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Gaming impeachment

Friday, January 18, 2019

It seems like years ago that a new Congresswoman (was it coincidental she was a person of color) was savaged for saying that Individual-1 should be impeached. Given the disclosures of the past few days, and the near certainty that even more will come out in the near future, it has now become respectable for even members of the media to discuss the possibility. It is now clear that he has committed impeachable offenses.

Over at Hullabaloo, tristero makes a good case for the proposition that politically, it would be better for the Democrats not to impeach, though he (or she) still thinks impeachment is the morally right course. The thrust of the argument is that so long as the Republicans continue to enable Trump, they will continue to lose political support and the “entire country can see that the party as a whole is intellectually and morally bankrupt.”

There is another side to this as well. Let’s play pretend, and assume for the moment that the tide of public opinion pushes Republican senators to a guilty verdict. This is unlikely in the extreme, but bear with me.

In that case, McConnell would put himself out front, because a consensus would have been reached among them that conviction would be smart politics.

Even though anyone with a lick of sense would realize that the verdict was the result of political necessity and not principle, that’s not the way it would be played by our unbiased media.

Should there be a guilty verdict, the media would instantly announce that the Republican Party had put country before party. All of its sins, which led directly to a Trump presidency and enabled his criminality once he got in, would immediately be consigned to the memory hole. McConnell and his ilk would be favorably compared to the Democratic Senators who refused to convict Clinton, because, after all, we live in a both sides world, and surely being a Russian agent and getting a blow job are comparable sins. The loathsome Pence, enabler extraordinaire, would immediately become a healer. The Dems would probably still win in 2020, but these memes would nonetheless rehabilitate the party of racists, Nazis, and plutocrats in short order.

I think it’s fair to say that’s how it would play out, should the Republicans defy their base and vote to convict. I doubt it will happen, unless Fox starts laying the groundwork very soon. If you start hearing the folks on Fox saying Trump is really a liberal, then maybe it’s in the cards.

I also very much doubt that tristero’s hoped for “demise of the modern Republican Party” will happen, no matter what the genius’s fate may be. The fact is that the media has come to believe that the Republican Party is the norm, with a sort of vested right to political power. How else explain the preponderance of Republicans and conservatives on the Sunday shows. How, to go a step further, can one explain the ubiquity of Lindsey Graham, a man undistinguished for any actual accomplishments? Whatever the future may hold, Trump’s sins will be Trump’s sins and his alone; his Republican enablers will not suffer at the hands of the media, which will do its best to see that the public forgets the role of the Republican Party in creating the conditions for a Trump presidency and enabling his criminality once he was in office.

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A soul mate

Friday, January 18, 2019

The guy who wrote this must have been a Red Sox fan during the character building years. I’ve compared the Democrats to the Red Sox of yore, and like us fans of old who can’t quite believe their team can win (or even should….tradition, you know), this Democrat can’t quite get his head around these newfangled Democrats:

And now? Young upstarts, led by a certain fetching socialist from the Bronx, are destroying everything we’ve worked so mediocrely to build. If you want their vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on Joe Lieberman’s face forever. Actually, don’t picture that; focus group testing has demonstrated that that image really resonates with voters across demographics, something we most certainly do not want.

…

We used to be a party that wasn’t afraid to barely scratch the surface of a problem, and I fear that those days may be behind us. Youth today are too coddled with their unpaid internships and lowered life expectancies to understand the importance of having a mealy-mouthed voice at the table. If today’s Democrats insist upon winning, you can count me out.

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To impeach or not impeach

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

There’s been a lot more serious talk about impeachment lately, which makes sense, since there’s been a lot more evidence to support it, though some of that evidence, it seems to me, was a matter of public record before, but we’re revisiting the implications. For instance, I believe it was known before that Trump confiscated his interpreter’s notes of this meetings with Putin. But, I’m not pounding my keyboard today (I’d like to say I’m taking up my pen, but I’m not) to make the legal case for impeachment. Individual-1 does that almost every time he opens his mouth.

