Lake Michigan, looking east, approximately 5:40am

After an oddly restless night in which I woke up for good around 3:30, I dragged myself out of bed and went to the gym, but watching our President, even on mute, was too dispiriting.

I began to wander, ending up, inevitably, at the lake. The moon was still full and bright and chilly, gazing with stolidly in the lightening west, and the sun, not yet risen, was wiping the sky over the water with a riot of pinks and oranges. The empty and endless sky was only briefly and mildly profaned by a plane red-eyeing its way over Michigan.

As I walked north, I imagined the water spreading itself even wider as it stretched the length of Wisconsin. But then I remembered, as with everything in that once great state, even the lake is being subverted for the needs of capital and the gratification of Scott Walker. To wit:

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has approved the city of Racine’s request to pull 7 million gallons of water daily from Lake Michigan for a Foxconn Technology Group manufacturing plant.

You remember Foxconn, right? The international tech/suicide factory, which is opening up a flatscreen factory in Racine? Its approval was rushed through by Scott Walker, eager to create jobs, any environmental or worker protections be damned. It’s part of Walker, and the broader GOPs, race to the bottom: encouraging states to compete for jobs by removing all regulations and protections.

Is this new diversion part of that? Perhaps: it is certainly saying that the needs of Foxconn, and these jobs, is more important than the Great Lakes Compact, which is already slightly wobbled by Waukesha.

Ah, but, you might say: surely this is an overreaction. After all, the request was approved by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which is tasked with protecting the immense natural beauty of the state. But, I reply: remember this is Walker’s Wisconsin.

Nowhere is this (his rush to sell the state) more clear than in his Department of Natural Resources, which he’s gutted and filled with cronies and industry oxpeckers. He’s had it reduced to being the fetchservant of extraction and the state’s leading climate denier. It’s been essentially privatized, and it shows, and the doddering legislature has no interest in changing it.

Indeed, the Compact Implementation Coalition summed the whole rotten deal up very nicely.

On April 25th, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) hastily approved the City of Racine’s request for a diversion of Great Lakes water for a private entity, Foxconn.  While the request was pending before the DNR, the CIC, and many regional and Great Lakes state partners, requested that the Regional Body and Compact Council review the proposal because of several flaws including that the use of the water was not for a public purpose, but rather for a foreign corporation’s use.  The CIC feels it is unfortunate that DNR is ignoring not only the spirit, intent and plain language of the Great Lakes Compact, but also the voiced concerns of thousands of Wisconsin citizens.

Ignoring citizens? Ignoring the “spirit, intent, and plain language” of an international treaty, especially one regarding the environment? And doing it all to give away the store to a huge worker-breaking corporation? It’s not just Wisconsin: it’s the quintessence of the GOP.

Now, this isn’t a huge diversion. The numbers sound enormous, but most of the water (save 2 million gallons) will go back to the lake. This, in an of itself, won’t destroy the water. But it is another straw in the lake, another excuse to break the compact, and it is done so for the obvious, and therefore banal and universal, of reasons: the thrill of jobs.

If opening a plant (that won’t even hire that many people, and certainly not the non-degreed working class of Racine) is justification for breaking the Compact, what won’t be? Where does the line get drawn? This is how treaties die, and this is how lakes dry.

Lake Michigan seems like it stretches on forever, but just past the sunrise lingered the sleeping shore of Michigan, with its millions mere miles from our millions, all thirsty and ready to stretch and shower and brew coffee, greeting the first real day of spring after an endless winter.

The point of the Compact is to preserve the water so we can use it. If it is broken, if the rules no longer matter, it is only a matter of time before the treaty table becomes hectic, violent, and impossible.

Arizona Shows The Way

If that seems a little extreme, let us look at how an enormously successful water compact is beginning to fray. It involves, with little surprise, Arizona.

After expressing their frustration privately for weeks, negotiators for four Colorado River Basin states sent a strongly worded letter to Arizona water managers on Friday, singling out the actions of one state agency as “threaten[ing] the water supply for nearly 40 million people.”

In the letter, the Upper Colorado River Commission said those actions could threaten efforts to conserve water and prevent Lake Mead from going into shortage for as long as possible. It could, they wrote, also undermine a decade of broader collaboration intended to avoid costly litigation between Colorado River users.

This is pretty complicated, but basically, Arizona is gaming a hugely complex treaty in order to maximize the water allowed it from Lake Mead and Lake Powell. It is actually using less water from one lake in order to trigger a release from the other, while all the other states in the compact are trying to conserve for real.

