COWARDS ON THE POTOMAC

COWARDS ON THE POTOMAC

Donald Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director this week.

Trump did so because the FBI is investigating Trump's fall Presidential campaign and its connections, if any, to the Russian government's interference in the national election.

After receiving news of Comey's ouster, sources within the FBI reported that Trump had summoned Comey to a dinner meeting at the White House a week after the Inauguration and had demanded Comey's loyalty.  

Comey refused.

At a number of points this past week,  people speaking on Trump's behalf -- including his press secretary (Spicer), principal deputy press secretary (Huckabee-Sanders), counselor (Conway) and Vice-President (Pence) -- denied that the so-called "Russian investigation" had anything to do with the firing of Comey.  In denying that motive, they also claimed that the firing had been caused by a report given to Trump by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. That report criticized Comey for discussing -- last July and last October just before the election -- the agency's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails.

We now know that all of those denials, as well as the claim that Rosenstein's report caused Comey's ouster, were false.  We know this because, in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt on Thursday, Trump admitted the Russian investigation was the reason he fired Comey. As Trump put it to Holt, "When I decided to just do it, I said, 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'"  We know the Rosenstein report had nothing to do with the firing because, in that same interview with Holt, Trump said that "regardless of [Rosenstein's] recommendation, I was going to fire Comey."

For those of you scoring at home, that's Lies - 8, Truth - 0.

Trump has also denied, albeit implicitly,  that he attempted to exact any loyalty pledge from Comey at that White House dinner. He did that today when he tweeted that Comey "better hope there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!" The implication was that those "tapes" would rebut Comey's claims regarding the ostensible loyalty pledge.  The implication was also that "tapes" would support Trump's assertion that Comey told Trump, again at the dinner (but also on the phone on two other occasions), that Trump was not under investigation. 

Responding to the tapes tweet, Comey  is reported to have said he hopes there are "lots of" them. He has, however, not commented on whether he ever said Trump was not under investigation.   Nor has the Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe commented on this subject (though, in testimony on Thursday, McCabe did say it was not the sort of conversation the FBI usually had with anyone). McCabe also denied that agents or other employees at the FBI had lost confidence in Comey, which rebutted claims to the contrary made by the President and his seconds repeatedly over the last two days.

Trump is a pathological liar and lives in the gutter.   

The likelihood here is that there are no tapes. And certainly no complete or unaltered ones. 

Because . . .

If there were, and if they were complete and  unaltered, they no doubt would support Comey's claims, not Trump's. 

When asked at today's press briefing whether, in fact, the White House had tapes of any Trump-Comey communications, the press secretary, Spicer,  refused to comment.  He said, "The tweet speaks for itself. I'm moving on."

It certainly does.

Trump wants his veiled threat to just hang out there.

To intimidate Comey . . .  

Or anyone else who discloses what Comey told about his conversations with Trump months ago.

Were the FBI conducting a criminal investigation, Trumps' interview with Holt and his morning "tapes" tweet would result either in a letter from a prosecutor warning Trump to stop talking to witnesses or an indictment of Trump for having attempted to intimidate them. He'd also have received a subpoena for any tapes. And meanwhile, in a normal world,  the House of Representatives would be wondering about impeachment and everyone in Congress would be demanding an independent investigation by a special counsel.

But the FBI isn't conducting a criminal investigation. It's conducting a counter-intelligence investigation, ostensibly without criminal targets.

And the world we live in ceased to be normal long ago.

Apart from the usual handfull,  there has been no unified call for a special counsel from the GOP leadership or rank and file, and certainly no mention of the I-word.  They are waiting to see who Trump will appoint to replace Comey, apparently oblivious to the reality that any independent director will suffer the same fate as Comey and anyone else will simply do Trump's bidding.

I'm reminded of Churchill's view of the British government in the 1930s.

As their world was rocked then . . .

By what is  rocking ours now.

The un-sought, the un-expected.

The un-hinged.

"So they go on in strange paradox," said Churchill,  "decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent."

We have a word for this.  It's called . . .

Cowardice.

LOOKING FOR THE PONY

LOOKING FOR THE PONY

About a decade ago, I was speaking to one of my best friends.  Like me, he is an Irish-Catholic from the middle class.  He excelled in high school and then went to a top-ranked college and an Ivy League law school.  Today, he is a partner in a major white-shoe law firm.  And all those years ago, in the course of giving some advice, he offered a pessimistic aside.

"Just remember," he said, "things can always get worse."

