The Carpentariat

Andrew Sullivan's (and others') curious assessment of Trump's Russia collusion

​​​​​An earworm, that little tune that swims around in your head and you can't shake it. Its close relative is what I would call a whimworm, a certain idea or notion that gets unshakably planted in your brain. And Andrew Sullivan has one. A big one. A really determined one.

His is the media's wrongful obsession with Trump's Russia collusion — "especially the Steele Dossier," he writes in "It Wasn't a hoax. It was Overkill: Parsing the truths in the 'collusion' narrative." That's a curious thing to headline, since right off he concedes there is "no question that [Trump] was absolutely willing to accept Russia’s — or any country’s — illicit support, and no doubt he actually asked for it.... But this was not what the MSM tried to sell us from the get-go. What they and the Democrats argued — with endless, breathless, high-drama reporting — was that there was some kind of plot between Trump and Russia to rig the election and it had succeeded.... This. Was. Bullshit."

I guess Sullivan is simply more promiscuous than I when evaluating a "rigged election." That Trump "was absolutely willing to accept Russia’s" help and "actually" asked for it denotes a plot, and that, in my and many others' book, is rigging. Its "success" will always be unknown, since Trump's election "was due to many, many factors," as Sullivan correctly observes. Still, plots and riggings add up to collusion. I would also posit that most anyone's initial denial of collusion would be convincingly persuaded otherwise by the following events and revelations.

For one, the Roger Stone trial of 2019 — not the media — which blew away Trump's assertions of "I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with [Stone], nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign." Deputy campaign manager Rick Gates' testimony revealed that Trump's written testimony to Special Counsel Bob Mueller was a lie. Trump was aware of such discussions, in which Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Jason Miller participated. Later, Brad Parscale, David Bossie, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump Jr. bragged about their having had a hand in the WikiLeaks dump. Trump himself had a conversation with Stone well before WikiLeaks first published its Russia-hacked material on Hillary Clinton. Collusion.

But Mueller — not the media — screwed up. He withheld what he already knew about the incriminating Trump-Wikileaks-Russia plot. He instead reported there was insufficient evidence for a criminal conspiracy charge. As Politico reported in Nov. 2019: "That was a mistake, said several legal experts. The decision to keep private such information left the public confused and more susceptible to the president’s 'no collusion, no obstruction' spin."

This, Sullivan ignores.

And then there was the Senate Intelligence Committee report — not the media — which, of course, Trump called "a hoax." Reuters wrote that the committee found that "Russia used Republican political operative Paul Manafort and the WikiLeaks website to try to help now-U.S. President Donald Trump win the 2016 election.... WikiLeaks played a key role in Russia’s effort to assist Republican Trump’s campaign.... The report found President Vladimir Putin personally directed the Russian efforts to hack computer networks and [Democratic] accounts.... As Russian military intelligence and WikiLeaks released the hacked documents, the report said Trump’s campaign sought advance notice, devised messaging strategies to amplify them 'and encouraged further theft of information and ... leaks.'"

Collusion by any other name — and by any other words — is still collusion.

Sullivan concedes that there’s "no doubt that Trump obstructed justice in trying to stymie the Russia investigation." Indeed, Mueller found 10 obstructions of justice. What would any reasonable person conclude from this? "No doubt," he or she would conclude that Trump & Assoc. had a lot to hide about their campaign connections with Russia. Collusion.

"Night after night after night," Sullivan complains, "cable news was obsessed with what they hoped would be their Watergate moment." There was a Watergate moment — in fact, there were three: the Stone revelations, the Senate Intel's published report, and Mueller's findings. The problem was that the "moment" was so bafflingly spread out.

As for the Steele dossier — "especially the Steele Dossier" — well, when compared to official findings, the dossier was little more than a sideshow. Now, as revisionist commentators like Sullivan mean to make it some sort of central event, it's more of a freak show. Nevertheless, was there media "overkill" on Steele? Yes. (Not on this site, though.) Have much of the media failed to acknowledge their erring overconfidence in the dossier? Yes. Does either at all diminish the Trump-Russia collusion documented elsewhere? Profoundly, no.

In my mind I keep coming back to what pretty much everyone knows and what Sullivan twice admits: "Of course [Trump] was going to deny everything, obstruct everything, and dig in.... Of course he was going to lie about everything." This, it seems to me, was Exhibit #1 in establishing Trumpian collusion, even more so than the Stone trial's revelations or Mueller's findings or the Senate committee's damning report. Innocent people don't obstruct justice. Also self-evident was that Trump's corrupt Justice Department would never have entertained a criminal-conspiracy charge recommended by Mueller. That, however, relieved no one of guilt.

