Images like this make you feel a little paranoid, da? Image from New York Magazine, linked below.

So, for a few days I’ve been mulling over Jon Chait’s epic piece making the case that Trump has possibly been a Russian asset since 1987, trying to figure out how I figure it. The piece has gotten surprisingly little attention, partially because Chait is anathema on left-wing social media, but also because the whole thing just seems ludicrous, and to the mainstream access-friendly media, downright impolite.

Chait’s article boils down to one essential element: Trump being a Russian asset would explain a lot of things that are otherwise inexplicable. It would explain both the recent and lifelong actions of a man who is being pressured, cajoled, flattered, induced, and otherwise beset by both positive and negative pressures from a foreign state.

Of course, that’s the great thing about conspiracy theories. They make sense of a crazy world, tie everything together in a neat little package. They tie strings between disparate elements, creativing a cohesive story out of the fractured wooziness of modern life. They are actually a source of great comfort, which is why people cling to even the most far-fetched ones.

So how far-fetched is this, really?

(Warning: this piece is super long, even for this blog)

Continue reading →

Obvious obligatory musical cue

One thing which anyone who studies space will tell you is that there’s a lot of it. Like, a whole lot. As Douglas Adams puts it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, space is “really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

The corollary to that is that, relatively, the earth is pretty small. Pale blue dot, and all that. All our hubris and dreams in this one little rock, etc. And it’s true! Compared to space, compared to even our unremarkable little solar system, the earth is pretty small.

But in our lifetimes, we don’t compare the earth to space. We can’t. We can only compare it to the size of our lives, which live outsized and all-encompassing in us. And in that sense, the earth is huge. It is a long road down to the chemist.

That’s why stories like this one from Inverse are both surprising and unsurprising.

(R)esearchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Texas A&M University have charted a multitude of new rivers and streams, showing that we have 44 percent more of them than we ever thought.

That’s a lot of rivers and streams! It’s actually sort of boggling to think about: there’s a decent amount more running water in this world than we had accounted for. This isn’t to say that these are undiscovered streams and rivers; almost certainly people living near them knew of their existence, and had them charted and all that. But we’re just beginning to understand the way river systems work, and the enormity of their feeder systems, and their interplay with the land. It’s a buffet for limnologists.

Unfortunately, as the paper, which wasn’t just a river counter, showed, we’re also beginning to understand how moving water takes human pollution and mixes biochemically with the air to throw more carbon dioxide in the sky.  So 44% more moving water sort of means more chance for bad biochemistry.

The ramifications of global warming are already playing out, everywhere. And while there may be more water than we thought, there isn’t actually more water. Freshwater is running out in some of the world’s hottest places, which are going to get a lot hotter.

Here’s a few.

• Lima, Peru. It’s a city of 10 million people. It gets .3 inches of rain a year. It’s already beset by poverty and vast inequality. As this report from Circle of Blue demonstrates, these factors are colliding, with poor on the dry end of the stick, and an explosion seems on the near horizon.
• India. 90 cities are “water-stressed”, as India faces what officials are calling its worst-ever water crisis. It’s already beginning to turn ugly, as it will, with officials being attacked and people being killed in the streets in water brawls. An Indian think tank estimates that 600 million people have extreme to high water stress, and that by 2030 (which is in only 12 years), 40% of the population won’t have access to clean water. Can Indian democracy and any hint of ethnic/religious peace survive such strains?
• Iran. Iran is already roiling with discontent, and has been for a very long time. The generation that overthrew the Shah is gone or calcified, and generations are frustrated. And now water is becoming a huge issues, and protests have broken out and been broken up by security forces. When the state can’t provide clean drinking water, and beats people up for demanding this basic right, it becomes more difficult to claim a divine right to rule. It’s a bad look!

We’ve talked an enormous amount about Iranian regional influence here, and how it is in line with the historic record, and is essentially inevitable and needs to be managed, It’s a hope that a responsible government establishes itself, instead of this one. But all my geopolitical maunderings can be made irrelevant by a lack of water.

Because the thing is, while space might be really big, none of us are going to see very much of it. It matters philosophically, and I would argue morally, that we’re just a tiny part of a vast and inexplicable and profoundly unconcerned universe, but it doesn’t put food on the table.

And it doesn’t matter if we found out that there is actually a lot more clean water than was thought if it isn’t anywhere near you and your family and you have no access to it. Scientists didn’t suddenly discover a vast underground river beneath the baking Indian plains, some new Alph, as potable as it is sacred, that will solve everything. This story is probably, at most, the merest curiosity to people who desperately need clean water. It’s measureless to man.

All politics is local, and at the end of the day, all politics can be crushed under the basic needs of humanity. As our planet gets both higher salty seas and drier everywhere else, we’ll have to figure out ways to increase water supplies for everyone. It’s a really long road, and it will mean actual global solutions.

