P.M. Carpenter

Jeb Bush's big adventurous week

Here's an out-of-body thought experiment for you. If you're a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, and you're the brother of a living U.S. president whose chief legacy is battling James Buchanan for the title of "Worst President Ever," and you have no verbal or apparent intellectual skills with which you can promote yourself, and your chief pre-nomination legacy is that you're willing to "lose the primary to win the general," and, finally, you have before you two GOP campaign models to imitate — that of your candidate brother's, who sort-of won the White House by misrepresenting his real intentions in every way, and that of the 2012 loser, who foolishly signed on to Kochian madnesses only so that he could win the primary — what do you do?

Why of course. In reverse order, you go with the loser's model, you chuck your pledge of primary courage, you inarticulately engage in all manner of irremediable intellectual blunders, and you remind everyone of your DNA match with the worst U.S. president in at least the last 155 years.

There's a trick to this thought experiment. One mustn't think.

And Jeb Bush has been doing a brilliant job of it this week. He began, Wednesday, by musing that "We need to figure out a way to phase out" Medicare — one of the two most successful social programs in world history — and on the following day he compounded his general-election doom by trying to sound smart: Medicare is "an actuarially unsound health care system," said he of no health-insurance worries whatsoever. So we should gut Medicare preemptively, since "your children and grandchildren" are, and I quote, not going to have anything.

Even the ineffably daffy Donald Trump — who's running what is perhaps the first unpremeditated presidential campaign in American history — figured out that the GOP's hardest-core base, old and aging bigots, likes government guarantees, which now, if anything, should be strengthened. Other successful conservatives, from Bismarck on, have figured the same.

Here's another thought experiment. When you're losing a battle of wits to Donald Trump, what do you do?

You guessed it; another trick question. You just keep doing what you've been doing, which is channeling Mitt Romney, whom I dearly miss. At least he fucked up everything with some style.

 

GOP polling just gets better and better, funnier and funnier

Risking as I am that historic moment of Donald Trump deplaning in Laredo — "despite the great danger" involved, said his statement, ah, there he is, he's down, on the ground, securing our border as I write — I pause to note that he's still in the lead:

PPP's newest national poll finds that Donald Trump is likely facing at least some fallout from his comments about John McCain over the weekend. Nevertheless we do find him narrowly leading the national field in our survey, which went into the field on Monday. Trump gets 19% to 17% for Scott Walker, 12% for Jeb Bush.

"Only 5%" of self-identifying "very conservative" voters support Jeb; Marco the Magnificent is tied with Ben Carson (at 10%); and "Chris Christie has just become even more unpopular than he was already," according to PPP.

Is this not justice? Do we not live in the best of all possible worlds? Donald Trump is whisking his party to certain doom; Bush, the probable nominee, nonetheless can't catch a break because of his party's overabundant moronity; Marco Rubio is tied with a lunatic nearly as certifiable as Trump; and Ahab Christie is gnawing off his own leg.

I saved the best from PPP for last:

He may not quite have as much support as Trump for the nomination, but Walker is the most widely liked of the Republican candidates following his announcement last week. 58% see him favorably to 15% with an unfavorable opinion.

Promise 'em global war on the day of one's inauguration, and one soars in primary popularity.

Fuck the general.

Is this not justice? Do we not, at this moment, live in the very best of all possible political worlds?

 

Dear Barney Frank: What are primaries for?

Barney Frank's twofold strategic argument for a bloodless Democratic primary season is indisputable. The "counter-argument made by some on the Democratic left that a closely contested nomination process will help our ultimate nominee" — Hillary Clinton — is an absurdity; lacerations inflicted upon any candidate in the primary process always hurt, and the scars show. The "counter-argument" is without merit. If candidates emerged more healthful from bruising primary campaigns, they'd all be begging for one.

Frank's second argument is also strategically sound (mostly).

I believe strongly that the most effective thing liberals and progressives can do to advance our public policy goals … is to help Clinton win our nomination early in the year. That way, she can focus on what we know will be a tough job: combating the flood of post-Citizens United right-wing money, in an atmosphere in which public skepticism about the effectiveness of public policy is high.

Aside from that fearmongering bit about Hillary having a tough time ahead — burdened, as she'll be, with her ultimately united billions pitted against billions from a hopelessly fractured opposition — Frank is, on the face of it, correct that a unified party, early, beats a party in prolonged turmoil.

