The Carpentariat

[Not all of us] have lost our sense of proportion

It seems I spoke a day too late. From HuffPost:

Activists laid body bags outside the White House Wednesday evening to protest … Trump and Republican officials' catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The demonstration started with a mock 200-car funeral procession beginning at the residence of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, passing by the Capitol building, and ending at the White House, where demonstrators dumped body bags onto the sidewalk…. Religious leaders delivered eulogies, while other demonstrators gave speeches about loved ones they’ve lost to the virus.

The protest was part of a nationwide “Day of Mourning” … [and] similar demonstrations took place in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas and other states. More demonstrations will take place throughout the week and will include mock funeral motorcades outside the office of Sen. Lindsey Graham in Columbia, South Carolina, and outside a property owned by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Presidential pouting

Reading Trump's executive order titled "PREVENTING ONLINE CENSORSHIP" is a journey into the surreal. In classic Trumpian fashion, the document is mostly a misdirection; In ominous language, it addresses a subject that lies outside the president's nitwitted dispute with Twitter:

"In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick [sic] the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power."

Most impressive and powerfully patriotic — except Twitter did not "hand pick [Trump's] speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet." What it did was to clarify and correct official authoritarian disinformation of the sort that one would expect to vomit from the diseased organs of Pyongyang.

It's all quite ironic and characteristically hypocritical of Trump, in that just two months ago his reelection "campaign sent cease and desist letters to TV stations to try to get them to stop airing [a Biden super PAC] ad criticizing his coronavirus response." Now that's censorship.

But let us not totally despair over Trump's tantrum of a retaliatory executive order, for it also contains quality entertainment:

"As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets [with a warning label]."

No further comment is necessary.

I'm with her

This struck me as a precise representation of the religious right.

We have lost our sense of proportion

An honest, objective question.

First, I need to be clear. I am in no way unconcerned about the manner of George Floyd's death; it was brutal, cruel, unlawful, and almost certainly racist. I am also sympathetic to Minneapolis' African-American community's reaction to his needless death; it was understandable, likely inevitable, and probably overdue.

What does concern me is that a sitting president of the United States has, to date, according to some scientific studies, essentially murdered about 90,000 Americans of all ethnicities and ages. And yet, no protests, no marches, no demonstrations, and no violence.

At the very least, a funeral procession should pass by the White House every day, men in black, women in dark veils, children following, all socially distant and in masks, many holding elegiac signs in memory of the tens of thousands lost and naming the man who is responsible for their needless deaths.

This nation is living the authoritarian rot of Stalin's infamous, sociopathic aphorism — only mildly modified here: "If only one man dies of unjustified police violence, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that's only statistics."

Why are we applauding the understandable fierce reaction to one man's death, and yet quietly dismissing the wholly condemnable deaths of 90,000?

Borowitticism

How strategic is Mitt Romney's conscience?

I don't mean to be cynical about his probably heartfelt tweet below, however I still can't help but think that Mitt has his now-mainstream assault sights set on that higher office in what he hopes is a historically, socioeconomically ruinous, 2021-2024 post-Trump world.

Once Agent Orange has been gone from the White House for a while, leaving nothing but the metaphorical deforestation of once-prosperous America, perhaps at least a plurality of the pseudoconservative rabble will return to the conservative fold — with Mitt defining it for them.

No Americans should fear enmity and harm from those sworn to protect us. The death of George Floyd must not be in vain: Our shock and outrage must grow into collective determination to extinguish forever such racist abuse.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 28, 2020

3 1/2 things Don Jr. wants you to know

In a fundraising email from Prince Donnie, the old soft sell:

The Democrats have become the party that:

* Disrespects the American Flag and praises China
* Chooses BIG GOVERNMENT socialism over American prosperity
* Prioritizes illegal immigrants at the expense of American People
* And, would rather see America fail than my father succeed

Their liberal agenda would be a DISASTER for America if they were ever given the power to implement it…. We can’t sit by and let our Country be overrun by Big Government Socialists like Sleepy Joe, Cryin’ Chuck, and Crazy Nancy.