These seem impossible in an age of strongmen xenophobically slamming doors, sneering at science, not looking for ways to shelter the miserable or slake the thirsty. As small as the individual is, these times are even smaller. But we can’t afford that. We have to make ourselves bigger, and fill up this terrible moment.  We have to take that step. We have to find that river.

One of the primary projects of this blog has been to analyze America as a normal country beholden to the normal rules of history and demographics, and not an exception to everything (while still of course understood as filtered through a specific context, as you must for everywhere). Part of this has been the now-fairly-common trope of understanding America from the outside, in a “how would they cover it?” sense.

And so…

from The Atlantic

Hundreds of Thousands Mobilize Across the Country To Oppose Ethnic-Nationalist Quasi-Military Force Loyal To President

Yes, the ostensible point of Saturday’s #KeepFamiliesTogether march was to protest the family separation policy and its cruel aftermath (which includes charging migrant families thousands of dollars to get their children back). But more broadly, it was about Trump’s immigration policies in general, and, with a roiling undercurrent, a call to abolish ICE.

What started as a fringe movement has now gained steam, with major politicians like Kristin Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren joining upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in saying that ICE should be abolished. The right and Thoughtful Centrists are calling it political suicide, but there is a very strong case to be made.

1. ICE is 15 years old. I have shirts older than them. America got along fine without them.
2. ICE doesn’t actually protect the border. While I have huge issues with CBP, and feel it needs drastic reform, eliminating ICE doesn’t leave our borders unprotected or whatever.
3. ICE is a cruel agency which is essentially a haven for people who couldn’t be police officers or who chafed at the idea that the police should serve and protect. That’s why real police officers don’t like them: they make the jobs of those who are actually trying to protect the community much more difficult and dangerous.
4. ICE right now isn’t going against MS-13, our President’s idiotic fantasies notwithstanding. They’re going into restaurants and busting up busboys or waiting outside of schools to arrest mothers who have been in the community for decades.

What? 

And so this is kind of the point. Trump (and many of his supporters) love ICE precisely because they are Trump’s spear point of ethno-nationalism. They are an increasingly unencumbered police force in an ever-expanding Constitution-free zone who seem to answer (and be entirely aligned with) the white nationalist political goals of Trump and his movement.

Trump’s calls to end due process and for instant deportation aren’t in a vacuum, or entirely because he doesn’t understand/doesn’t care how the law works (although there is that, too). They are genuine, and genuinely scary, because if ICE can deport anyone who can’t prove their citizenship, who couldn’t they deport. Could you prove yours?

This seems like a lurid fantasy, sure, but what impossible things have happened in the last year? We’re now a nation that gleefully deports people who have been here for decades, and that rips apart families even when they apply for asylum at legitimate entry ports. A lot of Trump’s Tweeted ramblings have eventually morphed into policy.

That’s why I think these protests were different. They weren’t just about a specific policy, even if that was the stated point. They were against ICE, and against Trump’s abuse of state power, and against the idea of an unchecked force working in tandem with a single political figure.

These weren’t against law and order. They were for law and order, and against creeping authoritarianism. More than any other marches, that hot Saturday was the first one that was pushing back against the changing American state in a very real way, in a way we’ve seen in Russia and Hungary and Turkey.

Those marches were crushed, eventually. These weren’t. Maybe that’s because America is actually different, or maybe this is the deep breath before the crackdown. It was hot on Saturday, but I think it is going to get much hotter. And we’re all going to have to decide if we are out on the streets or in our homes.

This land is our land.

With the resignation of Anthony Kennedy, you know the stakes. You know that abortion could soon be illegal in at least 33 states, if not nationwide. You know that we could see a return to the horrors of forced pregnancy or dangerous illegal procedures. You know this.

You know that the Supreme Court has in the last week solidified racial gerrymandering and tried to give a final death-blow to organized labor. You know they are marching lockstep with the GOP as they suppress votes and erase the gains of the Civil Rights movement in an effort to reinstate a new and even more inhuman Gilded Age.

We know that the foundations of America are crumbling, as a tacky authoritarian is coming into his own, his dim but on-point instincts pushing against the outlines of what he can do, expanding them. His Nitwit Nurembergs are getting sharper, more frequent, more blood-soaked and insane.

We know that a dangerous party has found its ultimate leader, a man with no respect for democracy, who can preeningly usher in everything they’ve fought for, because in his bones, he believes it. His pathologies and race hatreds match their goals, and his empty self-image as a great man matches their desire for a final plutocracy.

I feel despair and a sense of the bottom falling out. But also anger: white-hot, incandescent anger. And that anger has to turn into action.

If you’re like me, you sometimes don’t even know where to start. But there are place. The inimitable Amee Vanderpool has compiled a list, from volunteering for the DNC to marching to sending out postcards to voters (perfect for people who can’t do door-to-door or phonebanking).