I say it is unsurprisingly Arizona because, in the history of Colorado River management, Arizona has always been the fighter. It delayed signing the treaty for decades, afraid (with some justification) that it would be taken advantage of by California. The Central Arizona Project, which is the now-archaic sounding name of its water resource commission, wasnt fully finalized until the 60s. California and Arizona nearly (sort of nearly) went to war over water in 1934.

Indeed, most of Arizona’s, um, interesting political culture can be tied in some ways to its endless fight for more water, both against its neighbors and against the federal government. And the odd thing about this current fight, which has led to a flurry of mean words between the signatories, is that Arizona is technically only breaking the spirit of the Colorado River Treaty, in a very Arizona way.

In theory, the CAP isn’t really doing anything wrong. John Fleck points out that he was wrong to they say “manipulated” or gamed” the system: they just optimized their usage.

The whole thing is hugely complex, and the article I liked up top, and of course the Fleck piece, do a much better job of explaining it. But what’s really interesting to us here is the fact that they aren’t really breaking the treaty. It’s just that it is easy to break the spirit of things, and still be in your rights, while destroying what has been worked for.

The treaties that govern water in desiccating times are huge and complex, with enormous overlapping needs and the weight of historical baggage. They are between states and countries, between conservation and development, urban dwellers and farmers, ranchers and miners, business and outdoorspeople.

The fragile Colorado treaty and Great Lakes Compact were years, even decades, of work in the making. They are historic and important, and it is blindingly frustrating that that work can go away.

As we see in every desperate day, all it takes to destroy things is to not care, to shrug off shame and any idea of the common good. The willingness to violate the tenous norms that really create a democracy is all it takes to kill it. That same willingness, that same blithe dismissal of treaties, is all it takes to destroy the goodwill that helps us manage our ever-shrinking supplies of clean water.

There’s a joyless routine to a burst of mass violence in the West. After making sure the people we love who are anywhere in the area are ok (“You live in Canada; you didn’t happen to be in Toronto, did you?”), we pass a pro forma state of horror and revulsion, and then begin feeling around for a reason. Or, rather, we begin searching for a broader movement to blame, and hope that it isn’t ours.

It’s not that we hope the killer isn’t on our side; very few leftists actually consider themselves on the same side as brutal theocrats. It’s that we’ve gotten to the point where we hope that the murderer isn’t someone who could be used against us politically, or who could be used by the other to promote their own rancid ideology.

As what seems to be the case now, the van-driver in the deadly Toronto attack, which has left 10 dead, and dozens (if not hundreds) more traumatized, and which will push cities even further intro entrenched military zones, full of tranches and truncheons and a thin veneer of normal life painted over cracked-wood fear, was someone who couldn’t get laid.

That seems to be…well, a bit simple, and if you are blessedly removed from the world of violent misogyny, this might be pretty confusing. It certainly doesn’t seem ideological. It’s not Islamic radicalism used by the right to dehumanize refugees fleeing from that same violence. It’s not Dylann Roof or a sovereign citizen, with their toxic racism and deep American hatred.

I mean, from time immemorial people, especially men, have not been able to have sex whenever they wanted. 88% of the movies in the 80s were about that. It happened all the time in the aughts, too.

But what we didn’t have were “incels”, or “involuntary celibate”, which is how Alex Minassian, the Toronto killer, saw himself.  Well, we had involuntary celibates, but we didn’t have fancy names. We didn’t have a movement. We just called them Caruso.

(note: approximately three people reading this blog will get that, but so what?)

It’s more than just a fancy name, of course. The idea of the Incel Movement, and the Incel Rebellion, which Minassian apparently saw himself as a part of, is wrapped up in ancient feelings and primeval longings, but nurtured in our stupid and self-selecting times. We form new tribes every day, and foster new grievances, and cast our tribe as both heroes and victims. Minassian is an avatar of our times: a disturbed or maybe just annoted individual, lashing out, and finding succor and support in the like-minded, who don’t provide comfort, but encourage anger and violence. He looks for others like him, and they help him find Others.

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This is not an unfair picture; nullification has always been the heart of the Mitch McConnell project

It’s easy to get lost in the bloated malevolence of Donald Trump, or the poor-killing piousness of Paul Ryan, but we shouldn’t forget about Mitch McConnell, who may, actually, be the worst.

I don’t know if there has ever been a more cynical politician in my lifetime, or maybe ever. Bill Clinton watched a mentally-handicapped man get execute to prove his tough-guy bonafides, and that’s unforgivable calculated cynicism. Ronald Reagan stoked every fringe anti-government group while climbing up the ladder of governmental power, which is pretty damn cynical.

