Author Archives: Brian O'Neill

05.10.17
by

Dear GOP: Mike Pence Hates Health Care and Loves Tax Cuts, Too

 

You guys already bond over horrible things! Wouldn’t this be nicer?

 

If I were a Republican (which sharp-eyed and politically astute readers of this blog will recognize I am not), my basic calculations in the wake of the Comey firing would be this:

  • We’ve supported Trump so that we could kick millions of people off health care and cut taxes for the rich.
  • And oh yeah, destroy the environment and the public good!
  • And he’s been super willing to do that, so it’s been ok to ignore the troublesome what-have-yous over his total lack of mental or moral capacities for the job.  He’ll sign anything to get a win so he can pretend to be Mr. Businessgenius President, and anyway, the Mexican and the Muslim stuff has been a great bonus. Aces all around!
  • But ok, this might be too much. You can’t fire the FBI director because he’s investigating your Russian crimes, man. This looks superbad, even though we love the strongman thing. Except when the black guy does it, then it is tyranny.
  • So, can we get through this? If we get rid of him, can we still get our stuff done?
  • Let’s say we impeach. It’s a bad year, really bad. But we look brave! And the media calls us heroic, putting the country ahead of our party. And then we have President Pence, and he hates taxes, health care, the public good, the environment, hippies, and liberals as much as we do. And he hates abortionists and gays way more than Trump!
  • So we can weather this impeachment, because god knows our democracy is literally under assault, and still get stuff done before the midterms. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll actually pick up seats for our courage.

There are flaws in this calculation. For one, what if Trump doesn’t care if he is impeached and refuses to leave? And the drama of displacing a President might overtake everything else, especially this President. And you might lose the base entirely. And you might not be done by 2018.

And I may be assuming facts not in evidence. I am assuming there is a baseline of genuine patriotism here. That despite their love for voter suppression, the GOP doesn’t actually want to see us go full banana. That Trump, whole embarrassing, is sort of exactly what they want. So I might be making a few too many assumptions, really.

But dammit, come on. President Pence will give you what you want! I would loathe a Pence Presidency. He’s a theocrat and a bigot and kind of a dummy and I’d fight every one of his policies, but he is so within the acceptable norms. I even sort of fear a post-impeachment Pence, because the sigh of relief will be so great that he will be sort of unshackled. Any opposition might be seen as gauche.

But things are so bad now, and we’re so close to an epochal constitutional disaster, that I’d embrace that. Even if it is for the wrong reasons–to make it easier to pursue their terrible agenda–one has to hope that the GOP discovers some patriotism, before it is too late.

05.10.17
by

The Comey Firing and the Coming Constitutional Crisis: Crossing the Border

1961-11-01a

When talking about the firing of James Comey, that smirkingly moralistic Boy Scout who clearly decided to hand over the election to Donald Trump, there are a few things to stipulate.

  1. The stated reasons for his firing–that he engaged in a grotesque abuse of power, or at the very least, political malpractice in how he handled Clinton’s emails–were the correct ones. James Comey should no more be the Director of the FBI than I should.
  2. The stated reasons are clearly bullshit.
  3. The stated reasons are initially clever, but incredibly witless. They hang a lampshade on how cheap and petty the arrangement is.  They only make it more clear that this is, in one way or the other, about Russia.

You can tell the Administration is somehow stunned that no one believes their nonpartisan rectitude in this manner. They honestly expected to be praised for this. That’s how they operate: they still assume that if they say something, us normal non-billionaire totally un-President people should believe it.  It’s Trump’s way. One of the reasons for his increasingly erratic ways are that it isn’t working. The media isn’t just reporting what he says as reality.

Because really, this is too much. I bet there are 10 hours and 2000 tweets worth of material on top Republicans praising Comey for disclosing the Anthony Weiner email “investigation” (and I still can’t believe we have to talk about that as a world-changing event). Many of these are by the President! We’re expected to believe that they are now outraged about this? And if so, why five months in?

