In an earlier blog post, I mentioned that one key indicator in this election would be former Republican office holders who have no further apparent interest in seeking political office and how many of them speak up against Trump or even for Hillary.  Since these people don’t have to worry so much about holding the base or helping to keep the congress Republican, they can speak their conscience.

We had two outright Republican endorsements for Hillary this morning.  Larry Pressler former GOP senator from South Dakota and Arne Carlson, former governor of Minnesota. Neither of these guys are heavy weights nationally, but these kind of endorsements get noticed in individual states.  And the Republicans for Hillary web site is surely sitting on a staging server for launch some time around the convention.

Here is the Carlson endorsement posted on Politicalwire.com

“I’m not often critical of the media, but I am this year. And it’s driven mostly by television, and ratings. They never really vetted Bernie Sanders, and to this day have not vetted Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton? Oh my God. No human being in history has been more vetted.”

— Former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson (R), quoted by City Pages, announcing his support for Hillary Clinton who he said is a “very kind, a very good person.”

As for current office holders, Morning Joe showed clips of McConnell, Ryan, Roger Wicker (head of the GOP senatorial campaign committee and senator from Mississippi), and others flatly and tersely refusing to answer reporters’s questions about Donald Trump. Some of them avoided the reporters entirely.  When Lamar Alexander of Tennessee refused to talk about Trump, a reporter said, “but he’s your nominee.” the normally mild mannered Alexander snapped,”He’s not the nominee yet,”before storming away from the cameras.

 

 

Can’t say this is one of my more thoughtful posts.  But, since I’m still not over the two Reagan landslides, I want to enjoy this while I can. So, just from today:

• Noticing in an unscientific way that cable news (o.k., MSNBC) doesn’t cover Trump rallies wall-to-wall like they did during the primaries when he was Coney-Island-Side-Show essential viewing and the ratings were great. But, now it’s a general election, and all the free media exposure is drying up. Or is at least equal to Hillary’s time.
• He’s losing in Kansas. He’s losing in Utah. And the year is not 1932.
• He’s losing by 13 points nationally.
• Yesterday he said, “I’m much better for the gays.”
• Newt Gingrich proposed recreating the House Unamerican Activities Committee
• Bob Corker, respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has said positive things about Trump’s foreign policy views before yesterday, today said, with customary senatorial understatement, “I think I made a big mistake.”

 

Both Laska and I debated all through high school.  We were pretty good at it, but even the best lose debates now and then.  One of the sure signs you were losing is when you realize that your entire argument is based on semantics.  Sometimes that’s all you’ve got so you argue it as best you can and take your lumps. It’s worse when you get too emotional about a subject and too contemptuous of your opponent—and then start to see meaning and significance where there isn’t any. And you just get angrier and talk faster because you think you are making a point.  And, if you can just talk faster and louder . . . .

It’s not just Trump. Although of course it is, also, Trump.  I’m referring to all the times that Trump and other, competent, Republicans, like Lindsey Graham, have seized on the president’s reluctance to use the words “radical Islam” in talking about Isis or Isil.  The GOP has so much contempt for Obama and live in such an echo chamber that their foreign policy statements increasingly sound like the kids from Norwin High School that Laska and I used to routinely trounce.

This morning Newt Gingrich pointed out, accurately, that Churchill didn’t hesitate to use the word “Nazi” in referring to his enemies in 1940.  Which he did. Because they called themselves “Nazis”. And, he pointed out, accurately, that Kennedy and Reagan called their enemies “communists.” Which they did. Because they called themselves “communists.”

Remember back in 2012. Romney thought he had Obama nailed about the exact moment he used the words “act of terror” in regards Benghazi. Notice Romney’s cross examination of the president on this point. It’s what a high school debater does when all his friends agree with him and he’s lost all perspective.

Here’s the clip. Oh, just watch it again. You owe yourself a few minutes of fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kbv7H_Sp-U

The president has said that he refrains from using terms like “radical Islam” because Isis might use that for propaganda benefit. I’m not qualified to weigh in on the tactical merits of how the use or non-use of the term may play in the Middle East.

