for rational thinking today then they were 500 years ago. Maybe in another 1000 years. But not today.

Not with the way, as Harari argues, the algorithms of our nascent social media information industry can so easily inflame our mental processes. Not with how they can overwhelm rational thinking by seducing us with the fears and prejudices that motivate us most and the sense of an enormous community out there that sees the world precisely as we do.

That would be a world where the vice-president … a woman … of non-white heritage .. and a Democrat … from San Francisco … opposing a candidate who says he’s not only a self-made billionaire but God’s avenging angel sent to Earth in an act of retribution … a leader who tells us only he can protect us from 13,000 serial killers running amuck … amid the fury of targeted, liberal-engineered hurricanes aimed at true Americans.

I wish I had a better word for it all. Maybe I could linger longer in my Trump Free reverie. But I don’t. So I can’t.

So I snap out of it, look around, and am left, as I have for a decade now, saying simply and bluntly, “It’s just SO stupid.”

Live, Unscripted Joe. Better. But Too Late.

Posted on July 11, 2024 by Brian Lambert

Biden refuses to quit race, faces tough questions about fitness to run — This guy … not babbling about “fat pigs”, Hannibel Lecter, planes without pilots and tourists getting mugged and raped in DC.

Well, that was … better. But too late to turn back what’s coming.

Here, about 10 minutes after Joe Biden wrapped up the kind of live, unscripted display of cognitive competence hundreds of thousands to millions of people having been demanding for the last two weeks, it’s reassuring to know that at least one of the two choices we currently have for POTUS can dissect and illuminate serious foreign policy problems.

But, sad fact of life, that isn’t going to get enough people to the polls in November. If tonight’s Joe Biden had shown up in Atlanta two weeks ago we — and he — wouldn’t be where we are tonight. But he didn’t. And I’m pretty much convinced the die has been cast. Joe will have to go.

Over the past 14 days a couple things have happened for certain. A: At least 52 million people have been irrevocably reminded that Joe Biden is 81 and looks every minute of it. But also, B: Political pros and activists have gotten a taste — in polling and wishcasting — of the opportunity for something new, fresh and revitalizing.

Few things in life are fair and politics definitely isn’t one of them. Biden knows the gig. He has done his homework and far advanced beyond that into any master class of policy you can think of. And he has delivered.

But humans have a natural affinity for something new. They want to believe it’ll make them happier, safer, sexier, more popular and so on and on. And over the past couple weeks they’ve tested this idea of new in their minds.

As have political pros, pundits and Hollywood rainmakers. And what they are steadily coming to believe is what I quoted Obama campaign manager David Plouffe saying after the debate disaster. Namely, that given the cast of likely Biden replacements, including the much and unfairly maligned Kamala Harris, the appeal of something/someone new, is so strong , “they would win in a walk.”

“A walk” might be a bit too optimistic and giddy, but the broad disgust — and boredom — with Donald Trump’s act is as smothering as July humidity. It’s a point of national embarrassment that nine years on we’re still dealing with such an obnoxious, vulgar fool. Put anyone among Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro on top of the ticket and who doubts a shift of … hundreds of thousands to millions … of bored, indifferent, disinterested voters? Many if not most of them young, to a fresh face and style? A modern cut, if you will.

Biden looked fine tonight. He wasn’t babbling about sharks and electric boats and Hannibel Lecter and tourists getting raped at the Jefferson Memorial. As I say, he knows the gig. But he was never the best retail salesman. There’s not enough of the hamminess of Bill Clinton or the cool dude vibe of Barack Obama. Never has been. And whatever was there vanished on the night of the debate in the mind of the average persuadable American.

Too old.

Team Biden is being accused of “running out the clock.” I think the buzzer is about to sound.

“Civil War” May Not Be In Your Face, But It Is In Our Moment

Posted on April 19, 2024 by Brian Lambert

Civil War folds a tremendous human drama into its thin, vague politics - Polygon

For years the annual South by Southwest arts and tech festival in Austin, Texas has been a kind of marketing launch pad for music and films … and media “elites” asserting their influencer status. The hype this congregation can create is pretty impressive.

At the top of the list of the “most hyped and hyper-ventilated over” at this year’s SXSW was the new film, “Civil War”, which I finally got around to seeing last night.

If you follow news and culture at all you know that “Civil War” imagines a modern day USA in all out violent conflict between at least two factions. In the film the focus is on a small group of journalists looping through the eastern seaboard countryside. Leaving a war torn New York and looking for a back way in to Washington D.C., where they tell us they plan to interview the President. Kirsten Dunst is the lead, playing a hardened war photographer.

As they are so often wont to do, those at the levers of the hype machine — declared “Civil War” “a masterpiece!”. I’m pretty sure this is the same crowd constantly declaring every new pop song, old building and pricey hand bag “iconic”. (For me, the constant over-use of “iconic” has gotten so bad it’s like someone hammering a gong next to my head every time I hear it.)

I’m not here to say “Civil War” is bad. It’s not. It’s quite a good film, and thoroughly admirable in giving life to the nightmare imaginings of quite a few Americans. But, please people. This is not “8 1/2” or “2001” or “Lawrence of Arabia.” What it is is a very well crafted piece of speculative fiction with an umbilical attachment to our 2024 zeitgeist.

The film’s creator, writer-director Alex Garland, (his earlier film, “Ex Machina”, about a Peter Thiele-like tech billionaire who has created a sentient robot in his New Zealand-y forest hideaway is excellent, and bit closer to a “masterpiece”), is quite canny about the set-up for his film. While the sitting President, played by Nick Offerma, is clearly a thuggish autocrat, serving a third term and demagoguing about “restoring America … “, the film plays with little other sense of who is “right” and who is “wrong”.

Perhaps its for this reason that audiences after screenings this past week in Texas and other red areas were not offended by what they watched, suggesting they did not see themselves in Offerman’s Trump-like character or his supporters, several of whom Dunst and her crew encounter on their way to DC.

How any MAGA cultist fails to see a full Trump Part Deux future in Offerman and “Civil War” is beyond my ability to understand. But then as I say, Garland’s construction is canny in the way he doesn’t rub anyone’s nose in ham-fisted ideological soliloquies or red meat antagonisms. That, and as we all know, MAGA America is not exactly known for its grasp of nuance.

Part of Garland’s plan for avoiding “in your face” partisan antagonism lies in the decision to make his lead characters journalists. Professionals doing a job. People out there just “getting the story” and letting audiences back home “decide.” The characters’ entrenched apoliticism has apparently bothered some lefty/blue audiences, who find the characters unsympathetic to what’s going on around them.Never mind that Dunst and her crew suffer terribly at the hands of various combatants, most notably Dunst’s real-life husband, Jesse Plemons, playing a, dare I say?, highly recognizable modern American “type.”

Civil War' Isn't as Scary as Modern America

What’s perhaps most admirable about the film, which as I say is very well staged and acted (with another excellent sound design, BTW), is that it can’t help but engender a conversation about how close we could be to this sort of open warfare in real modern American life?

As I watched, I couldn’t help but ask myself something I think about perhaps too much. Namely, what exactly will my response be if Donald Trump were to suffer yet another substantial popular vote defeat and be elected (again) thanks to the Electoral College. The college being a wildly anachronistic device sustained primarily by right-wing politicians and judges that is 80 years older and arguablyt even less relevant to modern America than the much-mocked 1864 abortion ban recently held up as standing law by the same type of political crowd in Arizona.

Worse, what if this next election is riddled with nefarious activity by Russia or whoever, and then subjected to the kind of blocking and delaying tactics imagined by Trump legal advisor John Eastman, substituting state legislatures, like Arizona’s and Wisconsin’s, for the popular vote of their people?

At my advanced age and obvious decrepitude I’d have to think twice about smearing camo makeup on my face and learning how to fire an AR-15, but I seriously … and I do mean seriously … suspect tens of thousands of people younger and equally outraged Americans will say, in effect, “No fucking way!”

And at that point “Civil War” becomes something more than speculative fiction.

Entertainment and Retribution. A Very Tough Act to Beat.

Posted on November 16, 2023 by Brian Lambert

We’ve all got little moments, seemingly innocuous at the time, but that stick in memory nevertheless. Like this, for example.

October 2016 and I’m sitting in a hotel bar in West Yellowstone, Montana with a couple friends and a dozen or so guys out on a hunting trip or early season snowmobiling. The TV is carrying one of the debates between Hillary Clinton, who everyone assumes will win and Donald Trump, who is trying to recover from that pussy grabbin’ business.

At one point, Trump makes the crack about how Clinton should be in jail … and half the hunter-snowmobilers guffaw in unison. They are amused. This Trump dude is, you know, “just sayin’ it”, and they find it entertaining.

That’s the moment. Nothing more. I didn’t take names and follow up to see who they eventually voted for. Although one guy, figuring me for a Clinton voter, followed me out to lobby to register his moral outrage at the way Bill Clinton “defiled the people’s house”, with the Monica Lewinsky escapade.