Let's assume that in Junior's list of four Democrazy convictions that Sleepy Joe, Cryin’ Chuck and Crazy Nancy really do detest the American flag and adore China, love big government only for big government's sake and would shower benefits on illegal immigrants while stealing the candy of noble, middle-class white folk. Let's assume those three items are all true, and Junior's prehensile readers need to know it.

His fourth itemized Democratic conviction, though, is absurdly, superfluously ironic. By now, even Junior's Everyman fundraising marks know that the more Pop succeeds, the more America fails, falls and flops. But Pop hates just the right people, so it's all worth another $25 pitched into the Trumpism pot.

When failure — through incompetence, corruption, cronyism and cretinism — is defined as success, one really can't lose.

Far left(?) meets center left

Socialist Bhaskar Sunkara has chosen to back Joe Biden, although grudgingly and with a dram of paranoia and a dollop of a persecution-complex: "'After the Nevada Blowout, It’s Bernie’s Party Now,' read a headline I wrote for Jacobin, the magazine I edit, after he won that state’s caucus in February. We all know what happened next. Centrist leaders within the Democratic Party, along with millions of ordinary voters, rallied behind Joe Biden."

No, what happened next had been predictable since Iowa and New Hampshire. The primaries moved to the Palmetto state, where the African-American vote put Biden back on top; where Sanders' deadly weakness among the party's chief minority base was strongly revealed; and whereafter Sanders' electoral weaknesses and Biden's strengths could no longer be denied by a majority of the Democratic rank and file. No "centrist leadership" coup was either present or implied.

Continues Mr. Sunkara, straining for an accommodation acceptable to his socialist readers:

"Like center-left liberals and progressives, during the coming presidential election and beyond we aim to defeat right-wing populism. The difference is that we refuse to do so on the centrist terms that we believe helped create it in the first place….

"[So] we are campaigning for core demands like Medicare for All, saving the U.S. Postal Service from bipartisan destruction, organizing essential workers to fight for better pay and conditions throughout the coronavirus crisis and backing downballot candidates, mostly running on the Democratic ballot line."

How far socialism has fallen. Or should I say, how high the Democracy has risen? Biden and Democrats are virtually all in favor of some form of Medicare for All — a public option, Biden's option, is essentially the same thing; the U.S. Postal Service would be secure under a Democratic administration; and just who from the center to center-left to progressivism — from even the center-right, for heaven's sake — opposes better pay and conditions for workers? All that worries are the potentially wacko downballot extremists supported by Mr. Sunkara et al.

But again, look at the policy priorities of America's socialists. They are largely mainstream. And yet organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America pride themselves on ideological virtues either unknown or unacceptable to rank-and-file Democrats. Something tells me most of the virtuous have never met one the pragmatic.

He golfs, tweets, and ...

More crap — this pile, rather humorous — from Trump's authoritarian impulses:

"Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices," he tweeted today. "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen" (my emphasis).

Writes CNN: "Trump did not elaborate on what actions he could take. But the threat is Trump's clearest expression of intent to use the power of government to target his perceived political enemies in the private sector … [and safeguard his] misleading claims about mail-in voting and his baseless insinuations that a cable TV news host had a hand in an aide's death decades ago."

I'm not aware of any constitutional censorship actions he could take (not that that would necessarily stop him). But the tweet above is a Trumpian action in itself — that of authoritarian masturbation.

He had a cost-free sandbox all to himself at Twitter, and now the platform has gone and muscled its way in with an occasional fact check of the president's torrent of extraordinary lies. In response Trump fumed, screamed, pounded his desk is now pounding himself in furious self-abuse.

Trump unintentionally promotes Scarborough, and Romney guts Trump

If there was any chance of Sen. Romney and mob-boss Trump exchanging Christmas cards this year, it's now completely, totally, entirely, altogether gone with the wind.

