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You can stop if you’ve read this same rant elsewhere

Monday, March 25, 2019

I realize that everything I’m about to say has been said ad nauseum, but inasmuch as this is my blog and no one has to read it if they don’t want, I will proceed to vent.

First, lets stipulate that when people read newspapers, they often just scan the headlines, or read the first couple of paragraphs of any given article. Everyoneknows this to be so. It, therefore, behooves the press to make sure those headlines reflect that actual state of affairs for any given piece it chooses to publish. It’s simply not enough to put qualifying statements in the last paragraph of a piece.

Robert Mueller sent his report to Barr, and Barr proceeded to provide a “summary” to Congress and the public. Lets step back and recall some rather salient facts.

  • Before he was chosen as AG, Barr wrote articles in which he essentially argued that Trump could not possibly be guilty of obstruction of justice.
  • Barr was chosen to be AG precisely because Trump hoped and expected that he would do what was necessary to protect Trump from Mueller.

These facts, in the eyes of any but the most rock ribbed Republican, would lead one to conclude that one must be wary of any summary he would provide, particularly when that summary includes his own admission that Mueller felt there was evidence that Trump obstructed justice, and Barr decided he hadn’t after giving it a nanosecond of thought.

So why do all the headlines blare that Trump has, essentially, been cleared? Sure, the op-ed pages are full of caveats, but no one but junkies reads them. It’s probably the case that by the time one reaches the final paragraphs of these articles that it is conceded that one must consider the source, and that perhaps this “summary” might be somewhat slanted. Given Barr’s background, and given the overall mendacity of Trump and his criminal cohorts, the headlines and leading paragraphs should reflect that reality. Instead Barr and Trump got just what they wanted.

Have I said anything original? Nope. I’m even a little late, but that’s because I was away yesterday and couldn’t write this rant until now. Who knows, maybe if enough people scream about this we’ll see a change in behavior from our media elites.

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This guy’s pretty good

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Watch this video at Crooks and Liars of Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He’s obviously a long shot, but he’s quite impressive. It has been a pet peeve of mine for years that people in this country throw around the word “socialism” as if we all share a definition of that term, when in reality it is nothing but an all purpose word of derision for the right. The word has really been thrown around ever since, as Buttigieg points out, Obama’s conservative think tank inspired health plan was labeled socialist. Never have I seen anyone demand that those using the term define it. It’s just assumed that we all know what the word means, and we all agree on that meaning. As a result, it now means anything Republicans want it to mean. They always seem to get their way, don’t they?

Anyway, “Mayor Pete” is having none of that. He implicitly calls out Joe Scarborough for using a term that has become completely devoid of real content.

More of that, please.

Also, everything else he said made sense.

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Pundit amnesia syndrome

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Every Tuesday and Friday I religiously check out the op-ed page at the New York Times to peruse Paul Krugman’s latest. I’m not sure if David Brooks always runs on those days as well, but if he is I also check out the title to his latest, groan, and make a mental note read the inestimable Driftglass’s deconstruction of Brooks latest bullshit. He reads Brooks do I don’t have to, and I truly appreciate it.

Today Brooks piece is titled Cory Booker Finds His Moment. (I refuse to actually link to David Brooks) I immediately knew two things upon reading that title. First, that I should push Booker even further down on my presidential preference list, though truth to tell I think he’s only been ahead of Kristin Gillibrand and Tulsi Gabbard. Second, I could sense that Driftglass would have a field day with this particular column, and indeed he did. He had something up before I put the paper down.

Brooks premise, apparently, is that Booker would seek to govern in a bipartisan fashion; would work with both Democrats and Republicans in a spirit of comity and mutual respect; that this would be a surefire way to get important and meaningful things done in this country; and that it’s about time someone tried governing like that. Driftglass points out:

Golly, if only Democrats would elect a president who is calm and humane. Formidably intelligent and fundamentally decent. A president who would reach out to Republicans to a fault, no matter how ruthlessly they slander him, how scurrilously they attack his family and no matter how relentlessly they sabotage anything he tries to accomplish, even if it means filibustering their own bills.

But of course Democrats did try that, didn’t we?