Again, as for media overkill on the collusion story, as Sullivan charges, I'd say the media actually came up short — albeit through no fault of its own. Mostly because of Trump's obstruction, the complete, appalling and criminally inculpatory facts were always unreportable. I also suspect a certain amount of shoulder-shrugging within the media: What difference would the whole truth make? Bill Barr's DOJ and Senate Republicans would protect the sleazy vulgarian anyway.

I observe all this not out of any love for cable news, which Sullivan specifically fingers while not naming the most obvious name. In general, it's awful: repetitive, mostly void of international news, and unashamedly partisan as Fox. But there's a market for it, so that's that.

Virtually all the media, though, perforce underkilled the collusion story. And now, because of the Steele revelations, revisionists are out to kill it altogether.            

B&W Black Fridays(?) of yesteryear

I love photos of times past, and this morning the Grey Lady has published a few of Christmas shoppers of yore.

The years are noted but not the days of the month, so there's no way to know if these pictures were shot on Black Friday. (I looked up the origin of "Black Friday" as a phrase. It was first used in 1951, but only by employers in reference to workers who called in sick on that day so as to make Thanksgiving a four-day weekend. The term didn't appear in The NY Times, "the paper of record," until 1975.)  

The first photo is from 1940, which I share mostly because of the sale sign: "Brush Sets" from 59¢. (Of course the median annual income for men was a bit less than $1,000, and women earned just 62¢ of every male dollar made.) Little did shoppers know that, just coming out of the depression, they'd soon be hit with wartime rationing.   

The next photo is from 1948. What's interesting here is that the shoppers appear to be lined up and held back, suggesting the day was indeed Black Friday — in spirit if not in name.

The last one fast forwards to 1991: portrait of an excited husband. This I post only because it reminds me of why my wife, and later my daughter, never wanted me tagging along on shopping trips. Both said my bored, haunting presence made them nervous and hurried. Men everywhere know what I'm saying.   

Have a good shopping day, if you can. And if you've the courage. I, for one, am a coward.

Giving thanks for football heaven, and today's three predictions

The NFL's TV schedulers must have mumbled themselves to sleep last night, burbling "the best-laid plans." Although Thanksgiving Day is the smaller Holy Grail of ratings (the Super Bowl, of course, is nirvana), it's still the stuff that dreams are made of. And back in the day, as they say — the days when Thanksgiving's football fare was chosen by the NFL's timetable gurus and evangelists — the scheduling looked pretty smart.

Then reality set in. Racked by injuries and, too often, some head-scratching play calling, those NFL lineups began looking less-than legitimately inspired. Upsets have ruled, kings have toppled, and game predictions have turned rather foolish. But I pride myself on foolish predictions, so ...

Today's first game is traditional in its Turkey Day setting, hence its television scheduling was fixed and forgivable. It's the Chicago Bears vs the Detroit Lions. The Lions have tied 1, lost 9 and won none. The Bears, at 3-7, aren't all that much better. The spread is 3 in the Bears' favor, nevertheless I'm picking the Lions. After all, though 10 straight coin flips have produced Lions-you-lose-on-heads, the 11th flip is still 50-50 coming up tails. I also remain confident in the Lions' basic ability to win football games; empiricism be damned.

Next up will be the Dallas Cowboys, 7-3, against the Las Vegas Raiders, 5-5. (I still haven't got used to them being in L.V., not Oakland. It's just not right.) The spread is Cowboys by 7.5. I'll allow for 10.5. Perhaps at the height of foolishness, I still see Dallas as a prime suspect for the Super Bowl. Someone once said of Wagner's music: "It's better than it sounds." Same with Cowboys football.

Finally there's the primetime matchup between the New Orleans Saints (5-5) and the Buffalo Bills (6-4). The spread is Bills by 6, but I'll go with the Saints. I once thought the Bills were likely to go all ... the ... way this year, but their defense has unexpectedly weakened. The over/under is 45.5, which sounds about right. The moneyline — Bills -270, Saints +220 — does not.

Why do I get such a kick out of football matchups, predictions and concomitant wagering? To me the sport is a secondary form of political matchups, with predictions and bets to follow. Football showdowns are also a pleasant distraction from political agon, even though both are imbued with bone breakings and induced concussions, one somewhat more literal than figurative. (Which one is up to the players and gawking spectators.)

So if you're like me, you'll have a happy, happy Thanksgiving. Just sit back, rip off a leg, pour a beverage, and comfortably enjoy those other guys' threefold, body-crushing spectacles on the gridiron.

In America, it's Roman Colosseum Day.

***

2:42 p.m.: And so the Lions lose another. Penalties penalties penalties. 

7:32 p.m.: All righty then! I'm batting 000.0.