The takeaway that has haunted me ever since is not just that Trump won — the electoral college — largely because he was a pop culture entertainment star who spoke in a common man’s vernacular. But that despite the seven years since, the 30,000 documented lies, the gross mismanagement of an epidemic that killed over a million Americans, the constant insults to allies, bona fide meritorious Americans and, you know, inciting a riot to overthrow the elected government, his followers, at their essence a deeply ignorant mob, still find him both entertaining and a better steward of their future than … well, just about anyone, but certainly Joe Biden.

All this was in mind when I read that recent New York Times/Siena College Poll that had Trump beating Biden in key battleground states. (Key and battleground because the fate of constitutional democracy is once again in the hands of … the electoral college.)

Among the facets of this coming campaign that are clear is that Trump’s voters, the MAGA crowd, most certainly does see him as their “retribution”, and this next election as their best and perhaps last chance to correct a terrible wrong and set the country back on a path that serves them, (and only them.)

Point being, the MAGA mob is 100% certain to come out with even more zealotry than they showed in 2016, since revenge and retribution have been added to the entertainment appeal of their leader.

The same can not and will never be said for Joe Biden. Tucked away in the Times/Siena poll was 25% of younger voters interested in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with options like Cornel West and Jill Stein still in play. (We of course hope Stein, to plump up her independent bona fides, can cadge another dinner invitation to Moscow with Vladimir Putin and Gen. Mike Flynn.)

A normal presidential campaign features all sorts of “critical issues.” This next campaign has only one: keeping Donald Trump, his praetorian guard of renegade legal experts, election denying state officials and his self-pitying red hat mob away from even a scent of government authority. That’s it. Nothing else matters.

This will not be an election that turns on policy. The deciding factor is not tax equality, climate change, or police reform. One side is afire and firmly set on on cult-like retribution, while a critical faction of the other is lost in self-absorbed silliness.

Which brings us to why Joe Biden, regardless of the legitimacy he’s restored to the White House, the legislation he’s delivered and the wisdom he’s applied to Ukraine and now Israel/Hamas, is simply too precarious a vehicle to risk in another match up with Trump.

Given the electoral college — vigorously defended with inverted, Mobius strip logic by greybeard Libertarians — the indifference to Biden of a couple hundred thousand Millenials, Gen Z’ers and blacks identified in the Times/Siena poll — restores to Trump to the White House. That’s how precarious the situation is … today. And a restoration of Trump incompetence, fraud and pop authoritarianism is simply too calamitous to imagine.

The presumption among the political cognoscenti is that we are far past the point of no return in terms of Biden-Trump. Biden is in it to stay.

That said, all of them that I follow go on to fret openly about the instantaneous death spiral of the Biden campaign given one “health episode” on Biden’s part, one mumble-mouth response in a debate, or another uptick in the price of gas.

Trump’s addled buffoonery has never deterred his voters. Nor will his dive deeper and deeper into truly ugly Himmler-Goebbels-speak. The MAGA mob either doesn’t get the historical references of “blood poison”, “rooting out vermin” and setting up “camps” for immigrants, or doesn’t care. Either way they’re still entertained, Trump is their retribution, and revenge is a very powerful human motivation.

By contrast, one Mitch McConnell-like “freeze up” and Biden is toast.

I know I’ve warned against catastrophic thinking, but I did say that some matters before us are “worrisome.”

This is the biggest. Biden can’t make the mistake Ruth Bader Ginsburg made. Voters, especially young voters, want to be “excited” about a candidate. Sad but true. Political leadership is a form of entertainment. Joe Biden can never give them that.

Their response then is to stay home or vote for some third party vanity act. And the consequence of that is the Trump restoration.

I repeat what I’ve said before. Biden has done an excellent job. But the realities of 21st century politics powerfully suggest he should step aside and let a fresher face give critical voters the dopamine hit they need to feel entertained.

CNN’s Chris Licht, Yet Another Example of How Everything Trump Touches Dies.

Posted on June 9, 2023 by Brian Lambert

A week ago, reading Tim Alberta’s 15,000 word Atlantic piece on the tribulations of CNN exec Chris Licht, I kept shaking my head and saying, “This isn’t survivable.” In a rare moment of foresight (for me) I was quickly proven correct. Days later Licht was “let go” and CNN was “moving on.”

What made the story unsurvivable wasn’t just the reporting on CNN’s ratings problem or even Licht’s handling of the absurdly problematic town hall with Donald Trump, although that is very much connected, as much as it was the portrait of a much too generic corporate functionary in way over his head in terms of dealing with his primary resources, namely the anchors, reporters and staff at CNN. Had Licht been wheeled in to shore up the quarterly earnings statement at Road Runner Acme Explosives, Inc. he might still be in charge. But not when his mission was to sell a “reset” of journalistic tone and focus to hundreds of professionals whose primary skill set involves recognizing the pungent odor of bullshit.

Others have focused on all variety of details in the extraordinarily well reported piece, but Alberta — formerly at Politico and a guy with deep sources within what used to be your father’s Republican party — correctly placed particular focus on Licht’s determination to apply the concept of “absolute truth” to CNN’s presentation of the news. Alberta presses him several times on what … exactly … that means … “absolute truth?”

Licht had no good answer. As Generic Corporate Man, Licht was groomed and installed by David Zaslav the current head of recently reconfigured Warner Brothers-Discovery + and himself answerable to Colorado billionaire John Malone, long-serving board member and, FWIW, the second largest land owner in the United States. If you’re scoring at home, Malone — a classic old school Republican — wasn’t pleased with CNN’s persistent hyper-critical tone toward Trump, and put his energies into getting Zaslav his job with the clear instructions to restore CNN to something like partisan neutrality, which largely determind Zaslav’s choice of Licht. (I’ll leave aside for the moment that Zaslav, paid $165 million annually, is widely viewed as Voldemort in the current strike by TV writers. Generic, AI-style scripted TV being acceptable as long as those quarterly numbers hold up.)

David Zaslav Doubles Down on Theatrical Movies at CinemaCon - Variety — David Zaslav

Point being here that this generic/neutrality shtick/vision from Malone (and other board members) which begat Zaslav which begat Licht was nakedly obvious to CNN’s employees. As Alberta and others now tell the story, rebalancing objectivity wasn’t the issue for CNN’s staff. There was acceptance of the idea of dialing back the constant Trump rage. But Licht appeared clueless about how to do that given the, um, pesky journalistic, reality-based facts at hand.

The 'King of Cable' Behind a Charter-Time Warner Cable Deal - The New York Times — John Malone

What Licht couldn’t articulate to his news team was how … exactly … do you report on so prominent a public, political figure as Trump, and those who so ardently supprt him, without reporting, objectively and accurately, with a commitment to something approaching absolute truth, that he’s a fraud and a liar as well as criminally incompetent?

Go ahead. Everyone’s listening. We’ll take notes.

Absolute truth: Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump says he didn’t. One is absolutely true, the other isn’t. Are we going to pretend both are?

This was and to some extent still is a serious issue for many levels of modern journalism, but particularly those still adherring to paradigms of reporting now wildly out-paced by characters and competitors for whom truth, absolute and otherwise, is first and foremost a sales game. What’s true is whatever the people will believe.

Back in 2016 I did a piece talking to local journalism profs and pros about injecting the word “lying” into reporting on then candidate Trump. The consensus was that “lying” should be applied only as a last resort and with full confidence of (Trump’s) intent, which of course no one could ever say, so in effect you never use the word “lying.”

That standard has clearly eroded over the ensuing seven and a half years, with even The New York Times, deploying “the ‘L’ word” … judiciously. Meanwhile, CNN, cable competitors like MSNBC and untold websites applied “lie”, “lies” and “lying” much more generously. Some would say “excessively”, though still not inaccurately or unfairly in the context of Trump.

The question for Licht and now for post-CNN and other news organizations still timorous about calling Trump and his hyper-partisan acolytes what they clearly/absolutely are, is how do you assert journalistic credibility when you decline to describe accurately and in the common vernacular what is so vividly apparent? What are you protecting yourself or your audience from?

Countless norms have been broken by Trump’s rampage across the international stage. The once sagacious concept of a balanced presentation of both sides of story, essentially communicating validity in both points of view, has taken a particularly brutal battering in The Age of Trump. Most reporters and most audiences are too smart, and have access to too many other venues of information, to see neutrality as an asset.

What they see instead is timidity, and often complicity.

What Would Trump Steal That is So Ultra Top Secret and Why?

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Brian Lambert

When I heard last night that the FBI had raided Trump’s garish Florida mansion, my first reaction was, “Jesus, what took them so long?”

There’s a line of thinking that the public explanation about searching for public documents Trump illegally airlifted out of the White House is merely a cover for executing a raid that very likely will sweep evidence of all sorts of other Trump malfeasance. And that would surprise exactly no one who doesn’t sleep with a Trump-as-Rambo poster over their bed.