The question is: should he be impeached or should he not be impeached, based on the pure politics of the thing. Michael Tomasky recently made the case for waiting until 2020 and booting him out, and his column has engendered a lot of internet commentary. He makes a decent case for this point of view, but I think he’s wrong. Maybe.

I think he should be impeached, but timing is all, as is a persuasive and well developed case for the prosecution. The point is not to get a conviction. It’s a given that not enough Republicans would jump ship to convict even if there are tapes of him promising Putin that he’d withdraw the U.S. from NATO in return for Putin’s help in the election, besides which many of them are probably “with the Russians too”. The point is to give the American people a comprehensive narrative of his criminality, which should be fresh in their minds as they go to the polls in 2020. I’m sure the people that the Times seeks out in diners will be unimpressed (why, one must ask again, were we never treated to stories about Obama voters?), but they’re not the people we’re aiming at.

The Democrats have to make it clear that they are invoking the constitutional remedy of impeachment because Individual-1 poses a clear and present danger to the continued existence of the American Republic. That means marshaling and presenting the evidence in a coherent fashion, both in committee hearings and in a Senate trial, which should be timed to occur at the optimum time. Just off the top of my head, the summer of 2020 sounds good, but I’m open to conviction on that one. In any event, it should come at a time when Republican senators voting for acquittal will do so with the knowledge that, while they are satisfying their base, they are probably offending everyone else, a category that contains the majority except in the very backward states. The U.S. Senate is up for grabs in 2020, and given the fact that Mitch McConnell may be as big a threat to democracy as the genius, and given the further fact that the American judiciary has already been ruined perhaps beyond redemption by a Republican Senate, winning the Senate is as important as winning the presidency.

If the Democrats make a compelling case for his guilt, and an equally compelling case for the proposition that the acts of which he’s guilty merit impeachment, and if the Republicans nonetheless vote to acquit, we may very well see the last of Republicans like Susan Collins. The Clinton impeachment failed in the court of public opinion, not because he wasn’t guilty of something, but because, while everyone knew he’d lied about having an affair, most people didn’t think that was a good enough reason to throw him out of office. Most people, on the other hand, did think that Nixon’s sins merited his removal, and the genius’s sins make Nixon look like a choir boy. 

One obstacle, other than the Democrat’s inability to speak with a single voice, is the fact that the media has changed since Watergate days. There was no state media then, and the non-state media did not engage in the Republican enabling both-siderism with which it is infected today. Nonetheless, impeachment, if handled right, could be a net winner for the Democrats.

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Fuzzy math (at least to me)

Sunday, January 13, 2019

A new poll, unsurprisingly, finds that Republicans overwhelmingly blame Democrats for the shutdown, despite the fact that Individual-1, before the fact, proudly took ownership of any shutdown. Facts don’t mean much on the dark side. But there’s something that doesn’t seem to compute here. Here are the results:

 

 

The percentages given don’t add up to 100 because “no opinion” and “neither” are not counted. The overall numbers are fairly close to the numbers for Independents. If one assumes the number of self professed (I’m assuming that’s the only way the pollster knows party affiliations) Democrats and Republicans are roughly equal, you’d think the overall percentage of people blaming the Republicans would be slightly higher than it is, since Democrats are far more unanimous in correctly assigning blame than Republicans are in buying into Fox propaganda.

Anyway, it seems to me it would be helpful if pollsters supplied the percentage of respondents that identify with the parties. I’m sure if you sat down with these numbers and fiddled with them for awhile, dredging up the algebra we all learned years ago, you could come up with a rough estimate of the relative number of Dems, Independents, and Idiots, but, for my own part, I’m way too lazy. Again, at first blush, it looks like these numbers imply that there are more Independents than adhere to either party, and more self professed Republicans than Democrats. It’s hard to believe that the latter conclusion is true in reality. I suspect that the percentage of self professed Republicans is declining, which explains the near unanimity with which those remaining adhere to Herr Trump. There must be a lot of somewhat rational former Republicans that have jumped ship. Could be wrong, of course.