It is belaboring the obvious to say that this is about Russia. It’s either that Comey got “too close” to something they are trying to hide, or just that he refuses to close the investigation, to do the bidding of Donald Trump. Either way, these aren’t headlines we should be reading in America.

But again, the lie is the key here. In his public letter, Trump says “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.” Why even bring that up? It’s a way to change the story, to say, “see, there’s nothing here!” It’s the typical Trumpian con. You can just say anything, so long as it gets you to a yes.

That reckless cynicism and nearly supernatural disregard for the truth isn’t just a part of this crisis; it is key to it. They actual tawdry crimes and corruption that drive this Administration are, in and of themselves, enough to cause a genuine catastrophe, but it is what they are driven by that makes this moment so scary.

Our system of government is formed less around laws than it is around norms and expected behavior. There are rules, but when they are broken, there is shockingly little that can be done until the rule-breaker himself is forced to change his behavior. When the exemption on conflict of interest rules were carved out for the President due to the complexity of the job, it was assumed that the President would avoid potential conflicts, not that he would see it as carte blanche, an open door. That’s obviously not the case with Trump.

He has no instincts except to enrich himself and to further his brand. There isn’t a democratic bone in his body, or a thought for the greater good anywhere in the arid warped-mirror desert of his mind. That’s why he can fire the FBI Director for lack of loyalty: he thinks this is how it should be, and there is really no way to stop him.

That’s the problem, and that’s why we are in a crisis. It was assumed that the President wouldn’t be in hock to a foreign power and wouldn’t have every top staffer equally entangled. It was assumed they wouldn’t fire the FBI Director for looking into it. It was assumed that they would adhere to some basic democratic standards. Donald Trump, with his unique and terrible sicknesses and vanities, turned out all those assumptions.

That’s what has always worried me the most about this Administration. That the only real mechanisms to stopping his revolt against the Constitutional order were Republicans, enthralled with a right-wing strongman and unable to put basic patriotism over their lust for tax cuts. And even if they did (and now is the moment, boys), there is only so much that can be done.

Let’s say this is impeachable (High crimes and misdemeanors are not just jailable offenses, but crimes against the Presidency), or something is, and the GOP actually decides to do it.  Say they impeach, and the Senate convicts. Then what? What if he refuses to leave? Again, it is assumed that a convicted President will leave office, but what if he refuses to, claiming that Congress can’t usurp an election? What horrors await us there?

This is the problem. We assume a President will behave one way. This one won’t. I’ve been worried that at some point he will order the military to do something flagrantly illegal, or that he’ll govern as a strongman, ruining our democracy, and the military will have to decide to do something. (This is the Turkish model, as I argued) A coup against an elected leader is antithetical to democracy, but it also might be needed. It is a terrible, unfathomable situation. But it is fathomable, now.

We have no idea how this President will act or what he’ll do. We don’t know if we have the legal mechanisms to alter some of his worst behaviors. We don’t know if he’ll follow the Constitution, and impeachment is part of the Constitution. If he doesn’t follow that, then what?

The title of this post is about a border. I felt that on Jan 20th we crossed the border into another land, in a way. Our conceptions of ourselves have changed, because the norms that guided us don’t any longer. It’s a psychic shock, and I think the naked and sweaty corruption of yesterday’s assault on democratic norms is pushing us further across the line.

(B)eyond his ignorance, his vapid stupidity, his tireless and pathetic ego, is that he is the exact kind of dull and base grotesquerie we’d laugh at in other countries. There is nothing there but ego and avarice, brainless pronunciations in the service of cheap laughs from his braying sycophants, who react tumescently whenever he punches down. He’s the comic bouffant strongman, the kind you see in some wretched mountain land. And that’s the border we somehow crossed over.

The true psychic shock of this transition will, I think, be hard to measure, and hard to predict. But I do think, now that the elegies are over and Donald Trump is sworn in, placing his hand on the Lincoln Bible, that there will be a subtle breaking. Its effects won’t be felt all at once, of course. But our conception of who we are will change.