That's the sort of prognosis we Americans tend to reject out of hand. We see ourselves as a can-do people, constantly marching forward in an un-ending spiral of progress.  We roll our eyes at the pessimists among us, pretty much casting them aside for failing to sing from the hymnal of American exceptionalism.  We praise the optimists, those boys happily digging through the proverbial pile of horse manure on the theory that there's got to be a pony in there somewhere.

And then comes yesterday, and the "by one vote" repeal in the House of Representatives of Obamacare . . .

And, with that, my friend from all those years ago is looking more prescient than pessimistic.

Things can get worse.

In fact, they just did.

The American Health Care Act passed by the House yesterday is an unmitigated disaster, both as a matter of policy and for what it says about the sorry state of American politics.

The Act itself was born in the aftermath of the Republican Party's failure six weeks ago to bring an Obamacare repeal bill to the floor for an up or down vote.  Hard right conservatives did not like the bill that was then being proposed because it did not repeal enough of the Affordable Care Act, and some moderate Republicans did not like it because it repealed too much.  

The principal dispute between the two groups appeared to be whether insurance companies would be freed from enough requirements so that the GOP could claim premiums overall would fall.  The hard right wanted to allow states to allow companies to charge higher rates to those with pre-existing conditions, arguing that requiring subsidized state based high-risk pools for that group could be used to cover a group that Obamacare now precludes insurance companies from excluding, and that charging more for that coverage would allow companies to charge less for everyone else (or, principally, less for the younger, healthy folks who are not at as great a risk for getting sick in the first place).  The moderates claimed that those high-risk pools would not be remotely adequate to insure those with pre-existing conditions, and that an Obamacare replacement resulting in 24 million un-insured -- which is what the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said would be the result of the GOP replacement bill over time -- was unacceptable.

So, unable to corral enough Republicans in favor of replacement, no vote was taken.

This was viewed, predictably and accurately, as a major failure for the Republicans in general and for the Trump Administration in particular.  Trump himself had made a vigorous, albeit last quarter, effort to convince the GOP's hard-right Freedom Caucus to accept the bill, and when he failed, his "I alone can fix it" braggadocio took its first -- but by no means last -- direct hit.  The dealer -in-chief had produced . . .

No deal.

Now, when Trump fails, he doesn't accept it.  Instead, he assigns blame.

To everyone but himself.

And so he did here. 

The culprits he held responsible for this failure were Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, and Reince Priebus, Trump's chief staff.  The pair had been unable to herd the cats that constitute the GOP's House majority in order to vote for the repeal of Obamacare and thus honor a promise the GOP has been making for the past seven years.  

The fact that Priebus and Ryan  had to herd only Republican cats was, of course, part of the problem. No Democrats would vote for the replacement bill, or for that matter for any bill that eliminated the individual mandate and cut Medicaid expansion, both of which are the principal reasons Obamacare reduced the number of un-insured by more than 20 million over the past seven years but neither of which are or will be part of any GOP replacement.  In fact, though the individual mandate was their own Heritage Foundation's idea, and was actually turned into law in Massachusetts by none other than its Republican then-Governor Mitt Romney, once Barack Obama endorsed the mandate, the Republican Party, in an act that gave hypocrisy new meaning,  decided it wouldn't. Similarly, though Obamacare used federally-funded Medicaid expansion to cover those who would still be unable to afford policies marketed through state-based insurance exchanges, nineteen Republican-controlled states refused to accept the money in an intentional effort to make Obamacare fail.  

Thus did GOP politics trump -- and for many actually kill -- health care in those nineteen states.

As they did with the Donald in the aftermath of the failure of the House to hold a vote on repeal and replace. 

The order from His Hairness afterward was to pass a bill, any bill.  His petulance demanded it and his ego required it.

So they passed one.

Yesterday.

By a one vote margin.

After no hearings, and no CBO score on how many would lose coverage (the number was 24 million with the first bill six weeks ago).

And then all the House Republicans got in a bus and drove to the White House to celebrate.

In truth, there was nothing to celebrate.  Yesterday's bill was no better than the bill they couldn't get to the floor six weeks ago.  In fact, it is worse.  Like the first bill, it eliminates the individual mandate and rolls back Medicaid expansion.  Unlike the first bill, however, it also effectively eliminates the ban on exclusions based on pre-existing conditions.   The first bill retained the ban but eliminated the individual mandate, which was the Obamacare provision that made the ban affordable in the first place; insurance companies obtained a larger, healthier overall pool of premium paying policyholders in exchange for being required to cover everyone.  In the first bill, the GOP tried to mitigate the elimination of the mandate with subsidies and a provision that taxed those who re-applied for insurance after allowing their coverage to lapse.  It's this last subsidy and tax provision that the right wing couldn't stomach.  So they replaced it with one allowing states to allow companies to charge more to those with pre-existing conditions and then added money to the stabilization fund designed to help states create high risk pools. The subsidies, however, are not remotely adequate to fund those pools, so the net effect is that the exclusion for pre-exisitng conditions has been re-born.  