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Both Siderism to the tenth power

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

The internet, particularly the twittersphere, is agog over this tweet from ABC News:

AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another. https://t.co/9IWnqUgl2d

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) January 9, 2019

It arguably raises the both siderism argument to a new extreme, but then again, maybe it’s just par for the course. But it got me thinking.

Back in the days of the Clinton administration, the beltway punditocracy couldn’t wrap it’s collective head around the fact that while most people disapproved of what Clinton had done, they didn’t consider it sufficient reason to remove him from office. In the case of the Clinton impeachment, it seemed that they just couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the electorate as a whole was sophisticated enough not to think in black and white terms about the issue. The prevailing, if unspoken opinion, was that Americans just weren’t sophisticated enough to be a bit nuanced. So far as they were concerned, everyone outside the beltway was a fundamentalist whacko, so the fact that people actually opposed impeachment threw them for a loop.

I think there’s something similar going on here, except this time it’s completely different. (Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself). Anyway, in this case, the pundits operate under the delusion that both siderism is the one true road to truth, and that this should be obvious to anyone. After all, it’s been their religion for years, so they’ve become blinded to the fact that it doesn’t describe the political world in which we live. It turns out, though the media will take a while to figure this out, that regular people are more inclined to blame only one sidewhen something like this happens, particularly when one side pre-announced that it was to blame for the situation and that one side is, in fact, responsible for the situation. The fact is, that given our present political reality, the state of affairs in this country can properly be put at the doorstep of one side, since it’s only one sidethat promotes racism, opposes science, promotes gun violence, attempts to impose their “religious” beliefs on the nation, and covers for a president intent on subverting the constitution and using his office to line his own pockets, and who has, besides the foregoing, also conspired with foreign powers. The list could go on. The only area in which both siderism might make some sense is in the shoving money to the rich arena (to which the pundits don’t object-most of them are rich), where some Democrats are complicit, but in which Republicans still are far and away the major sinners.

ABC doesn’t feel the Democrats are as much at fault as Trump because, whereas he wants to build a racist wall, they do not. The fault, as ABC sees it, lies in the failure of the Democrats to meet Trump in the middle, an area always defined as that which Republicans want. No side can every be wholly wrong. The truth always lies in the middle, a middle that drifts to the right at the speed of light. At least so far as the above tweet goes, they’re learning that real Americans don’t see it that way.

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Some speculation

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

I’ve been thinking a bit about Individual-1’s threats to declare a national emergency so he can build his wall. I’m not 100% wedded to this idea, but It occurs to me that it is a way for him to declare victory while essentially preserving the status quo. The reality is that any such declaration would be mired in the courts for years. One aspect of it that doesn’t, in my humble opinion, get enough attention is that in order to build a wall on the border you have to take private property rights by eminent domain,a process that takes years and will likely be strongly resisted, even by many Trumpers. How you do that when no money has been authorized, in the face of a explicit constitutional amendment requiring both due process and fair compensation, is a puzzle.

But, declaring the emergency may be a way for Trump to tell his base that he’s won and simply allow what is already happening on the border to proceed. This gives him a way to save face while caving on the shutdown issue. He might even get the media to echo those claims.

Were he to go that route, he would nonetheless be guilty of an abuse of power of sufficient magnitude to justify impeachment, but, given the present Republican Party, and the both siderism media that will surely compare it to some act by a Democrat that is not at all really comparable, that’s unlikely to happen, meaning that even though such a declaration might have little tangible effect on the issue it purports to address, it would still be a landmark on our journey toward dictatorship.

UPDATE: For the record, and as further evidence in support of my offer to write a column in the Day, I must point out that I got there first.

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An anniversary

Sunday, January 6, 2019

Another snippet from my journal. One year ago today Individual-1 pronounced himself a “very stable genius”. It seems so long ago.