We’ll have a penny-ante Balkan-esque strongman in the White House instead of a President. We’ll have a witless dummy who thinks his smirks are poetry. We’ll have a man whose conception of leadership is finding and punishing enemies. Our country will be different. We’ll be different.

I wrote this in January. I was hoping to be wrong, and the resistance still makes me hopeful. I do think that this might really spur the GOP into action, partly because he made them look foolish (most of them praised Comey for the October letter with effusive partisan bonhomie). But we also might be slowly ground underfoot, one lie at a time, until we think the bottom of a shoe is the wideopen sky.

 

05.08.17
by

Sinclair Buys Tribune; Boot Synergistically Crushes Independent Media, Forever

Image result for sinclair media

I’m not going to romanticize Tribune, Inc, they of the TRONC-ish nightmare and the propensity to lose their damn mind, but being bought by Sinclair Media is a disaster.  This is the type of media consolidation that is the death-knell of democracy.

Part of it is, of course, that Sinclair leans very hard to the right, having made a deal with the Trump campaign for interviews across the board in exchange for favorable coverage and softball questions. This friendship was rewarded with even deeper ties (something I missed until just now).

The conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group’s announcement that it hired former White House aide Boris Epshteyn as its chief political analyst suggests a move to deepen its ties with President Donald Trump’s administration.

So I’m guessing we aren’t exactly going to get in-depth coverage of this administration out of the nation’s largest media company, who own at least one affiliate in every media market, and now have bought one of the nation’s other largest media company.

Their ties to a hideous right-wing admin are bad enough, but it might not be useful to think of them simply as right-wing. They are in a way more insidious. Their entire corporate ethos is aligned against thought, against inquiry, and against anything that doesn’t support the bottom line. They are the quintessence of corporate media, perpetuating a thoughtless status quo. Actual journalism is anathema.

You can see that in their radio empire, which has helped to make every other station in America dental-office bland, with the exact same DJ teams playing the exact same songs (when they even have DJs, that is) across the country, an endless aural strip mall. That’s their vision of the media. It is inherently right wing, because it enforces conformity. It might not be the ravaging alt-right horde or embrace the racism of Jeff Sessions (indeed, it embraces the bland multicultural appeal of a Coke commercial), but by destroying independent media and actual journalistic inquiry, and by embracing ties to the powerful as a means of profit-driving leverage, it allows for shameless goons like Trump to flourish.

The beige boot of corporate conformity is embodied in this almost-parodic statement, which might as well serve as the epitaph for American journalism.

“This is a transformational acquisition for Sinclair that will open up a myriad of opportunities for the company,” said Chris Ripley, president-CEO of Sinclair. “The Tribune stations are highly complementary to Sinclair’s existing footprint and will create a leading nationwide media platform that includes our country’s largest markets. The acquisition will enable Sinclair to build ATSC 3.0 (Next Generation Broadcast Platform) advanced services, scale emerging networks and national sales, and integrate content verticals. The acquisition will also create substantial synergistic value through operating efficiencies, revenue streams, programming strategies and digital platforms.”

05.08.17
by

EPA Replaces Scientists With Industry; Embraces Cartoon Villainy

 

Image result for polluted river america

“Yeah, but those regulations were super onerous…”

 

The phrase “you can’t make this up” is overused, since these days, all you have to do is imagine the worst possible idea being enacted by the worst possible people, and you have a pretty close approximation of reality. Right, NY Times?

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency has dismissed at least five members of a major scientific review board, the latest signal of what critics call a campaign by the Trump administration to shrink the agency’s regulatory reach by reducing the role of academic research.

A spokesman for the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, said he would consider replacing the academic scientists with representatives from industries whose pollution the agency is supposed to regulate, as part of the wide net it plans to cast. “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” said the spokesman, J. P. Freire.

