Interviews like this one are more than gut-wrenching. They're unimaginable to other parents. They make one want to punch (I'm being restrained) Wayne LaPierre. I saw the full, live interview earlier, in which, toward the end, Mr. Parker lost it emotionally. I'd never last that long. I wouldn't last 30 seconds.
Our admiration for these victims of the demonic LaPierre is inexpressible, as is our loathing of the demon.
The vaunted Clinton money machine isn't as powerful as it's perceived. Reports the Washington Post:
Of the 770 people who collected checks for Obama’s 2012 reelection bid, just 52 have signed on as a "Hillblazer" bundler for Clinton or have held a fundraiser for her.
Consequently,
"I think you are going to see a groundswell [for Joe Biden]," said one prominent party funder.... "There is a lot of enthusiasm on the wires. This feels real."
Maybe, maybe not. What's not in doubt are two other perceptions — of candidate Clinton. The first, however unfair it might seem, is nonetheless quite real. A "well-connected" bundler frames it objectively: "People are saying, 'The press has always been out to get her, they are never going to let it go, she’s never going to get past it, what do I tell my friends?'" That's a perception that hangs on Hillary like a malevolent weight — even worse, like an immovable weight. Again, it may not be fair to the candidate — the criticism may be better directed at the press — but who in politics regards fairness as a rule of the game?
The second perception is much less impalpable: that of Hillary's political-management skills as a tangled sclerosis. In 2007-08 we watched Hillary plod along, committing unforced error after error, and showing little inclination for improvement. All was always well, according to Team Clinton, and Clinton herself seemed to actually believe it — until it was too late. Some watched in horror, while others looked on with glee (rarely have I grinned so often). The latter assemblage rather expected Hillary's poor management skills to stay put, and so far, her determination to do just that — wait until troubles morph into crises — has been brilliant. Here, for instance, is Maggie Haberman's lede in the Times:
Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that she understood why people had questions about her decision to use only private email while she was secretary of state and that she took responsibility for that decision, a shift from her past remarks about an issue that has dogged her since shortly before she began her presidential campaign.
The Clinton camp will maintain that this is no "shift." But a shift it is, after Hillary's joking — joking, mind you — about the chief drag on her campaign. ("'What, like with a cloth or something?' she said to a Fox News reporter last week who had asked whether she had 'wiped,' or erased, her email server before turning it over to the F.B.I. recently.") And the shift is agonizingly belated.
It is also an opening for Joe Biden. And the money knows it.
Hilarious.
"Finally found a category in which George Pataki leads the GOP field," tweeted FiveThirtyEight, whose accompanying link harbored these attack-enumerations:
Also from Quinnipiac:
Vice President Joseph Biden runs slightly better than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton against leading Republican contenders in the 2016 presidential sweepstakes, and has the best favorability rating among top Republican and Democratic candidates….
Biden tops Trump 48-40 percent. He beats Bush 45-39 percent and gets 44 percent to Rubio's 41 percent.
Clinton edges Trump 45-41 percent. She gets 42 percent to Bush's 40 percent and gets 44 percent to Rubio's 43 percent.
At this stage of the game, polls aren't about precision. They're about impressions. And Quinnipiac's poll reinforces that of a chronically problematic Hillary in the eyes of many Democrats. "Frontrunner" Clinton fares worse than the undeclared Biden?
She'd still win in the general, almost any Democrat would in 2016 — and that's the point. Uneasy, unenthusiastic Democrats deserve a realistic alternative to Hillary in the run-up — and no one, it seems to me, is more realistic than Joe.
For George Will, it's all Trump's fault:
For conservatives, this is the dispiriting irony: The administrative state’s intrusiveness (e.g., its regulatory burdens), irrationalities (e.g., the tax code’s toll on economic growth), incompetence (Amtrak, ethanol, etc.) and illegality (we see you, IRS) may benefit the principal architect of this state, the Democratic Party. This is because the other party’s talented critics of the administrative state are being drowned out by Trump’s recent discovery that Americans understandably disgusted by government can be beguiled by a summons to Caesarism.