Among all the things that have astonished me in the context of Trump’s appeal to “conservatives” is the blindered unwillingness to see the guy as the “fraud” and “con man” his fellow Republican candidates told us he was back in 2015. Why? Because Trump’s astonishing disregard for business ethics, tax laws, SEC statutes, immigration laws and, well, you name it, was abundantly well known to anyone who did business with him in New York and anyone with a passing interest in business reporting by credible national newsapers. There was never any excuse for the Rewpublican managerial class not knowing this long before he descended on the gilded elevator. It was a known fact shortly after he began stinking up the real estate/gossip column scene in the early Eighties.

And yet … to this day … the guy has never been indicted. Hell, we’re to believe his taxes from over a decade ago are still under audit!

And a bit further down the rap sheet, there doesn’t appear to be any on-going investigation of the extremely shady, Russia-assisted “banking” he did with Deutsche Bank, the only crowd of money changers willing to loan him money … even after he sued them … after he refused to re-pay the loan they gave him for Trump Tower Chicago. (I strongly encourage anyone interested to read “Dark Towers”, New York Times financial reporter David Enrich’s briskly-paced tale of the bank’s myriad nefarious executives and endeavors, including those buttressing Trump at his most desperate moments.)

Whether this raid is the first of many dominoes to fall in the clearly broadening, deepening investigation into Trump’s January 6 behavior we must wait … a while longer.

But after consuming 48 hours of reporting and pounditry on this FBI raid. my lizard mind has focused with acute fascinatioin on the nature of these Top, Top Secret documents/information the Feds clearly believe he still possessed. This the information so ultra top secret it can not even be described.

Really? Wow.

But we do know a few things abut this stuff.

A: The Feds absolutely believed Trump had the info, and convinced a Federal judge to let it raid the home of a former President to get it back.

B: Trump quite obviously lied about having whatever it is and did not include it in the 15 boxes of trinkets and souvenirs and whatever the Feds toted away last spring.

C: The Feds and the judge agreed that Trump was unlikely to ever hand it back in a polite, professional manner.

And D: They had good reason to believe Trump would destroy what they were looking for if they gave any notice that they were coming to get it.

Hence, a raid, much like kicking in the door on a meth dealer in Albuquerque.

So then I ask myself, “What would Donald Trump steal and cling to so desperately that he’d risk this scene?”

And I answer by reminding myself that we know two things about Trump with absolute certainty, namely everything is about him and money. This leads me to suspect that whatever Super Double Secret Probation information he stole has to have very high value in terms of either protecting him from some kind of prosecution and/or can be monetized in a negotiation with another party … most likely in a highly nefarious context.

(One of the facical aspects of this episode, as one national security expert pointed out yesterday, is that Trump was obviously too stupid to realize that as POTUS he had the authority to de-classify anything, including whatever the Feds are looking for now, and therefore could have avoided this whole mess.)

Finally, as fans of John LeCarre certainly understand, whatever the Feds are looking for is not one-of-a-kind. There would be copies somewhere. Which means that other than the illegality of iut, the peril her, the risk to national security is who has this information.

And in that case it is the as-yet-unindicted careeert fraud and con man Donald Trump, who long ago demonstrated he will do anything to get what he wants.

I Think Putin’s Getting Himself in a Pickle

Posted on February 24, 2022 by Brian Lambert

At this moment in the drama I’m probably in the minority who thinks this will end badly for Vladimir Putin. In these first moments he seems to hold all the best cards. But the consequences for this kind of naked aggression in the 21st century are yet to be felt.

Leading up to yesterday’s invasion of Ukraine there was plenty of discussion of why Putin would risk something like this? The most common answers being that he sees himself as the Grand Restorer of the Russian (i.e. Soviet) empire, and he’s doing it now while he still has the kind of economic leverage over the West that comes with pumping so much gas onto the world markets. It’s a leverage even he must know will dry up once western Europe in particular goes green (or nuclear) and stops sending him — and I do mean him, personally — billions of dollars (and they’re mostly dollars) in exchange.

But Putin’s bigger problem is also largely of his own making. He is administering a shockingly sick country. 20% of Russians don’t have indoor plumbing. The country is ranked 70th in the world standard of living. It has a GDP 20% smaller than Italy. Russian conscripts are paid the equivalent of $28 a month. (One pundit joked that this war would end today if the European Union offered citizenship to every Russian soldier who laid down his rifle and migrated west.)

Under Putin’s 23 year rule, he has orchestrated a partnering with a cadre of mob-like oligarchs to whom he is Vito Corleone. Each of these characters are not just looting Russian resources — gas, aluminum, etc. — for their private fiefdoms but are kicking back so much cash to Putin he is widely regarded as the wealthiest person on the planet as of this morning, far beyond the wildest dreams of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

How Putin's Oligarchs Got Inside the Trump Team | Time

And every (thinking) Russian knows this.

Whether the sanctions — and other retaliations by the West — cyber attacks and the like, will be enough to incite revolt inside Russia remains to be seen. Russian history is after all a tale of an endless series of semi-god-like strong men tolerated by the woefully abused masses out of fear that Oppresive Leader is their only protection from another invasion — from the Asian east or the imperial/fascist West (Napoleon and Hitler).

But that was before the internet. Before a constantly interconnected liberal intelligentsia could see and hear in real time what was true and what was just the hysterical war-mongering of Putin’s state media.

Here by the way is a sample of what Russian TV (your average Rooskie’s FoxNews) was saying prior to the invasion. (Via the Los Angeles Times:

“To hear Russian media tell it, the government of Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis waging a genocidal campaign against ethnic Russians in the country’s east, where Moscow-backed authorities regularly uncover mass graves full of the corpses of women and children with bound hands and bludgeoned heads even as they face the hell of constant shelling.
“Such false images and narratives have become a daily staple in Russia….The Russian media have gone into overdrive with stories depicting a government in Kyiv so cruel that Moscow has no choice but to swoop in and protect the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
“ ‘It’s a war between the Ukrainian government and its own people…. People are dying there every day. Thousands of civilians died there. Thousands of children lost their limbs there, buried in little coffins’,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the state-funded broadcaster RT, said on a talk show on the Russia-1 channel.”
Having successfully undermined international confidence in the United States through his manipulation of social media and fluffing up Donald Trump, and by degrading Great Britain with Brexit, Putin appears to believe he’s succeeded in splitting the West. To the point that the principal forces of NATO are now so polarized and fragmented they are incapable of wreaking any serious economic damage on him personally.
Judging by Trump and Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and Mike Pompeo and the other usual suspects aligning themselves more with Putin than the United States and NATO, it’s tempting to think he’s right.
But I think he’s delusional. A creature of his own bubble. I believe NATO in particular, and world markets in general, are tired of the constant corruption-induced chaos they’re suffering at Putin’s hand. To the point that, with something as unquivocally outrageous as this invasion, they’re united enough to want him — Putin — to suffer a resounding defeat.
You’re hearing it from many quarters: Direct, personal sanctions on Putin and his high-flying mob cronies. Freezing of their accounts, confiscation of their property, (much of it likely acquired via money-laundering — hello again, Donald J. Trump), expulsion from Western communities, colleges, etc.
The tough nut on the personal finance front is — as usual — getting international bankers, our good friends the Swiss in particular, to accept that playing cute with the Third Reich wasn’t lesson enough. If you want credibility in the 21st century, you cut ties with indisputable, war-criminal gangsters.
America’s Trumpist media will continue align with Putin, and more loudly as gas prices spike up towards $5 and $6 a gallon. But I don’t see them convincing a majority of Americans – other than the 20% of Republicans who view Putin more favorably than Joe Biden — that this is anyone’s fault other than Putin’s and that things will only get worse if he prevails.

Florida Man Seeks Teenage Female for Fun Adventures with Frequently Indicted Tax Collector/Embezzler/Trump Minion

Posted on April 1, 2021 by Brian Lambert

The competition is intense and the choice is always subjective, but everyone has their favorite Florida Man story. But this thing with super-Trumper Matt Gaetz and his tax collecting home boy is so spectacularly and so ludicrously Floridian it will soon eclipse a couple of my all-time favorites.

Until Gaetz I was fond of the tale told by a Florida Highway Patrolman who pulled over a Cadillac exceeding 100 mph on Alligator Alley, i.e. I-75 from Naples to Ft. Lauderdale. According to his report, upon stopping the vehicle he noted that the driver was both “intoxicated … and naked” and that the three women passengers were likewise, “intoxicated … and naked.” Florida: the Wisconsin of the South.

Perhaps better is the tale of the extremely Trumpy couple in a Tampa-area Medicare-related business. The dude was the company’s super salesman and the Mrs. was the receptionist for the small office. She was the cheery face of the company. Family values and other assertions of all-American patriotism and rectitude were standard parts of their conversations, along with lamenting the hell-on-earth sewer being propagated by liberals, socialists and pretty much anyone who didn’t genuflect to the godliness and glory of Donald Trump.

