The Carpentariat

Is this article satire? "How to Persuade a Trump Voter"

From Medium:

"About the Author: Dr. Karin Tamerius is a political therapist with advanced training in psychiatry and political psychology. She is the founder of Smart Politics, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching progressives how to communicate more persuasively with people across the political spectrum."

Which is to say, Trumpers. The good doctor's advice?

• Don’t attack people
• Tolerate opposing views
• Listen without interrupting
• Don’t argue
• Listen to understand, not reply
• Find common ground
• Give others the benefit of the doubt

Now remember. You are not to attack any admirer of the malicious, vindictive criminal in the White House, nor argue with some historically bewildered ass who believes Trump is a better president than Lincoln.

You are to tolerate such claptrap; you are to listen without interrupting, which means you'll never get a word in; you are to understand, again, without interruption, why Trump is so dreamy; you are to find common ground — e.g., I guess, "Damn right, I hate the wetbacks, too"; and you are to give an even bigger buffoon than Trump — at least he's fucking all the adoring buffoons for fun and profit — the benefit of the doubt. 

If you're a believer in, though consequently a trifle bothered by, any of this, for your own sake don't see "political therapist" Karin Tamerius for help. 

Trump's polling, by the best? Kinda bad.

From the latest Monmouth University poll (rated A+ by 538):

"Just over 4-in-10 (43%) registered voters feel that Trump should be reelected, while a majority (54%) say it is time to have someone new in the Oval Office."

That, you might say, is dangerously only 3 points lower than what sort-of elected Trump in 2016. However at that time he had real voters — voters who actually exercised their registration to vote. Hence it would seem that among the total universe of registered voters favoring Trump, this incumbent president's reelection prospects look dim, since his (for now) actual voters will be significantly less than those merely registered to vote.

But, no matter how many ways one wishes to interpret Monmouth's findings — and there are plenty — elections always comes down to only one thing: turnout.

Honestly terrifying: framing Trump as just another president

Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of perhaps Trump's biggest bugbear, the FBI, said this last night to CNN's Chris Cuomo about the president's many denunciations of the law-enforcement bureau:

"It's just a disgusting level of disrespect for the people who serve this country everyday.

"To spend your life dedicated to protecting America and upholding the Constitution and then to be accused by the president of treason and suggest … that the proper penalty for us would be death — I can't describe to you how revolting that is and quite honestly terrifying."

I'm sure that McCabe, as one among Trump's cherished prey, feels especially revolted and terrified. Given his last two words, above, it's certain that he also feels like a shooting-range target for any Trumpian lunatic. Were I in McCabe's shoes, I too would be honestly terrified.

Yet, when I'm among others — others who have never been intensely political — and a mere mention of Trump comes up, I often see the dread in their eyes; their dread of this president and his ugly Trumpism. They also exhibit a peculiar kind of terror — a political something they've been unfamiliar with, all their lives. Their heads then slowly swing from side to side, followed by weary mutterings of despair. None of it requires any prompting, and it's everywhere.

On the other hand, there are those carefree apologists in the press, such as the Washington Examiner's Philip Terzian, who today somehow managed to plant his devil-may-care flag on the op-ed page of the NY Times. Says he:

Trump's foul nicknames for enemies, "while occasionally puerile and sometimes cruel, deftly capture something essential in their subjects"; he's "a striking departure from one English journalist’s rule that the public prefers its politicians to resemble either clergymen or undertakers"; "he presides at ceremonial occasions [like, you know, memorials] with a measure of solemnity and switches gears for the lighthearted trappings of office" — but still, "none of this is altogether a bad thing."

Terzian's point — other than the one on top of his head — is that we should graciously historicize the many revulsions of Trumpian imbecility:

"While unique in his way, Mr. Trump is not a president like no other" — he's political kin to a T.R. or Robert Taft, says Terzian — "nor a threat to democracy or the constitutional order. He has roots in the American civic tradition, which is considerably more complex, and more fractious in tone, than we care to remember."