I particularly enjoyed that "talented" part in Will's description of the administrative state's critics (see "Disclosure: The columnist’s wife, Mari Will, works for Scott Walker."). Why obscenely promote the Wisconsin governor when one can simply toss him into an anonymous mix of GOP "talent"? This is perhaps less tawdry.
In more general, enjoyable terms, Will misses the true irony. (I often wonder if he really misses rather obvious political irony, or just pretends to miss it.) If authentically talented critics of the administrative state there be, they have displayed their talents by focusing on the top of that state: President Obama. He, nearly exclusively, has been the bulls' eye of Republican critiques, and those critiques have been more malicious than analytical. Indeed, the two approaches don't compare. Blind rage — not reasonable scrutiny — has been the relentless modus operandi of GOP politics since 2009: Obama as dictator, Obama as unAmerican, Obama as traitor, Obama as bungler ad nauseam. All national ills and evil, sayeth Republican doctrine, reside in one man, and evil's embodiment sleeps in the White House.
The GOP's Obama-hate machine has deafeningly pounded this message into its dupable base for years. The base has, accordingly, accumulated an overabundance of pent-up hate. Malice, vengeance, hatred — they all require a release. Yet these internal emotions bulge in a kind of external containment; there evil sits, year after year, grinning, preening, taunting them from the White House. The base is about to blow.
All of which is to say, it was George Will and his party — not Trump — that have compelled the disgusted to summon Caesarism. Only a strongerman than Obama can not only envision what's wrong, but set things right. The incumbent's evil has gone too far for yesterday's critiques. The Republican Congress is full of squishes; unrepealed Obamacare and a treasonous nuclear deal prove it; the Bushes and Walkers are fiddling; and thus a Republican Caesar crosses the Rubicon, swinging and twirling his mighty sword of vengeance.
You, George, were summoning others to summon Caesar all along. Congratulations, you ironically befuddled twit.
When will Mike Murphy, that keeper of Bushels of boodle, wake up? Has Trump, the wicked wizard of the east, enchanted Murphy into sleepy delusions? Is Murphy really waiting for other plutocratic princes to save his sweetheart? Does he believe that happy endings are inevitable? That Disneylike villains — because of their villainy — always succumb, in the end, to blue-blooded righteousness? Just when will Squire Murphy wake up?
This morning's latest, from Quinnipiac:
Donald Trump leads the crowded Republican pack with 28 percent, up from 20 percent in a July 30 national survey.... Ben Carson has 12 percent, with 7 percent each for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
Less shocking than Trump's 28 is Bush's 7.
It is customary, in American democracy, for herds to swell in size, absent any internal thought as to why. In truth, it's the Friends & Family Plan at work, something that Tocqueville observed of the American multitudes nearly two centuries ago. If one's partisan mates favor Trump over Bush 2:1 and then 3:1, then one naturally supposes that he himself, she herself, must favor Trump too.
The majority — in this case, and for now, a plurality — has a mindless mind of its own. The herd moves where the herd will move. In the additional absence of buffalo guns blasting or wolves snarling, the swollen and swelling herd is content. Such is the way of GroupThink, not much of a surprise.
But then there is Murphy's thinking, which is shocking. There is a legitimate flipside to Obama Cool: In politics, if you're not panicked, then you're probably overlooking something very important. Yet it's the facade of Obama Cool that Murphy maintains in these hemorrhaging times, or at least he did upon last report: "Trump is, frankly, other people’s problem," said Murphy.
With each passing week Trump gains and Bush slides, and yet the man behind the $100-million Man believes that Trump is someone else's problem? Seriously?
Trump is gaining in another way as well. Remember when roughly 60 percent of Republican voters rather consistently told pollsters there's no way they could ever support the Donald? According to Quinnipiac, that percentage is down to 26 — which is in the neighborhood of Bush's 18.
Jeb Bush, once The Man destined to win the nomination by losing the primaries (and then the general), now competes with Trump in only a negative category. But, what, Mike Murphy worry? Shocking.