(links in tweet go to other links for action)

Seriously, start today. We might not win, but this is the fight we have. You don’t get to choose the times you live in. You can only choose how you live in them.

I don’t want to brag about my inside political knowledge, but I’ve been paying close attention to the meteoric rise of the new Democratic superstar since last night around 10 CST when I saw a text my buddy Brett sent reading “alexandria ocasio-cortez. get ready.”

I had assumed he was talking about a prospect for the Cubs or something, but a subsequent news alert let me know that he was referring to the Democratic Socialist who beat Dem leader Joe Crowley. As you probably know by now, the 28-yr-old progressive has a chance to be the youngest person ever elected to Congress, and has already shaken a party torn between its left flank and its centrist leadership. Indeed, as you are about to hear, a lot, the Democratic party has its own Tea Party, and is now just as radical as the Republicans.

Just a reminder, though, that what you are about to hear is all bullshit.

For the last couple of days, we’ve been having the Conversation about Civility and Decency. On the one end, the bulk of Democratic voters who don’t think that family separation is a good thing, and feel that those who are making it happen don’t deserve to hang out in polite society. On the other hand, you have leadership like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer who are tripping over themselves to be the wise and civil heads in the room, criticizing Maxine Waters with gusto and performative dismay.

This has opened up, I think, a gap in the party. Although I did vote for Bernie, I’ve been generally sympathetic to Democratic leadership, who it should be remembered are essentially powerless right now. It should also be recognized that the Bernie wing of the party hasn’t really been successful in nominating candidates, and for all the white dude moaning, the actual base of the Democratic Party has been women, specifically black women and Latinas.

The energized “base” didn’t get a Democrat elected in Alabama; the actual base did.

So what do I mean by a gap? I mean that right now, the leadership seems disconnected. The actual base AND the supposed base are livid at the administration and regular people are wanting to stand up and do something. People who don’t fit into activist buckets have been in the streets. People who aren’t radicals are marching and organizing and voting. But the leadership, who have done good, seem intent on tamping that down to appeal to a mythical voter who is willing to vote against Donald Trump but only if we are super nice to him and don’t say anything too mean about him. It’s maddening.

(As a reminder, it is nice/maddening to remember that Donald Trump is always the dumbest guy in the room:

…should we…tell him?)

That’s where I think Unlikely Giant Slayer Millenial Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fits in. Yes, there’ll be attacks about how we’re crazy, and the media will wring its hands over the party tipping over the edge, but fuck that.

She’s for gun control. So are most Americans.

She’s for immigration justice and the abolition of ICE. Most Dems support the latter and most Americans the former. 75% of Americans think immigration is a good thing, and 65% think it should be increased or kept at current levels. The slavering hatred of the Admin is out of step; not the DSA.

She’s for fighting climate change. That’s not exactly identity politics, unless you think it is pandering to Lunged-Americans.

She’s for regulating Wall Street, expanding housing rights, expanding Medicare protections, and for campaign finance reform. These are all, if not largely popular, pretty much down-the-line Democratic beliefs.

So where is she radical? Well, she believes strongly in LGBTQ+ rights, as do most Democrats, but all those letters might turn off some people who don’t believe in rights. But they’re not going to vote Democratic anyway. The assault weapon ban will pretty much turn away people who are already convinced that Democrats want to steal your guns so they can protect their pedophile rings.

And I don’t know, is ending private prisons radical? Is criminal justice reform? It wasn’t a few years ago; before Trump’s Law and Order tough-guy act, it was pretty bipartisan.

So yes: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t going to win votes in Steve King’s district, although, to be honest, she might. Her message of protecting workers and the working class can actually cut across political divides, and if she herself is not the answer*, the message is anything but a radical one.

(*Again, I hadn’t heard of her until last night, and neither had 90% of the people you hear analyzing the State of Our Politics tonight.)

That’s where the party should be. With the Supreme Court ruling in favor of racial gerrymandering, a minority party beholden to the rich is using anti-democratic means to hold onto power. The energy should be in candidates who offer a message of economic solidarity, but not milquetoast politeese. Minority candidates and women are particularly well-positioned to take advantage of this, since again, those are the real base of the party.

To be honest, I do sort of dread the attacks, and am not thrilled that she’s a Democratic Socialist, rather than just a Democrat. I don’t like the idea of the media talking about the Dems in disarray, but at the end of the day, so what. Dems keep winning, and the leadership might recognize that while the base is NOT Chapo Trap House, nor is it feeling particularly placid.

Candidates who can speak to the economic dislocation and rigged system without brosephy sneers and condescending attacks can win. Those who are willing to stand up to the grotesque stupidity of the Administration and its enablers can win. We should be running liberals in liberal districts, and purples like Doug Jones in less blue areas. But the message can be pretty similar.