That's an astounding comment. Trump's only "roots in the American civic tradition" are those of olympian incivility: the Southern, sectional-crisis fire breathers whose fractiousness led to the death of hundreds of thousands; the racist xenophobia of the late 1800s and early 1900s; the tyranny imposed by McCarthyism.

Or, as the FBI's Andrew McCabe put it: "To be accused by the president of treason and suggest … that the proper penalty for us would be death — I can't describe to you how revolting that is and quite honestly terrifying."

Because, of course. Justice Dept.'s IG refutes Trump's scurrilous claim of FBI bias

The NY Times:

"A long-awaited report by the Justice Department’s inspector general released on Monday sharply criticized the F.B.I.’s handling of a wiretap application used in the early stages of its Russia investigation but exonerated former bureau leaders of President Trump’s accusations that they engaged in a politicized conspiracy to  sabotage him."

As to the IG's first finding (above), contemporaneous to the report's release were these remarks by MSNBC's soft-spoken Chuck Rosenberg, former U.S. Attorney, former Justice Department counsel, former FBI counsel, and all-round good egg. In any complex investigation, he said, "there are always going to be procedural flaws" highlighted by an inspector general. "I have never read an IG report that said: 'No problem here. Sorry to have wasted your time.'"

A rather intriguing tedium - one unacceptable elsewhere

The Post's James Downie asks and answers:

"You know what you won’t find when you read [the 'old' and rather expansive 'coverage' of Hunter Biden's appointment to Burisma's board in 2014]? Republican leaders calling for investigations. The same people who were ready to investigate President Barack Obama if he hiccuped at the wrong time didn’t deem Hunter Biden a concern. Those silent included the current president. Trump, never one to shy away from criticizing the Obama administration, said not one word about Hunter Biden while his father was vice president. Yet Republicans now want us to believe that Trump’s extortion attempts were really about concern over Burisma? Give us a break."

It may be, by now, that noting Republican hypocrisy and fairy-tale telling is akin to writing a film script whose lines are "too on the nose," meaning, of course, too obvious or unsophisticated. Television series are especially famed for such gaucherie, but for good reason: Be too sophisticated and you'll lose nearly all the Ozarkian, Appalachian, and deep Dixie viewership.

Yet, in political reportage and commentary, there'd be an almost complete absence of reporting and commentating were it not for Republican hypocrisy and fairy-tale telling. These are pretty much the only journalistic game in the Beltway and throughout this once-reasonably sane republic — i.e., pre-1980, with post-intermittent recoveries. 

In other words, we're stuck with this overbearing blood sport. Though tedious, political journalists and opinionists cannot simply suspend noting the ugly realities of Republican cynicism until 2021, when, just before, one hopes, the electorate converts the Senate and White House, and leaves the People's House as is.

It seems we'll never learn: from Vietnam to Afghanistan

Only one proper noun has been changed, to protect no one, in this unsentimentally nostalgic and almost weirdly explosive story from the Washington Post: "The Afghanistan Papers, a Secret History of the War; U.S. officials misled public about Afghan war, confidential documents reveal."

To wit:

"A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that ['U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats'] failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable….

"John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the [internal study's] interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show 'the American people have constantly been lied to.'"

The Post's most disheartening passage reads — take your pick, according to your political or foreign policy interests — like either the 2012 Republican autopsy or 1971 Pentagon Papers: "The $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one."

For years we read in a variety of sources that the United States military, under not only the aegis but the orders of successive presidential administrations, had utterly botched its mission in Southeast Asia. Never again would commanders in chief and U.S. firepower commit the catastrophe that was Vietnam — and later, Cambodia.

We were, of course, falsely assured. Begun under Bush II, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were but raging sinkholes awaiting President Obama. He was left with President Jefferson's observation, originally voiced, in part, by Roman Emperor Tiberius: "As it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go." Yet hold him the U.S. has done.

And partisanship has played a co-starring role. According to a 2018 Pew Research survey, "about half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (48%) say the U.S. has succeeded [in Afghanistan], compared with about three-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaning independents (28%). Three years ago, during the presidency of Barack Obama, partisan opinions were nearly the reverse: 42% of Democrats said the U.S. had succeeded, compared with 29% of Republicans."