The inextinguishable problem in Frank's advocacy? He's a good lawyer, but he fails to anticipate and answer the inevitable question in Democratic jurors' minds: What are primaries for?

Is he arguing for a 2016 version of the old party-boss system of presidential-candidate selection — one heavily reliant on, and strategically derived from, the "best bet"? I would have no problem with that argument as a philosophical venture; it is worthy of debate, and Frank makes an excellent prima facie case for it. Yet he omits tackling the cons, except the aforementioned absurd one. And this only weakens his case.

What are primaries for?

 

Trump's scrotum strategy

Trump has them by the balls, and if their hearts and minds don't follow … wait, those latter two body parts make no difference; it's merely grab the balls and up the keister, any which way Republicans turn:

Donald Trump says the chances that he will launch a third-party White House run will "absolutely" increase if the Republican National Committee is unfair to him during the 2016 primary season.

"The RNC has not been supportive. They were always supportive when I was a contributor. I was their fair-haired boy," the business mogul told The Hill in a 40-minute interview from his Manhattan office at Trump Tower on Wednesday. "The RNC has been, I think, very foolish."

The GOP is screwed. It can be very foolish in denouncing Trump, and thus lose his votes in the general; or, it can be very foolish in coddling or just tolerating Trump, and thus collect his votes in the general while heaving millions of others overboard.

Trump doesn't just have the GOP's balls in his hand, he has the party in a savage pincer maneuver. Ouch! And he gets his jollies either way.

A Trumpian third-party run would be fun, but superfluous. His current party is already being raped in the Bedlam of pseudoconservatism, and Reince Priebus is his main bitch. 

 

The indecency of Rick Perry's smackdown of Donald Trump

Yesterday, Rick Perry had his intellect-enhancing glasses on when he read:

When a candidate under the Republican banner would abandon the tradition of magnanimous leadership of the presidency, when he would seek to demonize millions of citizens, when he would stoop to attack POWs for being captured, I can only ask as Senator Welch did of Senator McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

Moving? Ah yes, it could have been, except that no Senator Welch ever asked Senator McCarthy that question. Gov. Perry fabricated the story. It never happened, it could not have happened, for there was no Senator Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings. There was a lawyer Welch, a Joseph Welch, special counsel for the Army, who asked McCarthy if he had, at long last, any decency left. But there was no Senator Welch. Perry's morality tale was immorally fallacious.

Did the former Air Force officer, former governor and current U.S. presidential candidate even read his speech before delivering it? (One assumes he didn't write it; "magnanimous," even with his glasses on, doesn't strike me as the kind of word Gov. Perry would be likely to scribble.) The "decency" passage was meant to be moving but got botched in the writing, which quite obviously was subjected to no editing or fact-checking. A schoolboy might have at least checked Wikipedia. Gov. Perry & Staff couldn't be bothered.

I submit that a presidential candidate going before network cameras and spouting a rudimentary error in historical fact is an act of indecency itself. Here's a man who seeks a job in which a thousand purported facts a day would be incoming, and some of those "facts" would hover over matters of life and death. It is scarcely fastidious to ask that such a man get his facts straight — at minimum, those facts that are checkable. Curiosity didn't kill the cat; indeed curiosity saves lives, it can even spare us another "Oops" after invading the wrong country (assuming, of course, the sitting president wishes to be spared the Oops).

What's more, several times last night I watched Gov. Perry mangle his history, and this morning I read several news items on it. Not once, in all the cable-news coverage, and not once in print, did anyone covering the speech note that Rick Perry, candidate for the U.S. presidency, doesn't know a senator from a lawyer. At the time of this writing, all I had found was this, from John Dean, of John Dean fame:

Could it be that cable anchors and print reporters are as sloppy and clueless as Rick Perry? One trembles at the mountain of misbegotten garbage hurling toward us each day. It's indecent — not much better than Donald Trump himself.

 

Having got, as is my custom, the godawful Republicans off my matutinal chest (see below), I'm now off to the back specialist, who I hope is a surgeon. I've had enough of this spinal nonsense and its narcotic palliatives, and I know myself well enough to also know that my lazy ass would never perform the physical therapy needed to help my back. Like Rocky I cry, Cut me!

Anyway, after seeing the specialist I have another, afternoon appointment. So, see you tomorrow. Perhaps by then the GOP smolder will be glowing, praise Jesus, and back I'll be.