So it came as a bit of surprise to learn that the couple’s side-hustle was running a Mom and Pop porn site, featuring the Mrs. as the main attraction Pop as the cameraman/director and a half dozen of their buddies as the eager and willing props.

Hey! Free country! Drain the Swamp!

But come on, the steadily accumulating details about Gaetz and his buddy the Florida tax collector (a can’t-make-it-up filigree) are so sleazy, so shameless and so … so … Florida in all its humid corruption it would take your breath away if you weren’t laughing so hard. And the fact that no character in Congress had coiled himself tighter around Donald Trump’s cankles than Gaetz — to the point he was “dating” Trump’s daughter makes it more delicious than a sweaty trucker’s cap filled with deep-fried gator bites. (Apparently that relationship has cooled. Gaetz recently proposed to his latest girl friend while relaxing at Mar-A-Lago. The girl friend just happens to be the sister of the guy who invented the Oculus virtual reality head set, is worth $700 million and has been an unapolgetic Islamaphobe and alt-right Trumpist on social media.)

Here’s more on Greenberg. And still more.

If you haven’t paid full attention to this farce, not only is Gaetz under investigation for having sex with under-age girls, but his buddy, the tax collector, is now looking at … wait for it … 33 separate federal charges, including sex trafficking as well, mail fraud and embezzlement from his tax collecting job. (The latter may be part of every Florida government official’s job description, I’ll have to check that.)

Everything about Gaetz screams “rich, entitled asshole”, which explains why so many of his Republican colleagues seem happy to let him flail and rant to Fox News about “extortion” … while simultaneously rolling Tucker Carlson into his sewer and defaming a prominent Florida attorney (I say “prominent” not necessarily “respectable”) in the same berserko interview. .

But since I’m always interested in “Where do you get these guys?” I Googled around a bit for Gaetz’ old man, Don Gaetz, politely described in news stories about his um, troubled, off-spring as “a wealthy Florida businessman and prominent state politician.” And that is true, as far as it goes.

The good and wholesome part about the old guy, is that he was born in North Dakota and educated in the great evangelical tradition at Concordia College right over there in Moorhead, Minnesota.

Then he moved to Florida.

It was down there on the Redneck Riviera that he made his fortune in … wait for it again … the for-profit hospice business. A unique health service niche for which his company was eventually indicted for Medicare fraud — over-charging the government, charging for people with no need for hospice care, etc.. i.e. the usual Florida business model . The case was quietly settled out of court in the way that most well-capitalized fraud cases involving prominent politicians usually are.

Oh, and did I mention that old man Gaetz cashed out by selling his pricey, government-supported hospice business for close to a half-billion bucks to an Ohio firm best known as the parent company of … Roto-Rooter?

At death’s door? We’ll handle that and get that nasty grease glob out of your pipes!

Florida. For-profit hospice Medicare scams. Sex trafficking teenage girls. Embezzlement. Mail fraud. Defamation. Face-planted puckering into Donald Trump’s gold-leafed rump.

Even Carl Hiaasen hasn’t rolled all this into one character.

Every Hour of Every Day Irony Dies Again

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Brian Lambert

With apologies to Graydon Carter, 9/11 was no Donald Trump.

Back in the week after the attacks that killed (only) 3000 Americans, Carter, then editor of Vanity Fair, memorably intoned that the event was so grave and sobering that, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” There is dispute over whether Carter — who co-founded the regularly brilliant satire magazine, Spy, back in the late ’80s and gets some credit for the description of Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” — was the first to suggest we’d never again laugh at the ironies of outrageous hypocrisy and shameless buffoonery. But fair or not, the line has stuck to him.

The smart kids at the Oxford dictionary define irony as, “A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.”

Now, given four years of Trump we can debate whether the line about “contrary to what one expects” has standing any more. Still, let’s take a quick roll through just a few of the shiv stabs of irony we’ve endured in recent weeks and see if there’s still a way to laugh.

Trump Campaign Manager Melts Down and Is Tackled By Cops in His Front Yard. To TrumpNation the MAGA reelection machine is a bigly world-class hypercar, the McLaren F1 of political campaigns, and therefore worthy of every dollar they can peel off their disability checks and send over to it. So it is ironic, to us if not them, that the campaign has somehow blown close to a billion dollars of MAGA money and is being heavily outspent in key places like Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Irony grows when campaign manager Brad Parscale, after citing “a million” requests for tickets to Trump’s Tulsa rally, (which ends up pulling in slightly fewer than a bad arena football game), is demoted/fired. Worse, having um, “migrated” $38.9 million of MAGA dollars to side hustles he personally benefits from, Parscale has rather flagrantly bought himself a Ferrari, a $400,000 boat and a $2.4 million waterfront home … only then to learn he’s under federal investigation. At this point he allegedly slugs his wife, gets drunk, threatens to kill himself with one of the 10 guns he keeps around the house for protection, perhaps from antifa, and wanders shirtless out into his front yard (while drinking a beer) where he gets tackled by cops and carted off to mandatory psychiatric care.

To this, purly as a bonus, we have ex-GOP hack and now Lincoln Project driving force Rick Wilson saying he “believes” Trump,’s campaign funding problem is compounded by the candidate himself, i.e. “The World’s Greatest Business Man”, taking “a 20% skim” off the top of all those $10 MAGA collections and stuffing it straight into his pocket. .

Not Only Isn’t Trump “Really, Really Rich” but He’s Essentially Lost $400 Million THREE Times. Those two $750 annual tax bills got most of the attention after the big New York Times story. But people long amazed at Trump’s shell game finances took special interest in the fact that he first blew $400 million in money he inherited from his father, (and likely swindled away from other relatives), then made and blew the $400 million he made off “The Apprentice” (including acting as a pitch man for Double-Stuf Oreos). But then — and this is based on what his records show — he is now in debt to god knows who for at least another $400 million. For those keeping score at home that’s $1.2 billion he’s basically thrown in a hole and set on fire. So here we have the irony of the “world’s greatest businessman” revealed to be demonstrably incapable of balancing a check book.

(At Vanity Fair William Cohan throws this in, ” … that is only a fraction of the more than $1.1 billion or so in debt and obligations that Trump [currently] owes across his empire, my calculations show. There’s Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, which Trump owns and which has $100 million of debt on it, due in 2022. On 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, which Trump also owns outright, he owes another $139 million, due in five years. He also owns 30% stakes, alongside Vornado Realty Trust, in two office towers: one in Manhattan at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, and one in San Francisco at 555 California Street. His 30% of the debt on these two buildings, according to the Vornado filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is $448 million—$163 million of which is due next September, with the balance of $285 million due in two years. (If you are still with me, we’re up to $687 million in debt. … thanks to Dan Alexander, the Forbes Trumpologist and the author of new book White House, Inc., we can account for another $100 million or so, bringing the total debt that Trump owes to around $1.1 billion—well beyond the $421 million of debt the Times shared in its piece.)

So, for another deeper level of irony, we have the “Art of the Deal” tycoon who screams “hoax” and “no collusion” every time someone says “Russia” deeply in arrears to a collection mysterious lender/investors, all of whom I gotta assume are feeling nervous about ever seeing a return on their money.

Can you call yourself a billionaire if the only billion in sight is what you owe your creditors?

Trump’s White House is Itself a Super Spreader Cluster. Leaving aside for a second the grand(est) irony that Trump the Denier, Trump of “Like a Miracle” and “We’ve Got it Totally Under Control” fame himself becoming infected, as of Wednesday, 27 people connected with the White House have also tested positive. In D.C. that one famous building is a goddam viral hot zone.

By contrast, last week the entire country of Taiwan, all 23 million people, reported … nine cases. Want more? Over a dozen countries reported fewer than 10. The Denier-in-Chief’s personal physical situation is so bad it’s the only plausible reason why the White House is refusing to allow contact tracing to determine who in the building is “Patient Zero”, the infector of the infected.

Does any of this mean that the scales have fallen from the eyes of Trump Nation? I doubt that, profoundly. Sean Hannity is telling MAGA warriors that Trump is a 21st century version of Winston Churchill, leading us through a crisis, presumably by exacerbating the crisis with incompetence and then infecting himself to demonstrate his sheer damn manliness.

TrumpNation is keeping the faith, or maybe they’re keeping the fraud, I’m not sure which. But then there are studies exploring why conservatives don’t use or seem to understand irony and satire, as liberals do. It’s a cognitive thing.

So as you and I can agree, the problem isn’t that irony has died. It’s more a problem that we are awash in so much irony it’s too damn hard to decide what’s laughable and what’s tragic.

Baseball Must Take a Stand Against the Era of Remorseless Sleaze

Posted on February 19, 2020 by Brian Lambert

Clearly remorse, like courage, is out of fashion these days. While Donald Trump continues to pardon or commute sentences for a truly miserable cast of characters, none of whom have expressed even a milli-second’s worth of remorse for their crimes, it’d be nice if a grand national pastime like say, Major League Baseball, would step up and show America’s youth that cheating has serious consequences.