Our rather willful, interchangeable partisan ignorance of U.S.-Afghanistan blunders is thunderingly similar to public opinion gained from the U.S. military's deceptions in Vietnam. A Naval War College strategist says in the Afghanistan Papers that "military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results." Areas taken, bodies counted, and all that.

And says Bush-Obama's "Afghan war czar" Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general: "We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … [2,300] lives lost. Who will say this was in vain?"

I will.

Quick take on an obscure subject

I find some journalistic conventions, such as this, from the NY Times, infuriating:

"As Mr. Trump faces impeachment for allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden, he and his allies are now turning those same claims about Mr. Biden  and his son into a key element of their defense."

Trump faces impeachment for allegedly pressuring Ukraine?

It's on the howling, growling record, for heaven's sake.

There is no question among informed citizens that Trump pressured the former Soviet republic. The proof sits staring at us — and all of Congress, even its in-denial caucus — smack in the middle of Trump's edited transcript of his impeachable call to the Ukrainian president, the release of which Trump somehow believed would exonerate him.

What's especially peculiar about the NYT's coverage is that just prior to writing "allegedly," the reporters observe: "The president … has unleashed a stream of unfounded accusations against the Bidens." 

I'm quite aware that the definition of allegedly is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, "used to convey that something is claimed to be the case … although there is no proof." However Merriam-Webster's second definition of "alleged" is "asserted to be true" — and this, I'd wager, is the common, American understanding of alleged and allegedly alike.

Hence the NYT's usage of the latter subtly lends credibility to Trump's vacuous counteroffensive.

An excellent economic system ruthlessly denied us by the right

I was about to write about another topic until I ran across a fascinating op-ed, by author-consultant Anu Partanen and her husband, Trevor Corson, a writer and teacher, titled "Finland Is a Capitalist Paradise."

The headline is intentionally ironic. More than a year ago, these former Brooklynites with a newborn were struggling with financial anxieties. Their cost of reliable health care in the U.S. was precariously draining, as would be the cost of their daughter's education. These worries, and others, induced the couple to look overseas, specifically Finland, whose "small but dynamic free-market economy has punched far above its weight," write Partanen and Corson.

Why? After the Second World War and multiple battles between management and workforce, "Finnish capitalists … realized that it would be in their own long-term interests to accept steep progressive tax hikes. The taxes would help pay for new government programs to keep workers healthy and productive…; [it's] a convenient way for capitalists to outsource to the government the work of keeping workers healthy and educated."

While we might call this system either socialism or a "Socialist Paradise," Partanen-Corson argue that that would be a "mislabel[ing]." For "we blind ourselves to what the Nordic region really is: a laboratory where capitalists invest in long-term stability and human flourishing while maintaining healthy profits." Fair enough. Yet, as the married couple explain:

In Finland, we are automatically covered, no matter what, by taxpayer-funded universal health care that equals the United States’ in quality (despite the misleading claims you hear to the contrary), all without piles of confusing paperwork or haggling over huge bills. Our child attends a fabulous, highly professional and ethnically diverse public day-care center that amazes us with its enrichment activities and professionalism. The price? About $300 a month — the maximum for public day care, because in Finland day-care fees are subsidized for all families.

And if we stay here, our daughter will be able to attend one of the world’s best K-12 education systems at no cost to us, regardless of the neighborhood we live in. College would also be tuition free. If we have another child, we will automatically get paid parental leave, funded largely through taxes, for nearly a year, which can be shared between parents. Annual paid vacations here of four, five or even six weeks are also the norm….

Finland also has high levels of economic mobility across generations. A 2018 World Bank report revealed that children in Finland have a much better chance of escaping the economic class of their parents and pursuing their own success than do children in the United States.

Finally, and perhaps most shockingly, the nonpartisan watchdog group Freedom House has determined that citizens of Finland actually enjoy higher levels of personal and political freedom, and more secure political rights, than citizens of the United States.