10:01 pm.: So I'll finish the day with a trifecta of losses. I should stick to political forecasting.

On high authority, you're excused

Boycott the Beijing Olympics? No way that's gonna happen.

With Republican demagogues — especially Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton and Nikki Haley — screaming for a U.S. boycott of Beijing's Winter Olympic Games because of the Chinese government's mistreatment of tennis star Peng Shuai, American sentiment may be swinging in that direction. I can't really say, since the last polling on the general issue of boycotting came way back in April.

Then, 36% of U.S. adults were in support of a boycott (for, obviously, a Peng-unrelated reason). That number has surely risen, though, given so much domestic media coverage of Peng's Nov. 2, sexual assault allegations against a high-ranking Chinese official, her subsequent disappearance, and China's censorship of any online discussion of her absence and possible fate.

With appropriate adjustments, the old aphorism about one death as tragedy and millions as a statistic still holds. A Georgetown law professor who specializes in Chinese jurisprudence put it best: "Kind of weird that disappearing one Peng Shuai is more likely to lead to an Olympic boycott than committing crimes against humanity (and arguably genocide) against an entire population of Uyghurs. They must be scratching their heads in [Beijing]."

I can say what Beijing's chief propaganda arm — the fascinating Global Times, always a must-read — is saying. Two days ago it scoffed at talk of a boycott: "It's not worthy for China to spend energy and resources to care about [the West's] emotions and attitudes and ... negative thoughts.... Why should China care about their noises?"

It's safe to further say that rumors of a boycott are not greatly exaggerated. But I'd be shocked, as the world would be, if the Biden administration exercised any more than a diplomatic boycott. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if barking Republican demagogues pressured at least a few, weak-minded U.S. athletes into staying home. (Incidentally, a presidential prohibition of U.S. athletes traveling to Beijing — would that even be legal? — would represent nearly the same governmental oppressiveness that Republicans accuse China of.)    

The question, though, stands: Should gross humanitarian injustices or violations of an individual athlete's human rights be necessary cause for boycotting China's or any others' Olympic Games? My guess is that most Americans would, by now, agree.

And though I sympathize with that sentiment, I simply cannot see its materialization being a practicable instrument of U.S. policy — for the same reason the U.S. does not and cannot police mass injustices everywhere in the world.

To interventionist hotheads who would send American troops back into Afghanistan to protect indigenous innocents, one must ask: What about the millions of innocents in, say, North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and the insultingly named Democratic Republic of Congo? Along those same lines, if we slapped down China on the Olympics vis-a-vis its humanitarian injustices — again, a fantastically unlikely event — what of other dehumanizing nations down the road?

Indeed the list might include the United States, where chronic racism results in the police or vigilante murder of so many young Black men, not to mention the daily injustices experienced by all Americans of color. I'd love to hear Sen. Cotton fume his way out of a Chinese, racism-justified boycott of a U.S. Olympics. Yet such is the reciprocity that America would face.

Nevertheless, Republican boycotting howls are sure to persuasively heighten in volume and heat. But what the hell, werewolfian howling is what they do.

What deserves out greatest thanks this year? Here it is.

​​​​​Toward the end of the 11th month of each year we're treated to newspaper columnists, editorialists and op-eders informing us of either what they're thankful for or what we should be thankful for. Their recommendations range from the playfully silly to the sententiously gag worthy to the empirically incontestable.

The sillies are just that — brief, harmless, lighthearted reprieves from the grindingly grim. I'm particularly fond of the gag-worthy suggestions, though — over-the-top paeans to founders and forebears and the like. They're the first cousins of those laughably godawful Christmas card missives in which we're notified of the parents' Einstein-level children, spectacular job promotions and dazzling, worldwide trips taken.

Which brings us to those written reminders of what's not always remembered with vastly appropriate thanks  — the dark times, done and gone. And that brings me to Dana Milbank's latest column, "Be thankful that sanity has returned to America — for now." In this printed tempest, Mr. Milbank seeks to remind us of just how wretched the United States was "by this time in Trump’s first year." To wit, by now he had:

"praised the 'very fine people' marching among violent neo-Nazis in Charlottesville; fired the FBI director for investigating his national security adviser; replaced his national security adviser, chief of staff, press secretary, communications director, chief strategist, secretary of homeland security and secretary of health and human services; ripped up treaties and threatened to pull out of NATO; threatened nuclear war on Twitter; attempted to impose what aides called a 'Muslim ban' and disparaged a 'so-called judge' who objected; belittled U.S. intelligence and shared sensitive Israeli intelligence with Russia; sabotaged Obamacare; falsely claimed his predecessor had tapped his phone lines; embraced Stalin’s phrase 'enemy of the people' to describe the free press; exposed the 'dreamers' to deportation; stood by a Senate candidate accused of sexually assaulting a minor; tossed paper towels (but not the needed aid) at hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico; continued nonsense claims about a 'deep state'; insulted hundreds of people in often vulgar and misspelled tweets; made more than 1,600 false or suspect statements; and shoved the prime minister of Montenegro before a photo op and insulted German Chancellor Angela Merkel."