I remember it like it was yesterday. I’m sure you do too, as do billions of human beings around the world. How very, very strange it is, therefor, that quite possibly the only adult human on the planet who doesn’t remember a single thing about the Obama administration is the senior Conservative political/cultural columnist for The New York Times.

That last cut is unfair to Brooks. Lots of beltway pundits don’t remember a single thing about the Obama administration. Consider the fact that Chuck Todd just blamed Obama for failing to bring the country together.

Orwell was right about a lot of stuff. One of them was the memory hole, into which people like Brooks and Todd consign every past event that is inconvenient for any meme they wish to push in the present. In Brooks case, this very often includes his own columns, predictions and opinions from years, months, or weeks past. It is the only way to preserve the illusion that both sidesare responsible for getting us into the parlous situation in which we now find ourselves. In the Brooksian world, as Driftglass points out, right and wrong are irrelevant. Or, more precisely, they are irrelevant when your side is in the wrong. 

Yet another reminder that we on the left must not forget, and must keep reminding the forgetful other side of its history.

As a bit of a sidenote, I must note that not all facts are consigned to the memory hole. It always amazed me that before he ended his pundit career by letting his racist flag fly too obviously, Jeffrey Lord constantly made the argument that Democrats were evil because they were the party of racists back in 1850 or thereabouts. An actual historical fact. No one ever asked him how, precisely, that had any salience in the second decade of the 21st century. For that is another privilege that only the right has: the right to spout non sequiturs without challenge.

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Latest rant

Saturday, March 16, 2019

This is not going to be a post about the genius’s tone deaf but honest reaction to the killings in New Zealand. That’s been massively covered elsewhere, but I’ll note, as it is somewhat germane to this post, that his racist reaction is eliciting, at least here in the U.S., the now familiar “Trump being Trump” reaction. The rules are different for Trump individually, and Republicans in general.

Which brings me to the main point, something I’ve sort of been mulling over for several days. Recently the New London Day ran an editorialendorsing the idea of tolls here in Connecticut. In the course of that editorial it dismissed the Republican alternative of borrowing money to fix the roads, while reducing bonding authority for non essential things like education. All fine, as far as it goes, but this bit of prose really rankled:

Lamont is expending substantial political capital in pushing for tolls. They are unpopular. No one wants them. But Connecticut needs them.

This will fall to Democratic lawmakers holding ranks. Republicans appear lockstep in opposition. That is the politically expedient course. We urge local Republican lawmakers to break from the pack, yet we understand the political calculus to let Democrats own this. (Emphasis added)

I can tell you that without doubt if the situation were reversed the Day would not be so understanding, and it would call out local Democratic legislators by name. But when it comes to Republicans, the Day explicitly gives them a pass. “Sure”, it says “it would be nice if you did the right thing, but we totally understand if you want to play a cynical game”. Why does the Day in particular, and most of our media in general, give this sort of pass to Republicans? My own belief is that it’s because this has been the Republicans’ game plan for so long that the media has now been trained to perceive this behavior as normal, when Republicans engage in it. It’s a different story entirely when Democrats do it, of course, because they are expected to be responsible. After all, in the quote above the Day tells us that it is up to the Democrats to hold ranks to give Connecticut what it “needs”. If they don’t, they will have done the irresponsible thing, something only Republicans are allowed to do.

I will hazard a prediction. Local Senator Heather Somers (R) will engage in this cynical behavior until the very end. But the Day loves them some Heather. She can do no wrong. The Day will endorse her in 2020 without so much as mentioning her cynical failure to support giving Connecticut what it “needs”.

End of rant.

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What if Obama had done this, part (insert high number here)

Monday, March 11, 2019

As Driftglass is wont to say, “it’s a funny old world”. 

As all of the internet knows, the genius recently referred to Apple CEO Tim Cook as “Tim Apple”. He is now busily lying about the fact, first claiming he said “Tim Cook of Apple”, a lie even his corrupt donors couldn’t swallow. Then he changed his tune. This from the article I’ve linked to above:

Now, however, Trump is claiming that he meant to call Cook the wrong name, changing his recollection of the event and keeping alive a stupid story that would have died had he just kept his mouth shut.

I have a bone to pick with this writer.

