P.M. Carpenter

Dallas mayor leaves Democratic Party, adopts Republican 'thinking'

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson today announced that he's switching parties for a really bewildering reason.  

"Our cities desperately need the genuine commitment to [law and order] ... that has long been a defining characteristic of the GOP," he writes. "The future of America’s great urban centers depends on [it]....

"Unfortunately, many of our cities" — Democratic, of course — "are in disarray. [Democratic] mayors and other local elected officials have failed to make public safety a priority.... Too often, local tax dollars are spent on policies that ... coddle criminals....

BUT, "Alone among America’s 10 most populous cities, Dallas has brought violent crime down in every major category, including murder, year-over-year for the past two years." This, Mayor Johnson accomplished as a Democrat. 

SO, "today I am changing my party affiliation."

If you're able to follow that train of thought, then you too are a Republican.

Johnson's twisted, tortured GOPThink is only hours old, but he's already adopted another Republican characteristic: lying to voters.

The only reason he switched parties is because his political ambitions in deep-red, gerrymandered Texas demanded it. "When my career in elected office ends in 2027 on the inauguration of my successor as mayor, I will leave office as a Republican."

Otherwise I'd be political toast. This was in the submitted draft of Johnson's op-ed, but the WSJ's editorial page plenipotentiary helpfully shredded it.  

Is DeSantis' blood in Florida's political waters?

An interesting piece in Politico ... "Interviews with nearly two dozen lobbyists, political consultants and lawmakers revealed that DeSantis’ struggles as a presidential candidate have already eroded his influence in Florida." 

Here is an instance of Gov. DeSantis having fired at King Trump, and missed.   

"Now, it may be just a matter of time before Florida Republicans, once unflinchingly loyal, seek distance from DeSantis and his hardball governing methods," reports Politico. DeSantis-appointed college boards "are rejecting job candidates with ties to the governor"; Florida's Republican Party chairman "urged executive committee members to attend all GOP candidate events," meaning they're now free to dine with the governor's nemesis; and a DeSantis-friendly executive director of a state housing board has been cut loose. 

There's also a matter of DeSantis having tampered with the mother's milk of his profession. His campaign asked Republican legislators "to fundraise for him ahead of the GOP debate in August" (emphasis mine), which effectively was the same as asking them to put their money needs behind his. Politicians can be testy about that sort of thing.  

Of that request, one alienated lawmaker said "Few members of the Legislature have a relationship with Ron DeSantis. He’s like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. You can’t get to him. All you hear about is the great and powerful Oz." 

Another negative pressing against DeSantis may be that some Floridians have now had their taste of fascism — and don't particularly like it. The next probable state House speaker, Daniel Perez, cautioned his GOP colleagues about authoritarian arrogance: "The problem with wielding the power of government like a hammer is that the people start looking like nails," he said.

One lobbyist said that lawmakers are signaling that the "conveyor belt" legislature — rubber-stamping whatever DeSantis desires — "is coming to an end." Another Tallahassee lobbyist related that "There’s no love lost between the legislature and DeSantis.... They are faking it. They are waiting long enough to see the king drained of all his power. It’s a slow-motion coup."

If Politico's reporting is accurate, they're no longer waiting. But I question any uniformity of opinion among Florida's GOP lawmakers. At least some of the publication's coverage may be the result of Matt Gaetz's rumored hankering to become Florida's governor; the Politico story reads a bit like a Gaetz campaign press release.      

One thing's for sure, though. Mr. DeSantis horribly miscalculated his odds of succeeding in national politics, as I did as well.  

And Republicans say it's BIDEN who's not in control?

As our ship of state sinks calamitously in the east, we at least have the comic relief of House Republicans attempting to govern. This is not something they do well, in fact they rarely do it at all. They much prefer spending their taxpayer-supported time defaming Democrats. There is also the factor of detesting the very institution they're in charge of — the federal government — hence ad hoc dysfunction is the solid psychological foundation upon which their clusterfucking is built.

Yet prior to every congressional election they promise voters a smooth-operating House fully attentive to their constituents' needs, unlike those out-of-touch Democrats, they say, who spend their time fomenting culture wars on behalf of society's freaks, fairies and f.u.b.a.r. feminists — wars which, of course, Republicans must put to an end. Other than hustling dysfunction, flipping scripts is a favorite GOP pastime.