It does occur to me that during the troubles in Ireland, I can’t remember—and admit I’ve only had time to do a cursory check—but I’m pretty sure that U.K. and American governments rarely referred to the IRA as “Catholic terrorists” or their cause as “radical Catholicism.” It was certainly advisable for the U.K. to be in a fight with terrorists rather than Catholics. I don’t know many Muslims, but I know a lot of Catholics, and I’m pretty sure they would have objected to Margaret Thatcher calling the IRA “Catholic terrorists.”  Even though that’s what they were.

Pretty sure that the non-Irish Catholics in the U.S. would have paid a lot more attention to what was happening in Belfast if it involved “radical Catholicism.” I can think of several people who would gladly own up to being “radically Catholic.” Maybe even feeling a little bit more resentful when driving by that Protestant church in town. All those Cadillacs in the parking lot. “My boss goes to that church . . . . They sing all the verses of the hymns. Not just the first two.”

I feel like I’m just kicking a straw man here. But, then I realize that’s what straw men are there for. And that we have such a man “presumptively” running for president.

Last week’s episode of The Weeds spends some time on why HRC’s nomination isn’t being celebrated more, or as much as Obama’s.  Fatigue of knowing HRC?  The fact that it didn’t surprise anyone?  That Obama came out of nowhere after almost not getting into the Senate?  Sexism?

Ezra Klein referenced some articles recently that ask whether HRC is is being unfairly measured against either:  1) standards that aren’t applied to men; and 2) standards that are applied to men, but men are generally given a pass on, being that they’re men and all.

It’s hard to argue against the first point because duh.  But I was intrigued by the second.  In the conversation it included charisma, charm, working a room, strength, and of course likability.  Which led me to wonder, how many other candidate in our lifetimes have been dinged for these?

Not saying HRC doesn’t face sexism of many types (and she gives a great interview with the hosts of Another Round talking about the ways she has dealt with it over the years).  Not saying there isn’t a pro-male attribute to what people look for in Presidents.  Not sure what I’m saying, aside from that comment feels too blunt.

This morning, I’m trying to get new details without constantly re-reading old details about the ghastly murders in Orlando.  (Latest news says 50 dead.)

But I’m also trying to figure out why I find Mitt Romney’s admirable stands against Trump so odd.

“I don’t want to see trickle-down racism,” Romney said in an interview here in a suite overlooking the Wasatch Mountains, where he is hosting his yearly ideas conference. “I don’t want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following. Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nation, and trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny, all these things are extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America.”

Again, wholly admirable.  Romney is opening himself to abuse, forcing other Republicans to distance themselves from him until this whole thing is over, and is being very direct about the connection between language, ideas, actions, and personal responsibility.  I’m oddly impressed by his leadership and convictions.  (Or I’m foolishly naive in missing that this is nothing more than positioning himself to be the candidate when Trump finally punches an editor in an interview.)

But the language that interests me is “trickle-down”.  Google n-graph tool shows the phrase peaking in 1994 and then dropping quickly:

Definitions from Urbandictionary, an equally authoritative source of the zeitgeist, have two clusters:  1) definitions in the early 2000s close to the 80s economic debates but with some added snark; and 2) some post-2008, post-Occupy venom, as below (CVFD, feel free to take this picture down if it turns out we do have some boundaries):

[IMAGE DELETED.  SEE DEFINITION #6 ON URBAN DICTIONARY]

But why use that phrase?  Why would a one-time Republican standard-bearer associate a one-time Republican idea with the spread of racism?  Why wouldn’t he be cleverer and say “bully pulpit” (you see it right?)?

Makes me wonder two things:  1) trickle-down has drifted into a new semantic space where it connotes leadership (or permission?) by example; 2) the semantic drift has made the word something about slower forms of change;  or 3) Romney is consciously using that word to distance the party from earlier economic theories which the deification of Reagan could bring back.

Or is there something more obvious going on that I’m missing while I’m watching the Young Turks?