***

The consult resulted in deep bewilderment, on both sides. My condition is "complicated," I was informed. Physical therapy was not suggested, and surgery, for now, is inapplicable. The specialist, who seemed a rather humorless man, did suggest that I could just live with debilitating pain and thus buckets of pain killers. His solemnity notwithstanding, I assumed his suggestion was a standard joke among the medieval torture-chamber crowd, M.D., Ph.D., and I laughed before realizing he was serious. This option I rejected, so now I'm scheduled for a massive injection of steroids, which requires fasting and a spine center visit and, I gathered, a good deal of prayer. I'm also scheduled for an "open" MRI, so that I don't dismantle a pricey piece of equipment in the course of a claustrophobic rage — a physical tic I picked up from the suffocating effects of COPD. The MRI's results may reopen the possibility of surgery. Till then, it's just me and synthesized opiates. But I have chosen to look on the bright side: As long as I keep popping them, I'm liking my odds, more and more, of a high-paying position on the Trump campaign. 

 

The GOP asks for help in solving its deadly Trump problem. It's too late, boys.

Steve Schmidt, former McCain adviser and all-round Republican strategist, appeared on "Hardball" last night, and he was in rare philosophical form. His fellow guests were former RNC chairman Michael Steele and perpetual mourner Joan Walsh, and before long, he had everyone bawling.

Chris Matthews' subject was Donald Trump, whereupon Schmidt instantly got weepy for — are you ready for this? — the Democrats. It is they, groaned Schmidt, who should fear the Trump phenomenon that is destroying the Republican Party, for as any thoughtful student of political history knows, our two-party system is a dialectic, a dance, a discourse, one that indeed requires two. Ergo, any Trumpian annihilation of the GOP would be an immense injury to the Democratic Party. It is the specter of opposition that haunts both parties and keeps them sharp, hence the absence of a healthy GOP spells only doom for Democrats, argued Schmidt, so the latter should assist the former in ridding politics of Trumpism.

As noted, within seconds, fellow guests Steele and Walsh were piling on in agreement, both of them broodingly tearful that the wicked Donald Trump is such a singular threat to Democrats' future. Oh dear, they chimed, any left-leaning partisans keen enough to perceive Trumps' roundabout destruction of the Democratic Party would do well to pray for his Republican extermination. Our entire political system hinges on this one moment.

I can see how Schmidt rose to the top of Republican consultancy. Last night he was selling a deceptive pile of horseshit — a pile deposited on our doorsteps well after, of course, the horse had left the barn.

I recall writing years ago that the Republican Party was slipping from major-party status into a cult-like weirdness that could only do harm to the two-party system. The GOP was already steeped in macroeconomic imbecilities and neoconservative slaughter, and it was swiftly becoming a national farce. If the party remained on its self-destructive course, our traditional political system might collapse, and probably would.

What did the GOP do? What else? Upon President Obama's arrival, it doubled, tripled and quadrupled down; it repeatedly fed the worst passions of the reactionary mob and thus systematically cultivated today's environment. It made a Donald Trump possible (just as three years ago it made a Bachmann possible, and years before that, a Palin possible). Now, the specter of a hearty opposition no longer haunts the Democratic Party nationally — not on the presidential level — and one can see this in Hillary Clinton's rather casual approach to the White House. Boldness and ingenuity need not apply; in fact, they'd be downright dangerous to a safe slide. Just sit back, say as little as possible, and let the Republicans hang themselves. That's smart, in the short term, yet it lacks the essentials of dialectical growth.

Throughout, some political observers, myself among them, were foretelling the two-party system's collapse; and I don't say this to preen, for every thoughtful student of political history could see the pile-up coming. For the good of that system, we begged the GOP to grow up, to jettison its self-vanquishing elements, to rejoin the — reasonable. The Republican Party instead went with and stayed with birtherism and Obama-as-Hitlerian-communist and Obama-as-healthcare-tyrant and all the other bugaboos that only dug the party deeper. Republican leaders were content then with that filth, and this, to his credit, Matthews repeatedly pointed out last night.

In brief, Republicans had their chance to turn things around — they had second, third, almost infinite chances to avert the apocalyptic implosion they face. Now it's too late; they've nothing salvageable, and no hope to offer. Any assist from Democrats in ridding the Republican Party of its lethal Trump problem would only aid that party in staggering along beyond its time.