Meanwhile, it is likely that the new bill will have the same overall effect as the first one.

In other words, more than 20 million will over time lose their insurance.

We do not know for sure yet what the actual numeric loss will be because the new bill has not been "scored" yet by the CBO.  Along with the GOP's refusal to hold any hearings at all on any version of repeal-and-replace, this too, however, was intentional.  Republicans know that the CBO score will show millions losing coverage and did not want that data available as Trump, Priebus and Ryan sought a vote on a measure they knew could fail and would succeed, if at all, only by the thinnest of margins.

Trump's and the House's victory dance at the White House was, of course, obviously premature. The House bill is by no means law and the issue must now go to the Senate.  Optimists are predicting the Senate will kill the House bill;  in fact, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer yesterday said the House bill is "going nowhere fast" in the Senate.  

I, however, am not as sanguine.

We live in a country where, as a practical matter, an aggressive and strategically located minority is now governing the majority.  The last two Republican Presidents,  Bush II and Trump, have been elected only because a piece of 18th century arcana known as the Electoral College allowed the majority-vote loser to assume the office inasmuch as his votes were located more optimally than his opponent's.  Similarly, because of computer-based gerrymandering, the GOP has a sizable forty-five vote majority in the House even though it only gets about 45% of all the votes cast in House elections. Though the Electoral College has only produced a President without a popular vote victory on five occasions, two of them have come in the last sixteen years; and though gerrymandering has always existed, technology has improved line-drawing to the point where the districts themselves may no longer allow for majoritarian corrections.

In this world, anomalies such as these would not threaten democratic governance were the winners -- in this case, the Republicans -- cognizant of them and willing to tailor their program accordingly. Jefferson once said that "Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities."  And that is doubly the case when those who would do the forcing enjoy no majority at all.

And when the forced result hardly amounts to an "innovation."

Which is the case here.

60% of America likes Obamacare. And, given that more than 80% did not approve of the GOP's first replacement, yesterday's second act by the House is not likely to fare any better.  Especially in view of how bad the first measure was and the second is.

But this Republican Party is not humble.  The Senate last year literally stole a Supreme Court appointment from President Obama; the House yesterday approved a measure without a single Democratic vote, or even any effort to craft reforms to Obamacare that Democrats might have approved; and the GOP agenda going forward is all right wing all of the time  -- tax cuts for the wealthy who do not need them (including those for Trump himself, who would have paid $31 million less in 2005 had the GOP's current tax plans then been law), draconian cuts in funding for environmental protection and education, and the continuing denial of science that allows them to ignore climate change even as its consequences regularly announce themselves in hundred-year floods, dying coral reefs, arctic ice melts, species extinctions, and warmer temperatures.

And on top of all that, Trump is a fact-free President interested only in the perceived "win."  That's why he celebrated yesterday.  He didn't get a new law but he got a win and a picture.  And though Republicans showed up to stoke his ego on the White House lawn, it's not even clear he understands what is in the bill or why it is so ridiculously bad. Indeed, later yesterday evening, at a black tie press conference with Australia's Prime Minister Turnbull in New York City (where the two were meeting at dinner on the Intrepid to celebrate the American/Australian alliance during World War II),Trump launched into his usual tirade about our currently "failing" health care system, only to stop himself mid-way and turn to the Prime Minister. Said our policy-challenged President: "Right now Obamacare is failing. We have failing health care. I shouldn't say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia cause right now you have better health care than we do."

Trump was right about that.  Australia's system is better than ours.

Australia has Medicare for all and provides universal coverage.

Something Obamacare approached but the House bill passed yesterday does not remotely come close to providing.

In other words, something that already exists down under.

But about which Donald Trump obviously had . . .

Not a clue.

Under all these circumstance, I am having a hard time finding my inner boy . . .

Looking for that pony.

THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

There are many outrages in the (now 99 day old) Trump Administration.

They include hypocrisy,  nepotism,  corruption,  incompetence and dishonesty.

Just to name a few.

But the biggest outrage, and the one that gains the least attention, is the outrage inherent in how he does it.  