What’s interesting here is how they don’t even pretend to be talking about citizens anymore. Normally, they say things like “those egghead bureaucrat scientists in Washington DC don’t understand the kind of water that we enjoy here in Mudville. Our citizens are just fine with a little bit of cadmium in their soup.” But that’s not even what J.P. Freire is saying. He’s talking about the “regulated community”, i.e., the businesses themselves. It might be a different definition of “community” than you or I understand, but remember, my friend: corporations are people.

There’s not even anything to unpack here; there’s not even the tribute vice pays to virtue. They are straight-up saying that any regulations will be vetted by the people whose profits are impacted by regulations, and how that is the only concern.

It’s a pretty clear baseline. What matters is the impact regulations have on the bottom line of the company. The baseline isn’t what deregulated pollutions has on the humans who lives around the company. That is, at best, secondary. That’s not the impact that matters.

So it doesn’t matter, just to take a quick jaunt around recent headlines, that:

None of that matters (the attack on indigenous rights might actually be a bonus for these jackals). What we need are fewer regulations, and they should be vetted by the industries themselves.

It’s easy to see the counterarguments. More regulations are job-killing, and these plants and factories and industries are the lifeblood of the community, and if those science pinheads continue to ram their globalist climate-hysteric ideologies down our throats, we’ll be forced to close shop and go pollute Mexico. And why should the Mexicans get all our good pollution?

It’s a seductive argument, except it is also a completely phony one. The choice isn’t between “pollution and jobs”; it is between “pollution or slightly reduced profits.” It’s always been a lie that a company can’t follow simple environmental regulations. They made the same argument when smokestacks were regulated to reduce deadly smog, and industry didn’t collapse. It’s a choice made by companies to chase greater profits by moving to deregulated countries.

Reducing or eliminating regulations doesn’t actually help anyone. There will always be a place that cares even less about its citizens, that slashes regulations, that lets you dump paint right into the well. That the US is rushing to join these countries isn’t pro-worker; it is showing absolute contempt for the worker. It’s saying “you can keep your job, but only if we can lower wages, kill your collective bargaining rights, and poison you and your family, working you until you die young or are too broken to be of use.”

That’s Scott Pruitt’s vision of the future. It’s another reason why this administration has to be resisted at every step. Everything they do is carcinogenic. That’s unfortunately too often literal.

05.04.17
by

Sociopaths Celebrate Human Immiseration: The Healthcare Repeal in Three Images

We did it, boys! 

What I can’t get over is how happy they are with themselves. With their cheering and backslapping, the popping open of Bud Lights, and the sense of a job well done. These are people who are thrilled with today’s work of rushing through a terrible bill that will take healthcare away from tens of millions of people, leading to more sickness, bankruptcy, and death. They honestly could not be more pleased.

Part of it, of course, is because their ideology makes them want to hurt everyone who isn’t rich so the wealthy can become even more so, even if it is, for them, just a rounding error. Putting a cool couple of million in the pockets of billionaires is worth destroying the lives of poor, regardless of race.

But of course, the main reason they are so happy, is because they think this sticks it to Obama, their literal bete noire. They want to tear him down, destroy his legacy, and trample the progress that he represented (not to mention, for ideological reasons, the progress he actually achieved). He was an aberration to their sense of what the country should be (run by, and to the benefit of, white men). They want to make him a distasteful footnote.

Image result for rose garden trump ryan ahca

We did it, Paul. Me and you. Linked together forever. 

And that’s why Trump is so important. He’s a useful idiot, to be sure, one whose mental sickness is perfectly aligned with the GOP. He hates Obama, because Obama is the opposite of Trump in every single way. Obama is the living example of merit, of intelligence, of class and dignity. He is the best of us, and Trump is the worst. He’s a man who earned nothing his coddled life. The GOP might find him obnoxious, but more than being someone who will help them save the rich, he’s a living rebuke to Obama.

That’s why this quote is so telling.