Lately, their most assiduous script-flipping is that President Biden doesn't really run the White House, the executive branch or the country. In a way it's a compliment, since they also say the country is almost hopelessly messed up. Republicans insist that it's society's freaks on the "far left" who are running President Biden, simple-minded doddering fool that he is. Here is a classic case of flipping the script, since the second-most powerful man in government — the Republican speaker of House, Kevin McCarthy — is not only powerless, he is overtly being run by the far right.    

Poor Kevin. His partisan comrades falsely contend that Biden is out of the loop, while McCarthy demonstrably lacks even a loop to be in. He's surrounded by a herd of 220 incorrigible felines, each belonging to an uninfluential "conservative" faction within a pseudoconservative framework. Their only cohesive ideology is that of nihilistic chaos — a specialty which naturally grants bomb-throwing imbeciles such Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene a slight stockholder edge in party ownership. The edge they wield is not influence; it's extortion.  

Poor Kevin. Earlier this week he told reporters that "We’ve got a plan to move forward" via a cordial settlement of all the fiercely fought budget battles. That was one day before his caucus publicly lighted his plan on fire and threw its ashes in his face. I say his caucus crossed him, which actually means a party of five — the chaotic nihilism specialists. But, they're in control, which further means they're as good as a House majority. Semafor describes McCarthy's budget-vote "fiasco" as an act of "House Republicans plung[ing] their way into previously unexplored depths of dysfunction" — or a speakerless House.  

Poor Kevin. The upshot of an ungoverned, or ungovernable, Republican caucus is that a shutdown of the institution they have long abused is now guaranteed (again). Keeping the government open for bad business had been McCarthy's principal desire since May, when the putative emasculated president single-handedly outwitted and overpowered him in the debt-ceiling deal. The speaker is fast earning the epithet of the most feckless pol in Washington.      

And why not? I mean, he's being bullied by a two-bit Florida grifter and little-girl molester who is so spectacularly incompetent he left his cloak-and-dagger plan to unseat Speaker McCarthy on a baby-changing table in a subterranean House bathroom. This idiot is the Guy Fawkes of America's lower chamber. Nevertheless, he has successfully weaponized stupidity.

He's been so successful, even his colleagues now openly characterize their party as "a total shitshow," one in which its leader "obviously can’t count" — votes, that is. We never would have seen Speaker Nancy Pelosi staging a doomed floor vote. Post-doom, McCarthy said "I don’t understand how anyone votes against bringing the idea up and having the debate." Everyone else can't understand why he invited the dumb idea to the floor to begin with.  

He's also a bit behind Republican times. "This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down," said Kevin. Washington Irving's best-known character could not have better summarized Republican ideology of the past several decades. But McCarthy may not have to cope with his uncomprehending fecklessness much longer. Not if the Florida grifter has his way. 

Gaetz might succeed in dethroning McCarthy. But as for the more pertinent, more important, concern, it's likely that Democrats, as always, will step in and save the government from total implosion. Semafor reports that Republican "moderates" — an ever-farther-right term — are "threatening their own sort of rebellion. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., has said that if the House does not pass a short-term spending bill to prevent a shutdown, he'll join with Democrats and sign a discharge petition forcing one onto the floor."

If there were no Dems in the House, we'd have no government at all. For the House's "leader" is as limply impotent as any other 58-year-old speaker without some official Viagra. Amusingly, however, Republicans insist that it's President Biden who lacks self-possessed vigor and vitality in his domain.  

Posted because it's cool

Below is a sheet from a 54-page Einstein manuscript that recently sold for $13 million at a Christie's auction in Paris. The handwritten note at the bottom right, dated Sept. 1939 — one month after the physicist, in a letter, advised President Roosevelt to begin developing an atomic bomb — is signed by one David A. Rothman (also pictured below) of Nassau Point, Long Island, where Einstein was summering. Rothman was a local store owner who had an interest in physics, although he never finished high school. He also played the violin (poorly), which helped to strike up a friendship with the more accomplished musical physicist.

If you can't make it out, the handwritten note reads: The above calculations are in Prof. Einstein's own hand used to explain to me without the use of mathematics the reason for the contraction of a rod in the direction of its motion and why a clock changes its rhythm. (I trust Rothman understood Einstein's calculations better than I.) 

The sandals Einstein is wearing were purchased at Rothman’s Department Store, which David opened in 1919.

No posts today. See you tomorrow. 

Is the "elitist" contempt justified?