You may want to print out the above maelstrom of Trumpian imbecilities, national embarrassments and skin-crawling transgressions — all committed within merely the first 10 months of his maladministration. Read them off to your gathered family, who thereupon will drop to their knees in profound relief that that nightmare is over. At least, as Milbank adds, "for now."

A brief moment with Jacobin, the good socialist's guide to enlightenment

For reasons unknown to me I just dropped by Jacobin, the internet's leading socialist magazine. My visit reminded me of why my dropping bys are so rare.

The site's main middle post — complete with a very serious-looking Oliver Stone photo! — revealed itself in text thusly: "[Oliver] sat down with Jacobin to discuss JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, his new documentary that exhaustively makes the case that the national security state, including the CIA and FBI, killed John F. Kennedy — not a lone shooter."

I ventured no further. The opposite case has been exhaustively and conclusively made for decades.

The top left post is titled, simply, "Lower the Crime Rate." Alas, Jacobin deprived me of enlightenment as to the method or methods involved in lowering the crime rate. (It seems much or some of Jacobin, The People's Salvation, is paywalled at $20 a year; or, and I loved this, for $50 you can subscribe with "Solidarity." Either way, your ethereal goodness will cost you.)

Whatever. I suspect poverty's causation of crime — imposed by heartless capitalism, which globally has lifted billions from dire privations — was exhaustively and conclusively made by Jacobin to the exclusion of all other socioeconomic and environmental factors: family cohesiveness, a family's criminal history, drugs, alcoholism, truancy, racism, mental illness or intellectual deficiencies, age, population densities, peer pressure, temperate vs. intemperate climates, and probably at least a dozen other causes cited in the subject's literature. This is not to suggest that poverty is some sort of side-causation. But ... Solidarity! Of thought.

And whose crime? Poverty cannot account for the white collar variety. 

The more ideology I encounter in politics and media — whether left or right — the more I detest it. It's lazy, limiting, and societally damaging.

What's the matter with MSNBC?

MSNBC continues to struggle in ratings competition with Fox News, which isn't news. What is news, it seems to me, is that Franco is still dead, as "SNL" used to report weekly, and MSNBC, by and large, is still up to its same old tricks. There must be an anti-inspiration poster in every MSNBC executive office that reads, "Innovation Kills."

I see little of MSNBC's programming these days, a viewing habit now matched by hordes of others. But I've seen enough to write this column. And I do enjoy following the ratings game, that monthly contest of cable-news competitors butting heads. According to Adweek  — brace! — there's still one ram and two sheep.

In October, Fox News won and MSNBC placed. (CNN showed.) Again, there's nothing eye-popping about those ratings results, which, again, seems to be oddly newsworthy. The internals reveal far more.

From September to October, MSNBC lost 5% of its primetime audience and 5% as well in total viewers. The network's coveted 25-54 age demo "represent[ed] the network’s smallest audience in the daypart since 2004." Fox's primetime audience was double that of MSNBC's and more than 3x larger overall. (Anecdotally, in public venues with TV screens I almost always see Fox, never MSNBC.)

In primetime, the "liberal network" will take another hit sometime next year, when star-host Rachel Maddow eases herself out of her regular 9 p.m. slot to appear, perhaps, only one night a week. She'll participate in other NBC projects. Rumors had it that she would instead launch her own media venture, but it seems a steady paycheck won out.

Overall and right now, though, MSNBC is hurting. What's peculiar is that I find virtually no reporting on the reasons why, excluding the usual stuff of "Trump is gone, thus left-leaning viewers have lost interest."

That, and the even more commonplace media observation of Democratic despair: Republican gerrymandering will almost certainly retake the House; Dems' slim Senate majority is quite possibly in inescapable danger; and in the next presidential contest there looms Republican election subversion — all of which has MSNBC viewers clocking in as ex-viewers, groaning beyond hope.

Which will be disastrously self-fulfilling, of course, unless Dem viewers and voters shake off their despair and get mad — enthusiastically mad and organizationally engaged.

But back to MSNBC and its slipping viewership, to which I'll add two other causations, extracted from my not inconsiderable media background (I worked for years in both commercial and public radio).