Things aren’t good. They are very bad. But we can take it back and swing things again. That’s the lesson of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and anyone who thinks differently has something to sell you.

This is a professionally terrible person who helps rip families apart and orphans children for short-term political gain. Why are we even talking about being nice to her, for god’s sake

John Bolton, one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq War, is currently head of the National Security Council. Working for Trump is an exercise in daily humiliations, but is still a pretty good gig, which he got after a decade or so of well-paid TV and speech circuit work. It is certainly a better gig than being a live-in nurse for soldiers who have had their limbs blown off or their heads wrecked or their spines severed.

John Yoo, who made the legal case that turned America into a nation that tortures, is currently the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. I don’t know exactly what that position is, but I imagine it is significantly more cushy than, say, being an ash-covered mendicant traveling the country in sackcloth begging forgiveness.

Dick Cheney, who beside being evil was a remarkable failure, being the most powerful man in the country during two lost wars and a catastrophic recession, gets up to $75,000 a speech to talk about the leadership and the broad themes of history. Ari Fleischer is a talking head. Dana Pirino has had like 10 shows.

In other words, not a single member of the Bush administration, which at the very least deliberately overturned the Geneva Conventions, wrecked the lives of hundreds of innocents, and brutalized a nation into accepting torture, suffered any real legal or financial consequences for their actions. And they certainly didn’t suffer any social ones, at all.

That’s important to remember as we debate inanely about “civility” in the wake of both DHS Secretary Kristjen Neilsen and Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders being booed from and politely asked to leave from a restaurant, respectively.

By now you know the outlines of this. Official Washington is absolutely aghast that these women weren’t allowed to have their meals after a day spent separating children from their families and/or lying about it. Even the Washington Post, which has been a beacon of hard reporting in a toothless and truthless era, pearl-clutched itself into irrelevance with an official editorial begging for civility.

Obviously, the right has been livid about this, with performative cries of fascism and declarations that the Left is finally showing their true colors. It’s easy to point out the hypocrisy here: the party of “Lock Her Up!” and “Trump that bitch!” and “grab her by the pussy” and “fuck your feelings” and “Mexicans are rapists” and “Democrats want open borders to protect their gun-grabbing jihadist pedophile pizza slingers” is sad that other people are being mean.

https://twitter.com/GovMikeHuckabee/status/1010497564435730434

But there is obviously more at play here than just hypocrisy. It’s very strategic hypocrisy, taking advantage of Democrat’s natural inclination toward compromise and obsequious grandstanding centrism to force apologies and throw us on our back feet. It’s part of the constant firehouse of lies and nonsense that is impossible to combat, the swirl of confusion that is the constant background music of our times, the Rites of Spring being played on a broken accordion, forever.

It’s that horrible music, and the Democrat’s natural tendency to quail, that can force Nancy Pelosi to condemn a true champion of the base and stand up for Sarah Huckabee Sanders because they know how to work the system.

Note: she didn’t call for harm to supporters, but more incivility against Trump administration officials, who at the very least work for a man who consistently calls Maxine Waters, and no one else, “low IQ”, a racially-charged slur, which Trump knows, which is why he keeps doing it, which is why it is outrageous for Pelosi to condemn Waters for god’s sake.

So why did Pelosi capitulate? It’s because she knows how the game works (and has probably internalized it so much that it is part of her, or she is part of it, or it is indistinguishable. It was so laughably obvious and predictable how our elite media and political class would react to an acting agent of incipient authoritarianism being asked to leave a restaurant. They’d call for the left and the Dems to be polite, and to treat Trump’s bullying fascism with “kindness”, because “that’s not who we are”. We can’t let our politics get in the way of decency!

Fuck that. Saying that “politics” shouldn’t matter is the rallying cry of the powerful, for whom politics has no real impact. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is participating in a program to permanently orphan children on behest of the American people. She’s helping the administration poison our air and water, sew discord and distrust everywhere, slander career law enforcement agents, and block any real chance at seeing how deeply Russia has infiltrated our politics.

She’s a face of a party who has now legally enshrined suppressing minority votes, thanks to a stolen Supreme Court seat appointed by a man who got a minority of votes.

Politics is real life, and really affects the lives of people who aren’t in the powerful class. That’s why the Even The Liberal Washington Post and commentators from “both sides of the aisle” are universally aghast at what is happening to administration officials. They are nearly as complicit, and don’t want to upset the rules of what for them is a very comfortable game.

But that’s not how it should be. If you think that we are at a very dangerous inflection point in American history, you can’t let the comfortable stay comfortable. If the powerful are still comfortable during times of evil, evil wins.

That’s one way to combat this. There may never be actual legal or financial disruptions for these people (although there also might be, fingers crossed). But there damn well should be social ones. You don’t get to enact cruelty during the day and then go out like nothing has happened. You changed clothes; you didn’t change skin. Actions, we’re always told, have consequences. It should for the powerful as well.