Both the conservative Arthur Brooks (the American Enterprise Institute) and the progressive Ruy Teixeira (The Liberal Patriot), observes The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes, agree that dismissing "working-class voters as ignorant, irrational bigots, who really don’t understand the economy or even their own self-interest" is a Democratic conceit, which the writers also rightly label as "contempt." 

And that, add Brooks and Teixeira, is a political blunder of the first magnitude. Yet, that said, they then unwittingly justify this "elitist" Democratic contempt. Here's Sykes paraphrasing the twosome's criticism:    

"It’s important for Democrats to understand just how poorly the Biden economy has played with working-class voters so far: A recent Quinnipiac poll found Biden with a 25% approval on the economy among white working-class (non-college) voters vs. 52% approval on the economy among white college grad voters. 

"And white working class voters are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the national economy (75%), and are pessimistic (82%) about the cost of goods and services, a recent CBS News poll found."

Now, putting aside "irrational bigotry" as immeasurable statistically, it's obvious that some significant portion — in fact, 25% — of working-class voters are pretty well informed about the true economy. But I ask you: Is not contempt the proper attitude to hold about voters who are so willingly blind to economic reality that they believe President Biden deserves no credit for its smooth, positive workings? Who are pessimistic about the economy's short-term prospects, notwithstanding that virtually all systems are go?

"Contempt" is indeed a harsh word. It is not, however, an unfair word when applied to those who choose to simply not keep up.   

***

P.S.: A reader abroad inadvertently reminded me that the only problem with the above observation is that I foolishly limited it to the working class. In my defense, I did so only because that was the socioeconomic order addressed by Brooks and Teixeira, whom I was disputing. So, to be clear, the criticism applies to all classes. 

Nate Silver has doubts about a Biden-Trump race

I'm at a loss as to why data-junkie Nate Silver says the presumption is already creeping in. It has been presumed since 3 November 2020. I'm also bewildered as to why he finds probable reality "tedious." But, to each his own pet peeves.         

"Read media coverage of the presidential race, and a certain amount of tedious inevitability is already creeping in," writes Silver. "It’s just presumed that Joe Biden will once again face off against Donald Trump, making for the first presidential rematch since Eisenhower-Stevenson in 1956.... 

"By contrast, if you look at prediction markets, they take a much more cautious view. For instance, as of when I’m writing this on Monday morning, ElectionBettingOdds.com, which compiles odds from several prediction markets, reports that both Biden and Trump have only about a 65 percent chance of winning their respective nominations:"

I should note that I, at least, have not presumed a Biden-Trump race. For months I have speculated not unseriously that the political peril of Trump's indictments, once they really get rolling in four separate courts, state and federal, may start to catch up to Republican primary voters. I initially cast the odds of this development at 50-50, although I confess those odds are looking more precarious by the day. Nevertheless, I still believe Trump might well encounter some primary troubles as his legal woes rumble on.

As for Silver's exercised disgruntlement with what he calls the presumption's "tedious inevitability," I would counter with So what? or Who cares? Only the right-hand column is imbued with real vexation: the virtual tie between Biden and Trump, a statistical fact agreed upon by both betting markets and opinion polls.

Such has been the tedious consistency of this presumed race, which, after Trump's godawful four years in the White House, topped by an overt attempt to steal the 2020 election, few of us expected. I'd venture that what we did expect was a Trump ceiling of around 45%, not the 50% or 51% we have so often witnessed in public polls.          

The latest conspiracy theory: Lauren Boebert was "set up"

Matt Wallace is an Elon Musk bootlicker who also calls himself an "independent reporter," although he somehow missed the nearly year-old story about Musk having canceled his Safety Council, which Wallace still says he sits on. Wallace has 1.2 million followers, one of whom comments on this post, "Is it possible something was slipped into her drink?" Another says, "It is very likely it was a setup, and unfortunately she was not aware that she may have been played." Yet another commenter agrees with the "setup" conspiracy: "I think the even more obvious clue is the theater footage itself. Of all the seats in the theater, the two were dead center in the video. If they were a few seats in any other direction you couldn’t even tell what they were doing."

I assume Wallace is but another Trumpian-Muskite grifter who enjoys inventing Q-like conspiracy theories. But his commenters seem to genuinely believe that Boebert was set up. For years I have tried to imagine how a human brain could be so damned gullible. And for years I have failed.  