One is that each MSNBC hour is essentially, even exactly, the preceding hour in news content. Watch any morning program and you've preemptively seen every afternoon and pretty much every evening program. Informationwise, there's really no reason to tune in more than one hour at most. Daily content is never-changing, as are the network's guests. MSNBC's ideological slant flatlines throughout, and the pounding monotony of it all is numbing to anyone intrigued by controversy instead.

For sure, this makes for tons of programming on the cheap. Yet one is bound to wonder if the tradeoff — low and lower ratings and thus lower ad revenue — is actually worth it. The network likely employs a dozen or so MBAs who parsimoniously count the network's chickens and their payoff eggs, but such is the same mindset that has costly streaming services gobbling up free, legacy television.

My advice to MSNBC execs would be to at least mix things up ideologically — not, heaven forfend, by inviting Trumpian pols on-air, whose scripts are as predictable as Rep. Jayapal's, but by hosting reasonably sane, centrist-to-center-right personalities. Give controversy a chance.

My second suggestion contradicts only in a minor way with my criticism of MSNBC's stultifying sameness every hour, its basic lack of innovation. The network has tweaked the sameness somewhat, although its tweaking is baffling. A certain amount of block programming — in MSNBC's case, discrete hours aimed mostly at particular ethnicities — has entered the lineup. This is unhelpful and it should stop.

While the same issues are still mostly out front, Joy Reid has a Black Hour and José Díaz-Balart has a Latino Hour. I'd wager both will soon be gone; I'm at loss as to why they ever appeared. Block programming interferes with any broadcaster's overall programming "image," its market "positioning" — which can be, and usually is, damaging. 

Diaz-Balart works immigration issues into each of his hours, something of supreme interest to only a small slice of MSNBC viewers. Others bail. What's more, in addition to catering largely to a Black audience, Ms. Reid is so ideologically over-the-top, only the most committed leftists could tolerate her bombastic ways. In October her ratings, unsurprisingly, continued their downward march.

However much of a disappearance act is occurring among the once-cable-news inclined, something must nevertheless present itself against the rightist, doctrinaire bullshit spewed daily on Fox News. Wouldn't it be nice if MSNBC, then, were to present itself more responsibly, more reasonably and more intelligently?

The Big Lie and all the Littler Lies together: the second, as powerful as the first

Little to no good is accomplished by the WSJ editorial board's refutations of Trump's Big Lie when those are balanced by the board's serial propagations of less-big lies, such as the magically wondrous effects of discredited supply-sideism or the autocratic malevolence of Democratic strivings to alleviate monstrously high child-care costs confronting financially strapped American families.

Indeed, in mathematical and jurisprudential fact, take all of the Journal's lesser lies, add 'em up, and you get a great big package deal of the editorial board's lesser lies balancing out the scale of Trump's Big Lie.

The Journal's political perjury now harbors yet another, rather weighty element of mendacious propagandizing: Recent revelations about the Steele dossier's "phoniness," writes editorial board member Holman Jenkins, have destroyed the believability of Trump's Russian collusion — a cloak-and-dagger partnership story which the writer characterizes as a "farrago" of the Fourth Estate's "intellectual collapse."

In short, there was never anything to see here, folks; the story was merely a leftist hoax, and we should just forget the whole collusion thing.

Jenkins singles out CNN as a particularly vicious perpetrator of journalistic deceit. "In an act of institutional cowardice," he writes, the network "ends its whitewash" of an article "by winkingly saying President Trump’s performance at the Helsinki summit led 'many to wonder if Trump was compromised after all.' Not only is this anachronistic since the press’s collusion obsession was still in full flower at the time. It’s a falsification of reality and history. Mr. Trump’s ad-libbed performance left much to be desired but what the press wanted from him it would not have gotten under any president. The world does not want to see the leaders of two nuclear powers engaged in heated animus on a public stage."

There, it is Jenkins creating a "falsification of reality and history." What led to proper suspicion of Trump being compromised was not at all his refusal to engage in "heated animus" with Putin. It was his siding with the Russian dictator over America's own intelligence agencies — a remarkably subversive act no other U.S. president would ever have entertained.

Continues Jenkins: "Nor would any president pleasure his partisan, lying critics by portraying his own election as illegitimate, which is what many wanted from Mr. Trump (who of course knew collusion was a lie)." Sure, of course Trump knew that.

Thus the Journal is but part of the right's clanging propaganda machine that's been jamming itself with this preposterous protest: The Steele revelations have shattered all published notions of any Trump-Russian collusion. Even usually saner, peripheral cogs such as Andrew Sullivan have joined the press-bashing parade, in which collusion implicitly morphs into nothingness.

This demands an extraordinary blindness, something akin to America's hard leftists having decided in '39 that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was a good and logical thing.