Nothing Trump does can keep this story alive, illustrative as it is of his stupidity and/or dementia, except in certain godforsaken nooks and crannies of the internet. The average Fox viewer will never hear of it. The other major media may mention it in passing, but it will haves no legs, because it’s just the genius being the genius, which we have all come to expect and therefore this evidence of serious mental and/or moral defect will vanish down the major media memory hole. I am not, by the way, arguing that it is a moral defect (though it may have been a mental defect) that caused him to call Cook “Apple”. The moral defect comes with the lie.

Now comes the obligatory refrain. Imagine, for a moment, if Obama had made this verbal slip and then lied about it. He once wore a tan suit and we heard about it for years. It would have been pundit fodder for months, and not just on Fox.

It is a funny old world, isn’t it?

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We’re all fraudsters on this bus

Saturday, March 9, 2019

This isn’t a political post, per se, but it raises a question that has some bearing on our present plight, considering that the person occupying the White House built a career based on fraud, much of which involved misrepresenting his own abilities.

I ran across this articleon ProPublica. It’s titled I’m a Journalist. Apparently I’m also one of America’s “Top Doctors.”The journalist in question is Justin Volz. Volz writes:

My eyes narrowed when the woman on the voice message told me to call about my “Top Doctor” award.

They needed to “make sure everything’s accurate” before they sent me my plaque, she said.

It was a titillating irony. I don’t have a medical degree, and I’m not a physician. But I am an investigative journalist who specializes in health care. So I leaned forward in my seat with some anticipation when I returned the call last year. I spoke to a cheerful saleswoman named Anne at a company on New York’s Long Island that hands out the Top Doctor Awards. For some reason, she believed I was a physician and, even better, worthy of one of their awards. Puzzled and amused, I took notes.

I asked how I had been selected. My peers had nominated me, she said buoyantly, and my patients had reviewed me. I must be a “leading physician,” she said.

Later:

On my call with Anne from Top Doctors, the conversation took a surreal turn.

“It says you work for a company called ProPublica,” she said, blithely. At least she had that right.

I responded that I did and that I was actually a journalist, not a doctor. Is that going to be a problem? I asked. Or can you still give me the “Top Doctor” award?

There was a pause. Clearly, I had thrown a baffling curve into her script. She quickly regrouped. “Yes,” she decided, I could have the award.

It’s an open secret in the legal profession that the various awards with which many lawyers festoon their websites are purchased by the honorees. Those seeking to honor me didn’t make contact by phone; they littered my email inbox on a daily basis.

The only financial advice I can recall giving my clients was that my social security clients should open checking accounts so they could get their checks direct deposited. Apparently that advice was good enough to qualify me for an award honoring me as the best financial adviser in the WORLD!. That one sticks in my head solely because it was so off the mark.

There is a certain magazine published in this state, which actually bears the name of this state, which gives such awards. Do I have proof that its readers choices are heavily influenced by the exchange of lucre? No, but I have my suspicion based on the fact that the lawyers it has honored have included some folks that are almost comically inept. I have some questions about the restaurants the readers have chosen as well.

I’ve often wondered whether these honoring institutions have some potential liability should some poor sucker, impressed by, for instance, my credentials as the world’s best financial adviser, should lose his or her shirt after following my advice. In truth, I humbly turned down the award, but in a different universe I accepted it, and there may now be several bankrupt advisees in that alternate universe. Do they have a case? I’d say they do, but I also recall that a lot of the awarding institutions (putting magazines aside for the moment) were located safely overseas.

So far as I know, neither the legal profession nor the medical, judging by Volz’s experience, bother to police the advertising of these awards, which are arguably false and deceptive representations. We have normalized fraud, which is sadly consistent with what we’ve done with the fraudster in chief.

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Some revisionist history

Thursday, March 7, 2019

I have to admit that I’ve always felt the Clinton impeachment backfired on the Republicans, but Philippe Reines, a former Hillary Spokesperson, makes a trenchant case that it was not:

The other thing that drives me crazy is this notion that the…Republicans suffered for impeachment in ’98. I’m not sure what that what that means. They lost a couple of Senate seats, but they held the Congress, they held the House in 2006, and they won the presidency in 2000 for eight years, they’re back here with Donald Trump. I would make the argument that the Republicans did a damn good job of poisoning impeachment forever more and that they are benefitting from that right now because all we’re doing is saying, well, it didn’t work out so well for them — for Bill Clinton so we shouldn’t do it again. How, exactly, did it NOT work out so well for them?