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Pew! Research: Americans think our politics stink - for the wrong reasons

The Pew Research Center surveyed 8,480 adults from 10-16 July 2023 on their opinion of the country's politics. Yesterday the center released its findings, which are disquietingly summarized in the headline, "Americans' Dismal Views of the Nation's Politics," followed similarly in the lede: "Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are unrelentingly negative."  

You may conclude: That's all I need to know, for surely our unrelentingly negative view of politics is grounded in an overwhelming disdain for Trumpism — itself unrelentingly dismal and negative. You might further conclude: no doubt our views of American politics have been sullied by Trumpism's ruthless attempts to undermine representative democracy; by the dizzying fact that Trumpism's leader also leads the GOP presidential pack while facing four indictments and 91 inevitable criminal charges; and by the additional fact that the Republican Party is being led by nihilistic wingnuts aiming to shut down the government and burn down the system.

Why read on? perhaps you're thinking, for the cause of our grave discontent is doubtless singular in this one expression: Trumpism writ large, bold-faced and italicized. That explains it all, no need to read further. Of course Americans have a dismal view of the nation's politics and are profoundly negative about its Trumpian politicians— all of this being self-evident, you might logically think. But your thinking would be wrong.  

What Pew Research found is, well, something else. It's not Trumpian politics that Americans disdain so much as it is just politics. "About six-in-ten (63%) express not too much or no confidence at all in the future of the U.S. political system," reports Pew. The same percentage of Americans are unhappy with both presidential candidates, and a roughly equal portion — 65% — "say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics." More than half — 55% — "feel angry," which would include large numbers of Americans angry at the competent sitting president, not the bumbling ex-POTUS under indictment.

Pew asked respondents to put their "feelings" about our politics in a word or phrase. All of 2% — not a typo — of willing respondents chose to characterize our politics in a positive way. Of this infinitesimal group, only 9% chose a phrase historically associated with the U.S., e.g., "freedoms and democratic values"; 8% said "the opportunity to vote in elections." On the flip side, 79% are negative, describing our politics as "divisive" or "corrupt."

This vast negativity ranges throughout every demographic group: the old and the young, Whites, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians. A particularly worrisome finding was that the younger generation — those under 50 — are "less likely than older people to say voting can have at least some effect on the country’s future direction." The chronological edges are more pronounced: 65% among those aged 65+ say "a lot" or "some" effect; only 52% of ages 18-29 say so.    

From the Department of Chronic Befuddlement — only 22% of respondents say that "partisan polarization" is politics' "biggest problem," which means only one in five recognizes that blind allegiance to Trump is deeply troublesome. Also astounding is that 57% believe that "conflicts between Republicans and Democrats receive too much attention these days." Let us repeat, despairingly: too much attention. Equal numbers see the Democratic and Republican parties favorably, 37% and 36%. 

From the auxiliary Department of Permanently Out to Lunch — 52% of those surveyed classify "recent presidential campaigns" as "dull." Since "campaigns" is plural, this means that a slight majority of Americans perceive the monstrous electoral event of seven years ago, which inaugurated four terrifying years of an authoritarian goon molesting virtually every respectable policy, was a yawner. More recently, recovering America from the authoritarian goon was also a bore, according to the incurably blasé.   

As suggested by Pew's respondents, remedies for our political mess are a mix of the ill- and well-advised. Reports the research center: "Large shares of Americans support ... establishing term [and age] limits for members of Congress [and the Supreme Court] and scrapping the Electoral College." Even the 22nd Amendment is a despicable and undemocratic reality; it would have barred FDR from a third term. In Congress, term limits would mean removing informed, experienced legislators and essentially replacing them with unelected, long-sitting bureaucratic insiders. Term limits for S.C. justices is another story, but age limits for either branch of government would be grossly discriminatory. As for the Electoral College, it should have been nixed decades ago.     

Taken together and summarized in the most succinct form I can manage, Pew's survey strikes me as an authoritative statement from the body politic announcing an extraordinarily dangerous indifference to America's greatest and most conspicuous threat. There exists rough parity in political opinions where there should be enormous asymmetry — i.e., nearly universal disdain of Donald Trump and his ism. In any society, one expects a fringe. But in Pew's polling, we instead implicitly see the dead heat between Trump and President Biden — an alarming, deplorable tie consistently confirmed in other polls.

In 1940 John Kennedy wrote his senior thesis at Harvard, titled "Why England Slept." We now need a definitive and perhaps motivating explication of why America is sleeping.             

Missing the point?