One gropes for the metaphysical or fantastic to explain such heedlessness, since the latter defies rational analysis. Is Murphy & Money dwelling in some enchanted forest, a happy place where the wicked are always vanquished by inexorable virtue of their wickedness? Tinkerbell, I believe, I believe, I do believe … that just might be the case.
The mission is that of destroying "mainstream-media liberal-journalist" Megyn Kelly (it's the thing to do now! it's herd-approved!) and the creep, in this instance, is Ted Cruz.
I finally learned something from a Fox News segment. And what I learned is that Ms. Kelly is smarter than Mr. Cruz, a better debater than Cruz, and, in a pinch, far more composed than Cruz.
Her gaping wonder at his gutlessness is a real video treat, as is Cruz's sheepish squirming.
Demagogues don't squirm, Ted.
My focus in grad school was American demagoguery, and I may have just had a related brainstorm. Earlier today I expressed my regret at not having not gotten in on the racket of Luntzian focus-grouping. You know what Donald Trump's 16 competitors really need? Not another focus group, that's for sure. But Lord do they ever need lessons in intermediate to advanced demagoguery. P.M. Carpenter's School thereof!
(Day One. Dunce cap fitted for Cruz. Pointer rapped on podium. "Today, students, we're going to discuss the bloody fucking obvious: 'Good demagogues don't squirm.'")
The steady and principled leadership of a true conservative:
First, asked by NBC’s Kasie Hunt whether he supported ending birthright citizenship — a constitutional principle in place since the Civil War era — Walker said: "I think that’s something we should, yeah, absolutely, going forward."
Later, asked by CNBC’s John Harwood to clarify his position, Walker retreated. "I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other" until the border is secured, he said.
Finally, on Sunday, Walker said without qualification that he would not seek to repeal the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to those born on American soil.
Dana Milbank's list of Scott Walker's dazzling pirouettes goes on, and on, from environmental flips to right-to-work flops to the utter incoherence of his stance on abortion, which also exceeds "one." Gov. Walker's latest mutabilities are indeed the result of the Trump Effect, yet these are but surface manifestations of a deeply soulless pol …
… who represents, to much of the GOP base, what GOP politicians at large have come to represent: mealy-mouthing poltroons.
Is it any wonder, then, that so many Republican voters are just wild about Donald? He may be a lunatic (a prerequisite for effective, high-level GOP politics), and he may be reckless, and he may not possess the vaguest idea of what an actual political program looks like, but by God he delivers his recklessly mad ravings with conviction.
Meanwhile, the only plausible challenger to all this is, as the Donald has correctly noted, putting his audiences to sleep.
Frank Luntz held another focus group. (I simply cannot express how much I regret not getting into this racket.) Observes Time magazine:
[A]ll of them had been selected because they like (or love) Trump….
The focus group watched taped instances on a television of Trump’s apparent misogyny, political flip flops and awe-inspiring braggadocio. They watched the Donald say Rosie O’Donnell has a "fat, ugly face." They saw that Trump once supported a single-payer health system, and they heard him say, "I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created"….
At the end of the session, the vast majority said they liked Trump more than when they walked in.
Of course they did; that's the way most opinions work. You show me a man or woman full of self-certainties and I'll show you a human being who will give no quarter to countervailing evidence. Indeed, when put on the spot, each will dig in deeper.
Yet the kind of adulation shown to the — let's be charitable — "unorthodox" Trump is rarely sustained. To sustain it, the adulated must tirelessly crank up the crazy, and with each crank, he loses a bit of that adulation among a bit of that base. Celebrated case in point: Joe McCarthy's sliding poll numbers well before his humiliating senatorial censure.
You will note, in Time's reporting, that "the vast majority" said they liked Trump even more after viewing his screened misogyny, etc. etc. We are unsurprised. But that means a minority did not — which might represent some aforementioned chipping away.
I just hope the chips, if that they be, turn not into chunks before February, March, April ...
