Despite of everything, all our efforts to commence a serious, solid and professional joint work are rejected out of hand.

“There is a well-known style, a rough, clumsy algorithm. Dirty provocations are organised, and the guilty side is determined in advance.

The so-called “investigation” is conducted almost completely on the basis of information from social networks and several international non-governmental organisations, which have tainted themselves long ago by fakes, forgeries, primitive fabrications and so on.

This unworthy style is clearly observed in the so-called ‘Skripal’s case’, Syrian chemical dossier, and previously, in the fabrication of pretexts for military invasion to Yugoslavia and Iraq.

-Russian Ambassador to Australia Grigory Logvinov, in response to Russia being definitively implicated in the downing of MH-17 over Ukraine in 2014.

 The Kremlin said on Tuesday that U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other related crimes would end one day, describing it as pointless.

“There’s hope that it will wind up one day,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the investigation.

“In Russian, it’s called passing water through a sieve,” he said of the U.S. probe, using a Russian expression that means flogging a dead horse. “That’s exactly what the process looks like.”

One of the big questions of the Trump Era has been whether he is stupid, is deranged, is absolutely unable not to lie, or if he plots out his provocations for maximal effect. And the answer, most likely, is: all of it.

That’s what we see at the top, a tweet string yesterday unintentionally lightened up by his under-two-hour commitment to actually work at being President. In it, he blurts out all the keyphrases and incantations that the right has ben picking up: Fake News, Spygate, Phony Russian Witch Hunt, Rigged Russia Witch Hunt, 13 Angry Democrats, Crooked Hillary, Obama/Comey/Lynch et al.  He spouts how the only collusion (or: Collusion) was by the Dems.

On the surface, of course, it is a madshow, absolute blubbering insanity. But it makes a little more sense in light of the Russian statement about MH-17, in which it was shown (though it was known) that Russian soldiers downed a civilian plane as part of their wildly illegal invasion, division, and annexation of Ukraine.

You see a fairly similar use of language here: the Syrian Chemical Dossier, the scare quotes around the Skripal Case, because it is absurd to think that Russia is responsible for an enemy of Moscow being poisoned in Russia, the use of “fakes” and “phonies” and “forgeries” to describe a 4-yr multinational investigation.

This method of argument (if one could call it that) hinges on the knowledge that there is too much information in the world today, and too many easy recourses to alternate realities, that if you say enough things they’ll stick somehow. At the very least, they’ll confuse the issue, and force your opponents to spend time arguing one point.

Like, if you want to point out how absurd it is to say that Moscow was somehow framed for Skripal, you have to go into the whole history of Litvinenko, of Yuschkenko, of Politkovskaya, of Nemtsov, each of which have their own conspiracies you could spend the rest of your life debunking.

The Russians, for very complicated reasons, have perfected this as part of their “active measures”. They can frame everything that pains Russia in a bad light as part of this long-running conspiracy against Russia, which stretches back through time, and can incorporate elements as disparate as international Jewry and Hitler.

In his book The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder uses the term schizo-fascists to describe actual Russian fascists, like literal-Balbo-type ones, who use the term fascist to describe any enemy of Russia. I think it is a sort of clunky, but very useful term, and absolutely describes this phenomenon.

Because think about it: if you are talking to an honest-to-god fascist, and saying that you oppose them, and they say, “of course you do, you fascist”, what do you say? Do you talk to them about how their policies and ideas are drawn directly from the fascism of the 30s and 40s, filtered through the local context and mythologies?

Imagine doing so! And then they’ll say that you’re suppressing their speech, and are in fact the true fascist! Antifa are the real Nazis! Anti-Rosanne’s are the real racists! Democrats are the real corrupt ones!

It’s impossible to argue against it, not just because anyone can find a conspiracy theory to back that up (and what the undead Ukrainian journalist did, while understandable and probably right and undoubtedly pretty awesome, will only give more ammo to these sides), but because you are quickly reduced to their shouting level. I’m angry right now. No, goddammit, you’re clearly the fascist you’re wearing a skull armband. 

Yes!