Trump's approval rating is at 40% and was lower for much of the past few months, it having advanced ever so slightly in the last two weeks largely as a consequence of the bombing in Syria. These are historically low approval numbers.  In fact, they are the lowest in the history of presidential polling for the first 100 days of any administration.  They reflect Trump's practiced and continuing aversion to the truth, his rampant narcissism and in-your-face "I am the greatest" sheer boorishness, and the fact that, lacking any real commitments on policy that extend beyond a video clip designed to boost ratings, he has been captured by the far right in the Republican Party and is supporting their extreme agenda.  That agenda includes gutting health care, enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, de-funding environmental protection and education, and a somewhat schizophrenic foreign policy in which the Commander-in-Chief talks tough and threatens unilateral action in his service to "America first" nationalism,  while his seconds tour the planet re-assuring a nervous world that we remain committed to our longstanding strategic alliances.

The domestic side of that agenda is radically unpopular and, on foreign policy, the Administration is at no better than break even.

  

As an example of the former, Trump's and the GOP's on-going effort to repeal Obamacare comes in the face of the Affordable Care Act now being supported by 60% of the country.  Americans understand that Trumpcare -- or, more accurately, Ryancare -- would eliminate insurance for more than 20 million people and, in the latest proposal now being bantied about on Capitol Hill, would also likely eliminate coverage for many with pre-existing conditions. The right-wing GOP's new proposal allows states to avoid the ban on exclusions for those conditions that Obamacare enacted and the public overwhelmingly supports.  It does so by allowing states to claim their own plans will result in lower premiums overall and ostensibly equal or greater coverage as a consequence of that lower cost. 

Conservatives claim they can accomplish this hat trick through the creation of high risk insurance pools. 

Good luck with that.  Because . . .

Absent enormous government-funded subsidies, those high risk pools into which all those "pre-existing" diabetics and cancer patients will be thrown will be pools where premiums will  be extraordinarily high and therefore unaffordable for many who need the coverage most.

And when was the last time Mississippi ever voted to subsidize those who can't afford something?

Nevertheless, among the 62 million or so who actually voted for Trump last November, 96% still support him.

This is what is known as a disconnect.

It exists for two reasons. 

First, among that portion of those 62 million voters who are wealthy, Trump is a windfall waiting to happen.  They are willing to forgive and forget his transparent personal failings (narcissism, sexism, dishonesty, and ignorance) in exchange for the millions in tax cuts he promises and the right wingers in Congress are eager to enact. Second, among the middle and poor swaths of that voting group -- in other words, among the rural, white working class that hasn't had a raise in thirty years and is moving down, not up, the economic ladder -- Trump has sold them a bill of goods that holds immigrants abroad, minorities at home, and globalists in D.C. responsible for their economic plight.

The sale was and is fraudulent.  

But those who want to repeal Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society have been making this same  pitch for more than thirty years.

And it is working.

There are really only two ways to improve economic conditions for those in the middle and at the bottom.  The first is to improve economic productivity as a whole, and the second is to both  insure that the gains from any improved productivity are distributed widely on the one hand while re-distributing wealth to those who still lose out on the other.  Fair productivity distribution depends largely on the existence of equal bargaining power between capital, the investing class, and laborers, the working class, and  re-distribution can take many forms -- unemployment insurance, food stamps, housing subsidies, college loans, increased payments under social security, increases in the minimum wage, even old-fashioned work of the sort created by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  

But you can't improve without both.  

And for thirty years we haven't had both.  

Unions have been weakened to the point of practical non-existence and globalism without labor standards has arbitraged wages down even as cheap imports have helped consumers.  You can't consume if you don't have a job, and as a consequence, the lives of all those West Virginians living in poverty (18% of the state's population at last count) have not been improved much merely because tchotchkes in Wal-Mart became cheaper.  Meanwhile, the GOP's love affair with tax cuts and inflated defense spending has put enormous and predictable pressure on any spending designed to redistribute or level the playing field.  In fact, that was the whole point of their tax cuts in the first place.  They were designed to "starve the beast" of government, as President Reagan's first budget director, David Stockman, admitted in a moment of honesty back in the '80s. With high deficits and lower revenues, the safety net has been gutted and even Social Security and Medicare have been put on the potential chopping block.

None of this should sell in West Virginia.

But it does.

Because the right wing's corrupt bargain between Wall Street's rich and West Virginia's poor is that the former get their tax cuts and de-regulation windfalls so long as the latter believe their poverty has its roots in illegal immigration and affirmative action.

Trump did not create that bargain.  

But his neo-fascist campaign and Presidency by insult, thuggish rallies, and fact free propaganda has done more than anything in the last thirty years to seal it.

PRETENSE AND REALITY

PRETENSE AND REALITY

Sooner or later, it happens to them all.

Reality intervenes.  

And what, until then, at least resembled the assumed menu of challenges and options on which one had puzzled for some time and about which arguably workable solutions existed, becomes the rough equivalent of the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force.