Here in the United States, we could have had that, we could have had it all. FDR put us on the right path with New Deal reforms (however conservative they now seem to many historians), which, after his death and a wartime unemployment rate of 1.9 percent, remained a prosperous path for average American workers.

Twenty years later came Goldwaterism, then the New Right, then Reaganism, Bushism, and Trumpism — all of them inordinately business-friendly and hostile to workers and government; in short, aggressively antagonistic to the humanly beneficial. Quarterly corporate profits — even at the cost of trillion-dollar federal deficits — replaced God as the divine. We've been headed to, if not permanently embedded in, the albeit disgraced John Edwards' "Two Americas" ever since.

The monied in American simply cannot or will not see what Anu Partanen, husband Trevor Corson, and nearly all Finns see:

"When capitalists perceive government as a logistical ally rather than an ideological foe and when all citizens have a stake in high-quality public institutions, it’s amazing how well government can get things done."

The woke are pissed

Jamelle Bouie, the wokest of the NYT's woke opinion columnists, is in a funk (as we all are). His disenchantment centers on the seemingly sweeping misconception of the Democratic Party as a union of the woke — which Bouie defines as "a broad awareness of oppression" — when, in reality, the party is anything but, to his regret.

He cites, for example, HBO's Bill Maher's exhortation to the party's presidential candidates: "Get out of Woke-ville, for a day." Maher's is a fundamental rejection of "identity politics and social justice ideology" as winning themes in the 2020 race, writes Bouie, the upshot being that woke candidates will disaffect the persuadable voters needed next year to eject Trump from the chief executive's chair.

But Maher and his fellow critics have it all wrong, argues Bouie. "The woke candidates have been the weakest, electorally speaking," he observes. For one, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand self-identified as a "white woman of privilege," in her words, who would "explain" to other suburban white women "what white privilege actually is." Yet by summer's end she was gone, further observes the dismayed columnist — all without even mentioning that Gillibrand had doomed herself upon railroading Al Franken out of the Senate.

Then there was "the wokest of woke Democrats," or so Beto O’Rourke strived to be, who in rising desperation campaigned on the federal government's confiscation of privately owned assault weapons — now there's a winning argument in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania's outback — as well as advocating the termination of tax exemptions for same-sex-marriage-opposing churches. Bye-bye a slew of any otherwise winnable border states.

Finally, the sad tale of she without a comprehensible central message, Kamala Harris. The senator "was not as openly woke as some of her rivals," says Bouie, "although she did voice support for reparations." That alone would have earned her McGovern/Mondale's Electoral College votes. "But," as Bouie frames her, "as the daughter of immigrants … she embodied the 'Great Awokening' of the Democratic electorate." Barack Obama's father was a minority immigrant, thus the son also embodied the Great Awokening — but successfully, because he knew what he was doing.

A key passage by Bouie, the opening sentence of which is to his political credit:

"The Democratic Party might still be too woke for its own good. But the evidence for that isn’t in the primary campaign. A former vice president, Joe Biden, known for his centrist politics and blue-collar affect, leads the field. His nearest rivals, Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, support social justice politics, but they’ve centered their campaigns on inequality and corruption."

The end of this passage is a mere divergence of ideological approaches. To dismiss Sanders and Warren as unwoke would be an outrage to political analysts of Marxist sympathies, who see wealth inequality as a matter of class more than race, and social injustice as an inexcusable lack of redistribution. Though not Marxists, Sanders and Warren essentially agree with both sociopolitical sentiments.

Still, also to Bouie's credit is his acknowledgement, at least, of the Democratic Party's "moderate and conservative" contingent, "including African-Americans and Latinos." Notwithstanding this twofold bloc, were the party genuinely woke, argues Bouie, then "one or two woke candidates" should have survived the race thus far.

That they haven't is simply a matter of percentages. As Gallup found in early 2018, the "woke" element of the entire electorate constituted just 26 percent — i.e., those who self-identified as "liberal," which is as close to woke as we can gather from contemporary statistics; the actual percentage of self-identified wokeness would be much lower.