The Atlantic's Tom Nichols looks at what I would call "A Day in the Life of American Decline." Nichols calls it "The Fragility of Freedom."

A single senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has been holding up hundreds of military promotions for months, endangering the national security of the United States. The acting chief of naval operations says it will take years for the Navy to recover from the damage....

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is going to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Why? Well, why not? Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised the extremists in his party that if they made him speaker, he would do what he was told. And so he has; the People’s House is now effectively being run by members such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene....

Elsewhere, the governor of Florida and his vaccine-skeptic surgeon general are telling people under 65 not to get boosted against COVID. He apparently thinks that anti-science extremism will help him wrest the Republican presidential nomination away from Donald Trump.

And then there is Trump himself, the wellspring of all this chaos. In a country that understood the fragility of its own freedoms, we would see him for what he is: the leader of a dangerous cult who has admitted to his attempts to subvert American democracy....

We might at least expect the media to report on Trump not merely as a candidate but as if they were following the developments around a dangerous conspiracy or the ongoing trial of the leader of a major crime syndicate. Instead, we have Kristen Welker inaugurating the reboot of Meet the Press by leaning forward with focused sincerity and asking Trump, "Tell me—Mr. President, tell me what you see when you look at your mug shot?"

Yes it's bad. Really bad. Truth is, though, Kristen Welker was merely giving the viewing public what they wanted to see. Only politics addicts like me, you and Nichols saw her one-hour extravaganza into perilous irrelevance for what it was.

Which brings us to the essential point. Only in Nichols' lede does he observe that "America is in a state of emergency, yet few of its citizens seem to realize it."  

Sen. Tuberville is doing what the citizens of Alabama elected him to do, as are the majority members of the House of Representatives. DeSantis is maneuvering to Trump's right because he correctly sees his party as hopelessly benighted and yearningly authoritarian. Trump saw that years ago, which was what got him elected to the White House in 2016.  

That much accounts for nearly half the electorate. The other half, roughly, opposes Trump Inc., but not in a hair-on-fire kind of way. As Nichols asks: "Democrats and their liberal allies claim to be in full mobilization mode to stop Trump and defang his threat to the constitutional order. But are they?" Full mobilization mode means all-out war, yet what we're witnessing is mostly skirmishes.

Hence the army we're left with is overwhelmed. Almost half of the citizenry is battling for Trump, and most of the other half is dangerously indifferent to the "wellspring of all this chaos." It's just politics, the same old politics, or so too many believe. 

The essential point — as if you haven't already guessed it and as if I haven't already screamed it innumerable times — is that America seems to have entered its own Dark Ages, one rife with medieval obscurantism and an everyday drudgery of life that chooses to be unbothered by the shenanigans of the ruling class.

We can scream — again — Wake up! But we're a tree in an isolated forest. How to motivate and mobilize the faint majority opposed to Trump Inc.? I really don't know. But their slumber could kill us.

I opened the "Comments" section for the post on a Biden alternative, should you care to tell me I'm all wet. I'm curious about passions on this subject. Perhaps opinion is not all that passionate?

Trump's "Meet the Lackadaisical Press" interview

Trump said all kinds of zany things in his "Meet the Press" interview with host Kristen Welker, which for mental health reasons I chose not to watch. A solid hour, or whatever its length, of psychotic ravings by a broken-down demagogue who also recently warned that President Biden is taking us into "World War Two" is not the way to nurture one's sanity. Especially when we're looking at another 14 months of his demented drivel — at a minimum. We must pace ourselves.    

From his assertion that 15 million immigrants are "flooding our cities, flooding the countryside" this year (there were 2.7 million last year) to "We had the greatest economy in history" — "this beautiful thing" — but "We had to let some money come out" to, of course, "There is so much evidence that the [2020] election was rigged," Trump was in typical form: totally full of it. 

But one of his loony gems from nowhere struck me as particularly Trumpian: "Things are not going right now very well for the consumer. Bacon is up five times." 

Having contaminated the nation with an hour of Trump on an otherwise pleasant Sunday morn, NBC News felt (I guess) a responsibility to correct at least some of his deranged bullshit with a fact-checking article. As for the Bacon Watch: "In U.S. cities on average, the cost of sliced bacon is up by about 12% from the end of his term in office."  

Such is what we can expect for another 14 months. But there's something else we can expect, unfortunately. Ms. Welker replaced the often ineffably clueless Chuck Todd, and Ms. Welker's response to Trump's 500%, plus various other nonsense was ... "There are a lot of factors that have contributed to that."