The right's mission: We must no longer see the June 2016, Trump Tower meeting between Trump's top henchmen and Russian "lobbyists"; the Senate Intelligence Committee's damning, bipartisan report, about which, lawfareblog.com wrote, "Whether one describes [Trump & Co.'s] activity as collusion or not, there’s a lot of it"; and Special Counsel Bob Mueller's written findings, which almost certainly would have been more incriminating and dispositive had Trump & co. not committed, as Mueller observed, multiple obstructions of justice, which fatally inhibited the special counsel's grounds to declare collusion's reality.

The Big Lie so familiar to all is a sick, unexampled, immensely corrosive assault on the American political tradition. That lie, however, has a sister companion of equivalent destructive force: The massive and forever amassing bag of lesser big lies, hustled from Bannonlike subterraneans to even the flagship "conservative" outlet of the Wall Street Journal.

How did Trump's misogyny become so appealing to the GOP base?

​​​​​One passage in Michelle Cottle's latest Times column, "The G.O.P. Has a Bad Men Problem," struck me with unusual force.

After noting that "in three Senate races — Georgia, Missouri and Pennsylvania — [the party] has leading candidates who have been accused of harassing, abusing, threatening or otherwise mistreating women" (Herschel Walker, Eric Greitens, and in Pa., Sean Parnell, who has the same amount of political experience as Walker, which is to say, none), Cottle wrote:

"The rot goes beyond the disrespect and mistreatment of women. Under Mr. Trump, the Republican Party has undergone a fundamental shift, swapping a fixation on character and morality and so-called Family Values for a celebration of belligerence, violence, and, yes, toxic masculinity."

The passage reminded me of just of how rapidly seismic the GOP's "fundamental shift" once was. At its molten core — soon to harden far more toxically — it took place in the span of a mere eight years, during which a general fixation on "character," as Cottle noted, first settled in.

In 1992, Republican-raised questions about Bill Clinton's character repeatedly intruded into the presidential campaign. In 1996, however, the traditional approach of avoiding character issues still held to some degree within the Republican Party, largely because self-aware conservatives knew that stone-castings could always boomerang on them.

Thus: "In my opinion, it is beneath Bob Dole to go after anyone personally," said Dole's running mate, Jack Kemp, while debating Vice President Al Gore in '96. The Los Angeles Times reported that Kemp's opinion and, by extension, Dole's, "bitterly disappointed Republican activists who believe an assault on Clinton’s character is the key to reversing Dole’s fortunes."

Four years later, those Republican activists had no cause to be bitterly disappointed. Vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney "immediately sought to link Gore to President Clinton in the minds of voters," reported the Chicago Tribune. Said Cheney to roughly 2,000 delegates at the GOP nominating convention, "Mr. Gore tries to separate himself from his leader's shadow. But somehow, we will never see one without thinking of the other."

Everyone present, as well as everyone in the viewing audience, understood the thrust of Cheney's shadowy "character" shot.

From there on, the gloves were off. Character became Republicans' favorite flogging of, especially, Democratic presidential candidates. John Kerry they converted from a decorated war veteran to a weak, effete, dishonorable man of "hippie" inclinations. Barack Obama became an amoral, dope-smoking, overgrown teenager.

Hillary Clinton they tied to her husband and his "immoralities." Only grandfatherly Joe Biden stumped them; Republicans never did figure a workable angle to attack him on character, so they opted for assorted derisions of his age (about the same as Trump's) and his purported, slipping cognitive abilities. (Though not character related, emphatically "personal.")

Did it trouble Republicans that, in both of his presidential campaigns, Trump's "moral" character was roughly equivalent to Mussolini's — absent Il Duce's rudimentary intelligence — and that his superabundantly cast stones would come back to bite him? Not a bit. Not one damn bit. Indeed, the "character" issue remained central to both candidate and party.  

Trump's personal history of "harassing, abusing, threatening or otherwise mistreating women" became a political carrot to the Republican base. It reveled in his "belligerence, violence, and toxic masculinity," as Cottle observed of today's three GOP Senate candidates. This was a long way from the GOP's initial "character" assaults, but it was from the roots of those assaults that Trump's appeal malodorously blossomed and flourished.

Once obsessed with what it characterized as others' deplorable character, in Trump the GOP maintained its "character" fixation, but by embracing the raunchiest character of its own. The party simply, and perversely, flipped the script.

What stuns my historical memory was the Republican Party's rather rapid conversion from character avoidance to total indulgence of character attacks and, years later, even "celebrations" of Trump's lowest, genuinely unmanly traits of masculine toxicity.

The party now thrives as much on misogyny as racism.

How any woman or any women-respecting man can still vote Republican is beyond my deepest comprehension of the human drama. There's a sickness there that, though comprehensible on an intellectual level grounded in a 30-year history, is, to me at least, unintelligible in its psychic and emotional dysfunction.