Then there are guys like Tom Delay, who spoke the language of the Christian Right while using its gulls as a side-hustle, raking in cash and giving the money guys a free hand in the temple. You also have dudes like Newt Gingrich, whose cynicism is extreme self-righteousness, able to levy teary empurpled criticism at those who won’t respect the results of elections. That’s breathtaking.

But still, there’s no one quite like Mitch, and arguably, there never has been. Sure, there may have been people more cynical, but not in our media climate, and not with the right wing what it is. He’s able to do the most blatantly political actions, without any regard for a right or decent outcome, while blaming the other side for doing exactly what he is. He’s a master at it.

One of my “favorite” examples, which I described as nearly Escherian, was funding for research into the Zika virus. The Republicans blocked any funding for months, refusing to give Obama a “victory”, as if helping pregnant mothers from a deadly airborne illness was anything other than the baseline responsibility of the government. And then they finally put Zika funding in a bill that would defund Planned Parenthood and weaken environmental protections. Obviously, Dems would vote against that. Mitch?

(P)ut Hillary Clinton in the White House and I promise you this, she will double down on the cynical approach that Senate Democrats seem to revel in these days.

Here’s what I mean. As we sit here tonight, a terrifying mosquito born illness threatens expectant mothers and their babies along our southern coast. And, just last week, just last week, Clinton Democrats in the Senate blocked a bill aimed at eradicating that virus before it can spread.

I mean, what can you do? It’s breathtaking, especially when he describes the Dems as using a “cynical approach”. And that’s far from the worst. This quote, during the hearings for Neil Gorsuch, reveal a pathological depth I can barely comprehend.

“This is the latest escalation in the left’s never-ending judicial war, the most audacious yet,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after describing Democratic opposition in the past to Judge Robert H. Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas. “And it cannot and it will not stand. There cannot be two sets of standards: one for the nominees of the Democratic president and another for the nominee of a Republican president.”

This, of course, after a year of blocking Merrick Garland, whom Barack Obama nominated for the Supreme Court during his four-year term.

That’s why Mitch is actually the worst. It isn’t that he is frustrating, or just that he is deeply cynical. It’s that he is actively working against our democracy, destroying the norms that are far more important than laws in keeping our country together. He has no baseline decency, and does literally anything for his side to win.

The Merrick Garland blockade wasn’t merely a power play. It wasn’t just a maneuver. It wasn’t clever, and it wasn’t about winning elections. What Mitch McConnell did (with, it should be said, the entire party and surrounding media environment parroting his squawking righteousness), was nullify the re-election of Barack Obama.

There can’t be any other word for it. Obama was elected for another 4-year term, resoundingly. Part of that is being able to nominate justices, especially on the Supreme Court. There has never been an election in our history where people didn’t talk about its ramifications for the Court. Everybody voting knew what was at stake, knew that Presidential perogative, and we voted for Obama.

And McConnell said no. He said no because he knew that, ultimately, there was nothing that could stop him.

He realized this after Obama’s first election, when he could be as obstructionist as he wanted, and take away all Presidential rights, because he’d be supported by his party and media. He realized that there were no real mechanisms outside of decency to compel him to follow the spirit of the law. And that’s been his whole career.

His entire career, both as minority and as majority leader, has been to shred everything that makes our government work. And in doing so, he’s ripped to pieces the idea of a self-governing people. By breaking these norms, he’s accelerated the devolution of politics, which is really nothing more than the decided self-expression of a free people, into face-painted bloodsports.

When he does whatever he can to delegitimize a party, to nullify an election, to ruin our norms, he is just as much an anti-democratic tyrant as Donald Trump. Which brings me, 800 words later, to the point of this.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has said he will not allow a vote on a bill that would protect the special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by Donald Trump, despite bipartisan concern that the president will act on an impulse to end the Russia investigation.

McConnell said on Tuesday that he did not believe legislative action was necessary because Trump would not fire Mueller, who is overseeing the FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump associates and Russia.

“I don’t think he should fire Mueller and I don’t think he is going to,” McConnell said during an interview on Fox News on Tuesday. “So this is a piece of legislation that’s not necessary, in my judgment.

That’s right: he won’t even allow, because he doesn’t think the President is going to fire Mueller. That would be considered optimistic, if you had any notion he believed it, or particularly cared.

He doesn’t care, of course. Sure, he couches it in the language he has to, that he doesn’t think Trump should fire Mueller, though you can almost physically feel his slump-shouldered shrug through the computer. And he later says that Trump would veto any bill, so what’s the point?

This is rich, of course, coming from a man who sent Obama bills to overturn Obamacare. That was also a probably veto! But the outcome didn’t matter; what mattered was letting his members vote on repealing. And that’s what matters to Mitch here.