For JFK, that day came in April 1961, only months into the New Frontier, when he authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA trained para-militarists who counted on igniting ostensibly homegrown opposition to the Castro regime in the expectation that this would lead to the regime's fall.  

For George W. Bush, it came on September 11, 2001, again months in, when a mildly unpopular Presidency  focusing on the education of elementary and middle schoolers in Florida was startled by news that what the CIA had warned them about in August, and about which the President himself had been somewhat dismissive, turned into a full blown terrorist attack on New York City and the Pentagon.

For Donald Trump, that day came yesterday, when Bashar Al Assad unleashed chemical weapons on rebels in Khan Sheikhoun in northwestern Syria,  and North Korea test launched yet another ballistic missile mere days before a scheduled meeting between Trump and China's President Xi.  

Assad's attack killed sixty-five, including eleven children, all of whom writhed in pain from inhaling either sarin gas or chlorine, and injured another 350.   Meanwhile, Trump's Secretary of State appeared to have invited Assad's attack and ignored North Korea's launch.  The day before, he said that Assad's fate was up to the Syrian people, implying that America's long-stated policy that Assad must go had been jettisoned.  And in the wake of the North Korean launch, he said nothing (or, as he put it, "North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment.").

For his part, Trump did not do any better.

Though he condemned Assad's use of chemical weapons, he spent a large part of his statement on the attack blaming President Obama. On this view, Obama's unheeded "red line" warning to Assad years ago, before chemical weapons had been used, followed by his accession to an internationally negotiated protocol (under which Syria's chemical weapons were to be destroyed) in lieu of an international military operation, after chemical weapons had been used, is the cause of yesterday's attack, and Tillerson's pass on Assad's on-going status -- along with the implied change in American policy -- is beside the  point.  As to North Korea, among the Administration's words "spoken enough" about the subject have been Trump's own, in an interview two days ago with the Financial Times: "If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will."

Trump is in a box.

In his pretend Presidency of tweets and bombast, everything is clear, winning is inevitable, and all that stands between the (way more often than not) invented failures of yesterday and the promised successes of tomorrow is Trump himself.  In that world, there is health care for everyone without the Affordable Care Act, Executive Orders banning travel from six (and at first seven)  majority-Muslim countries without deference to the Constitution, a right-wing Supreme Court without loss of the Senate filibuster,  and enormous economic growth (north of annual rates of 4%) without trade deals like NAFTA or the TPP. 

He has already failed in his effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare and (thus far) in his effort to turn his campaign promise of a ban on Muslim entry into a legal travel ban.  The former effort failed because the replacement was almost universally despised. It would have resulted in the loss of insurance for about 24 million Americans while providing enormous tax breaks to the wealthy. That alone should have been sufficient to kill it.  But, in addition, the so-called Freedom Caucus in the House (a group of forty or so hard-right legislators) objected because the replacement bill did not go far enough in getting rid of Obamacare; in addition to getting rid of the individual mandate, the right wingers wanted to in effect repeal the ban on insurance company exclusions for pre-existing conditions and end essential benefits requirements.

Similarly, on the travel ban, Trump's second order has fared no better than his first, even though the second was supposedly written to avoid the constitutional infirmities which plagued the first. Those infirmities were stark -- the first ban created a religious test by favoring Christians in any post-ban entry petitions.  In the case of the second ban, the explicit religious test is gone but Trump's words haunt him (and the courts); put differently, when Trump said during the campaign that he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country, the judges believed him and now think the second travel ban is just a "Muslim ban" in not particularly good disguise.

How quaint!  

Maybe words matter after all.

Meanwhile,  the GOP's Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, plows on with his pledge that Judge Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed "this week" to the Supreme Court.  The Democrats have announced they will filibuster Gorsuch, thus precluding an up or down determination, and they have the votes to do it.  In response, McConnell has told the Democrats that, if they do this,  he will have the Senate eliminate the filibuster.

In which case, the old politics of personal destruction will merely have led to the new politics of institutional destruction.

The US Senate is considered the "greatest deliberative body" for a reason.  The reason is that it takes sixty votes, a more or less super-majority these days, to cut off debate on most issues.  In other words, if you can't get to sixty, you have to talk some more, i.e., deliberate, and persuade your colleagues that the time has come to vote.  Eliminate the filibuster and the Senate turns into another version of the House of Representatives, where there is no real debate and a gerrymandered majority controls the floor.  This is not to say that the filibuster does not have real costs -- for liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans.  In fact, for much of the century following the Civil War, it effectively made the passage of any Civil Rights bills impossible.  Now, however, it is just standing in the way of the theft of a Supreme Court appointment that President Obama was entitled to make last year.