I hadn't read Tom Friedman in years. It wasn't that I was boycotting Friedman in protest of his warmongering zeal and utterly wrongheaded analyses more than 10 years back. I just didn't think he was worth reading. My Friedman-free mornings have been the result of a studied indifference to bovine twaddle, not a pretentious boycott of it. (Whenever I want first-rate twaddle, there's always Charles Krauthammer.) I have since seen Friedman in interviews, his chin resting on clasped hands, looking every bit the scrupulous intellectual. I then recall the real Tom Friedman — impetuous, thoughtless, easily herded — and I remember why we became strangers, why I drifted away.
But, he hooked me this morning. "Bonfire of the Assets, With Trump Lighting Matches" was the ideal click-bait for a reintroduction. The headline held promise: Friedman would explain not only Trumpism, but the world along with it. Suddenly I just had to revisit his mind and see if it still grazed with the roaming critters of conventional thinking. I was not disappointed:
This is not funny anymore. This is not entertaining. Donald Trump is not cute. His ugly nativism shamefully plays on people’s fears and ignorance. It ignores bipartisan solutions..., undermines the civic ideals that make our melting pot work … and tampers with the very secret of our sauce — pluralism, that out of many we make one.
Here is Friedman in all his fussy horror. He hasn't the genuinely unfunny Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction to kick around anymore, but Donald Trump will do. And in classic Friedmanesque style, he got much of it wrong. Which is to say, I'd put money on my contrary opinion. ($10,000, Tom? If I had it, I'd bet it. How about $10?)
Trump is not only perpetually funny, he is vastly entertaining (excepting last night's Dubuque performance, which was a bore). Of course his nativism plays on people's fears and ignorance. That's the whole fucking point, Tom; that's the conventional commentary from months ago; and that's the bugaboo-as-revelation that continues to seize "pundits" who are horrible at chess — which you, Tom, most decidedly were some 13-odd years ago, and still are.
If watching Trump's nativists — who were there last generation, the generation before that and the generation before that, almost ad infinitum; the Irish-haters and the Chinese-prohibitionists and the Italian-detesters and the Jew-loathers — isn't amusing in its pitiable continuity, then, in politics, what is? These are the "rabble" of whom we speak when we write of the rabble. These are the Chosen of American unexceptionalism, The Virtuous People, the Christian soldiers who thrive on fear, malice and ignorance. And they are any student of democracy's dream, since their "shameful, ugly nativism" accounts for a pretty good chunk of reoccurring populism.
As for the third portion of Friedman's "insights," well, it left me in awe - a quite familiar awe, the very awe I recall experiencing some years ago, when reading Tom's awesome insight's into the Middle East. He dismissed the "big picture" then, and he fails to see it now. Donald Trump is some sort of demagogic pioneer? It is a prototypical Trump who ignores bipartisan solutions and undermines our civic ideals and tampers with pluralism? Good! God! Tom! Trump's "innovations" are but a weary extension of a decades-long Republicanism.
It's been in the papers, Mr. Friedman. And somewhere, George Orwell is lamenting that his advice to political commentators goes so resolutely unheeded by so many: "To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle."
In Trump's case, one needn't struggle for long. For it's rather easy to see that Trump is the best thing to happen to the American political system in years. He is the Destructor of our eager imagination; he is that which labors — finally — to make the Republican Party immensely radioactive to about 80 percent of the American electorate; he is become death to the GOP.
The Friedmans of this world see 20,000 cheering nincompoops in a football stadium, and tremble. Others see tens of millions of trembling Americans, and cheer. I am among the latter.
He can't be as stupid as he sounds. [update and correction; see: MEMO 2.]
MEMO 1. Re: The Yellow Peril. To listen to you, Donald, a graduate of the Wharton School, one would think you know nothing of international trade, global markets, or U.S. debt as a financial haven. Not to mention that China is taking one helluva beating at the moment. It almost seemed that even your easily bamboozled audience was scratching its head over that one, and on the verge of correcting you.
***
MEMO 2. Re: Taking super-PAC graft. Bad move. Really bad move. Don't say you weren't warned. Even your easily bamboozled audience booed the "idea." Bullshitting them about China is one thing, but grabbing plutocratic loot and promising to do nothing in return sounds like … Jeb Bush.