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An open letter to the New London Day

Saturday, January 5, 2019

First, let me congratulate you on your recent addition of rightwing radio jock Lee Elci to your stable of regular columnists. This is yet another milestone in your years long effort to offer a wide range of opinions among your columnists, which opinions now range along a continuum from pundits who sometimes put their toes a smidgen to the left over the ever rightward floating media location of “centrism” to the extreme right, where the likes of Elci dwell.

I would like to propose that you think about adding yet another columnist to your stable: me. Adding me to the mix would widen the continuum all the way to the extreme left. Well, at any rate, to what’s considered the extreme left by the pundits you currently feature. Consider the radical stuff upon which I would opine:

  • I believe that Medicare for All is a good idea. Pretty radical right? I’ll bet none of your other pundits would even touch that, since everyone knows that a progressive idea supported by at least 60% of the country doesn’t bear discussing.
  • I believe in facts and learning from history. For instance, despite assurances from Republicans that this time a tax cut for the rich will result in more tax revenue, I continue to believe that it won’t, based merely on the historical record, basic economic theory, arithmetic, and common sense. You have to admit that’s pretty radical and would make me a perfect far left commentator to add to your stable.
  • Even more radically, I don’t believe in false equivalence. I don’t believe that a Democratic congressperson who danced. when she was in college is as morally bankrupt as an entire political party that has, since 1968, based its strategy for success on exploiting and fomenting racism and hatred and is now passively allowing a racist Russian puppet to destroy our democracy. No David Brooks I!

 

There are countless other ways in which my wild eyed rationality would place me far to the left of your other columnists, which would provide much needed balance to your opinion pages.

Another way in which I’m sure to differ from your present columnists is that I’m likely to establish a record of being proven mostly right about the issues about which, and politicians about whom, I choose to comment. I know that being right is far from an occupational requirement for pundits, but it can’t hurt, can it? As you may know, I have been writing a blog for something like 14 years and I’d invite you to compare my prescience with that of, say, David Brooks or Bill Kristol, not to mention people like Lee Elci. As one small example, I can produce witnesses who will testify that I predicted in 2012, after Obama was re-elected, that the next Republican candidate would be a whackjob. Got it right, didn’t I!

Really, after re-reading the foregoing, I can’t see how you can turn me down. Please let me know when you want me to start and what days my column will run. So far as pay is concerned, I’ll take whatever you’re giving Elci.

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A few disjointed observations

Friday, January 4, 2019

I started writing this a few days ago. In this day of instant reaction to the news via twitter that might as well be decades, but I’m going to post it anyway.

As I browsed through my blog reader recently I found a number of common themes. I have nothing to add to the universal scorn being heaped on Mitt Romney, except to add that, true to form, the mainstream is hailing him as a hero, instead of writing him off as this year’s Jeff Flake.

What I’ve seen just in the past few days, and what I’ve seen commented on in a number of places, is the beginning of the compartmentalizations of potential presidential candidates. This is generally not done with Republicans, perhaps because none of them ever present a real threat to the pocketbooks of the people who own major media. For instance, we’re seeing Elizabeth Warren being written offas “unlikable”, though there is little basis for the charge, except in the minds of those asking how she can overcome it, who happen to be the same people who will work hard to spread the “unlikable” meme. Pride of authorship, don’t you know.

Warren, like Hillary, can do no right. No matter what she does, the press will give it a negative spin. Her release of her DNA results is a good example. Had a Republican male subjected to similar charges (not that such charges would have had any shelf life against a Republican male) done exactly the same thing he would have been pronounced triumphantly absolved. With Warren she somehow “handled it wrong” by proving the charges against her were without merit. Had she done nothing, the same media that criticized her handling of “it” would have provided an echo chamber for Republican sniping at her Native American ancestry.