In addition, within Gallup's universe of Democrats, nearly half (48 percent) self-identified as moderate or conservative. Perhaps more important to a 2020 Democratic victory is that among independents, only 24 percent self-identified as liberal, while 43 percent swung moderate.

What Bouie somehow — and stunningly — seems to discount is that the loudest and most radical within a party ultimately define the party to the opposition's benefit. I myself have often used Texas' deranged Louie Gohmert as the quintessential House Republican, and James Inhofe as the quintessentially idiotic Senate Republican. Though my characterizations do no injury to the GOP at large, they just might, perhaps, further embed in some Democratic minds the foolish radicalization of the Republican Party.

I write that Bouie only discounts this political axiom; he does not disregard it. "Puritanism is not useful for politics or governing," he concedes. Nonetheless, in a Hegelian stab at the self-evident, he concludes: "But a broad awareness of oppression — of the ways this country does not work for many of its citizens — is vital."

Other than bashing the scandal-ridden monstrosity of Donald Trump at differing levels of intensity, is that not Biden and Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar's core argument?

Say most Republicans, Lincoln's emancipation of slaves meant little compared to, say, Trump's steel tariffs

According to a depressingly believable survey conducted by YouGov for the Economist magazine, most Republicans have — not to put too fine a point on it — hopelessly lost their already hideous little minds:

"The 16th president boasts his own memorial in Washington while the 45th president faces impeachment. But ordinary Republicans, in a 53-percent-to-47-percent majority, favor Trump over [Lincoln]….

"For example, one C-SPAN viewer, identified as Neil, a Republican from Oregon, said that Trump 'supersedes' Lincoln. 

"'Lincoln only freed the slaves,' he said during a call to the network Wednesday. 'Yes, that’s a big thing. But what Trump is doing is far greater.'"

Stupidity speaks for itself.

Adam Schiff: "The President doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for our country"

In an interview with The New Yorker's superb Susan Glasser, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff efficiently summarized the national and international horror of Donald Trump:

"The President doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for our country, what’s good for Ukraine. It’s all about what’s in it for him personally and for his reëlection campaign."

And that, gentle reader, is in itself an efficient definition of "the diagnostic [behavior of] a sociopath," as referenced in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition.

Another radicalism too far

I just read, in the Washington Post's "Social Issues" department, a roughly 3,000-word report titled "A Language for All: Teens in Argentina are leading the charge to eliminate gender in language." It's a frightening peek into a self-triumphalist radicalism that envisions a revised language as little more than an oppressive collection of words all dressed in Mao suits. You must conform to our standards, says this minuscule minority to the vast, grammatically correct majority of lexicographers.

Here [in Argentina], teenagers are rewriting the rules of the language to eliminate gender. In classrooms and daily conversations, young people are changing the way they speak and write — replacing the masculine "o" or the feminine "a" with the gender-neutral "e" in certain words — in order to change what they see as a deeply gendered culture.

Their efforts are at the center of a global debate over gender, amid the growing visibility of non-binary identities and a wave of feminist movements worldwide. A big part of the battle is being waged over language….

The Royal Spanish Academy, the preeminent authority on the centuries-old language, has said that such grammatical changes are "unnecessary and artificial"…. While changes in vocabulary happen fairly often, the grammar of a language rarely changes, said Paz Battaner, a lexicographer and member of the Royal Spanish Academy. It’s not impossible for the gender-neutral form of Spanish to someday become so common that the academy accepts it, she said. "But I doubt it"….

The language form has divided the feminist movement from which it originated. While some within the movement insist on speaking in a way that includes non-binary people, others have resisted, preferring to emphasize the voices of women by using feminine words….

Hernan Semprum, a 77-year-old Venezuelan law professor who has lived in Argentina for 10 years, argued it is essential to preserve the purity of the Spanish language. "It is what truly unites all of the countries" in the Spanish-speaking world…. Psychologist Agustina Taquini, 37, argued that women shouldn’t need to change the language in order to get ahead. "In the end, it makes women seem more weak than strong," Taquini said.