Let it die the death it deserves. As for the two-party system, it found a way when the Whigs collapsed, and it can do it again.

 

Yeah, but he never met Donald Trump

It's in the antiquity of Plato's Republic, as I recall, that the proposition is advanced: Only the absurdly rich should be permitted to govern, for they are in no need of boodle, and would instead devote themselves to philosopher kingdoms.

Oops.

 

The year of the weird

First Read has the averages from the last five polls, which offer a preview of the the first debate's lineup:

1. Trump - 16.8%
2. Bush - 14.8%
3. Walker - 9.8%
4. Rubio - 6.2%
5. Huckabee - 6.2%
6. Paul - 6.2%
7. Carson - 5.8%
8. Cruz - 5.2%
9. Christie - 2.8%
10. Perry - 2.4%
11. Santorum - 1.8%
12. Kasich - 1.6%
13. Jindal - 1.4%
14. Fiorina - 0.8%
15. Graham - 0.2%

If I had the polling of Gov. Kasich, who just got around to announcing, and I saw that another governor who is under virtual indictment is polling nearly twice as well I am, I do believe I just might conclude that this isn't my year.

And if I were a former governor of Florida and son of a Republican president and brother of another sort-of U.S. president and saw that a Birther is polling better than I, might I conclude that something has gone seriously, weirdly wrong with my party? — and maybe, just maybe, I'm making an equally serious mistake in having anything to do with it? 

Again, I do believe I would. I'd go instead with the Mugwumps, wherever they are these days.    

 

Just so you know - and you should

Such is the toughness, the fortitude and the courage that make him a great American:

I’ll never shy away from defending the religious liberty of every American.

— Ted Cruz

 

Still grieving HuffPost's decision to banish Trump

Nate Silver joins me and other pragmatic observers in pushing back against the offensive journalistic trend of banishing Trump to the entertainment section:

Is the tyranny of the Twitter mob better or worse than the "Boys on the Bus" model of a group of (mostly white, male, upper-middle-class, left-of-center) reporters deigning to determine what’s news and what isn’t? I don’t know, but it’s certainly different….

The media isn’t going to stop paying attention to Trump. Nor should it, really: His candidacy is a political story and not just "entertainment."

What made HuffPost's inaugural decision to banish Trump so offensive? It wrapped itself in a profoundly anti-democratic righteousness. Only Ryan Grim & Co. know who's valid meat for the rabble; the masses should play only a helpful part in the raw selection. Democracy, brayed Grim in so many, yet few, words, is a dangerous thing: When the multitudes are allowed a say in what fecal matter rises to the top of unfiltered populism, then virtuous scribblers must intervene and declare the entire democratic backwash mere entertainment. In short, the virtuous must protect the rabble from itself.

The lure of this logic rapidly proceeds to an immensely valid reductio ad absurdum. Who else should be banned from political coverage and cast into the anonymous pit of mere entertainment? Scott Walker, I submit with no little evidence, is a preposterous clown far loopier than a Trump. Any presidential candidate who announces he might very well launch WWIII on his first day in office is but an ass of a dismissible ignoramus willing to say anything to appeal to his fellow asses. He is a miserable joke, a rimshot comedian of dreadful unfunniness. Out with his coverage, I say. Stick him in the classifieds, under "Yard Sales."

And if Scott Walker is a joke, what of Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Rick Santorum, and, let's face it, pretty much the entire, very unfunny Republican lineup? (Oh, and democratic socialism — long regarded as a terrible joke in American politics — hasn't a chance, so let's also banish Bernie from the Politics page.)

I don't blame Ryan Grim for fearing democracy, which once frightened the bejesus out of better minds than ours. But American democracy and its tumbrel of political populism are what they are, and — fear it, loathe it, deny it — they encompass Donald Trump.

***

Kill us softly, I guess.

 

Another inebriate morning with Donald Trump

Commenting on the Trump phenomenon is like being on a months-long drunk: It's a grievous addiction sustained only by barfing all over oneself, murmuring incoherently with great frequency, and promising oneself that tomorrow, well, tomorrow one will write about something profound.

Then tomorrow comes, and one swiftly re-slides into the ghastly muck — because though the muck be ghastly, the muck is also familiar, the muck is easy, and above all the muck instantly cures those shakes born of topical barrenness. Deprived of the Donald, one is stuck with the tremulous horror of Scott Walker's pitiable groveling, or Jeb Bush's wretched dearth of personality.