Whoa! The proper response was something along the lines of, "You are so full of shit. And if you try to filibuster me and persist in rattling off more of this sillyass crapola I'm going to cut this interview really short." 

What, prithee, was the point of replacing Todd with Welker if we're only going to be served more of Todd's weak tea?   

Jonathan Last of The Bulwark observed this morning that Trump's "nonsense shouldn’t have been left to the after-action fact check because Welker should have debunked it in real time. She didn’t." Last suggested the way to interview him is the way Jonathan Swan did during "the worst of COVID."

I don't know Welker's salary for doing "Meet the Press." No doubt it's somewhere in the millions. Is that not sufficient for us to expect preparation?   

Or get elected.

The American right - from conservatism to nihilism

One of the many oddities of modern American politics is that Republicans have successfully demonized liberalism as an acceptable political philosophy as well as a word admissible in polite society, yet they've managed to lexiconically preserve conservatism just as they've become exclusively dedicated to nihilism.

This seems to be self-evident. After all, which better describes today's Republican Party? Conservatism — "a disposition in politics to preserve what is established" — or nihilism — "a belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program"? The question came to mind this morning as I was reading about the latest front in the GOP's culture war.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee chose to interrogate experts about "the historic rise in challenges to school books," reports The Washington Post. One such expert was Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. She "had been recorded arguing that ... this debate should not center on whether titles are sexually inappropriate for minors [but] about 'diverse materials ... that are about ... everybody’s right to see themselves and their families reflected' on bookshelves."

As the Post describes the ensuing scene, Republican Sen. Mike Lee "then pounced." Aha! "What we saw here was someone saying the quiet part out loud," he kvetched. "The goal is to sexualize children — to provide minors with sexually explicit material ... and then hide this content from the parents." Say what? Apparently it was so quiet, only Republicans could hear it.   

The point being, now even the distinguished ALA, founded in the bicentennial year of 1876, has become prey for the right's nihilistic culture warriors. "Politicians and parents on the right increasingly paint the association ... as a defender of pornographic literature for children — tying their allegations into a broader conservative movement that asserts school libraries are filled with sexually explicit, inappropriate texts." 

State libraries in the blood-red zones of Missouri, Montana and Texas have dissociated from the organization, "imperiling their libraries’ access to funding and training," notes the Post. Officeholding nihilists in nine other states are pressuring their state libraries to join the movement's disconnection. In Alabama, one state rep called the ALA "a conduit" for pornography. 

It's a kind of mass mania in which the ALA observes that there have been "1,269 attempts to remove library books in 2022, the highest number of challenges to books since the ALA began compiling statistics on the issue" more than 20 years ago. Continues the Post: "The disaffection with the ALA is unprecedented and related to larger societal tendencies to refuse vaccines and to doubt climate change, said University of Pennsylvania professor Jonathan Zimmerman, who studies the history of education. He said that for more than a century, the ALA benefited from 'professional deference' as the leading organization for librarians. That deference is gone." 

Its vanishment among the right's nihilists extends even to the U.S. military, once the most sacred cow among all of Republicans' critters. Even the Marine Corps, which once proudly entered debates only with guns blazing, has become a sissified target of right-wing derision.  

(Wouldn't you think these fighter planes with price tags of $90 million to $166 million apiece would come packaged with some sort of "Locate Me" function that you have on your $500 cell phone? Like Timex watches superior to Rolexes, that might work better than the "transponders and beacons" the planes come equipped with.)

Mysteriously missing Marine Corps jets aside, I'm genuinely puzzled by how the right has managed to retain the moniker of conservatism — "a disposition in politics to preserve what is established" — when nihilism — "a belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable" is not only indisputably more apt, "conservatism" describes the modern right not at all.

As noted earlier, also key to nihilism is that it's "independent of any constructive program." Republicans, the right, "the movement," the nihilists — you can call them many things but don't call them conservatives — are altogether devoted to destruction. They seek the annihilation of the justice system, the press, public schools, colleges and universities, fair elections, the culture's arts and entertainment, organized labor and big business, and, of course, government writ large. 

One would be hard pressed to think of one honored American institution they any longer embrace with love and protection. Republicans banished the word liberalism. Democrats should do the same to conservatism's relationship with Republicans. They're just nihilists, plain, simple, and painfully.