Until this past week it appeared unlikely that any of the actual players for the Houston Astros would be fined, suspended or otherwise disciplined either for the cheating scheme they created or were complicit in with their silence. But now, with heavyweights like Mike Trout — i.e. the best player in the game — and LeBron James, the most famous athlete of the moment — coming out and saying that baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is blowing it by letting the players skate, the times may be a changin’.

The commissioners of pro sports are quasi-independent employees of the owners of the various teams, and those owners, like CEOs everywhere have one primary objective: make money, or at least steadily increase the value of their investment. The punishment the Astros have received so far amounts to pretty much a parking ticket to people of the average owner’s total net worth.

But were Commissioner Manfred to belatedly bow to player pressure (in addition to fan and pundit pressure) and take serious action to restore credibility to the game and set a vivid precedent for anyone who tries anything like what the Astros have been proven to have done … well, that’ll have significant bottom line consequences for the Astros and several other teams, including the Twins and Yankees, whose current rosters include players involved with the Astros scandal in 2017 and 2018.

When the initial punishments of Houston executives and their manager were handed down, Manfred boxed himself in a corner by granting Astros players immunity if they came clean and admitted what they had done. Conventional wisdom was that the MLB’s Players Association would not have stood still for investigations, much less penalties of players. The thinking was that — as with your average bad cop — solidarity was so tight among players across baseball Manfred risked legalized mutiny and a PR nightmare by getting tough on the players.

But now, with a steadily increasing volume of outrage coming from opposing players, (i.e. other union members), rightfully disgusted by the way Astros players have slimed the reputation of the game (not to mention arguably stolen championships and individual awards), Manfred is getting pushed closer to making the decision he should have made weeks ago.

What kind of punishment? Vacating the Astros 2017 World Championship might seem extreme, but the NCAA (no one’s idea of an all-wise and just organization) has levied similar penalties right here in Minnesota.

Losing the 2017 World Series banner would sting. But the big hit, the only one that would catch everyone’s attention and send an unequivocal sign that baseball will not tolerate corruption, would be to suspend each and everyone of the Astros players on either the 2017 or 2018 teams, wherever they are now. (The Twins’ Marwin Gonzalez and the Yankees super-expensive new hire, Gerrit Cole would have to be included. Gonzalez has at least expressed remorse, which is more than any other the other Astros star players.)

One proposal is a 50-game suspension for each player. But that’s roughy 30 games less than the suspension a player gets for using an illegal diuretic. Eighty-one-games seems more commensurate with the discredit the players have brought on the game, and a full season is a nice round number that would serve like a bat to the head of anyone still not paying attention.

The financial impact is obvious. The Astros would have to field a team of minor leaguers and emergency hires that very few would want to see play, while the Twins and Yankees and other teams with ex-Astros would be more modestly debilitated.

My understanding is that most major league contracts contain, in essence, morality clauses, voiding the contract if a player’s personal behavior grossly violates common standards of decency. Since debasing the good name of baseball qualifies (IMHO), owners would not have to pay serious sums of money for the duration of the suspension … but would be in the business of complicated, expensive make goods for TV contracts, season tickets, corporate boxes, field advertising and on and on.

Better legal minds say Manfred’s immunity gambit has destroyed any option he might have to push for real punishment now. But he’s falling into a predicament where he has to try.

The point is — and it’s especially valid in the age of Donald Trump, someone or some organization somewhere has — to put it grandly — demonstrate a moral obligation to the culture at large. How? By standing up and proving it will not tolerate corruption. By showing there are very serious financial and reputational consequences for cheating.

Donald Trump’s sleaze and corruption may be entirely acceptable if you’re a Republican Senator, Congressman or state official. Or if you’re a white evangelical or a NASCAR fan.

But for everyone else who wonders and worries what the effect a vulgar, pussy-grabbing, porn star-cavorting, pathological liar is having on America’s youth, it’d be cathartic to see a bedrock role-modeling institution like big league baseball say emphatically, “No. This shit is dead wrong. Actions have consequences. So you guys are off the field and out of the money for a year.”

Bad Boys, Dumb Boys, Roy Moore and our “Cultural Moment”

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Brian Lambert

Is there a male alive today who doesn’t cringe at every new revelation of sexual misbehavior? God we look bad. Whether blatantly criminal, like Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore, or farcically oafish, like GOP Rep. Tony Cornish here in Minnesota, the male “brand” is taking a brutal beating in this “cultural moment.”

And for the (very) most part that’s a good thing. We’re witnessing an astonishing outing of perverts, boors and dorks. It’s a comeuppance that is generations-to-centuries overdue. As I’ve said before, since we live under the minority rule of gun fetishists, we’re not going to do anything about our weekly assault rifle slaughters, so maybe all this attention being paid to male sexual/ego dysfunction will accomplish something positive. (Clearly, the gun slaughter thing has been reduced to: A week of news coverage, “thoughts and prayers” and “let’s move on”.)

Having become a fan of Yuval Harari’s books on human evolution, I’ve been wondering how much of this predatory sexual behavior is a modern invention? And by “modern” I mean post-agricultural revolution?

Did adult males in our hunter-gatherer days lurk malevolently around adolescent girls — like a pervy Fred Flintstone at the Bedrock Mall — and force themselves on them against their will? Was violent rape a common occurrence? Did sexual fantasies of power and domination control male behavior? Sexual interaction between males and females of “breeding age” was common. We know that. But what about the violence part? The literature I’ve seen recently is mixed, but trending to the belief that this twisted, contorted notion of male dominance is yet another example of a large percentage of the human population — most notably the males — failing to adapt to the exponential increase in population, competition and discordant cultural messages.

Pretty much every culture war issue can be broken down to a diminishment of the archetypal male role. Our big muscle skill set began to be less important to species survival when we stopped having to spear and wrestle mastodons to the ground. Likewise the need for us males to spread our seed to as many females as possible has been making less and less sense species survival-wise since we settled down to farming and began producing more off-spring than we could feed.

A friend the other day mentioned he was called into a faculty meeting at the college where he teaches. The topic? You guessed it. Sexual harassment in the work place, (and by extension everywhere else.) He correctly saw his role at that meeting as, “Shut up and listen.” The women had plenty of venting to do, and this is their time to do it. No mansplaining required or allowed. (It’s fascinating to see the level of passion coming from media women on political chat shows. They are truly seizing the moment to clue — men — into all the crap they’ve been putting up with since junior high but until now have quarantined to lunches with their girlfriends.)

There’s a worry among the usual retrograde types — Sean Hannity, Alabama Republicans, etc. — that not only are fine Suth’n gentlemen like Roy Moore being tarred without a trial — but every male is now going to be treated like a criminal pervert.

That of course is part and parcel of the usual hysteria from the perpetually aggrieved, a description the Trumpist right wears round their necks like a medieval scapular. With male attention — sought an unsought — playing as large a role in women’s lives as it does (the reverse being at least as true for men), I’m not too concerned “the gals” will have a hard time making out the qualitative difference between getting raped (Harvey Weinsten), preyed upon and groped (Roy Moore and Donald Trump), being shocked and disgusted (Louis CK), inappropriately seduced and abandoned (Bill Clinton), aggravated and annoyed (Tony Cornish) or semi-amused and filled with pity at the average guy’s generally clueless and clumsy come ons.

Women have made a science of male behavior. Think of us as simple, one-cell/one track paramecium being observed under a microscope. The Harveys and Roys and Louis of the world are no surprise to them. All that’s going on now is that evolution has ticked up a notch to where (western) women can say out loud and with less fear of male repercussion what they’ve been saying to each other for, mm, several thousand years.

When Manafort Met Trump.

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Brian Lambert

I would love to have been in the meeting where Paul Manafort pitched his services to Donald Trump. What those two grifters saw in each other may be the wet kiss that seals both of their fates.

The suspicion today, before the inevitable avalanche of more damning details, is that Manafort was in hock to Russian paymasters — i.e. oligarch/gangsters — and badly needed to “get whole” ASAP. We know that almost immediately after getting the job to run Trump’s campaign he uses that very phrase in a correspondence seeking ideas about how to monetize his new presidential candidate connection.

But come on! The guy, who has been a DC system parasite for over 30 years, with a career of shady deals in his treadworn baggage, has no concern about walking into the spotlight of a presidential campaign? No concerns that at long, long last the Justice department or US Attorney or someone will take a more focused look at what he’s been up to or … what he will now do to win an election?

Talking Points’ Josh Marshall speculates that Manafort was so desperate to resolve his debt(s) to Oleg Deripaska (and likely others) that he decided the lesser risk was in the spotlight working for Trump. As we know, Manafort, a character who regards every breath he takes as an opportunity to make a buck off someone, worked for free.

Now that’s a motivated employee.

Says Marshall in the context of Manafort suddenly increasing his value to the Russians, “… spies look for people who are crooked and people who are desperate. Manafort looks like he was both.”