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Price gouging is adding to inflationary pressures

The Wall Street Journal reports that abnormally high corporate profits are adding to the oft-told-tales of the pandemic's effects of supply-chain congestion, labor shortages and higher consumer demand unleashed by huge increases in personal savings:

"Executives are seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices to match and in some cases outpace their own higher expenses ... [since] widespread inflation makes it easier to broach the topic of raising prices with customers.

"Nearly two out of three of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies have reported fatter profit margins so far this year than they did over the same stretch of 2019, before the Covid-19 outbreak, data from FactSet show. Nearly 100 of these giants have booked 2021 profit margins ... that are at least 50% above 2019 levels [emphasis mine].

"Oxford Economics' ... data show that a measure of profits for all U.S. corporations, as a share of gross domestic product, in the second quarter of this year was the second highest recorded since 1960."

The CEOs interviewed by the WSJ were all proud of the "fatter profit margins" they've acquired from pricing opportunism, for they answer to shareholders (and their year-end bonuses). Any sense of price restraint while retaining merely comfortable margins to reduce inflationary pressures would be met by the same guffawing as did Gerald Ford's insipid "Whip Inflation Now," which presidential candidate Jimmy Carter had so much fun with.

Atop the other factors mentioned above, the danger inherent in corporation's up-to-50% profit hauls is, of course, that the Fed may ultimately be forced to raise interest rates, harming consumers and corporations alike.

But in the latter's mind, it's only the next quarter that counts.

*** 

I''ve been doing a lot of updating of late, which is probably a function of what seems like 10 major news stories being thrown at us twice each day. The White House appears as vulnerable to "news lag" as the rest of us, which it really shouldn't be. 

"There are signs that the White House could soon push back more forcefully [against Republican misrepresentations of Biden's economic agenda as the principal cause of inflation], saying that large corporations are partly to blame for the dramatic increase in costs," reported the Washington Post this morning.

The proposed pushback, however, is coming not internally but from "several outside advisers [who] have pitched senior White House officials." The WSJ story is a week old. I appreciate that the WH has a few other problems on its hands, but inflation is becoming a mammoth political issue which must be tackled with due haste — or for that matter, undue haste. Being "proactive" both early and relentlessly is essential.

Is there also a problem with such pushback? When isn't there? "The push could backfire," continues the Post, "should it antagonize many of the firms it is highly dependent to resolve supply chain pressures ahead of the holiday season."

The WH's political benefit would surely outweigh the risks. Taking the "populist" angle against greedy corporations would scarcely be a political loser. The corporate boys would howl, but would their anger actually lead to their self-wounding acceptance of supply chain pressures? I think not, in fact I am sure not.

Go get 'em, Mr. President. 

A White boy's tears: Rittenhouse and the American jury system

Here's all you need to know about the Rittenhouse verdict's fallout, produced by 12 of the most gullible people on earth:

"Rep. Paul A. Gosar tweeted Friday that Kyle Rittenhouse would be welcomed in Arizona if he chooses to attend college on campus there. The 18-year-old is taking nondegree online classes at Arizona State University."

Rittenhouse "receive[d] multiple invitations to intern in Congress on Capitol Hill." The invitations came from Gosar and Reps. Matt Gaetz and Madison Cawthorn, who, as the Washington Post reports, "encourag[ed] others to 'be dangerous' and take up arms."

Online, far-right groups "erupted in jubilation."

A gun-control organization, Guns Down America, issued a statement as chilling as it is (mostly) true: "We live in a country where a White person like Rittenhouse is able to cross state lines with an assault weapon [he didn't] during a racial justice protest, take the lives of two, gravely injure a third, and successfully paint himself as the victim."

The right is now hoping the left becomes as "dangerous" as Rittenhouse, which would be precisely the wrong thing for the left to do.

(My own conclusion, however flawed it may be, is that Rittenhouse was at least guilty on the two counts of "first-degree recklessly endangering safety.")  

***

I rarely turn on cable news these days. Today, however, I made a point of tuning in Ari Melber's "The Beat," on MSNBC, since the host, an attorney, focuses on legal issues. I was expecting — don't ask me why — a reasoned, balanced, vigorously debated exploration of the Rittenhouse case and its verdict.

What I got was exactly what's wrong with MSNBC, a kind of sister network of Fox News. Melber's only guests? Two young Black women, identical views. You, I, anyone could have written the script. (Observed social-sciences journalist Jesse Singal before the announced verdict: "We seem headed toward a point where every major news story generates at least two distinct versions of reality that are summarily adopted as true by many partisans." The only error in that sentence is that we're not "headed toward" that point. Indisputably, we're already there.)