Either Gorsuch or the Senate loses here.   Both can't win.

More reality.

And you can't understand it -- or change it -- with tweets.

The same is true with Assad and North Korea.  On the first, Trump has few if any options and none that will be acceptable to Vladimir Putin, whom Trump never criticizes (itself extraordinary inasmuch as he seems to criticize everyone else).  You can put American boots on the ground, enforce a no-fly zone to protect humanitarian enclaves, and/or arm some rebels.  The first option is opposed by the country in view of our less than stellar results in Iraq and Afghanistan; it also runs the risk of becoming open ended inasmuch as the middle east's locals never seem to get around to peacefully resolving disputes the American military is effectively containing by its presence.  The second risks military run-ins with Russian and Turkish fighter jets now up in that air space.  And the third could result in arms winding up in the hands of ISIS or other terrorists.

On the second, the only thing Trump can do to North Korea if he acts alone is bomb their missile sites or invade, and he will do neither, mostly because either approach would likely provoke an attack on Seoul, as well as the re-emergence of China as a real supporter of the North.  The Chinese are not perfect on this issue but they are, as they say, "all we got."  They are keeping Kim Jung Un on a short economic leash and have on occasion voted in favor of UN sanctions against North Korea's earlier missile tests. But China won't allow the fall of the Communist party in the north.  

And since they are what "we got," Trump had better find a way to work a deal with them . . .

In other words,  do what  The Art of the Deal said he was good at.

Unfortunately, in this tweetstorm of a Presidency, where the lead guy -- in love with lies, pre-occupied with past opponents and score settling, and looking at personal poll numbers that drive him to distraction -- has an attention-span not all that large to begin with and infinitesimal knowledge on questions of actual policy . . .

Maybe that too was just pretense.

SAINT PATRICK'S DAY

SAINT PATRICK'S DAY

Today is St. Patrick's Day.

This means the Irish diaspora across the world will parade, drink and . . .

Talk.

All the parade go-ers -- and watchers -- will be festooned in sweaters, hats and shamrocks  that form  a sea of kelly green. Whether fueled by grain or grape, or by their own unquenchable desire to share, many will be loud.  A large number will sport buttons that read "Kiss Me, I'm Irish." 

Pay those buttoneers no heed.  They don't mean it.  What they're really saying is . . .

"Listen to me, I'm Irish."

Talk -- I have discovered --  is the activity that most closely captures the Irish soul.  It's an escaping soul.  You cannot be the product of organized famine, or suffer the pain of separation its survival ordained, without an almost genetic need to run away.  

So, we Irish have been running away.  

For centuries.    

From the land and language of our birth. And from the arms and British nation that enslaved and impoverished us.

But you cannot run from memories.  You cannot escape them.  

So ours is also a becoming soul.  We tell the stories of our history. We invent and regale.  We massage our past so that it does not poison our future.  We . . .

Talk.

At home, I am known as a storyteller.  This is not always a compliment . . .

Essentially because I tell the same stories . . .

Again and again. 

Sometimes the stories change.  Actually, they change in some respect, minor or major, all of the time. That's because stories are as much about what is happening now as they are about the facts recounted from some far away (or near-away) . . .

Then.

My father once told me that you "should never let the facts f**k up a good story."  At the time, I found this bit of advice either incongruous . . . or the product of the martini he was then drinking. Later, however, and long after he gave up the martinis, he soberly repeated the injunction.  The oddity is that he was a journalist.  He made his money getting the facts right. 

So . . .

Why this disdain for facts, for the very bread and butter of his (and my) life?

I figured that out today, St. Patrick's Day.

Fact must be respected.  They cannot be ignored.  

But neither can they be allowed to enslave.  

They have to empower us, not paralyze us.

In a weird way, the current President of the United States gets this. That may be the reason Irish Catholics voted for him in substantial numbers last November.  He never lets the facts get in his way. 

But we Irish need to be very careful here.  Trump isn't engaged in Irish story telling. To the contrary, he is massaging the past in a way that will poison the future.  In grossly distorting Obamacare, defaming immigrants, insulting his opponents (all of them), belittling the intelligence services, demonizing Muslims, and falsely accusing his predecessor of felonious wire-tapping, he is inventing a past that did not exist and was not tragic in order to create a future that will be.  

And we Irish cannot afford to aid and abet him in this effort. 

Because . . .

Between hope and history, the former is always the better choice when the latter is a tragic one.

But only then.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

MEET THE MESS

MEET THE MESS

Well, "Meet the Press" it wasn't.