***
MEMO 3. Re: Aforementioned Bullshit. You need new material. Even your easily bamboozled audience seems a bit bored by the same, same, same lines. They have your speech (singular) memorized. Who doesn't? The mystery is already gone.
***
MEMO 4. Re: "Unbelievable." There are other adjectives in the English language. Learn one or two of them. We're beggin' ya.
Brother, have you heard the latest Good News? No doubt you have, for the Lord is raining blessings upon us; they're a bit hard to miss. The most recent shower of beatitude comes in the reopening of warfare betwixt Roger Ailes and Donald Trump — Satan and Beelzebub, or is it Beelzebub and Satan? Who the Hell cares, I suppose. The Good, Uplifting News is that the scaly fight for the GOP soul has re-erupted.
Last night, the Donald proposed that Megyn Kelly take another vacation and he retweeted that she's a "bimbo." This caused Satan/Beelzebub to writhe in Miltonian agony. Subsequently, he zipped off a scorching damnation of the crude blasphemer Trump, whose "unprovoked attack," said Ailes, "is as unacceptable as it is disturbing."
Ailes continued, "Donald Trump rarely apologizes, although in this case, he should." He finished with a wickedly comical flourish, mixing the Lie with the Truth, as is Beelzebub/Satan's way: "All of our journalists will continue to report in the fair and balanced way that has made FOX News Channel the number one news network in the industry."
I think we'll have to give this round to Ailes. Trump responded this morning with his own statement that said "I totally disagree with the FOX statement." But as for his Twitter page? All I see is Trump's cowered retweeting of one @ASA_Patriot, who assured the Donald, "I now flip to other channels at 9:00pm."
That's it. A rather uninspired performance by the prince of mean, who is, I hope, merely licking his wounds.
The Good News, however, stands. The war betwixt Ailes and Trump is back on, and neither of them can emerge from it unscathed. In the end, each will leave the field of battle with his own army depleted — Fox News especially. Once the right-wing truth-teller, it's now the establishment voice detested by the insurgents. The hellish revolution is coming full circle.
Writing for Politico Magazine, Michael Lind is "disappointed to report that 'The Best of Enemies,' the new film about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, is the worst of documentaries" — which I was disappointed to read. I was looking forward to seeing the film. I should have known that commercial pressures would gut it of any value.
After noting some "minor lapses" in approach, Lind remarks:
Far worse is the utterly unintellectual nature of a movie that is supposed to be about two intellectuals.
Buckley is identified as a conservative and Vidal as a liberal. But what these philosophies meant for these two, beyond opposing perspectives on pornography and the Vietnam War, is never explored. Instead, the film-makers have compiled clips of the two trading insults, culminating in the infamous exchange in which Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and Buckley called Vidal a "queer." At first the spectacle is funny. But it soon becomes depressing and squalid. Anyone unfamiliar with the history of the time would see only two pompous men with old-fashioned accents insulting each other.
Lind's review is good stuff, though, as he surveys (often from a personal point of view) the philosophical permutations of both Buckley and Gore, which I'll leave you to read on your own, in your own good time, rather than recap them here. Perhaps best, mixed into it all, is this plucked quote:
Referring to National Review’s subscription base, [Buckley] complained to me: "Half of our readers seem to live in Arkansas."
Now more than ever.
I'd love to know what the devoutly Catholic Bill Buckley, somewhere in a purgatorial afterlife, thinks of his party's pre-afterlife.
I am grievously out of touch with popular culture, but I gather it has now invaded political punditry? I ask because this musing is featured prominently in The Hill's reporting:
I think [Trump is] going to be the nominee: He’s proven that no matter what he says, people dig him.
— Howard Stern, 24 Aug. 2015
I tend to agree with Mr. Stern; it's just that I don't know what he's doing in The Hill.
Maybe this is a good thing. Politics was once our national sport, before technology whisked us into obsessions with all things non-political. Perhaps Trump — by securing the interest of the country's Sterns — can re-meld cultural commentators with what's actually important. And maybe some of the apolitical will then come to see themselves for what they really are: ignorance that "digs" popularizers of it.
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