This isn’t a cry to harass any Trump voters, obviously. Literally no one is saying that. Argue, persuade, cut them off your Facebook feed, whatever. That’s a private decision. We’re saying that punching up is a duty. We’re saying is that the powerful should be held to account.  If they are, if their lives are made materially worse for their role in making other lives dramatically and irrevocably worse, maybe they’ll think twice. Maybe people won’t take jobs with brutal, authoritarian administrations. Maybe things will change.

And maybe not. The unique malevolent gravity of Donald Trump ensures that this administration won’t change its tone. But if its lackeys can’t eat in public anymore, if they are booed on the street and made to feel the weight of their cruel actions, maybe it will just be the fake king, wandering bloated down the empty hallways of the shadowed White House, mumbling nothings to the few ghouls who still hang around. And that, at least, might make a difference.

The conflict in question is where all the buttons are bunched up. Image from yemen.liveuamap.com/

(Note: using transliteration used in the Times and elsewhere, though not really for any good reason)

Yesterday, after weeks of frantic negotiations and an increasing sense of dread, the coalition of the exiled San’a government and the remnants of the GCC launched an assault on the Houthi-led port city of al-Hudaydah, a city of 600,000 caught in the vise of the world’s most catastrophic human rights tragedy.

There is little doubt that this will be a brutal slog. The coalition is led ostensibly by Tariq Saleh, nephew of the late ex-President and an erstwhile ally of the Houthis (as in: until December). That he is now leading a city-ruining assault against those with which he so recently broke bread is not surprising. It fits in the long history of Yemeni politics and war in the immediate context of this conflict, which started when the Houthis tried to overthrow his uncle.

Of course, few really think that Tariq is calling all the shots. While he has led several thousand of his fighters up the coast, it is the UAE that demanded the Houthi’s leave the city, an ultimatum which went whooshing by at midnight, followed by the sounds of heavy guns and bombing runs.

So why is this city so important? Al-Jazeera captures the contradictions.

The Hudaida port is crucial for the flow of food supplies into a country that is on the brink of famine.

But Riyadh and Abu Dhabi maintain that the port is being used to smuggle weapons.

Both can be true, and almost certainly are (certainly the first one is, and few doubt the latter). And that’s really the problem. The battle for the city could wreck even the meagerest supplies that are preventing famine, but famine and disease are hardly being prevented whatsoever already.  Hudaydah is the primary port in the north; under the Houthis it remains one of Yemen’s poorest and most hungry provinces.

Expelling the Houthis will be a catastrophe, but their occupation of the province (and most of Yemen) has been catastrophic. While we focus on the US involvement and our complicity in Saudi and Emirati war crimes, we ignore that the Houthis are brutal and vicious, running and increasing gangster/theocrat rule, with lawless violence being a hallmark.

Indeed, reports from trusted reporters seem to show that there is ambiguity in Hudaydah about the coming conflict.

This negotiated plan is what had been offered in the past, but the Houthis declined. At this point, there seem to be few good options for success. Writing in the NYTimes, Gregory Johnsen says that right now, the only real option is a half-measure de-escalation.

Mr. Griffiths (UN Special Envoy) has put together a framework for peace negotiations, which was leaked to the press last week. A key component of that framework is disarmament, which would require the Houthis to surrender all their weapons, including ballistic missiles and artillery, except for light arms. But in an environment of such profound distrust, where weapons are equated with power, no one side will voluntarily surrender them.

Instead, Mr. Griffiths should push for transitional arms control. Unlike disarmament, which is an all-or-nothing affair, transitional arms control is gradual and allows for the slow building of trust by getting the warring parties to step back from the brink while maintaining control of their weapons should they feel threatened.

In exchange for getting Saudi Arabia and the Emirates to stop airstrikes, the Houthis would commit to placing their weapons under lock and key. Under such a scenario, the Saudis and Emiratis would still have access to their planes and the Houthis would keep the keys to their weapons depot.

That’s pretty much where we’re at. A hated occupier is being slowly forced out in a humanitarian nightmare by the parties that are absolutely complicit in the broader humanitarian nightmare, led by a former ally of the first group. The only chance to get people to stop killing each other is to convince them they will still be able to kill each other at a moment’s notice if things don’t work out.

I say the Houthis are an occupier because they are: the soldiers they use are from northern cities with no connection real connection to Hudaydah, and in the context of Yemeni politics, that makes it an occupation. It doesn’t matter that they control San’a. They are not “foreign”, but certainly don’t belong. They came out of their province and ran roughshod over the local population, the same way that Saleh did to both Sadah and Southern Yemen.

This is Yemen at the moment. A swirl of shifting, uncertain allegiances, a whole swath of the country controlled by an increasingly blood-thirsty and malevolent/incompetent occupying army, and being fought by a coalition that has zero concern for the local population, and is essentially their own occupying force.