Because, make no mistake, even if the bill is “bipartisan”, its Republican sponsors represent a very small minority in their caucus. McConnell doesn’t want the bill to come up not because he is afraid of it passing, but because he knows most of his party would vote against it. And he doesn’t want that on their records, because he knows it would be terrible.

There’s no leadership. There’s no attempt to persuade. There isn’t even the recognition that he has a slight duty to protect the country from Trump, or from encroaching authoritarianism. There’s only the desire to protect his party from taking a vote that he knows will make them look awful.

Mitch McConnell, no less, and probably much more than Trump, has broken our democracy. His entire project has been too degrade the fragile bonds that keep our system together. And he’s been successful.

Trump saw and rode anger and discontent and outright racism to the top. He understood it, lives in it, and knew it matched the rot of his own character. He saw that fundamental American disease, saw it is a weakness, and used it.

Mitch saw something different. He saw that we were more than our Constitution. He saw that we weren’t really a nation bound by laws, but that we were an ongoing experiment in how to create a self-government. We were meant to keep changing, and that meant accepting and participating in unwritten rules that bind us together.

For most people, that’s a strength. That America is an experiment, that it is meant to evolve, that we are bound to our political destiny with each other, and not holy script, is a strength. But Mitch McConnell uniquely saw it as a weakness, and used it against itself. He perverted the experiment. He made it in his own impossibly cynical image, and the country is now the monster he created.

So yeah, he’s probably really the worst of the bunch. But what he broke can be repaired. This isn’t a call for bipatisan decency or anything. That’s a weakness McConnell exploits. It can be repaired by crushing them in November, and then in 2020, and getting rid of all the miscreants. It can be repaired by actually taking back the government, and remembering that it can be the very best of who we are, instead of befouled by the very worst.

Of all of Donald Trump’s various unhinged tweets about James Comey on Sunday, this one was probably the most mocked. It was certainly mentioned more than the ones where the President of the United States twice called for Comey to be jailed for 1) taking notes; and 2) saying things Trump believes are lies. That’s par for the course, now.

But it was the above tweet that caught most people’s attention, for how deeply removed from reality it was. It was in reference to this section of Comey’s book.

Comey worries that his belief that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election may have influenced how he handled the investigation of her email practices while secretary of state. “It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the polls.”

The referent here is when the FBI opened up Anthony Weiner’s laptop (and I will never, ever get over the fact that this goddamn dummy’s gross horndogging had world-historic impact), and notified Congress that it was investigating more Hillary emails. Obviously, Congress leaked that to the press in less than 1/10th of a second, and that helped tank Hillary.

The fact that this was guaranteed to hurt her, and was completely pointless (why would there be incriminating emails on his laptop when there weren’t on anyone else’s?), is why Trump’s tweet was opened up to mockery. Hurting your boss seems a weird way to ask for a job.

But I think that actually makes a certain amount of sense. After all, Comey had over the summer of 2016 publically delivered a tongue-lashing to Clinton, altering the dynamics of the race. But she was still going to win, it seemed. And she had reason to be angry at him.

So how do you guarantee job security? You announce an investigation. You show that you aren’t kissing up to power. And you therefore make yourself unable to be fired. After all, Comey knew as well as anyone that the GOP was already gearing up to nullify the election with phony investigation after phony investigation. If Hillary dare fired the FBI director who had investigated her emails, well…let’s just say impeachment would have happened in a heartbeat.

I mean, you can see that, right? WHAT IS SHE HIDING headlines would be all across the every paper in the country. Maggie Haberman would write so many articles about “the appearance of smoke” that she’d spontaneously come down with the first case of above-ground miner’s lung. And while the howling on the right would be deafening, the mainstream media would be just as loud.

Comey knew all that. He was a canny Washington player, for as much as a sanctimoniously-smirking Boy Scout he is. I don’t actually think he was trying to throw the election to Trump. It isn’t just that the FBI was already investigating the campaign. It was clear to anyone that Trump was a deeply unqualified fool, and venal as he is stupid, and both immoral and morally compromised. I doubt that Comey actually wanted him to win.

But hey, if he did, Trump would owe him, right?

Of course, you can never bet against Trump doing the very worst thing, which in this case is exactly what Comey assumed Hillary wouldn’t do: risk an obstruction of justice case. So don’t feel too badly for Comey. Sure, he justified his actions with dewy blatherings about protecting the Presidency, but the truth is he played politics, looking out for himself, and paid the price. But we all payed a much steeper one.

I’m glad his book is getting bad reviews, and I’m glad that, for the most part, the real anti-Trumpers (as opposed to the clannish Green Room parasites) are treating Comey with the contempt he deserves. I’ll be very happy if he helps to end this nightmare, but it isn’t absolution. The long-term effects are far too great.