He’s right. Sure there were some minor inconveniences. Two of their major hypocrites (Livingston and Newt) had to retire because they’d done exactly what they accused Clinton of doing, and they lost a couple of seats in the midterms just prior to the impeachment trial, but all in all it worked out quite nicely. You could make a strong argument that it was the lingering effects of the impeachment that made the difference in the 2016 election, since they were able to get their actual crook elected by playing on a media enhancedand echo chamber claim that she was a crook. You could make just as strong a case that they won in 2000 because, besides stealing the election, they had persuaded enough people that there was just something wrong with those Democrats because Clinton was such a bad man.

Something to think about, particularly because the Democrats could put on an impeachment trial that would present persuasive evidence that the genius is a traitorous crook. The Republicans weren’t very persuasive during the Clinton trial. They changed no minds. The Senators who vote to acquit Trump might end up having lots of explaining to do.

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Dems ready to disgrace themselves again

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Back in the olden days, way way back around 2007, the Democrats cravenly joined Republicans in voting for a resolution denouncing MoveOn for daring to criticize General David Petreaus. They had to demonstrate something, the First Amendment and truth be damned. It was never clear what they expected to gain by condemning their base. The irony in that particular situation is that it turned out that MoveOn was right in more ways than one. The good general barely escaped prison when it was revealed that he was funneling state secrets to his mistress.

Fast forward about 12 years, and we now have the Democrats prepared to directly or indirectly condemn one of their own for having the temerity to tell the truth: that Israel, through its lobbying arm at AIPAC, exercises far too much control over American foreign policy. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely verboten for an American politician to criticize Israel in any way. If one does so, one is accused, by AIPAC and its adherents, of being an anti-Semite, even though there are substantial numbers of American Jews that feel the same way about Israeli influence over our foreign policy. See, e.g., the author of the piece to which I’ve linked. Democrats are now lining up for a chance to pile on to Ilhan Omar, it not being sufficient that she is a GOP whipping girl. They have to demonstrate something, just like they did with Petreaus. The fact that what she said is true makes her offense all the worse.

There have, it should be pointed out, been examples of GOP racism too numerous to list over the course of the last several years (make that decades), the latest being the dog and pony show put on by Mark Meadows at the Cohen hearing. And, of course, the very stable genius has by any measure engaged in racist behavior and is unquestionably a racist. How long is the line of Republicans willing to condemn the racism of their Dear Leader or any of their colleagues? Bear in mind, we’re talking real racism here as opposed to policy differences. If a demand were made on them to condemn one of their own, they would simply accuse those making the demand of impugning them, because, according to them, acting like a racist, voting like a racist, confirming racist judges and racist attorneys general, and talking like a racist doesn’t make you a racist.

This vote will do the Democrats no good. It is wrong on the merits. It will curry favor with no one. It will win them no votes. It will lose them some. They will do it anyway.

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Random thoughts on 2020

Sunday, March 3, 2019

I don’t have a firm favorite for the 2020 Democratic nomination. I know who I don’t want to get it. That would be Kristin Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, and Amy Klochubar. I also don’t want Sherrod Brown, but for a different reason than the other three. We can’t afford to lose that Ohio Senate seat.

Putting all that aside, my main concern is that Trump’s numbers being where they are, and the high probability that the rest of his family as well as a number of his other hanger ons will be indicted or in jail by 2020, that we may be getting too confident about the ultimate outcome of the race. I agree with digby:

Personally, I think that most people want to beat Trump more than anything. But at this stage, they’re thinking of the things that affect their lives and want to be sure that Democrats nominate someone who reflects those values and commitments. Primaries are the mechanism by which we sort all that out in a big, diverse coalition.

But it’s also possible that more than a few people think there’s no way Trump can possibly be re-elected and that’s just not true. I really hope that people who know better make that clear. Trump’s base is mesmerized by him. And there’s a reason for that:

That base is amazingly solid and all it’s going to take is for him to siphon off a few percentage points and sneak in again.