“I don’t know if you remember what [then-Vice President Joe] Biden whispered in the President’s ear back when he was signing [the Affordable Care Act],” Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) asked reporters, referring to Biden’s “this is a big f-cking deal” hot mic moment.

“This is a bigger deal than that,” Flores said before Thursday’s vote.

Now, obviously, in a real sense there is no way today’s vote is a bigger deal. Already, their bill is mooted. The Senate is going to write their own, and then they are going to parlay and compromise and the House lunatics will cry traitor and Ted Cruz will grandstand and Lindsay Graham will say some thing, and maybe there will be a bill that can pass both houses, but mabe not. In a real sense, for the GOP, this isn’t something to celebrate. They’ve barely started, despite what our idiot President claims when he says “It’s dead. It’s essentially dead.”

But look at that closer. Joe Biden said something was a big fucking deal when we came closer to having full coverage than ever before, when we expanded health care. Biden said it was a big fucking deal because we came closer to the day when people could live without fear that a bit of bad luck, a sickness, or an accident at work, an open pothole, someone’s foot slipping off their brake and ramming into you because you happened to be at that intersection at that one second instead of any of the other seconds of your life, could ruin that life. Could send someone spiraling into bankruptcy and a lifetime of pain. Biden, bless him, was excited to help people get away from that. He was excited because the richest country in the world was trying to use that wealth to help each other, to unite in a common bond.

Flores thinks it is a much bigger fucking deal to get rid of that. That’s what gets him excited.

Image result for rose garden trump ryan ahca

God damn them

Look at this picture. Look at these monsters. Trump is excited because he has a “win”, regardless of what that means, and in his tiny self-obsessed mind thinks he stuck it to Obama. He thinks this means history will remember him above Obama, as a real victor. He doesn’t comprehend what he is doing to people, because people don’t exist.  This gloating, preening, self-satisfied manchild gave the sea of mayonnaise he’s facing exactly what they want. A chance to destroy the common good and the bonds that unite us as a self-governing nation.

Paul Ryan is so smugly happy about this. He’s oozing joy, with his insincere sincerity about being able to do this with Donald Trump. Louis Gohmert can barely believe his good fortune to be here at this moment. The rest of them just as excited. They’re craning their neck to hoot and holler in unison, hoping that Trump sees just how happy they are to be there with them. How happy they are to please him.

They are so eager to give him a win. To celebrate unearned wealth and undeserved fortune, and the luck they have to be born who they are in this country, to have a chance to rise up and serve the rich, and to trample on the bones of the unlucky. This image is the perfect symbol of why our country–vast and unruly and diverse, a nation that pins its hopes on luck and fears that the chasm is opening up underneath us–is doomed. The pettiest can pass something almost nobody wants. Complacency about progress is foolhardy. It can be smashed underfoot by the trampling hatred of the minority.

Obamacare might not be dead, but GOP decency had its final burial today. They made clear that they are content being the fetchservant of plutocracy, and are eager to make the rest of us suffer and die. Anyone who thinks differently isn’t looking at the same pictures.

05.04.17
by

High Risk Pools: Not Solving a Self-Created Problem

 

Image result for shark in pool

High-risk pools are never good

 

I am far from an expert on (or even super knowledgeable about) health care, so I’m not exactly speaking ex cathedra here, but this to me seems like the perfect example of idiotic and deeply cruel Republican non-governance.

WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders planned to hold a showdown vote Thursday on their bill to repeal and replace large portions of the Affordable Care Act after adding $8 billion to the measure to help cover insurance costs for people with pre-existing conditions…

Democrats and health care groups tried to slow that momentum. The liberal health advocacy group Families USA said another $8 billion would do little to improve the “high-risk pools” that could be set up by states to provide coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions who could not find affordable insurance in the open market.

The American Medical Association and 10 organizations representing patients, including the American Heart Association and the advocacy arm of the American Cancer Society, reiterated their opposition to the House Republican bill on Wednesday, as did the retirees’ lobby AARP…

Mr. Upton and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said they believed that the money in the bill would be adequate. “It’s our understanding that the $8 billion over the five years will more than cover those that might be impacted and, as a consequence, keeps our pledge for those that, in fact, would be otherwise denied because of pre-existing illnesses,” Mr. Upton said at the White House.