 

But maybe this sudden rush of charged-up Democratic party unity is just sort of flattening. Trump is manifestly, grotesquely unfit for office. Among all thinking people, therefore, everything’s a no-brainer now. I don’t mean I’d be scratching my head about who to vote for if Cruz, say, were the GOP nominee, I mean it bums me out that the first female presidency will come about — must come about! — in large part as a result of a situation in which the opponent is such a revolting parody of sheer incompetence that his own party has to try to run away from him as best it can. If it’s a blowout, great, but if Clinton were running against any even barely legit GOP male, the whole idea of female presidency would be getting put to a national test, and if she were to win, the question would be decided for all time and go away.

Under these idiotic, cartoon-like circumstances,  the many middle-of-the-road liberals who would have found themselves somehow reluctant to vote for Clinton — not, in this hypothetical situation, because she’s too hawkish, or too Wall Street, those are both perfectly good reasons — but just for some nagging, unspoken reason they can’t quite put their fingers on, like she seems slippery, or doesn’t always tell the truth, or isn’t inspiring, or she’s been around too long — qualities they’d be quicker to shrug off in a man — they’ll vote for Clinton now without any reluctance. But only because of Trump! So nothing really gets decided and resolved, psychologically, in this retrograde country about female fitness for office.

As CVFD has mentioned here, such a victory may be presented by future opponents as hollow: yeah, she beat Trump, big whoop. Merely as historic moments go, the presence of that monstrous fool is rendering a first-time female candidacy kind of lame.  I’d like to see her beat an actual politician. Trump has just rendered everything meaningless.

On the other unity front, yes, Warren is great at eviscerating Trump. Biden’s OK. And of course Obama will be great at that. And I guess it’s interesting that a sitting pres and VP are in a rare position to campaign forcefully for their successors. But again, whether or not they’re successful, intellectually and ideologically it’s pretty much shooting fish in a barrel. It can’t be that tough for the writers to come up with reasons why Trump sucks. (We could do it, if we weren’t so busy putting out this blog.) He handed them the most obvious issue with this judge thing, so Warren can  (rightly) say that he’s constitutionally unfit, just on separation of powers and potential abuse of office. That’s not a radical position, totally MOR, which is why it’s such an easy and appealing hook, of course.

I get it. But the fact that presidents can’t go after federal judges on any matter, let alone personal ones, doesn’t have much to do with EW’s real issues, which have to do, not with that most conservative American definition of equality — equality before the law — but with economic equality, a far more radical concept here.

So my real question has to do with Warren. It’s a real question in that I have no idea how this is going to go down.

Having joined forces intellectually, against Trump, with the most basic, unarguable, Civics 101, conservative definition of equality, will EW now be able to get Clinton to campaign actively on behalf of some of EW’s real issues? Make them part of the platform? Like the bill that would seek, anyway, to reverse the effects of Citizens United, which should be an issue HRC could bring some enthusiasm to, without seeming “impractical” or too far left or whatever  . . . ? If so, that might be a huge plus, and possibly could be achieved without the mutual rancor that marks and will continue to mark negotiations between the Clinton and Sanders camps, Sanders peoples’ desire to throw Barney Frank or whoever off the convention committees, HRC’s supporters’ resentment of having to give Sanders anything at all, etc. . . . ?

Maybe I’m not still flipping the bird. But man, these are still very weird times.

One of the many things that Elizabeth Warren gets right about Trump is how “small” he is. USA Today (Huh? Wha? USA Today?) reported this week how Trump doesn’t pay his bills with contractors. Especially smaller ones who can’t take him to court.  He negotiates a price. Makes the first payment. The contractor delivers. And, then, Trump refuses to pay the agreed-to price and reopens negotiations.

We’ve all done business with people like this. I remember working for a computer games start up, a company that two of my friends created and that had financing from a shady rich guy in New York. I had to work really hard to collect my expense checks. And, to be clear, these expenses were modest, a few hundred dollars. Economy class flights. Marriott hotels and no room service. I’d call accounts payable and “Stephanie”—she had a Queens accent out of central casting—would assure me that my expense check was signed and in the FedEx envelope.  And, then two days later, I’d start the process over again.

Five or so years ago, the company I worked for had a contract dispute with a company in a business similar to Trump’s. I was trying to collect a much overdue completion milestone. The second of four scheduled payments. The representative of this “company” said to me at one point, “If I pay you, how do I know you won’t f_ck me.” I actually had to explain that we were part of a publicly traded company and had, like, a basic understanding of business ethics. I flew to San Francisco.  Met with the CEO. We worked out a deal. Shook hands. And then two days later he reneged on everything. He just lied to my face, and we brought in the lawyers and eventually worked out a settlement.