That’s what Trump is doing, intentionally or not. There’s a chance he just hears these things on Fox, and believes them, because he is both the kind of dummy who believes conspiracies and the megalomaniacal paranoid dissonance-addict who thinks everything he does was done to him, and worse, by someone else. He might just be regurgitating whatever he thinks makes him sound good.

But his one great skill has always been to manipulate the minds of people through sheer bullshit, and now he has a constant megaphone with which to do it. He knows, I think, that throwing everything out there will convince enough people and throw the rest of us off guard, unbalanced, unsure of where to strike. Which bit of that madness do we argue? Which section of this flood do we try to mop up?

That’s the international right’s methodology, Russian-inspired, and it is what unites them as much as white supranationalism. It’s a tool for advancing their agenda. And it works, because when you don’t care about truth, you win. When you think that facts are just wobbly toys to be knocked over, you win. When you internalize the idea that all liberals and multinationals are evil and conspiring against you and control the media, and that you can fight against them by any means needed, and that lying in that service is a higher form of honesty, you can win.

And yes, I know that now I sound like a conspiracist, ranting about their methods. That I don’t think they are terribly organized, but rather inspired by each other, doesn’t matter. That I don’t think it is a conspiracy doesn’t matter. What matters is that I sound like I do, and now I am defending it, and that’s all that matters.

Seriously, like two years ago this guy was a garden-variety Tea Party nobody. 

In a speech yesterday, our Secretary of State, the terrible Tea Party Christianist bigot Mike Pompeo, presented his idea of diplomacy in the aftermath of the United States’ violation of the Iran deal: colonialism.

In essence, Pompeo told Iran that they would be faced with the most devastating sanctions in human history if they didn’t comply with his list of 12 demands. This, on its face, was nonsense. After all, they already faced terrible sanctions, which is why they gave up their nuclear program and agreed to a hugely invasive inspection regime.

But even more so, in order for that to work, the EU, Russia, and China would have to be on board with this. And so far, it is far from clear they will be. The EU is already saying they might protect firms hurt by US sanctions, which they absolutely should. US leadership doesn’t mean anything if we violate our agreements and then demand our allies support us.

And Russia and China? Please. Russia’s whole goal is to make this a post-US world, and separating us from Europe is a big part of that. Trump and Pompeo just handed them a huge gift. China isn’t trying to separate us, as much as make themselves far more relevant, and our rush toward empurpled irrelevance is extremely helpful.

But beside the unreality of his claims, it was Pompeo’s demand that really showed just what kind of people the administration is. I’m going to paste them in full.

1. Declare to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) a full account of the prior military dimensions of its nuclear programme and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity.

2. Stop enrichment and never pursue plutonium reprocessing, including closing its heavy water reactor.
3. Provide the IAEA with unqualified access to all sites throughout the entire country.
4. End its proliferation of ballistic missiles and halt further launching or development of nuclear-capable missile systems.
5. Release all US citizens as well as citizens of US partners and allies.
6. End support to Middle East “terrorist” groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
7. Respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi government and permit the disarming, demobilisation and reintegration of Shia militias.
8. End its military support for the Houthi rebels and work towards a peaceful, political settlement in Yemen.
9. Withdraw all forces under Iran’s command throughout the entirety of Syria.
10. End support for the Taliban and other “terrorists” in Afghanistan and the region and cease harbouring senior al-Qaeda leaders.
11. End the Islamic Revolutionary Guard corps-linked Quds Force’s support for “terrorists” and “militant” partners around the world.
12. End its threatening behaviour against its neighbours, many of whom are US allies, including its threats to destroy Israel and its firing of missiles at Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and threats to international shipping and destructive cyberattacks.

Some of these are extremely worthy. Some are insane (give up even their nuclear energy program?). Some are wildly hypocritical, like the demand to stop supporting the Houthis while we’re arming the Sauds in their genocidal war. It’s not that it is unworthy, but it is not exactly an ask backed by any moral authority.

But the point-by-point isn’t as important as the project taken as a whole. In essence, they insist that Iran stop trying to be a power in the Middle East. This isn’t just hyopcritical; it is colonial. It is demanding that Iran go back before the revolution, when they were a vassal of the west. It is demanding that the Middle East be ruled by America, who gets to decide who is the power and who isn’t.