So, essentially, millions of Americans are counting on the math skills of Sean Spicer.

Continue reading →

05.02.17
by

The Ivanka Irritation in Two NYTimes Articles

 

Image result for ivanka trump jared kushner immigration ban snapchat

“Female empowerment is more than a slogan for me–it’s a brand!”

 

I actually don’t really want to focus on Ivanka Trump, but it is also sort of weird not to, in a way that reflects the grotesque weirdness of our current political moment. I keep thinking, ugh, just ignore her, she’s a self-empowerment facade, a rich kid with smooth PR, a platitudinous ghost-person who is just some barely-earned dignity above any other fake celebrity. Famous for being famous. Before 2016, I doubt I spent more than four total minutes of my life thinking about Ivanka Trump.

But then, this person is a top advisor to the President of the United States. Ignoring her because she’s a political nobody is to ignore the central problem of America at the moment: we’re being run by reality show idiots. Our country has fully empowered our idol worship, celebrity obsession, and anti-intellectual pitchforking. And while Ivanka may be pretty and say nice things, she’s as much to blame as anyone else, and in her own way as much an embodiment of what is happening to us.

Continue reading →

04.28.17
by

Reuters Exclusive: Trump Had Literally No Idea What Being President Was

 

Image result for trump the apprentice

This dummy thought this was the hardest job in the world. 

 

If you polled 100 million Americans, making sure you got a cross-sample of ages, genders, races, ethnicities, income levels, political beliefs, religions, professional affiliations, and all that, and asked them: “Which do you think is a harder job? Being a reality show celebrity who sometimes calls into Fox News to talk about himself, or being the President of the United States?”, the latter would win 100,000,000 to 0, with a margin of error of one fucking guy.

And sadly, that guy is the President.

President Donald Trump on Thursday reflected on his first 100 days in office with a wistful look at his life before the White House.

“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,” Trump told Reuters in an interview. “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”

Well, live and learn! Or, live and destroy the necessary fundamentals of liberal democracy. Whatever.

04.27.17
by

“The Education of Donald Trump”: Politico Accidentally Shows Why Everything is Scary. (Bonus! The Most Newt Gingrich Quote Ever)

 

Image result for newt gingrich

“They might even impeach him! Who’s ever heard of such a thing!”

 

I don’t really have time to get into the fullness of how depressing and terrifying and bitterly funny this Politico article, “The Education of Donald Trump”, really is. It’s about how none of them knew that being President would be hard, and how it is especially hard because Trump doesn’t take the job seriously. It isn’t so much his education as how the people around him are learning how to manipulate him. I’ll just put in a few choice quotes.

He turned to his relationships with world leaders. “I have a terrific relationship with Xi,” he said, referring to the Chinese president, who Trump recently invited for a weekend visit at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

By all reports, they got along fine. Which is to be expected; only for Trump is not insulting a foreign leader the mark of a great relationship. But he won’t shut up about it. He mentions his great relationship with Xi once a day.  It’s like how he constantly brags about getting a Supreme Court nominee on the bench, when he has an open seat and a Senate majority. That’s literally the least you can do, you idiot.

Trump remains reliant as ever on his children and longtime friends for counsel. White House staff have learned to cater to the president’s image obsession by presenting decisions in terms of how they’ll play in the press. Among his first reads in the morning is still the New York Post.

I bet he still cuts out pages where he’s mentioned and sends them to friends, circling his name with his childlike hands. “They wrote about me again, Reince! I’m on the cover. Are you?”

As president, Trump has repeatedly reminded his audiences, both public and private, about his longshot electoral victory. That unexpected win gave him and his closest advisers the false sense that governing would be as easy to master as running a successful campaign turned out to be. It was a rookie mistake.