So what did Trump see in Manafort? We’re told they were well acquainted with each other, but not close. Besides a relationship with (yet another career long grifter) Roger Stone, the one thing they absolutely had in common, and which I suspect they knew about each other, were long-term relationships with Russians laundering money, in Trump’s case through wildly over-priced purchases of Trump real estate.

But what does Manafort promise to deliver? As of yesterday we now know Team Trump was being baited with the prospect of Hillary e-mails as far back as March, months before they eventually dropped, (within hours of the Access Hollywood tape.) Did Manafort promise to make that delivery happen? Did he convince Trump that he knew the right people to make it happen? Had he heard offers of cooperation from the Russian hacking operation? Did Trump see in him, a veteran grifter, a guy who could weaponize such information and not screw up?

We know that Manafort had some kind of role in dropping that plank about arming Ukrainians against the Russians. That move — though symbolic — had to have impressed Russians watching to see what they might get for their money, or at least their continued patience until Manafort delivered the money he owed.

But now that he’s under house arrest, with no chance of repaying whatever he owes Deripaska (and other Russian mobsters) how does Manafort see a way to defeat these first charges, much less all the others very likely to come down thanks to George Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, and “proactive cooperation”, (i.e. wearing a wire to talk to campaign and White House supervisors)? Russian oligarchs with millions in property all over Western Europe and the United States have to see a Manafort under arrest as worse than useless to them. If he starts singing, aggressive US attorneys (if there are any left after the Trump purge) will be delighted to move on those empty $5 million condos glutting markets in New York, London, San Francisco and everywhere else.

And then, as has been noticed, let’s not forget Gen. Flynn, about whom nothing was said yesterday. If Mueller kept Papadopoulos’s guilty plea under wraps for months, fair speculation says he’s got something similar going with Flynn.

Trump’s Resignation Imminent? There’s A Logic To It.

Posted on August 17, 2017 by Brian Lambert

I take this with a 50-pound block of salt. But the guy saying it has spent an unusual amount of time with Donald Trump and has insights into his, uh, business ethics and intellectual discipline unlike few others outside Trump’s immediate family.

“Art of the Deal” ghost writer, Tony Schwartz, is predicting a Trump resignation is imminent — fueled by looming, bankrupting indictments from Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The circle is closing at blinding speed. Trump is going to resign and declare victory before Mueller and congress leave him no choice.— Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) August 16, 2017

Trump’s presidency is effectively over. Would be amazed if he survives till end of the year. More likely resigns by fall, if not sooner.— Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) August 16, 2017

Skepticism is always a virtue. But given how recklessly Trump has conducted his business affairs and the vast trail he has left with Deutsche Bank, Russian banks, quasi-Russian banks in Cyprus and on and on, Mueller’s heavyweight team of financial investigators can not being having all that difficult a time building some kind of a case against him. Put another way, they may already have so many choices for indictment their biggest dilemma is picking the worst of the lot.

And remembering that Al Capone ended up at Alcatraz for tax fraud rather than garroting and machine gunning his booze-running rivals and cops, any kind of indictment that puts Trump’s “fortune” in lethal jeopardy would likely be enough for Trump to squeal like a pig and cut, you guessed it … a deal.

The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson has been doing some of the best work explaining Trump’s preposterously foul-smelling [i.e. money-laundering] deals in former Russian provinces. In his latest piece, titled “Trump’s Business of Corruption” he writes about (yet another) absurd-on-the-face-of-it Trump deal, this time in Soviet Georgia.

“I recently spoke with John Madinger, a retired U.S. Treasury official and I.R.S. special agent, who used to investigate financial crimes. He is the author of “Money Laundering: A Guide for Criminal Investigators.” When I told him what [long time Trump advisor Michael] Cohen had said to me [that Trump didn’t have any obligation to know the cash for the deal was being routed through a fraud-riddled Kazakhstan bank], he responded, “No, no, no! You’ve got to do your due diligence. You shouldn’t do a financial transaction with funds that appear to stem from unlawful activity. That’s like saying, ‘I don’t care if Pablo Escobar is my secret business partner.’ You have to care—otherwise, you’re at risk of violating laws against money laundering.”

By now Team Trump has to know what Mueller is probing hardest at, and it is almost certainly squalid crap like these cheesy Russian “deals”, all of which give Putin blackmail leverage on Trump, overt collusion or not. Moreover, as has been noted several times since the raid on Paul Manafort’s luxury condo, getting Trump’s tax returns/records requires Mueller et al meet a lower legal bar than getting a search warrant for Manafort’s property.

Point being, Schwartz is simply doing the math. Seized tax returns + heavyweight financial crimes investigators pouring over ludicrous “licensing deals” in former Russian kleptocracies + nearly total isolation from Congress and U.S. business communities after making common cause with neo-Nazis = Trump alone in a corner where even the 80% support of Republicans can’t protect either his money or prevent him from being re-branded as one of history’s most flagrant swindlers.

I also wonder how much thought Mueller is giving to Trump’s increasingly irrational mental state as that lonely spot in the corner gets tighter and darker?

Nazis? I Don’t See Any Nazis.

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Brian Lambert

So 72 years after The Greatest Generation defeated the racist, totalitarian regimes of Germany and Japan we’ve elected a President of the United States who doesn’t dare criticize … Nazis.

We understand why of course. It’s because, as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke reminded everyone over the weekend, after the neo-Nazi rally/murder in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“We are determined to take our country back,” said Duke. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.” He later added, “I would recommend you [Trump] take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

At this point in the Trumpocalypse I hold little hope that refusing to call Nazis “Nazis” and hiding behind a bland White House statement condemning violence will be the turning point civilized people have been waiting for. High profile Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marc Rubio have issued strong … words … saying more or less what Trump can’t bring himself to say. But what they ever actually do about legislating away the roots of racism is a whole other thing. Because they too have Trump’s base problem. Trump’s people are also their people. They don’t stay in office without the 10%-12% red-faced racist vote.

But the thing that jumped out at me watching tape of the Charlottesville rally was the brazenness and bravado of the mostly young-ish men hanging their faces for all the world to see as they chanted Nazi slogans against blacks, Jews and “faggots.” The blow back in the age of social media has been immediate and often hilarious.

Without discounting sheer stupidity, it’s always worth asking why these characters feel emboldened to make such an unashamed public display of their rancid bigotry.

Obviously stupidity and bigotry are hard-wired into human nature. There’ll always be a percentage of the crowd maniacally proud of their animosities. But the point here is that Donald Trump didn’t create this class of raging fools. It’s actually the reverse. This virulent, ermboldened form of racism created Trump. All he did was step up and exploit a principal facet of the late 20th/early 21st century Republican/conservative message.

I’ve been accused of having an obsession with the influence of commercial talk radio, which exploded in popularity in the late ’80s when the Reagan administration repealed The Fairness Doctrine, a broadcast rule requiring equal time rebuttal to charges and claims made against candidates and organizations. The modern “fake news” phenomenon began at this point, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and literally hundreds of wanna-bes across the country unleashed to preach, without any serious counter argument anything their audience wanted to hear, facts and reality be damned.

Having spent (too much) time covering and being a host in that milieu, I can tell you first hand that at every point the ratings took a slide the answer from corporate executives and their local managers was to … get louder and crazier, or “go harder right,” as my one time boss told us. (For the record I was the token liberal, there to be ritually flogged, supposedly.)

The response from this group of shirt-and-tie businessmen to me asking why the hell they were selling complete nut job ideas like evolution-denial and cults of “Democrat generals” screwing up Dick Cheney’s Iraq war plan was, you guessed it, “Settle down. It’s just business.” “We’re just trying to sell ads, man.” As though stoking and encouraging the delusions and grievances of emotionally immature listeners was no different from talking more Vikings or playing more Taylor Swift.

When you look at the raging faces of the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville it’s worth considering how much of that crowd’s sense that they are the rising tide, the great, brave upswelling of true conservatism is based on the 30 years of indoctrination they’ve received from friendly neighbors of yours and mine “just doing my job, man”.

Responsibility for Charlottesville spreads a lot further than The Daily Stormer, which as I see as of a couple of hours ago has been hacked and taken over by Anonymous.

Count on it: Today on Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin: “The Radical Leftists’ War on The Daily Stormer’s First Amendment Rights.”

100 Days. How Much Stupidity Can We Survive?

Posted on April 27, 2017 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3 So let me get this straight. The “yuge”, “beautiful” wall keeping out all those Mexican drugs, bad hombres and strawberry pickers is not only not going to be paid for by the Mexicans, but probably isn’t going to be built at all. Likewise, China the worst currency manipulator in the world, the bastards destroying our economy … will not be branded a currency manipulator, partly because the Chinese guy spent 10 minutes explaining how complicated this North Korea thing is.

And ObamaCare repeal, that thing Republcans voted for 50, 60, 200 times, meaning actually tearing the whole damn thing up and returning us to the golden days of yore when health insurance was dirt cheap and “accessible” to everyone … eh, not so much, and sure as hell not in time for the big 100 Days check-off this Saturday.