The battle is just starting. The war is grinding on with no end in site. The humanitarian crisis is already unimaginable and will get worse. And the question of what Yemen is, or what it should be, or what the sides are actually fighting for, will continue to be murky and unanswered even as the smoke wafts away from ruined cities and the dead are wailingly buried in the ground.

Remember this guy? It’s less funny to me, now. 

Among certain citizen bloviators, myself among them, the idea that the modern GOP, embodied by Trump, is too stupid to pull off a genuine authoritarianism is a frequently-pulled-upon comfort blanket. The people in the White House are the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, led by a preening child who is terrified of genuine human thought. Maybe we’ll be lucky!

That idea is easy to understand when you see the actions of Paul Manafort, one of the few people tied to the campaign or the administration who is genuinely smart and a savvy operator. As we found out last night, he’s been acting…not super brightly.

Despite being under house arrest, with multiple ankle bracelets, and certainly under the watchful eye of the Special Counsel for conspiring to sell our election to Russia, he’s been contacting associates and asking them to lie about what happened. I’ll paraphrase the transcripts.

Hey, co-conspirator? Hey, it’s…Paul M. You know who- I’m on the news, and we did the Ukraine thing together. Anyway, I’m not really at liberty to talk, since I’m certainly being watched, but I’m really going to need you to lie about the collus…coolatta. (Wink!)(I mean the collusion). 

Smart as Manafort may be, he is also desperate and panicked. As Frank Foer put it in The Atlantic, he’s lost his cool.  

Robert Mueller’s allegation that Manafort attempted to tamper with a witness permits us to peer inside Manafort’s mind, as it has functioned in a very different set of circumstances. When it comes to Manafort’s own deep problems, his moment of legal peril, he seems unable to muster strategic thinking. He has shown himself capable of profoundly dunderheaded miscalculations.

As Foer explains, Mueller knows everything. He’s got Rick Gates as a cooperating witness, and so he’s privy to all of Manafort’s dealings and contacts. He’s keeping tabs on everything. He know what’s up.

And that’s where our comfort has, at times, come in. That as Mueller gets closer, rolling up Manafort and maybe Kushner, Don Jr, etc, the rats will grow hungry and gnashingly desperate, terrified of every shadow. They’ll see the rest of their lives unspooling in a prison yard, and they’ll make more mistakes, turn on each other, blunder their way into confessions. God, I’m sweaty just thinking about it.

But then we remember that even when the powerful are idiots, they are, first and foremost, powerful.

This of course was briefly the story of the day when he tweeted it yesterday (yesterday? Jesus christ…). It’s hard to overstate what this means. He’s saying (with his lawyers, most notably Guiliani, confirming) that the President can pardon anyone, can stop any investigation into himself, and can do whatever he can to harass and discredit and law enforcement agency looking into his crimes. In other words: there are no laws to apply to him.

That’s dull and thuggish and not at all the work of a savvy player, but so what? If he’s willing to use the pardon simply to reward loyalty or protect himself, there are very few obstacles to stopping him. He doesn’t need to be smart. He just needs to be angry, and to not care at all about any norms or any decent behavior or anything beside his own impossibly fake tough-guy persona.

And as we see, this dim assumption of authority isn’t an obstacle to his success. Indeed, both pragmatically and emotionally, it is the source of his power.

Trump is the GOP

While his assertion of Presidential perogative is almost certainly untrue, and absolutely insane, and genuinely terrifying. it almost doesn’t matter. If the President pardons himself, I don’t think anyone knows what will happen. Even if the GOP decides to impeach him, would he even leave? What’s the mechanism for forcibly removing a President?

And let’s be clear: the GOP won’t impeach him.

When this “own party” poll came out yesterday, it was solidified for many on the commentariat that the GOP was too scared to go against him for fear of losing the base. And that’s certainly true for some of them. Some of them may not like Trump, but they are willing to play ball to save their own skins.

But really, that’s mostly bullshit. Many of them like Trump because he is willing to do whatever the GOP wants, both for reasons of what passes for his ideology, and because his own pathologies, weaknesses, and vanities (which is to say: his sum total) perfectly align with GOP goals.

Sure, there are some variations, like his obsession with tariffs, but those are few and far between. There is a general policy alignment, but more than that, there is deep-seated cruelty and meanness of spirit, which is the animating principle of today’s GOP.

As an example, let’s look at Kris Kobach, last seen failing entirely to suppress the vote nationwide simply because he didn’t know the first thing about the law. This man, whose entire career has been based around the goal of not letting poor people or minorities vote (that’s no exaggeration), is now running for governor of Kansas. And he has a great idea for how to do that: being the world’s biggest asshole.