More like "Meet the Mess".

Yesterday we witnessed an unhinged President at his first solo news conference since assuming the office.  Ordinarily this would be news. In the case of Donald John Trump, however, it is par for the course. Failure is always success.  Whatever he has done is always great. He is always the victim . . .

And someone else is always to blame.

Yesterday, it was the "dishonest media," "bad courts" and, of course, "Hillary."  No one cares anymore.  The 30-40% who are with him 'til the last dog dies just laugh at the so-called "urban" elite, mocking the supposed mockers who for years, it is claimed, have turned up their noses at all those Trump travelers in outside-the-beltway America . And as for the rest of us . . .

We've stopped being surprised . . .

Even as we gape in amazement at the sheer idiocy of it all.

By any objective measure, Trump's first month in office has been a disaster.  

The tweets and lies continue unabated.  

At yesterday's press conference, at least fifteen of his claims were either flatly false or so removed from reality as to amount to that. He repeated the claim that he had won the Presidency by the largest electoral college margin since Reagan (in fact, Obama (twice), Clinton (twice), and the first Bush all exceeded his count).  He took credit for the stock market being at record highs (after having decried as one big "bubble" all the gains during Obama's tenure).  He claimed the press has a lower approval rating than Congress (it doesn't; in fact, the two aren't close).

He asserted that Hillary as Secretary of State -- one of his go to pinatas -- had given away 20% of the nation's uranium (she didn't); that Wikileaks' information dump last year contained no leaks of any classified information (false; it leaked hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables); that he as President had "inherited a mess at home and abroad" (nonsense when compared to what Obama "inherited" -- a 7% unemployment rate and two wars -- in 2009); that he has "nothing to do with Russia" (he and his campaign spoke to numerous Russian operatives during the election; he for years sought business in Russia, as do his sons to this day);    and that . . . 

The roll-out of the travel ban Executive Order two weeks ago was "smooth."

Cue the laughter.

And the subpoenas.

His Cabinet and White House appointees count among them a rag-tag bunch of the uninformed (DeVos at Education, who knows nothing at all about the subject, and Pruitt at EPA, who thinks climate change is a hoax), the uncaring (Price at HHS, who has no replacement for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that could leave 20 million without health insurance, and Mnuchin at Treasury, who made millions as a "foreclosure king" in the wake of the 2008 financial implosion), the unethical (Sessions at Justice, who along with former NSA chief Mike Flynn was part of the Trump campaign's "national security advisory council" but who is now pretending he does not have to recuse himself in any investigation of Flynn's -- or Trump's -- Russian connections, and who won't appoint a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of his boss's love affair with Vladimir Putin), the unconfirmed (Puzder at Labor, who withdrew amid allegations of long ago domestic violence), and the now uninvited (Flynn, the erstwhile National Security Adviser, who was fired after he lied to Mike Pence about what he, Flynn, told a Russian ambassador on the question of sanctions).

Meanwhile, his chief political adviser (Stephen Bannon) has told the media to "keep its mouth shut," his "senior" policy adviser (the guy is 31, looks like he's 17, and basks in ignorance) has claimed that "the powers of the President . . . will not be questioned," and Himself more or less equated the US to Russia when FOX's Bill O'Reilly pointed out that Putin was a killer.  

Said the Donald: "There are lots of killers.  You think our country's so innocent."

The courts have stopped his travel ban. Though he promised yesterday to come up with a new one next week that tracks the Ninth Circuit's decision staying enforcement, that too will be subject to litigation given the known-fact that its purpose (as with the initial order two weeks ago) is to turn the campaign's unconstitutional "Muslim ban" into a rule that can get through courts. There is no guarantee this approach won't work.  Presidents have a lot pf power when it comes to aliens at the border, even if --  pace Stephen Miller  -- that power can be questioned.  

Nevertheless, it is generally a bad idea to start with the notion that your goal is to stop Muslims from coming here.

Or that your Executive Order is merely designed to clothe that illegal object in legal dress.

The Muslim ban itself, along with "the Wall", Trump's grotesquely false view of immigrants as job stealing criminals, and the sad spectacle of mothers being deported as routine office visits turn into deportation ambushes, resulted in yesterday's nation wide "Day Without Immigrants".  

This was a sort of wildcat strike by the nation's bodega owners, gardeners, workers, DREAMERS and their parents. It showed us all where life in America would be without them.  Namely . . .

At a standstill.

Trump is imploding . . .

Claiming he isn't ranting and raving . . .

Even as he rants and raves.

His popularity is at historically low levels (he lies about that too).  His administration is under investigation by the FBI for its contacts with Russia during the election.  His employees are leaking like sieves, so much so that he is threatening the group of them with criminal prosecution.  