Ditto tax “reform” (i.e. the usual Republican ritual performance of oral sex on its donor class without so much as a handshake for you and me). And … and … well the list of what His Orangeness promised, in the loudest and angriest terms to his hootin’ and hollerin’ rally-goers last fall is very, very long and all but entirely incomplete, except for Neil Gorsuch.

In other words it is exactly the farce of buffoonish incompetence most of us expected when we voted Nov. 8. The only thing that is “fer sure” is that the timer on the hand grenade both the “deplorables” and the tribal conservative clod-bro culture wanted rolled into D.C. is seconds away from detonation.

At last Saturday’s ~~“March Against Stupidity”~~ “March for Science”, I kept thinking, “How much stupidity can an enormous, intricately complicated society withstand before something blows … fatally?”

A lot of people are watching Trump poke at North Korea, like an impaired six year-old jabbing a stick at a rabid dog trapped against a fence. None of the outcomes to this drama are good, and some are border-line apocalyptic. More to the point, confidence that either of the main guys involved are rational and competent is, well, kinda like non-existent. (I still wonder what serious humans like “Mad Dog” Mattis would actually do if Trump decides he wants to lob some missiles into Pyongyang? There are — rarely used — military codes of ethics that prohibit an officer from following an order he deems illegal or wholly unjustified.)

Most likely, like everything else on his list of batshit campaign bluster, Trump will do nothing, other than play another round of golf at Mar-a-Lago and enjoy another five or six slices of “the most beautiful chocolate cake you’ve ever seen.” But the issue is what the North Korean nutjob does in response to what he thinks Trump might do.

While enjoying the sunshine, the crowds and a lot of very funny signs at the Science march I was reminded of another detail related to a book I read last month, “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs.” Harvard astrophysicist Lisa Randall and her team have a theory about the “periodicity” of asteroid impacts on planet earth. Something big and nasty rolls in roughly every 35-40 million years. Their idea is that this coincides with our Solar System’s two million-year passage through the center plane of the Milky Way, a plane dense, she thinks, with dark matter and its mysterious gravitational effects.

She theorizes that these effects kick up a storm among the rocks and comets otherwise tumbling innocently through the Oort Belt far out beyond Pluto, sending a barrage of the stuff inward toward the Sun and colliding with earth.

And what’s this got to do with Donald Trump and the ascendance of crass stupidity to power in all facets of the government of the planet’s most technically advanced society?

Well, there this. In his fourth grade coloring book of a budget “presented” last month, the one red-lining Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, Big Bird, and on and on, there was the part cancelling NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission.

The main part of that mission was an elaborate project to grab material off a passing asteroid and get it back to orbiting astronauts for examination. But a facet of it was money to pay smart people here on earth, (FoxNews/talk radio/clod-bro culture’s much derided “experts”), to think seriously and propose ideas about how me might deal with an apocalyptic meteor heading our way.

The cost of the entire Mission was pegged at $1.25 billion. The part where the gubmint pays smart people down here on terra firma to work out the details of how to protect civilization from toasted dinosaur-like destruction was probably a lot … a lot … less.

But if you’re too incompetent, lazy or sociopathic to care about stuff like that, well, screw it. We gotta pare this insane spending down to compensate for whacking the Alternative Minimum Tax, which would have saved Trump roughly $25 million off the only tax return we’ve ever seen.

Stupidity is darkly funny up to the point it makes survival an open question.

There Are People Who Know What The Russians Have Been Up To With Trump

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3 I’m not so sure “no one knows” what’s going on with Trump and the Russians.

You hear something like that four or five times an hour as pundit-reporters compete to be the most flabbergasted by the latest tweet and revelation from TrumpWorld. But, if there is any credibility to Steve Bannon’s “deep state” paranoia, it strikes me as very-to-highly likely that within the gargantuan US intelligence apparatus there are people, and my guess is they would be senior career professionals, who have a real good idea of the games Trump has been playing with Russians, or to be more precise, games Russians have been playing with Trump.

Over just the past two weeks three separate pieces of reporting have etched a portrait of the Trump reality in clearer detail. None of them can be described as “sound bites.” You’ll need an hour to digest them all. Two have appeared in consecutive issues of the New Yorker and one is a series of posts by Josh Marshall for his site, Talking Points Memo.

“Trump, Putin and the New Cold War” by New Yorker editor David Remnick and two colleagues is a fascinating overview of the populist forces that first Putin and now Trump have very cynically exploited (and in Putin’s case sustained) to grab power. “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal” by the same magazine’s Adam Davidson uses a bizarre development deal in Baku, Azberbaijan to lay out a money-laundering operation involving comically corrupt Azerbaijani officials, Trump and … Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Marshall’s series, zeroing in on Trump’s long-standing, very close association with a strange fringe mob/wannabe spy character named Felix Sater and Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen. Begin, if you’re interested, with, “The Innocent Explanation, Part 1.”

To compress a very broad narrative to its essence, you have this: In the late ’90s and early ’00s Trump was effectively bankrupt and no American bank would do business with him. What he found were Russian oligarchs, newly and fabulously wealthy from mob-style “privatization” in the post-Soviet economy. That crowd needed ways to launder money, and a lot of it. They bought into Trump projects, often at absurdly inflated prices, enriching Trump as their cash got legitimized. As the pattern repeated itself, Trump and family become ever more beholden to their “business partners.”

Now, it is interesting from a media critic perspective to note how little anyone else in the press is playing with this Felix Sater keyhole to Trump’s empire. Sater, as Marshall reveals, not only served prison time for stabbing a guy, Joe Pesci-style, with the broken stem of a wine glass, but has established connections to New York mob families.

It is a long-standing fascination of mind at how the once enormously influential crime families of “Godfather” legend have all but entirely disappeared from media attention, as though they were never anything but a fiction. (Remember, until 1957 J. Edgar Hoover insisted organized crime did not exist in the United States.) The general explanation being that they all went “legitimate” at some point 25-30 years ago and there’s nothing more to see here.

I don’t think so. More likely is that the families figured ways to better launder their criminal earnings and are probably as wealthy today as they’ve ever been.

Whatever, this Felix Sater story is the extraordinarily rare instance when American organized crime reemerges in mainstream reporting. (The New York Times has reported on Sater, but to date has not pressed the connections Marshall has.) On the other hand Russian mobsters are a common subject of conversation. (It’s another form American exceptionalism, you see. We are the only culture in world history exempt from the scourge of organized criminality, and the corruption and violence that comes from it.)

Marshall acknowledges the normal viability of Occam’s Razor — (Definition: “Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the simpler one is usually better. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is.“)

Says Marshall, “The simplest explanation isn’t necessarily the right one. But in the spirit of Occam’s Razor, we should prefer it because it usually will be. To state the key point for clarity and emphasis, it is not the simplest explanation. It it is the simplest explanation which accounts for all the known facts. That distinction makes all the difference in the world.”

I could go on, but the reading list above lays all this out in compelling fashion.

My point, regarding the likelihood of senior people in the permanent government, (the part of the government Steve Bannon wants to “deconstruct”), knowing what all this Russia business is about also has a bit of Occam’s Razor to it.

Specifically, fabulously wealthy Russian oligarchs, essentially organized international criminals, many (but not all) aligned with Vladimir Putin (who is reputed to be one of the wealthiest people in the world thanks to his looting of the Russian economy), would be precisely the people enriching and enabling all sorts of nefarious activity all over the world, including here in the United States. They would therefore be primary targets for US (and allied) intelligence operations, intercepting their communications and monitoring their contacts and money flows.

If they weren’t/aren’t being regularly surveilled it would be an astonishing dereliction of duty on the part of our $80-$100 billion annual intelligence apparatus.

So … here’s the assumption. Senior intelligence people, knowing with very high confidence what Trump has been involved with for years, begin a series of strategic leaks to the media to prod judicial action. After all, enabling by ignoring quasi-to-overtly criminal association with foreign adversaries is diametrically opposed to what they signed up for.

And this is very serious stuff for whoever is leaking. They themselves are risking criminal prosecution. Which is why I find it hard to believe it’s just a few Bartleby the scrivener types buried in the bureaucracy. People like that have essentially no political cover. But further up the chain, where senior officials have personal relations with influential political leaders — from the likes of Diane Feinstein and John McCain and Lindsay Graham, etc. — such a risk becomes more tenable.

In summary, while the pundit press saying “we don’t know” is credible.

But that is not at all the same thing as saying, “No one knows.”

The Roiling Freak Show of Trump v. Media

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3 Considering our woeful record in assessing the likely outcome of the November election, no one in American media should make predictions. But … I strongly suspect the tenor of President-elect Trump’s first press conference Wednesday will be amplified and aggravated … constantly … throughout his term in office. It’s the way he does business, and to date the way the press has done business.

Digesting the spectacle Thursday New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote, “There were two big lessons in the Wednesday morning melee.