I can’t state how wildly self-defeating this is, not just in Iran, but in the broader Middle East (Gulf Arab states not included). I talked about why a while ago, but think it is important to re-up.

It’s madness and fallacy to think that the Iranian regime, or really, any post-Shah Iranian government, would enter into any agreement that lessens their regional power and increases that of the West. To believe that is to have zero historical understanding, of the near or the distant past.

The Iranian revolution wasn’t about Islam, or not entirely. There was a mix of anti-imperialist leftists, communists, other various secularists, religious types who didn’t want clerical rule (which remember, is what Khomeini first promised) and non-ideological nationalists who were just tired of western interference.

Western Europe and Russia had eclipsed Persian power in the region in the late 1800s, but it wasn’t until oil that the West really started controlling what was happening in Iran. Lopsided deals with venal flunkies gave England and then America a dominant role in the expropriation of Iranian resources. Shahs got rich, the west got rich, and most Iranians stayed poor. The same thing happened in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Western colonialism in the Middle East was a 20th-century phenomenon, which in our lifetime seems like all of eternity, but was really a blip. It was a terrible one, from the perspective of the inhabitants, of course. It was dirty and condescending and venal and greedy and grubbing. It was literally crude. Khomeini wasn’t just deposing a shah for the sake of Islam: he was kicking out the west for the sake of Iran.

That’s the heart of this. Iran, after a low and brutal, but historically brief, interregnum, is trying to reassert itself in a changing and fluid Middle East, still reeling from the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the perversions of 20th-century colonialism and nationalism.

To demand that they shouldn’t do this is breathtakingly arrogant and essentially colonialist. It’s saying to these dirty Persians that they should probably do what we want or else it would be a shame if we had to destroy your country. Grovel, or be brought low. One way or the other, on your knees.

The stupidity and venality of this is overwhelming. It brings us back to the days where we’d sign treaty after treaty with native nations, and then break them, running roughshod over their land, simply because we could. Because we had the power.

It’s no different. After treaty-breaking our way across the continent, we expanded worldwide, treating distant locals the way we treated the nations in this land. In the last generation, the world sort of accepted that this wasn’t the way to do things, that smaller countries had rights as well.

The US never really believed that, but certainly paid tribute to virtue (Russia was more or less the same, minus the tribute). This is nothing but the bad old days again. To assume that Iran will accept this is madness. To think that they should is arrogance. To think that they will, in the age of Trump, an ascendant China, and a swaggering Russia, is blindness.

When the eventual history of this dumb and wretched is eventually written, this tweet could be one that children are forced to memorize, from a stone desk in their cave-school in the Nü-Barrens.

There’s a lot going on here, but the basic story is this: when the FBI found out about the extensive role that Russia was (ultimately successfully) attempting to play in our election, and the inordinate number of ties and meetings between Russia and the Trump campaign, they wanted to look into it. Seems reasonable, to me.

One thing they did was ask an intermediary to talk to several Trump campaign officials, your various Pages and Papadodoli. This intermediary would then report back to the FBI. Again, pretty basic stuff, when investigating criminality. Indeed, this would seem to be the bare minimum the FBI can do.

Of course, now that this is public knowledge, thanks to extraordinary leaks from quisling par excellence Devin Nunes, it has mutated into the FBI “infiltrating or surveilling” the campaign, which is only half accurate, for “Political Purposes”, which is nonsense.

The reason it is nonsense is basic common sense. This has been pointed out by probably millions of people, but the FBI, under the Higherly Loyal leadership of James Comey, slow-walked any Trump investigation to avoid even the merest hint of politics, even planting false stories in the Times about how there was no investigation, which was patently false. This is actually ok, or would have been, had they not made a huge show out of looking at some emails found because Anthony Weiner had to sext teenagers, and no, I will never ever get over this.

So, if you wanted to allege an FBI conspiracy to derail the Trump campaign, it was basically this: 1) Investigate and infiltrate; 2) find damning details of meetings and Russian interference; 3) alert the President, who said nothing; 4) tell the world there is no investigations; 5) ?; 6) win!