At a parade

Yup…he’s riding around a parade with a big ol’ gun strapped to his jeep, because he’s a genuine tough guy who just accidentally never served. Needless to say, this upset some people, who were not thrilled about seeing a gun at a parade, on account of our citizens, especially students, are frequently massacred.

But Kobach was ready for that. He was ready to pounce that it was a FAKE GUN and that he was TRIGGERING THE SNOWFLAKES who HATE THE 2ND ADMENDMENT. I’m not kidding. As the KC Star explains in a fantastic, biting editorial:

Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach wants us to be very, very angry over his weekend parade appearance with a replica of a machine gun. That’s because he hopes Kansan Republicans will delight in that anger and revel in the idea that he’s triggering the “snowflakes.”

In a fundraising email on Monday, the Republican secretary of state bragged about the reaction to his appearance alongside what only looked like a big gun in Saturday’s Old Shawnee Days parade: “Within seconds of the parade being over, liberals started losing their minds … But the fact is, the only reason why these ‘tolerant’ left snowflakes get so upset over even the sight of me is because they know I will not back down in my defense of the Second Amendment.”

Kobach apparently does need it, though. His campaign couldn’t wait to put out a statement deriding “those who use the excuse of school violence to restrict the right to bear arms.”

There’s a hell of a lot going on here, starting with the language of the internet, in which Kobach, an ostensible grownup, reflects the only language that matters on the right: keyword incantations and barely-literate trollery.

(As for the gun being fake, he’s lucky he wasn’t a black man in a Wal-Mart or a 13-yr-old kid in a playground…)

Obviously, trolling was the only point of this. He wanted us to get upset over his replica gun, so that he could talk about how we’re…intolerant of guns. Think about it: he wanted us to be upset over making people think that a weapon of death was coming down their street so that he could sneer about “the excuse of school violence”, as if that’s not a hideous wailing national tragedy. As if it is something to poke fun at.

And that’s the point: the GOP has been taken over entirely by this wanton cruelty, by this delight and demeaning and belittling (while complaining the whole while that the Ivy League professors are snobby jerks). It’s been an inevitable product of 40+ years of policy, a spreading meanness that mutates into contempt for decency.

Trump’s Tacky Eagles Stunt Is Anything But Foolish

That’s why Trump isn’t an anomaly, but a culmination. It’s why the GOP isn’t going to impeach him or stop him. He enables their success by supporting voter suppression. His authoritarianism is what a minority party needs to stay in power. They are a far-right party aligned with far-right parties around the globe, and democracy is an afterthought, a nicety to be gestured at while the real work of plutocratic looting gets done.

Some, like the American Ambassador to Germany, have stopped pretending to be anything other than a part of a growing anti-democratic right-wing movement. And while we think Trump is different, because he’s dumber, that’s not the case. He doesn’t need to be smart. His small-fisted sense of patriotism is enough.

His statement disinviting the Eagles to the White House, simply because a  lot of them wouldn’t come, is proof-positive of that.

Obviously, this is petty and stupid and foolish. For one thing, the Eagles players didn’t kneel during the anthem this season (despite what Fox News grossly pretended). What happened is that fewer than 10 players wanted to go (some reports have it at 3 or 4, probably depending on if you count Riley Cooper as 3 or 4 people), and so Trump cancelled it rather than have it reflect poorly on him.

But that wasn’t enough, of course. They didn’t want to come because they disagree with “their President” (and has any POTUS ever used a term so paternal and possessive?) about something that never happened, and so are essentially unpatriotic. It’s dishonest about the protests, dishonest about the reasons the Eagles weren’t coming, and dishonest about their motivations.

It’s wholly stupid and entirely false, a child’s idea of what patriotism is and a moron’s notion of revenge. It’s a jumble of brass bands and barely-mouthed incantations and symbols that the man calling for them doesn’t even understand. It’s an idiot’s path, designed entirely to rile up the base about angry blacks and ungrateful traitors and spoiled football players who hate the troops and the country by dint of disagreeing with the President.

If you think Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is too stupid to work, you’re wrong. If you think it is too cruel and punitive and obviously histrionic to take hold here, you’re wrong. You have a party that supports him because they revel in the onslaught of cruelties, they power of totems, the both fevered and dull recitation of buzzwords, and the slow stripping away of representative democracy.

They support Trump because of everything he is. We’re in extremely dangerous days, and the fact that they are so dumb and tacky and vulgar isn’t a cause for optimism: it’s a sign of the stompingly gray future to come.

NOTE: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO COME. This is an all-hands-on-deck election year. Don’t just vote, volunteer. Get involved. Democracy relies on everyday engagement.

At the blog, we like to poke fun at our President from time to time, and point out that his language is “colorful” and “eccentric” and “the pure distilled sound of deranged dishonesty” and “a madman’s bark that is warping and distorting the institutions and assumptions on which democracy and a functioning society are based.” But there are times when the costs of his pathologies become even more clear.