So yeah, at the end of day, I agree with Trump that for Comey, this was about a job. Of course, Trump is wrong in his reasoning. He thinks that Comey helped Hillary by not throwing her in jail, because Trump is unable to see that Comey helped him or that he hurt Hillary, because then he wouldn’t be able to see himself as both the world’s greatest conquering hero and the world’s most aggrieved victim. He’s wrong about everything, is what I’m saying.

But man, what dumb times. Comey made one of the biggest mistakes in history. He gambled with all our futures, and lost. Because of that, he will (or should) go down as one of the most consequential FBI heads in history, and not in a good way. That he might get rehabbed as a hero for saying that Donald Trump is a bad person, while getting rich for justifying all his actions, is a pretty good sign of our idiot times.

I hope it isn’t churlish to point out that these are terrifying weapons of death, and the people who see them screaming across the sky are no different than you or I. 

I know below I reposted something from last year’s bombing. I’m going to do the same thing with another post from last year’s bombing which, again, could have been written today. The media reaction was, in the main, sickeningly the same. We’re so susceptible to war footings and being cheerleaders for violence. The media loves images like above. We’ll probably be at war forever.

This is what I was getting at in today’s first post, when worrying that CBS was trying to reassure its viewers that the only reason Colbert was making fun of the President is that he didn’t know we had struck Syria.

One can see the telltale signs of a media gearing up to make war normal. Flashes of missiles launching through the darkened foreign night, the President huddling with advisors, reading a stern statement with a serious face, maps and graphics across innumerable cable screens, “experts” who just heard of Idlib this week talking about the strategic importance of sending a message.

I ultimately don’t think much will come of this. Trump is too chaotic and unfocused, and too deeply unpopular. I don’t think there will be much flag-wrapping across the country. I don’t think he’s going to grow significantly more popular because of this, except in a very few knee-jerk quarters. In a week, we may forget this even happened (though it did, with real consequences, but I am just talking domestically for this post).

But it is broadly disturbing how quickly the media gets on its own war footing, which not only has the effect of making Trump seem like a normal President, but shows something dark about our character, and about the last 15 years.

We’ve been at war since 2001 in one country or another, and usually several on some level. But most of those go unnoticed. They don’t get the banner treatment or the blaring chyrons. This is different, because it is against a President, which means it is against a real country, which means it is a real war (regardless of how limited). That’s exciting! That’s newsworthy. The rest? Background noise.

It’s really a dual danger. The first danger is that we get so excited to be at a real war, because that is what stirs the American character. It does so in other countries as well, though America seems particularly susceptible, at the same level as, say Russia. The idiot media is a reflection of that. It doesn’t just prime the pump. But the other danger is that war is so entrenched in our story, and so inextricable from the present moment, that it takes something extraordinary to even stir out attention. It’s ingrained now, in ways we haven’t begun to understand. We’ve always been at war, and always will be.

When news that the US was bombing a different part of Syria last night, there was talk of this being a dramatic escalation, which made me wonder if I was crazy? Because didn’t we just do this last year? Asad uses chemical weapons, the US sends a few missiles, we make sure the Russians are out of harm’s way, and everyone agrees to pretend something was accomplished.

This is probably even less worthwhile than before (and here I’m stipulating that this isn’t just “a distraction” from the swirling criminality of his administration). That the Pentagon today basically said this was going to be the extent of the operations, save for a vague promise from Nikki Haley that we’re “locked and loaded” to go again, if need be, was a clear tell.

There is no real goal here, and no real plan. The military had to react to a Trump tweet, and took the least actionable action. We carefully avoided triggering war with the Russians (which is good!) but will not involve ourselves in any other way, and will do nothing to stop Asad’s more routine atrocities, nor do anything to end the civil war.

Basically, Russia and Iran know that Trump is hollow. Please don’t get me wrong: I am not in favor of escalation in Syria, and certainly not in favor of war with Russia or Iran. But it is quintessentially Trumpian that a “mission” meant to “show resolve” really shows the exact opposite. It shows that Russia and Iran are free to have Syria so long as ISIS is sort of contained, and that Asad has a free hand, so long as that hand isn’t holding chlorine.

I think it is good to show that what happened last night is no different than what happened a year ago, save for different people dying (which, to the American press and politicians and, really, the public, doesn’t matter a fig). It’s all theater, and will go back to the same carnage, until Trump shoots some more missiles again, and becomes President.

So after the jump, here’s last year’s article on bombing Syria, from 53 weeks ago. Except for the part about Don Rickles dying, it could have been written today.

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