The real objection to Warren is that she poses a threat to the oligarchs. She even names them by name. We can’t have that. It’s one thing to demonize immigrants. Tasteless maybe, but not the threat posed by someone demonizing the people actually responsible for impoverishing the 99.9%.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects are hard at work pumping up Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the oligarchs, since he carried water for them while in the Senate, and he is sure to run the kind of bland, inoffensive, and uninspiring campaign the mainstream expects from a Democrat. I should add, parenthetically, that they were fine with Obama’s inspiring 2012 campaign, because while he talked in lofty phrases, they were gratifyingly devoid of any substantive content, and he never had a bad word to say about the oligarchs (In fact, he took great big gobs of their money). Back to Biden: the media loves his shtick about being a regular Joe and a friend of the worker, though they know whose interests he served when push came to shove. And lest we forget: Clarence Thomas.

Part of the process by which the media exalts shitty Democratic candidates is by giving prominence and credence to Republican concern trolls, who tell us they are only giving us advice for our own goods. Atrios points outthat the reverse is never true; Democrats are never quoted giving advice to Republicans.

Generally there’s always a push from centrist types for Democrats to put a Republican on the ticket, and a lot of concern trolling from Republicans telling us about the one Democrat that maybe they could vote for (but won’t). No one ever tells Republicans to run a “unity ticket” and Professional Democrats don’t pitch editors for pieces about Who Republicans Have To Nominate If They Want To Win because that’s stupid. So is the reverse, which happens all the time.

If we’re going to win we can only do it by giving people something to vote for. We shouldn’t take a win for granted, since the Republicans have proven beyond doubt that they are good at stealing even not so close elections. As others have noted recently, and as I’ve noted before, we also need to focus people’s anger where it belongs. Warren, Sanders, and I think, O’Rourke all understand that. They, or at least Warren and Sanders (not sure about O’Rourke) are proposing easy to understand, popular proposals to reverse the tide of inequality in which we are presently drowning. That’s why the mainstream wants to marginalize them. But they can only succeed if we let them. They wanted to marginalize Trump too, and they couldn’t, even though, in his case, he was an obvious fraud. We can win with a real progressive as our candidate. We will not win with a Biden or a –shudder-shudderGillibrand as our candidate.

On a slightly different subject, all hail Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As all the world knows by now some Republican troll attacked her on twitter for having (gasp!!!) danced. It didn’t go over well, and her response was perfect. It’s about time Democrats learned that they have to stop apologizing for every made up transgression that the Republican media concocts. I agree with the author of the post to which I’ve linked that the attacks on her are both sexist and racist (that’s pretty much standard Republican fare) but I think there’s more to it. I think they’re scared of her and what she represents: an aggressive progressivism that doesn’t back down or propose timid half measures in the name of a one-sided bipartisanship. If all Democrats followed her lead, the media, which in the name of both-siderism, tolerates Republican racism but gets in a twit about a Democrat being “uncivil” would have to start changing its behavior as well. They are the way they are because Republicans bullied them for years; they will only change if we start bullying them too, and that means pushing back vigorously every time they promote a Republican attack meme.

This post is too long and has no unifying theme, but that’s okay. I’m putting it up.

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Lest we forget

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

I have mentioned previously, I think, that I’m keeping a journal of sorts, of extremely doubtful literary merit. Every day I try to document the atrocities so far as Individual-1 is concerned. The app I use automatically shows you your entries from one year ago, two years ago, etc., so I am constantly reminded of such atrocities that have long since slipped into the memory hole.

But today I’ll pass along an atrocity, as I think it’s fair to say that it would be a prime exhibit in any what if Obama (or, really, any Democrat) had said this proceeding.

One year ago today, Trump took credit for the fact that there were no passenger plane crashes in 2017. In fact, no American passenger plane had crashed since 2009, which just coincidentally (and I mean that quite literally) is the year Obama took office. Imagine if Obama had taken credit for that. They’d still be talking about it. It hardly raised an eyebrow when Trump did it.

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