There was a lot going on in this low, dumb, dishonest week, but this is what should matter most:

A new study in TheNew England Journal of Medicine, conducted in part by researchers at Harvard University, sheds new light on what’s really happened on the island. The team found that there were over 4,600 deaths potentially attributable to the hurricane, a 70-fold increase over official estimates. The survey also measured high rates of migration among people displaced by the storm and, after it passed, long periods where residents faced a loss of basic services.

I don’t really want to talk about how this got lost in Rosanne and Sam Bee and D’Szouza and all that. We know we have cracked priorities (I’m as guilty as anyone). But it is clear that these priorities, this inward gazing, redolent of self-obsessed decline, is part and parcel of why we didn’t care about Puerto Rico, and that this truth could go relatively (though obviously and thankfully not entirely) unmentioned, is tied up in Trump’s wild dishonesty.

Our disregard for Puerto Rico didn’t start with Trump, of course. It is a colonial legacy of a country that somehow doesn’t believe itself to be a colonizer (an assumption that can be disproven by: all of America). Most Americans probably didn’t know, or at least fully understand, that by dint of law and ties of culture, Puerto Ricans are Americans. That makes this the greatest natural disaster in modern American history, but of course, it wasn’t just natural.

This disaster was exacerbated by the administration’s flagrant disregard for non-white lives, and by Trump’s all-encompassing need to protect himself. These sicknesses met in how he talked about Puerto Rico, which again, is part of America. As I said then:

One of the more grotesque manifestations of Donald Trump’s attitude toward the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico is that he insists on referring to the island as a collection of “thems”, as opposed to “us”, or rather, the US. We can’t leave “our” first responders there forever; “they” have to help “themselves”; “they” should be grateful.

Part of this was self-preservation. It was clearly a disaster, but disasters can’t happen under Trump, because he is the ultimate leader, and can never take responsibility for anything. Obviously, nothing bad can happen under his watch (unless he is betrayed), so he had to distance himself from “them”.

This also, obviously, can’t be separated from racism, both Trump’s personal racism and the kind baked into every American institution. I’m not going to pretend that any other American President would be able or willing to tearfully rally the country around a protectorate we’d rather forget.

But Trump’s essential dishonesty about the situation allowed us to ignore it, changed the topic, pushed the grim fate of modern American citizens into a malarial and nightblack cesspool. Trump didn’t care about “them”, and wanted us not to care about it, so he threw some paper towels, bragged about how good he did and how he did so much better than Bush and Katrina, bragged to Puerto Ricans about their very low death toll and how Katrina was a real disaster, declared victory, and brought “our” responders home. This all really happened!

I mean, that’s not all that happened, of course. This being the Trump administration, the aftermath was wracked with corruption and incompetence, with friends of Ryan Zinke getting absurd contracts to fail to repair the electricity (which costs lives and livelihoods). That’s par for the Trumpian course, but it was born from his essential dishonesty about himself, about what happened, and about Puerto Rico.

And so thousands died needlessly. Of course there was corruption and bad leadership on the island; there is everywhere in the country. But through the lens of Trump’s racism and need to insulate himself from anything that reflects poorly, that was shluffed off as brownish third-world nonsense, and distanced further from America. Trump was able to blame Puerto Rico on Puerto Ricans, pretending they weren’t American, and shifting the conversation to how good he did.

And people died. Our modern dishonesty kills. You want another example? Watch this video.

This is a viral video claiming to show Muslims rioting in Birmingham in order to eat in the streets during Ramadan, which is a weird thing since Muslims know about sidewalks and “inside”. But of course this isn’t a Muslim riot, but rather soccer fans in Switzerland celebrating a win or mourning a loss or just embracing soccer or something.

Needless to say, the “look at these Muslims” has been seen hundreds of thousands of times, and will certainly be used to reinforce prejudice, exacerbate tension, stir up violence, and continue to fray the slight bonds that keep Western civilization together. It’s a smallish sort of thing in the grand scheme, but its virality and complete dishonesty makes it perfect for our times.

And it doesn’t take much of a stretch of your imagination to consider the President, cranky and sleepy, retweeting it and saying “Donald J Trump was RIGHT and liberal Obama/Crooked H judges WRONG about security. Need STRONG AND SMART “travel” ban (won’t say Muslim) now! Good President!”

Our days are dishonest, and falseness is their currency. It is a weapon. It is a cudgel and a scalpel, capable of huge hammering deadly blows, as in Puerto Rico, and a million tiny daily incisions, until we’re baffled and worn out and unable to process. Trump didn’t start it, and it won’t end with him. But he is the snarling, bloated culmination of these times, both embodying and enlarging them. He’s every dumb, terrible thing we’ve done wrapped up in an empty package, and his legacy will be death and discord and misery. It’s a vulgar and tacky way to reconcile empire, but it is hard to say it is undeserved.