So one heaves some foul breath, pulls the cork, slumps by the toilet and commences to read and write — about Donald Trump, the fixer of hellhound woe.

Businessman Donald Trump surged into the lead for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination..., according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Support for Trump fell sharply on the one night that voters were surveyed following [his McCain] comments…. Even with the drop in support on the final night of the survey, Trump was the favorite of 24 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents … [which] marks a sixfold increase in his support since late May.

In other words, we have a baseline that's only mildly contaminated. At least 1 in 4 Republicans is supportive of venomous filth articulated in the rambling manner of a Mein Kampf, or, more precisely, what they perceive as Ihr Kampf — the secret of the former. The privilege of lily-white burdens they see slipping away; in their eyes, only a strong man of grisly, fantastic remedies can turn things around. Their struggle is that of a megalomaniacal prankster who has sinned only once, loves dogs and children, despises the established order, and who admixes unblemished hate with a transcendent vision of working-class purity.

These are the crazies, and yet the crazies are oddly blessed with small-r republicanism. They vote. And unlike the inattentively sane, they vote in primaries — thus they vote with disproportionate heft. It now makes no difference if their leader survives the party's interior democratic process, for the task of carrying the minority-as-majority's hatred will only shift tothers. The crazies are the core of the hardcore; hence they can't be rebuked, they can only be coddled.

Indeed, even better for democratic sanity when The Mouth fails in his interior quest, which of course he will. For he'll then go rogue, to sustain his own drunk. And "in a hypothetical three-way race, Clinton is at 46 percent, Bush is at 30 percent and Trump is at 20 percent."

The Republican Party has Jefferson's wolf by the ears. They procreated it, they raised it, they pampered it, and now it's going to bite off the GOP's ass in the most savage comeuppance in American political history.

… at the end of which, I still expect Trump to say, simply, Gotcha.

 

Prioritizing crazy

Here are some views of the GOP frontrunner in Iowa:

Speaking to reporters [in Ames] Saturday after an appearance at the Family Leadership Summit, [Scott] Walker said the next president will need to be prepared to take aggressive action against Iran, "very possibly" including military strikes, on the day he or she is inaugurated.... In his announcement speech at the beginning of the week, Walker had promised to "terminate" the Iran deal on day one of his presidency.

And Trump is the crazy one, the only one with the "crazies" behind him? 

 

On the periphery of American culture

Local news I'd watch:

That shot lifted from a site called TMZ, which reminds me, every now and then, of how utterly out of touch I am with American culture (except for shared tastes in local news). I just clicked on the site because of its blazing headline in a news aggregator: BLAKE SHELTON & MIRANDA LAMBERT DIVORCING. I had no idea who either Blake or Miranda is. And after reading the story, I still have no idea who they are, or why it is news.

I can't be the only one, right?

 

The mother lode of all things GOP

In a USA Today op-ed, Donald Trump reveals what would, in a perfect world, be his primaries-winning hole card: "A number of my competitors for the Republican nomination have no business running for president. I do not need to be lectured by any of them."

I struggled to think of the scattered few who do have some business running for president. Seeking the aid of online research, I discovered a delightful site called "2016.republican-cadidates.org," where I learned that "Considering their current position, the Republican party's prospects for the 2016 presidential election seem strong" because "the wind is at their backs." Don't ask. The site goes on to list all the Republican candidates, some of whom you may not have heard of; perhaps all of whom Mr. Trump has in mind, you know, for plausible political guidance.

For instance there's GOP presidential candidate Jack Fellure, who since 1988 has run in every cycle "advocating alcohol prohibition and the criminalization of homosexuality." Or there's Michael Bickelmeyer, who "wants to deploy weapons to fry [terrorists and drug dealers] from orbit," which seems potentially Trumpian. Or, there's my favorite — my favorite only because of the site's description of him. According to 2016.republican-candidates.org, Californian John Dummett, Jr. "is a Constitutional Republican who has become disenfranchised with both the Republican and Democratic parties." And the site's biographer kids us not.

(Jeb Bush, by the way, "is a heavyweight political contender who comes from a family of presidents," although "His left-leaning ideologies make him too liberal for the taste of some in his party.")

If Trump still prefers not to be lectured by John Junior, he could nonetheless benefit from the wisdom of 2016.republican-candidates.org.