Señora Taquini could have added that such demanded change also merely reinforces the centuries-old, sexist stereotype of women as shrewish, irrational, and endlessly troublesome. 

Unlike Spanish, or French or German, we haven't this gender-neutral issue in English, since our articles — a and the — are already neutral (a man, the men; a woman; the women). Still, a foul, linguistic miasma is seeping into the minds of those who should know better. "Merriam-Webster added a new definition of the word 'they' to its dictionary, declaring the pronoun may be used to refer to a 'single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.'" That is to say, they is. If even the sound of "they is" crawls up your spine as though you've been transported to an illiterate-redneck swamp, then your sanity are intact.

As e polemicist, I selected several above passages favorable to my opinion. I do not dispute the prodigious bias of that opinion, just as I would not dispute my biases in favor of gender equality, racial equality, and equality of opportunity. Yet I urge you to read the Post's entire, argument-neutral article. It is, let's say, interesting. And perhaps you'll violently disagree with me, which is, after all, what genuine debate over "change" is all about.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with this:

"Throughout [a television interview on the subject, 18-year-old Argentinian Natalia Mira] casually used gender-neutral words. As Mira spoke, the journalist, Eduardo Feinmann, kept interrupting to correct her. 'My way is Spanish. I don’t know what yours is,' the journalist fired back."

"Don't mess with me"; or, the ambiguity of Pelosi's prayers

I'm sure you've already seen this. I had seen it thrice. But I watched it yet again this morning because I love it when Speaker Pelosi delivers a withering smackdown of some vulturous, right-wing reporter.

Yesterday was barrel day for James Rosen, of the Obama-hating Sinclair Broadcast Group, when he hypocritically asked Pelosi, "Do you hate the president?"

I can appreciate Pelosi's theologically based reply, which, like all theology, can be located somewhere in the abstraction spectrum. But, since I dwell in the secular world, I must say, I hate Donald Trump. What about him, for Christ's sake, is not to hate?

On the other hand, Ms. Pelosi did not reveal what she prays for.

On Trump's impeachment: the war between the states of idealism and pragmatism

​​​​​If history is a guide, and it is, then the imminent debate among House Democrats about the breadth of impeachment articles will be a rip-roarer.

Some Dems wish to corral the charges into the narrow lane of Trump's powerful abuse of Ukraine, including his unconstitutional responses (such as contempt of Congress) to that one charge, while others wish to elaborate on Special Counsel Bob Mueller's findings on the president's tenfold obstructions of justice.

Hofstra University's U.S. history professor Carolyn Eisenberg takes up the latter's defense, using, as her guide, the bitter division among House Democrats prior to writing impeachment articles against Richard Nixon.

Ask anyone under the age of 50 about Nixon’s presidency and the first word is likely to be "Watergate." The second is "impeachment." Ask what this is about and the probable answer is "something about a break-in and a cover-up." Shameful as Watergate was, it was not nearly so serious a violation of law as the covert bombing of Cambodia. One of America’s foremost historians, Henry Steele Commager, observed that Nixon had won a strategic victory 'in the realm of public and perhaps even congressional opinion' by successfully 'concentrating attention on Watergate and its associated chicaneries.'

After three years in which the Trump administration has run roughshod over constitutional procedures and individual rights, the need for a broader response [than the Ukraine issue] seems clear. This is essential, even if the Senate Republicans behave as expected and vote against the removal of the president. For now, the challenge for Representative Jerrold Nadler and his committee is to use the mechanism, providing by the founding fathers, to reassert abiding principles of democratic governance.

Again I'm torn, just as I was torn — and remain so — between Democrats' decision to impeach or to play it safer, for swing-district Dems' sake, by not impeaching: There is constitutional idealism and there is political pragmatism — and the two are forever butting heads.