This is the kind of cheapjack that the Party of Big Business has nominated.  For president. In southwestern Pennsylvania we refer to these guys as “jagoffs”.  Here’s the USA Today link.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/

Two remarkable speeches this evening.  Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Biden speaking before a group of constitutional lawyers. Two adults reminding us that the future of the republic is at stake in this election.  As one of them points out, you have the nominee of one of our two political parties threatening a federal judge with retaliation if he’s elected in November.

I’d put Warren’s speech up there with some of the best I’ve heard.  Not quoting her, but she has a section of the speech where she says that “Democracy does not sustain itself. The rule of law does not sustain itself.” Referring to Republican efforts to destroy trust in the congress, the judiciary, and the executive. She should not run for vice president. She should keep doing this kind of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzLMf6QGONQ

Biden’s not as focused or eloquent. But, this is the vice president of the United States having to remind us that an independent judiciary is kind of important. I also like the part where he talks about serving in the senate being the greatest privilege of his life.  And how his many Republican friends in the senate know better than to support Trump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF82N0B2VYE

This is, indeed, a preview of the assault that Trump can expect from Hillary, her eventual running mate, Bill, Obama, Biden, Bernie, and Warren over the next five months. But, these speeches aren’t the usual campaign stuff.

To play the old guy for a moment — because it’s typecasting, that’s who Mister Jones is anyway — in response to the  Lee Camp “Stop Telling Me” list and video that Laska posted and reflected on, I say this:

I’m not “telling you” shit, and nobody cares what you celebrate or don’t celebrate. Being old, cranky, and full of necrotic guile, I see your copping this defiant attitude as a member of a supposedly oppressed class — oppression universalized here as nothing worse than being being bossed around by your elders — as a classic ploy of adolescents.

There’s only one thing I really do have over you: I was young , you’ve never been old, and you will be. It’s infuriating. I remember. Nothing makes it more infuriating than hearing some old guy say “I remember.” I remember that too.

Because that’s just the way fifteen-year-olds are: it’s all about you, desperately flailing to self-define, in endless reaction to the elders you pretend to disdain but can’t stop gazing at. Since you’re not fifteen, grow the fuck up and stop pissing, obsessively, on my parade. She’s obviously won the nomination as much as anyone else ever has who’s been in the position she’s in, which is the only point specifically regarding history, dimwit, celebrate it or no.

Or . . . is it the only point? Might she … get indicted before the convention!?

But no, because system. And because rigged.

There’s an interesting way in which she’s NOT the first, and I appreciate the way you use capital letters to get your point across there, because uppercase always makes things more persuasive. You have the sense of history to invoke ’08 and ’12, but let me rely on a classic privilege of age: telling you a rambling story with no real point. When I was a lad in the late 19th century, Victoria Woodhull — a member of the American Communist Party, a gender-rights and sex pioneer, a feminist so radical that you’ve never heard of her — ran for president. You wouldn’t like her: she was also the first woman with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.  So a “corporate-funded big-bank employee.”

Anyway, face it. Really, HRC is — no, I mean “IS” — the first real female candidate, and with any luck she’s about to be the first female president. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, again, I don’t care, but then why would you invoke McKinney and Stein? See, this shouldn’t be a bullet list. I know the list thing is supposed to make your plaint seem unarguably hardnosed in its logic; intellectually, though, it’s a circle. There are things you could do to fix that, but they’d require effort, and some regard for clarity not only of expression but also of thought. Stuff old people like.

— “Corrupt kleptocracy.” Now here’s something I can get with. Cleanse the kleptocracy of corruption! Make it a clean kleptocracy!

— “Stop being sheep.” Oh. OK, I will. Is this good? Just tell me what to do. So I can stop being a sheep.

Get off my lawn.

[UPDATE: I’ll save this for a more serious post, but: Anyone yakking on TV about a corrupt kleptocracy with that “Russia Today” logo in the corner of the screen has got to be fucking kidding.]