Mr. Trump remains a master media manipulator who used his first news briefing since July to expertly delegitimize the news media and make it the story rather than the chaotic swirl of ethical questions that engulf his transition.
The news media remains an unwitting accomplice in its own diminishment as it fails to get a handle on how to cover this new and wholly unprecedented president.”

These are not novel insights. But it remains interesting how regularly we’re hearing this kind of thing from the country’s acknowledged journalistic leaders. Trump the manipulator, delegitimizing the press and the press failing to adjust to a new reality. Or, as one observer put it, the press continuing to “apply balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon” to the extent that it “distorts reality.”

Missing from Rutenberg’s column and so many like it was a specific prescription of what to do. While he goes on to trill with the traditional news chorus indicting BuzzFeed for publishing the “extended version” of the U.S. intelligence briefing on Mr. Trump and his Russian activities, what he does in sum, is argue for yet more of the “balanced treatment” approach.

Whether you believe BuzzFeed, once a silly listicle-spewing engine, now given grudging credibility among traditional reporters, was right or wrong in publishing the unverified report in its full salaciousness no doubt depends on what you think of Trump. (Rutenberg lauds BuzzFeed’s work on the genesis of some of the past year’s “fake news” epidemic.) But it’s hard to see how the press adjusts itself and re-gathers its bearings over the near term future if it chooses to deny the right of an informed citizenry to know what the chattering classes of D.C. and New York have known and been talking about for months.

For the record, BuzzFeed presented the 35-page document with the clear disclaimer that information within was unverified. But the more important fact is that it published the thing. (Here’s a fiery takedown of the decision from Quillete.com.) Such a thing simply isn’t done! Or at least hasn’t been until now, in this starkly unbalanced, distorting moment. Comparisons of BuzzFeed to the now-defunct Gawker are being tossed around in the context of unjournalistic recklessness and shameless “clickbaiting.”

Such horror!

While the bonafides of the so-called dossier got something of a boost yesterday from a BBC story suggesting there at least four sources describing blackmail-quality material in Russian hands for possible use against Trump, for journalists of the traditional mindset, the line in the sand is “unverified”. Beyond that nothing matters.

The counter argument, which deserves more serious consideration than it is getting, is that having plainly asserted the material’s unverified nature, the credibility placed in it by U.S. intelligence agencies who briefed both the President, the President-elect and Senate leaders means the general public has a right to know what “the elites” are talking about.

As I say, the DC/media figures had been aware of this for eight months. (Here’s a timeline from businessinsider.com). If, as you can see in that timeline, influential people were making making strategic calculations based on its existence, who is the press protecting from what and why?

Former acting CIA Director Mike Morrell had a set of interesting comments on the matter to Christiane Amanpour.

If the crossing of the line, where news publications print unverified opposition research on powerful public figures is discomfiting to you, well, it should be. This is new ethical territory. Territory most polite people would prefer not to go into. But territory everyone in the press is reacting to whether they like it or not. Moreover, it is territory the press is being forced into, given the distortion of reality resulting from the head-on collision of “balanced” journalism and the “unbalanced phenomenon”, which in this case is an incoming President of the United States. Mr. Trump is after all someone who has steadfastly refused to disclose anything remotely like the normal financial information that could offer reassurance he is immune to foreign blackmail.

We may all wish we still lived in an era of two more-or-less respectful warring parties, where the press could play the comfortable, familiar role of bemused arbiter. But those days are gone, or certainly aren’t the ones we’re living today.

Another storyline in the roiling freak show that is the press in the Age of Trump is the offer by Penthouse magazine of a $1 million reward/bounty for anyone who delivers video of the dossier’s shall we say, “golden moment”. What does “the press” do if such a video ever appears? Beyond that, and something I think far more plausible, what happens if some wealthy liberal tycoon, a George Soros or Tom Steyer lets word get out that there’s a $5 million (or $10 or $20 million) bounty on Trump’s taxes? Drop them in a stall in an airport bathroom, no questions asked. What are ethics of running with that?

Our incoming President is a kind of ultimate disrupter. The press can accept that and adapt in order to assert the kind of oversight the public appears to want, or it can continue to wring hands over its relevance.

And Now the Knife Fight to Take Out Trump

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3 The harsh fact that Donald Trump will take over the White House presents liberals with an interesting ethical dilemma. Remembering how most of us reacted to Mitch McConnell committing Republicans to one goal in 2008, limiting Barack Obama to a single term, and how we recoiled at Rush Limbaugh crowing to his radio listeners, “I hope he fails”, how do we respond to this … unmitigated disaster?

One facet we should agree to wipe off the table here at the get go is the notion that Trump is illegitimate. Republicans overused that line on Bill Clinton and Trump himself built his campaign on the insinuation that Obama wasn’t even a legitimate citizen. We don’t need to go that far. He won. There were ten million more white males over the age of 45 available to Trump than experts thought after the 2012 election, and 91% of white Republicans stuck with their tribe. He exploited to his advantage every impulse inflamed by Republicans for the last 25 years. He’s their new leader.

For purposes of the coming non-stop battle, the basic reality of who Trump is will serve our needs well enough.

(I am as gobsmacked by what went down last night as everyone else, from Nate Silver to the Clinton campaign. My only defense is this blog post from last year, titled, Why Trump Can Win It All, And I Mean “All”).

But today, post-election, after the crudest, ugliest, most boorish and low-brow campaign of my lifetime, the traditional high-minded, generous impulse to accept defeat with humility and graciousness is wildly inappropriate. Trump is who he is. There’s no point kidding ourselves. At best he’s a self-serving buffoon. At worst he’s a threat to … well, you name it.

While the people who voted for him preferred him, maybe in spite of his misogyny, racism, tax avoidance, man crush on Putin, indifference to facts yadda yadda, you and I were/are disgusted by it. And for very legitimate reasons. But that’s the reality of Trump. He may be hiding a lot of information about how he has done business. But he isn’t hiding the quality of his thought-processes or character. All of which is another way of saying we’re not talking a normal, polite transfer of power to someone like Mitt Romney or John McCain. Traditional courtesies are misplaced.

This is a looming nightmare of dysfunction and, I strongly suspect, non-stop scandal so fraught with social and economic danger there’s simply no way any responsible citizen can doing anything less than object to it constantly and obstruct it at every moment and every turn. That may be hypocritical given the rages we’ve been in over the the Republican/Tea Party gridlocking of government function since 2009, but if turn about is fair play that crowd hardly has any grounds for complaint do they?

One great irony that it is easy to forsee that for all of Trump’s talk about jailing the criminal Hillary Clinton, the leaking, the trading of secrets and the investigative machinery that is about to go to work overtime exposing every detail of his finances, every accusation of sexual misconduct, every conflict of interest with adversarial foreign governments and on and on will be like gargantuan strip mining operation.

The average liberal may be a passive and polite soul, but out on the margins are very well financed individuals and organizations appalled and soon to be fanatically obsessed with not just neutralizing Trump’s authority, (the Republican Congress will obviously block all official investigations), but destroying him as quickly and definitively as possible. Nothing about that is pretty. It’s hardly the sort of behavior we were taught in high school civics classes or admonished to avoid by beard-stroking moralists. But it’s well within the rules of the game as the Republicans have been playing it.

It slid off Obama because there was no criminal or sexually predatory there there. But I doubt there’s an investigative reporter, whistleblower or hacker anywhere on the planet who doubts Trump is every bit the fraud we’ve seen on the campaign trail. Legendary Woodward and Bernstein-like reputations stand to be made based on who comes up with the smoking gun that takes him down.

Trump may have read the mood of “the deplorables” well enough to get elected, but my guess is he has no idea or any defense against the kind of knife fight the elite kids are about to bring down on him.

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

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Brian Lambert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you do it now.

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

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Brian Lambert

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

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

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

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

Trump avoidance was an impossibility.

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

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

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

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

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

Wry Wing Politics

Politics on wry.

Tag Archives: Donald Trump

“It’s Just … So … Stupid.”

Live, Unscripted Joe. Better. But Too Late.

“Civil War” May Not Be In Your Face, But It Is In Our Moment

Entertainment and Retribution. A Very Tough Act to Beat.

CNN’s Chris Licht, Yet Another Example of How Everything Trump Touches Dies.

What Would Trump Steal That is So Ultra Top Secret and Why?

I Think Putin’s Getting Himself in a Pickle

Florida Man Seeks Teenage Female for Fun Adventures with Frequently Indicted Tax Collector/Embezzler/Trump Minion

Every Hour of Every Day Irony Dies Again

Baseball Must Take a Stand Against the Era of Remorseless Sleaze

Bad Boys, Dumb Boys, Roy Moore and our “Cultural Moment”

When Manafort Met Trump.

Trump’s Resignation Imminent? There’s A Logic To It.

Nazis? I Don’t See Any Nazis.

100 Days. How Much Stupidity Can We Survive?

There Are People Who Know What The Russians Have Been Up To With Trump

The Roiling Freak Show of Trump v. Media

And Now the Knife Fight to Take Out Trump

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

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

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