As a lifelong student of politics I tend to favor — doubtless to my disrepute among constitutional scholars — William James' pragmatism over James Madison's idealism. This in no way implies I condone presidential lawlessness; and yet, I'm capable, pragmatically, of overlooking whatever constitutional sins may have been committed by my political idols, FDR and Abe Lincoln.

It's not that I don't "get" or appreciate the profundity of constitutional idealism; it's that I acknowledge the inestimable value of Roosevelt's legally questionable poundings of his New Deal enemies, and, as to what law professor Daniel Farber wrote of Lincoln's wartime excesses, "when he did infringe the Constitution, his trespasses were, at least, not egregious."

Since Trump's constitutional infringements are egregious, I would revel at having both our founding document and the entire body of U.S. criminal codes thrown at him. Politically, though, "the need for a [lesser] response seems clear."

Biden lands direct hit, mocking the world's laughingstock

In case you haven't seen Joe Biden's latest ad:

A sound foreign policy of at least eight years — not the impossible achievement of universal social justice by the end of 2021 — should be Democrats' central message next year. It won't be — the old quip, wrongfully attributed to Mark Twain, that only "war is God's way of teaching Americans geography" suggests our chronic indifference to global affairs — but it should be.

After all, the ineffable mess made of America by the sitting, impeachable president is almost entirely a matter of his ignorant malfeasance within the realm of international relations, in which I would include trade policy. He has alienated our allies, embraced our enemies, and cost American consumers and businesses millions of dollars in unnecessary taxation (tariffs).

Even worse, of course, is that he's attempting to normalize foreign interference into American politics and elections.

This, none of this, can stand. The United States now teeters on the edge of a bottomless precipice — one on which this president, with virtual total authority in matters of world affairs and limitless power to destroy traditional Americanism, can push us over.

What, then, is Democrats' responsible alternative to a foreign policy campaign?         

Trump's consiglieri have chosen a wise(r) path

Trump is running home to Mommy McConnell.

Says the White House's legislative affairs director: "We believe very strongly … that if [the House] were to elect against our better advice [and] send over impeachment to the Senate, that we need witnesses as part of our trial and a full defense of the president on the facts."

The quote is quotable largely because the Trump mob family could have sent witnesses, in "a full defense of the president," to testify before the Intelligence Committee's impeachment panel. In flagrant defiance of the House's constitutional legitimacy, it chose not to.

More than that, however, is that the deceptions and misdirections of the Trump family's legal strategy are closely aligned to its three-year political strategy: Lie about everything. To say, "Let Trump be Trump" is to say, in its larger context, "Let gangsters be gangsters."

And boy are these sons of bitches good at it, since not one of them was born with so much as a singular brain cell of conscience.

Underboss Mike Pence, for instance, yesterday visited the family's made men in the House, inspiring them, perjuriously, as it were, to "'turn up the heat' on House Democrats and accuse them of focusing on impeachment instead of solving the nation’s problems."

Said Republican congressman Steve Womack: "[He] wanted to remind us that in our discussions back home, we need to talk about things that are not happening because House Democrats are consumed with impeaching the president."

Noted Vox.com's Ella Nilsen late last month:

"Democrats in the House have been passing bills at a rapid clip; as of November 15, the House has passed nearly 400 bills, not including resolutions. But the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee estimates 80 percent of those bill have hit a snag in the Senate….

"Many of the bills that never see the Senate floor are bipartisan issues, like a universal background check bill, net neutrality, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act."

Such is the family loyalty of Mommy "Caporegime" McConnell. When he's not whacking bipartisan bills so as to deny the opposition any power, he's protecting the boss under the ruthless, expansive code of omertà.

Some weeks ago I erred in predicting how McConnell, according to that code, would proceed. I believed he would open the Senate trial, immediately call for a vote, announce Trump's inevitable acquittal, and thereupon close the trial.

Instead, assorted consiglieri decided on a wiser path: Stage a reasonably lengthy show trial of Democratic recklessness and lawlessness, then acquit, thus allowing Trump to run around this freshly lawless land, pronouncing his complete exoneration by that upper chamber of sage deliberation.

And that's precisely what Mommy McConnell will pull off.