(This timeline ignores Mitch McConnell refusing to release a bipartisan statement telling Russia to back off, one the many reasons he’s the worst, but this timeline isn’t about Republican abetting, just baffling FBI conspiracies.)

Obviously, it is nonsense, but despite–or rather, because–of that, it is an absolute article of faith with the President, his surrounders, most elected Republicans, and the whole right wing machine. That’s why this tweet is so ominous. We don’t just have the normal absolutely insane situation of the President tweeting out idiot conspiracies. He’s now demanding that the Justice Department investigate itself.

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As news and images exploded out from Gaza yesterday morning, as death counts increased, and the idea that Israeli soldiers opened indiscriminate live-fire on mostly-unarmed protestors became rooted in whatever passes for a public consciousness these days, a sort of counter-narrative began to take place. These protestors, massed against the border, were Hamas operatives. There was some talk of them being paid by Hamas, but the right wing in America and Israel believed, en masse, that these people were at best being manipulated by Hamas and used as human shields in a propaganda war.

Now, it’s not that these fabulists had no point at all: Hamas has never been above sacrificing Palestinians. And the protestors weren’t strictly angry about the move of the US embassy per se, but rather against the occupation as a whole. And it is clear that Hamas certainly encouraged people to mass at the border.

But still: think about it. Think of how little you have to care about Palestinians to think that they’d throw their lives away simply because Hamas said to. Think about how much you’d have to dismiss the daily cruelty and, ultimately, the pointless confinement of their lives. Think about the deep cynicism and reflexive denial you’d have to live in to pretend that there could be no legitimate reasons for a punished and trapped people to be angry.

And that’s when you realize that yesterday represented a kind of culmination, growing for years. The racism and religious bigotry that has been growing and ultimately consuming the GOP has found a full-throated partner in Netanyahu’s Likud, which has dropped even the pretense of peace, and even the illusion of recognizing Palestinian humanity.

The grotesque spectacle of the corrupt and terminally stupid US President sending the smiling emptiness of his daughter and the hollow absurdity of his son-in-law to open an embassy and close the door on any productive US role in the Middle East, to be surrounded and serenaded by bigots and religious hucksters, while a few miles away dozens were killed, is that final fusion.

It’s where the GOP’s ravening viciousness and absolute lack of empathy combined perfectly with the reckless hatreds of Trumpism and the cynical bloody-mindedness of Bibisim. They have been moving together for years, and they met fully and finally on Monday, the ting of clinking glasses drowning out the shrieks and the sound of rivening flesh below.

Ferguson and the Intifada

An oppressed minority has enough, and protests against their oppressors. Years–generations–of systemic abuse come to a head in clashes that turn violent. Official policy is to treat them as hostile, assume the worst, and use the behavior of any bad actor to engage in swift, disproportionate punishment.

You saw the subhead of this section, so you understand the parallels here. The protests in Ferguson in 2014 came from a defining incident, the shooting of Mike Brown and the decision not to prosecute Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed him. Immediately, a country already on edge after race-baiting demagogues used the fact of a black President to sow even more fear and division split apart.

The conversation quickly turned from the weight of Ferguson’s history (and that of the entire US) to whether or not Mike Brown deserved it.

In the hot summer of 2016, with Donald Trump stoking racial hatred at every raucous, adoring rally, we turned to another killing, in Charlotte, of Keith Scott. I wrote that maybe Scott had a gun or was a bad dude, but that wasn’t the issue.

The problem then is that these normal suspects will use any potential flaws in his character to gloss over the real issue, which isn’t just police violence, but the culture from which it springs. Tongues will be clucked over the defense of the dubious, and the question will be not “why are they angry”, but “how dare they be so angry. This one guy wasn’t a saint!”

It’s the normal dodge– that Mike Brown may have committed petty larceny means the sins of Ferguson don’t count, and that no one should have been mad. History is erased by a couple of cheap cigars.

That’s what has happened in Gaza as well. There’s no question that Hamas is a cruel sort of government, and that surely some of the people who went to protest wanted violence. But that we say, blithely, that they were “protesting at the border” is a benign way to describe the situation. They were at the fence that circumscribes their life, that leaves them in a wrecked and punished enclave, where they are trapped by Israel, and trapped with Hamas.