I can’t help but hark back to 2016. On this date three long years ago I wrote the following in my journal:

I have begun to think, however, that the odds of Trump’s winning are swinging in his favor. We may be electing our Hitler. He’ll be running against Hillary, which he can do from both the right and the left. It’s truly rather scary. She is unbelievably uninspiring. In addition, I read today that one of her former aides has been given immunity to testify about the email server issue. That’s scary because it’s something he can harp on, and the press will run with. I think it’s a nothingburger and I’m really surprised that the Justice Department is even looking into it, never mind feeling the need to grant anyone immunity. But it may be all we hear about in the summer, after the press comes around and decides that after all, Donald, by virtue of having gotten the nomination, is now respectable and responsible, being that he’s a Republican.

Maybe she’s got her shit together to take him down, but I doubt it. She’s bought into beltway wisdom before, and she may still believe that he’ll crash and burn on his own. All it will take to make him the new Fuehrer is for the economy to tank, which it very well may, a result, ironically, of Obama’s refusal to rein in the banks.

I wasn’t entirely right. He didn’t need an economic downturn. He beat her for the other reasons I mentioned. But the fact is that by the time November rolled around, I had bought into the conventional wisdom and was absolutely certain she’d win. We can’t afford to do that this time around. Nor can we afford a third party milquetoast candidate to drain off the small percentage of “centrists”. Howard Schultz may become the man responsible for ending democracy in this country and insuring that the climate crisis goes unaddressed.

Timing may be all in 2020. Some sort of economic downturn is inevitable. The nation and the world would be well served if it happened soon enough to have maximum impact on the 2020 election. The last time around (2008) it happened too late to have that much impact on the election itself, though Obama still won, but it left him to take the political heat for a situation caused by his immediate predecessor. FDR, by contrast, got in when the impact had already been felt, so everyone knew where to place the blame. It is remarkable that Trump is so unpopular given the superficial health of the economy, but that could easily change. The Republicans are good at staying on message; the Democrats are terrible. The media is reflexively both siderist, so we can look forward to them glomming on to some minor imperfection in our candidate and equating it with Trump’s criminality. After all they did that last time.

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The Church of Perpetual Bullshit

Monday, February 25, 2019

The Catholic bishops, many of whom are probably secret abusers themselves, are gathering in Rome to discuss the deeply complex issue of what they should do about the legions of sexually abusive priests. They have, according to this article, concluded that, shockingly, the problem is not restricted to the U.S., but is worldwide. Imagine that, people are the same everywhere. The linked article was in yesterday’s paper. Today we learn that Pope Francis has hit on the only solution he can think of: calling priestly abusers even worse names than he ever did before. That ought to solve the problem!

You have to wonder about the fact that they never appear to discuss the fact that the job requirements for being a priest may have something to do with the prevalence of sexual deviants within their ranks. After all, while sexual abuse is not unknown among the clergy of other sects, it is comparatively rare. According to the Church of the One True Faith (that overstates the number by one, by the way), god created man, installed within him a sex drive, ordered him to be fruitful and multiply, and decreed that the act of sex was the sole manner through which new life could be created. But, oddly enough, god also decreed that sex was evil, and that one could not truly prove his (it’s always a him) love for god unless he ditched all that “be fruitful and multiply” stuff. So, only abstainers are admitted to the priesthood, and the bishops are still surprised that it turns out that people willing to claim compliance with that requirement include a lot of deviants. 

The obvious solution to the Church’s problem is to abolish the medieval requirement of priestly celibacy, but that’s never discussed. You have to wonder why. There are probably a lot of decent, though deluded, men who would be glad to be priests if they could live normal lives. Given a few generations, they’d crowd out the deviants. Jesus never ordered the apostles to live celibate lives, and for hundreds of years priests could marry. The only ones that didn’t were, as Randy Newman sang in a slightly different context, “some fools in the desert, with nothing else to do, so scared of the dark they didn’t know if they were coming or going”. Celibacy was the alleged answer to nepotism. It didn’t work and it’s still not working.

But I blather. End of post. One more thing. Randy Newman’s Faust album from which the above quote is taken, is a great and, as is usual with his stuff, underrated album. (Do they still call them albums?)

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