This is not the time to turn up the heat and foment more racial tension. There's kindling everywhere. Let the right and the far right (if there's a distinction any longer) flip out in ecstasies of recklessness — not that the two young women were being reckless, but you catch my drift: heated rhetoric is bound to morph more heated.      

Poor Kevin

Poor Kevin McCarthy. He was not, in fact, born with a silver foot in his mouth. He instead was born with a hopeless sense of timing in his brain, along with other, mostly linguistics malfunctions.

Poor Kevin rose around 9 p.m. last night to speak, and speak, and speak on the House floor about the Marxist regime that President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and their Leninist-Stalinist party have visited on this once-great and noble land, disclosing six hours later that "I don’t know that this speech is going to make a difference," which it actually did in one major way.

Poor Kevin. What his 8 1/2 speech accomplished was to catapult Biden's historic social and climate bill out of the House late at night, when no one would have been paying attention, and into the media-focused daylight of Nov. 19. Democrats have been crooning all day, not at 1 a.m.

Poor Kevin's doomsday sermon to a few, insomniac rubes somewhere was a political gift to Democrats everywhere.

Poor Kevin. It didn't take long for Speaker Pelosi to realize what a grand gesture to Democrats the minority leader was making and, foolishly, delivering on. She called off any late-night vote. Let Kevin address the owls.

Poor Kevin. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer then alerted the press: "He wants to do it in the dead of night. We are going to do it in the day."

Poor Kevin. His logorrhea of petty grievances and falsehoods also produced — midway — one of the funniest comments to ever come from a politician, that of Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin: "It is a feat of epic proportions to speak for four hours straight and not produce a single memorable phrase, original insight or even a joke. McCarthy thinks he is a wit but so far he has proved he is only half right."

Poor Kevin, my poor, poor, Kevin. The nation will possibly, indeed probably, turn its profoundly disheartened eyes to you, as speaker, in 2023, but not for any intelligent leadership. Only for belly laughs.

Gosar's censure and what's to come in 2023

​​​​​As you undoubtedly know, the House voted yesterday to censure Paul Gosar and, accordingly, relieve him of his two committee seats. His social-media posting of a photoshopped anime in which he appeared as AOC's killer and assaulter of President Biden rendered decent citizens everywhere rightly outraged. 

Given that Gosar never so much as apologized and given Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's manifest support for reducing American democracy to late-stage Weimarism, the urgency of Gosar's censure was unquestioned by those of any conscience — which, as contemporaneity would have it, excludes virtually every self-identified Republican. The censure's one downside: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn weren't lumped in with it.

Watching C-Span before the vote, I heard this from ordinary Republican lunatic Louie Gohmert: "We should not condemn violence, but ..." Another nutcase, Tom Rice of South Carolina, protested that "cartoons routinely depict violence," so why all the fuss?

Said Speaker Pelosi, simply: "We cannot have a member joking about murdering each other or threatening the President of the United States." We can't, though today's Republicans revel in such infantile grotesqueries, excepting only Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, whom the GOP does wish to punish for inquiring about barefaced Trumpian treason. Weird.

Naturally, Republicans are howling that the Gosar censure was nothing but a partisan hatchet job, so characteristic of those sinister Democrats. To that we can smile. Have at it, howl 'til you drop. 

That said, we should be aware that Republicans are privately celebrating Gosar's fate. In their vindictive little minds, the Arizona gangster's censure will grant them unlimited freedom of so's your old man, come 2023. Doubtless, they're already contriving a list of tasty Democratic targets, House members who may have sneezed during one of Trump's usual asininities in a SOTU address, or some other such witlessness.

Some Republican senators — especially those with presidentialitis — are also telegraphing this vindictive intent. As one example, two days ago, after wailing on Twitter about the attorney general's jackbooted approach to virtuous parents at wholesome school board melees — a brutish approach that never happened — Cotton unsubtly concluded: "Garland will be held accountable for this." My guess, he'll be impeached, followed by a Senate spectacle meant only for the base's childish amusement.

Therefore, House Democrats, hie thee to Greene, Cawthorn and perhaps others' censure as well — not out of the disloyal opposition's sense of prepubescent antics, but because it's the right thing to do. These treacherous, unAmerican whackjobs quite literally have no business being in the United States House of Representatives.

So clean the House, while you can. The countervailing shit is headed your way anyway.

***

Update: As I was writing this yesterday, McCarthy was asked if he might strip certain Democrats — most likely Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar, Eric Swalwell — of their committee assignments, should he become speaker (he will, of course, reinstate Gosar and Greene). "This [is] about holding people accountable," he answered. "I think the majority is going to have to approve any of those [Democratic] members on the committees of which they could serve."

The war is on.