But none of that matters. The whole goal of the GOP has stopped even trying to understand why people might be upset over hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and the War on Drugs and police brutality. A whole campaign, and arguably an entire Presidency, was based around saying mean things about Black Lives Matter and getting performatively angry about football players kneeling.

That’s not just Trumpism, but he was the snarling completion of the GOP’s transformation, and certainly accelerated it and liberated bigots from using code words anymore. And he decided, without any hesitation (or really any thought) that he’d overturn decades of US foreign policy regarding the Palestinians, and be entirely unconcerned with their national aspirations of even basic humanity.

Again, though, Trump was the culmination of this. Over the last decade, the GOP accepted that Bibi’s particularly cruel and inward version of Likudism wasn’t merely cool, but was the avatar of Israel. That there was no Israel other than Bibi. And Bibi himself, in his rhetoric and cynicism and bigotry, was essentially, or even quintessentially, a Republican. They both decided whose lives were the only ones that mattered.

There is a common denominator between Mike Pence going to an NFL game just to walk out when black players demonstrated that their basic human dignity and lives were worth more than a tuneless poem, and Nikki Haley walking out today when a representative from Gaza rose to speak about the slaughter of his people. They both showed exactly how they felt about the wrong people claiming their humanity.

(The connection between the GOP and Israel is pretty complex, as the Republicans have been more of less taken over my apocalyptic Christians, who despise Islam and therefore love Bibi. It’s a marriage partly of convenience, as these Christians have no love for Jews in any real sense, but it is mostly a marriage of true love, based on mutual hatred.)

Foreign Policy by Politics and Personality

There’s another way that the United States and Israel are in the same trough of historical madness: they are being shaped entirely by the malignant personalities of their heads of state. Those personalities manifest themselves in different ways, of course, but there are parallels that go beyond their racism.

I used to think that Bibi had no ideology other than his own political career, and he was willing to bend as far to the right as possible to create coalitions that would keep him there. I don’t think I was wrong, but I think he calcified into the grotesquerie he always presented himself as. You don’t cater for years to Avigdor Lieberman without eventually believing your own wretched posturing.

But still, the raw cynicism with which he managed his career posioned everything in Israeli politics and its foreign policy. Piece by piece, in order to save his own skin, he destroyed first the possibility of a two-state solution and then even any idea of it. He destroyed hope, and in doing so, he further coarsened Israel. The country has largely washed its hands not just of the national aspirations of Palestinians, but their very humanity.

This was also made possible by the fervent embrace in which he was wrapped by the GOP, who had his back, and who gave him pride of place even over the United States President. Until, of course, that President was Trump, who either through laziness or meanness, tied his foreign policy entirely to Bibism, starting with the JCPOA (which, was always have to remind ourselves, is supported by the Israeli intelligence services, but not Bibi).

Trump’s attitude toward Israel was, by any logical stance, weird. It’s not just that he is willing to give them whatever he wants, and it’s not that he really has no principled reason to support them. It’s that he really doesn’t care, which is why he turned over all his policy to Jared Kushner, who knew nothing.

Our policy is then dominated by Trump’s laziness and ignorance and bigotry, by his idea that he really should listen to Bibi, by his addiction to the strange passions of Fox News, and by his absolute lack of concern for anyone who can’t fete him with red carpets and orbs.

That’s why he moved the Embassy. It is true that many Democrats supported this as well- Chuck Schumer, who is entirely inexcusable, congratulated Trump for doing so. It’s very true that not giving the Palestinians a real chance was bipartisan, but never to this degree. Since the first Bush administration, the idea that the Palestinians had rights was a given.

Moving the Embassy was never done by a Democrat, or a Republican before the zombie fungues took full control of the GOP brain, because everyone recognized that if we wanted any chance of being a trusted broker, we couldn’t honor the Occupation. We could play footsie with it, we could recognize it de facto, but a de jure acceptance of Israeli domination over Jerusalem? That was madness.