I know Joe Scarborough. Joe is a friend of mine. I don't know T.J. Klausutis. Joe can weather vile, baseless accusations but T.J.? His heart is breaking. Enough already.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 27, 2020

As you may know, T.J. Klausutis is the widower of Lori Klausutis, the young Scarborough staffer who died in his Florida office in 2001 (while the congressman was in Washington, D.C.). There were no signs of foul play when her body was discovered early the next morning. "A medical examiner determined that [she] fainted as a result of an undiagnosed heart condition, fell, and hit her head on a desk."

Nevertheless, former congressman and MSNBC host Scarborough has been subjected to relentless calumny and accusations of murder ever since — first from Trumplike conspiracy mongers on the left, and now from the real, rancid thing himself. Last weekend he tweeted, "So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that," and earlier, "Did he get away with murder? Some people think so."

Then yesterday, in the Rose Garden, Trump falsely asserted that Mr. Klausutis wants to "get to the bottom of it." In fact, he has "express[ed] no desire for the matter to be further relitigated or publicly investigated," reports Business Insider. T.J. and family simply want to be left alone, for fear of "retaliation by online trolls of the type who went after parents of the Sandy Hook massacre victims," writes the Washington Post.

Scarborough is a public figure of considerable notoriety who, as a Trump critic, surely expected the president to take his customary, lowest road of counterattack. The television host can take care of himself. But the "heartbroken" Mr. Klausutis is another story. And only a true, "vile" sociopath would violate the widower's privacy merely to sling mud at a TV critic.

***

Update — Writes Mr. Klausutis to Twitter's chief executive:

"The frequency, intensity, ugliness, and promulgation of these horrifying lies ever increases on the internet. These conspiracy theorists, including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their bile and misinformation on your platform disparaging the memory of my wife and our marriage….

"My request is simple: Please delete [Trump's] tweets….

"I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain."

Trump, hydroxychloroquine, and clinical psychosis

​​​​​Trump recently revealed he's been taking hydroxychloroquine for days. But that — as is true with everything Trump says — was a lie. He quite obviously has been an HCQ addict for years. And I can prove it.

In the online medical magazine HCPLive — "a comprehensive clinical news and information portal that provides physicians with up-to-date specialty and disease-specific resources" — an article was published in April 2020 titled "Adverse Effects of Hydroxychloroquine, Chloroquine, and Azithromycin." I quote:

"The drugs … cause a wide spectrum of neuropsychiatric manifestations, including agitation [check], insomnia [check], confusion [check], mania [check], hallucinations [check], paranoia [check], depression [check], catatonia [could be, at critical times], psychosis [check], and suicidal ideation [really?]."

Since for years Trump has publicly exhibited at least eight of the 10 neuropsychiatric manifestations of hydroxychloroquine abuse, we can be absolutely sure of one of only two presidential conditions: He's gone bananas because of a decades-long HCQ addiction, or he's simply been fucking nuts from the get-go, and his chronic hydroxychloroquine usage has only exacerbated his morbid derangement.

Given my vast clinical psychiatric experience and, by now, countless hours of video observation, I'll go with the latter.

From "Dead Right" to "Trumpocalypse"

The Guardian surveys David Frum's latest release, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy:

[He] argues that "democracy is tested by its ability to deliver security, prosperity, and justice". By that metric, the Trump presidency is a shambolic failure.

In a book mostly written before the pandemic, Frum details the efforts of the 45th president to gut the rule of law and institutionalize "white ethnic chauvinism", leaving the country reeling, the constitution bruised. Trumpian alchemy has turned gold to lead....

He declares that 21st-century conservatism has "delivered much more harm than good, from the Iraq war to the financial crisis to the Trump presidency". Yet he remains committed to his Burkean worldview, of individual autonomy fused to social cohesion.

Unlike so many of the NeverTrumpers, Frum's views are no recent conversion to a saner side of politics. In his superb, absorbing and eloquent Dead Right, published in 1995, he unfavorably critiqued late 20th-century conservatism as well, writing that it failed to reduce deficits or "big government," that its ally the Religious Right was a dangerous fraud, and that its turn from economic issues to culture wars was a major political error.