It’s not a rookie mistake; it’s an idiot mistake. Who would ever think that? How could any human think that?

As he sat in the Oval Office last week, Trump seemed to concede that even having risen to fame through real estate and entertainment, the presidency represented something very different.

Like with healthcare being complicated, this is something that no one knew.

Between Priebus and Vice President Mike Pence, who once served in House leadership, Trump thought he had the experts he needed and wouldn’t have to worry about Congress that much. But Priebus is a political insider, not a congressional one. And Pence, who was governor of Indiana before joining Trump’s ticket, has been absent from the Hill during the rise of the House Freedom Caucus, the ideological hardliners who delivered Trump the most stinging defeat of his young presidency.

Hey, not to belabor it, but these are things people knew in advance. Like, did you not know that Priebus has never had office? Leadership!

As Trump is beginning to better understand the challenges—and the limits—of the presidency, his aides are understanding better how to manage perhaps the most improvisational and free-wheeling president in history. “If you’re an adviser to him, your job is to help him at the margins,” said one Trump confidante. “To talk him out of doing crazy things.”

Maybe you shouldn’t have helped get a guy who does crazy things elected! That was something you cold have done that was a little nobler, Mr. Confidante. Or Mrs. This might actually be Ivanka.

But they’re learning. One key development: White House aides have figured out that it’s best not to present Trump with too many competing options when it comes to matters of policy or strategy. Instead, the way to win Trump over, they say, is to present him a single preferred course of action and then walk him through what the outcome could be – and especially how it will play in the press.

“You don’t walk in with a traditional presentation, like a binder or a PowerPoint. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t consume information that way,” said one senior administration official. “You go in and tell him the pros and cons, and what the media coverage is going to be like.”

This is literally saying that the President is a child who can’t handle making decisions, but if you tell him something will make Steve Doocey happy, he’ll do it. “He doesn’t consume information that way” is the polite way of saying “The President is a vastly unqualified idiot, and I mean that in every sense: there is nothing to qualify or ameliorate his idiocy, and he should not be President, and every day I work for him I am complicit in this disaster.” Granted, that’s a mouthful, but it is the whole story.

But the really prize isn’t really anything to do with Donald Trump. It is how Newt Gingrich, sycophant to the stars, justifies Trump having problems.

“I think he’s much more aware how complicated the world is,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who serves as an informal administration adviser. “This will all be more uphill than he thought it would be because I think he had the old-fashioned American idea that you run for office, you win, then people behave as though you won.”

Now, obviously, I didn’t hear Newt say this, but you can hear it. It’s a sneer against the liberals. He is obviously being sarcastic about “old-fashioned American idea”, and how it really shouldn’t be old-fashioned, but should be respected. Trump won, and the Democrats aren’t letting him do so. What happened to decency?

Newt Gingrich is saying this. Newt Gingrich. About Donald Trump. Donald Trump, whose political career started by literally saying for five years that Barack Obama wasn’t a US citizen and so an illegitimate President. And it wasn’t just Trump: Gingrich said this about him in 2010: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?…This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.” 

I guess he is saying that Obama was President, but it isn’t exactly behaving as though he won.

He’s saying this after the GOP did everything they could to obstruct the Obama administration, even nullifying his Constitutional duty to appoint a Supreme Court justice.

And, holy god, Newt Gingrich is talking about how no one is showing respect to the election results. Newt Gingrich impeached Bill Clinton over an affair. He shut down the government to try to force Clinton to do what he wanted. He had Congress investigate everything the Clintons had ever done. Again, just to be clear, he impeached a twice-elected President over an affair.

But listen to how aggrieved he is. How unfair the whole thing is. How victimized the Trump administration is by Democrats not recognizing his enormous mandate. There is no one, not even Ted Cruz, who is as self-righteously hypocritical and deeply unprincipled as Newt Gingrich. Mitch McConnell is cynical, but Newt actually believes this. He can say that and feel good about it.

This quote should be on Newt’s tombstone.