Well, it’s madness that the right wing likes. It sticks it to the Palestinians, and gives Bibi a boost. It’s a main cause of Fox News. They’ve been telling Trump to do this for years. And he wants to make them happy. He lives for them to say he was sure tough and he stuck it to the libs.

And so he made a catastrophic move, because that’s who he is. And that’s what our politics are now. That’s also the heart of our international relations.

White Supranationalism Over All

This was happening at the same time as the top picture

As we’ve argued on this blog, many times, putting Jared Kushner in charge of Middle East peace is one of the most insulting aspects of Trumpism. Even if he’s a bright guy, and that shouldn’t be stipulated as a fact, he knew nothing about the Middle East.

That’s sort of why it was maddening that he and Ivanka, who is a worthless cover for the admin’s depredations, were there dedicating the Embassy in the first place. This was a monumental event, whether you thought it was Brave and Bold or catastrophic. It wasn’t a photo op for a jumped-up empowerment guru and the security-clearance-denied rich kid she married.

But it was doubly maddening when you consider the violence that was happening while they cheered and grinned and celebrated. The contrast itself was sickening; that the Administration literally doesn’t care enough about a razor-edge situation to send anyone competent puts it in stark relief: they just don’t consider Palestinians to be people.

In his rare remarks, Kushner gave boilerplate platitudes about peace, the possibility of which’s death he was overseeing, but then improvised and let us know exactly what he thought about Palestinians.

“As we have seen from the protests of the last month and even today, those provoking violence are part of the problem and not part of the solution,” he said.

That’s really all you need to know about this administration, about the GOP, about Bibi, and about the white supranationalism that is overtaking so much of the globe. You see it in the cruelty shown Syrian refugees in Europe (especially, though not exclusively, in Eastern Europe). You see it in how we treat refugees of all stripes, and how the controlling party treats any minority. Cruelty isn’t the outcome: it’s the entire goal.

It’s the idea that the Other has to be completely dehumanized, that their aspirations treated as worthless, that any violence they commit is inexcusable, and that violence against them is justified, acceptable, and praise-worthy.

That’s Bibism. That’s Trumpism. That’s the GOP. And at the end, that’s America.

Nashville bounced back from this. It can bounce back from the Koch Brothers. 

Very few cities were imagined and conceived in one (relatively) fell swoop. Sure, there were some that were built with the whole spread of the city imagined and engineered, but those are few in number and tend to turn out Weird, like the inhuman scale of Brasilia or the strange half-peasant-kitsch and half Nazarbayev-infected megalomania of Astana.

But despite the feverish pitches of cigar-chomping boosters, most cities tend to grow like we do: an odd accumulation of growth spurts and injuries, new experiences being tacked on to dim memories, aging at odd angles, sprinting or stooping with little rhyme or reason. And so they grow up strange, careful grids intersected maddeningly by old angled trails or riverine circumnavigations.

Because of this ad-hoc nature, any attempts to change them take titantic efforts. The act of reimagining a city is usually just that: an act of imagination, never quite realized.

We were reminded of that yesterday when Nashville, one of America’s most happening cities, tried to pass a hugely ambitious referendum that would have created a vast new public transit system, complete with light rail, express bus lanes, and more.

How’d it go? Well…

Voters in Nashville rejected a sweeping transit plan on Tuesday night by an overwhelming margin. The plan’s supporters got trounced. In the end, residents voted it down by a 2-to-1 margin.

Had it passed, Let’s Move Nashville—the boldest municipal transit plan in recent memory—would have launched five light-rail lines, one downtown tunnel, four bus rapid transit lines, four new crosstown buses, and more than a dozen transit centers around the city. Depending on how you do the math, the scheme would have cost $5.4 billion or more like $9 billion, funded by a raft of boosted local taxes. More than 44,000 voters across Metro Nashville’s Davidson County came out in favor of the referendum, with more than 79,000 voting against it.

So that’s certainly not great, if you like public transportation and want to get away from our choking reliance on cars. It certainly is a resounding defeat. It happened, according to smart observers (like the article linked to above) for a variety of reasons, some specific to Nashville and its immediate politics, and some that are more national, troubling, endemic, and entrenched.

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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.