Even if you disagree with much of Frum's then-libertarianism, you would find Dead Right entertaining and uniquely informative in its early divergences from the maddening right-wing mindset. I recommend reading it (first) as ideological background to Trumpocalypse.

A greater depression or sharp recovery?

In a whopper of outlying opinion, Obama administration economist Jason Furman predicts that "we are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country. [A recovery] can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V."

To fellow Obama administration economist and metaphor maven Austan Goolsbee, however, Furman's prediction should be less frightening to the Biden camp: "I view it as Trump left the door open and five rats came into the kitchen and you’re going to brag, 'Look I got two of the rats out?' There’s a high risk you look completely out of touch if you still have double-digit unemployment rates."

Since our short-term economic future is pretty much all guesswork for now, I as a nonprofessional feel free to also predict with as much certainty as Furman. In Goolsbeesque language, I view it as Trump left the door open and five rats came into the kitchen and maybe, maybe one of them will have left by November.

Given the vast number of small businesses (which employ about half of all American workers) that have either gone bankrupt or are headed that way, and given the ripple effect from that dreary phenomenon plus virus-related downsizing at major firms, and, most ominous, given that the economy's premature reopening in so many states virtually guarantees a massive, second-wave covid offensive, my guess is that fall will look more like 1932 than a rosy opening to 2021.

Still, even assuming I'm correct, the Biden camp has legitimate political worries about the Trump camp's divorced-from-reality economic claims. As Sen. Chris Coons puts it: "No matter what the recovery looks like, I expect President Trump to either take credit for things he had nothing to do with or to avoid blame for things he helped cause."

About that, there is no question. The one that will hang for months, though, is how many voters will buy Trump's bullshit?

A (hopeful) peek at November

Michigan and Pennsylvania are prerequisites for a Biden victory, After that, what can put him over the top? Is it Wisconsin, Arizona, or Florida?

— Dave Wasserman, Cook Political Report

Wisconsin was once the most progressive state in the nation — Fighting Bob La Follette, his Progressive Party and all that. In 2016, it went a little crazy, but current polls suggest a rather firm lead for Biden. Michigan seems to have regained its sanity, too, with Biden leading in most state polls. Same for Pennsylvania. My money would also be on Arizona and Florida; Biden leads in both, although within the margins of error. In Florida, however, Trump will likely whack thousands more of its citizens in the second, pre-November coronavirus wave, with a huge assist by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

All of this assumes, of course, that the entire country doesn't go completely bonkers as it did four years ago — with Trumpeteers venomously riled up, Democrats lounging at home or forgetting to mail in their ballots, and some dizzy-brained third-party candidate draining the Biden vote.

Let's not pretend we ever pretended

Out of curiosity I clicked on Paul Waldman's rather oddly titled, Washington Post column, "Can we stop pretending Trump is fit to be president?" I clicked off after the lede: "At various times over the past three and a half years, many of us have asked what would happen if President Trump truly went over the edge or if his behavior became so frightening that his unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth could no longer be denied."

When did "many of us" start pretending? When has his behavior ever been reassuring? When has his "unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth" ever been questioned? And why would Waldman specify "the past three and a half years"?

That Trump is a bullying imbecile, a racist, misogynistic goon in possession of an extraordinarily narcissistic personality was evident well before his presidential- unfitness clock began ticking.

During the 2016 campaign, he publicly mocked a disabled reporter for the NY Times; he belittled a Gold Star family; he questioned John McCain's wartime valor; of a protester he said, "I'd like to punch him in the face"; of women, I "grab 'em by the pussy"; of his penis, for God's sake, "I guarantee you [it's not small]"; of voters, they'll "get bored with winning"; of Mexicans, they're drug-runners and rapists; of Muslims, there should be a "complete shutdown" of their entering the U.S.; of his sacrifices in life, "I've had tremendous success"; and of honest, fair elections, "I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win."

An improved lede for Waldman's piece: "Repeatedly, over the nearly two years before the 2016 presidential election, everyone of sanity asked why anyone would vote for a man so over the edge; a man whose behavior is so frightening that his unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth cannot in any way be denied."