And he is getting nothing done.

No budget.  No tax bill.  No ACA replacement. No trade deals.

And no more jobs at middle class wages for all those old economy workers who put him in the Oval Office.

The Republicans in Congress will tolerate this for a long time.  Far longer than the Republicans in 1974, who finally took out Nixon.  The class of '74 was independent and contained some giants (Howard Baker, Barry Goldwater, and Hugh Scott come to mind).  Today's GOP, however, is too sycophantic and those with real courage (McCain, Graham, Sasse) need more company.

The press, however, will be relentless.  They will leave no stone un-turned as they attempt to unearth what's in Trump's tax returns, who said what to whom in Russia during the campaign, what the President knew and when he knew it on Russian hacking, or what portion of that MI6 dossier is true. Trump can squeal "fake news" all he wants. His base may buy it. The rest of us won't.  

And the free press doesn't care what Trump thinks about them . . . or how often he insults them. 

I grew up with journalists.  My father was one and my grandfather worked for a newspaper.    They're used to abuse.  It comes with the territory.

Yesterday Trump tried to control the day and the news cycle.

He didn't.

Mostly because . . .

He can't control himself . . . 

Or the facts.

EXECUTIVE DISORDERS

EXECUTIVE DISORDERS

There's that famous scene in JAWS when Roy Schneider, having come face to face with the great white, returns to Quint in the bow of the boat.  For seconds, Schneider stands in stunned silence. Then he tells Quint: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

Well, I'm gonna need a bigger thesaurus.

Because I'm running out of words to properly describe Donald Trump.

We're ten days into the new Administration and the running adjectives are "childish",  "arrogant", "incompetent" and "embarrassing".

The running noun is "lies".

First there was the divisive Inaugural Address, where an inaccurate picture of American "carnage" became the stage for illusory promises to the "forgotten" that will not be kept because there are no policies planned or in place to do so.  The next day, the President went to the CIA, stood in front of its Memorial Wall to  un-named heroes who have died in our service, falsely blamed the media for divisions between him and the CIA (which in fact were based on his early refusal to accept findings regarding Russian hacking), and then spoke about . . .

The size of the crowd on the mall at his Inaugural.

Later that afternoon, because he is obsessed with size, Trump sent Sean Spicer, his Press Secretary, out to claim, contrary to unequivocal photographic evidence, that his Inaugural crowd had been the biggest in history and that anyone broadcasting evidence to the contrary was "shameful".

Meanwhile, Trump watched TV in the White House and became enraged as the Woman's March generated crowds in Washington and throughout the country and the world that truly were historic in size, giving notice in the process that (i) there will be no honeymoon for this Administration and (ii) Congress had better stand up and take notice or it would not be invited back come November 2018.

And then the new week started.

We tried to catch our breath but couldn't.  

On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway told Meet the Press that Spicer's lies were just "alternative facts."  

On Monday, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal and re-issued the gag rule prohibiting Planned Parenthood, all other NGOs, and foreign nations from receiving any federal monies for abortion services.  This gag order went further than those issued by the two President Bushes and President Reagan because it also de-funded family planning.

That night, in a conversation with lawmakers at the White House, Trump repeated the lie that he had lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton only because three million illegal aliens had voted.   On Wednesday, he announced that  there would be a "major investigation" into that issue and that night again repeated the lie in an interview with ABC News.   When pressed, Trump did what he always does when one of his lies is exposed.  He claimed that "many people" believe this.

Which, even if true (it isn't, once the sycophants are eliminated), would merely prove that he is not the only idiot or liar (or both) out there.

Meanwhile, and also on Wednesday, Trump issued instructions to various agencies to begin building the promised wall between the US and Mexico.  Mexico's President, Enrique Pena Nieto, then warned Trump that he might cancel the meeting he and Trump had planned for the next week, and on Thursday morning, Pena-Nieto did so.  

Because Trump can't admit he was -- as my kids say -- "dissed and dismissed",  he then announced that the cancellation had been mutual, indeed necessary in view of Mexico's unwillingness to pay for the wall.   Back at the ranch, Spicer said that the wall could be paid for with a 20% border tax on imports from Mexico.

That  tax -- of course -- would fall on Americans. 

Who would then be paying for the wall.

As we headed into Friday, one would think that nothing could top the week that had been.  

But Trump, being Trump, had to out-do even himself.  

So he did . . .

With the Executive Order banning refugees from anywhere for 120 days and banning anyone from seven nations -- Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya -- indefinitely.  

Neither the new Secretary of Defense, the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, nor the new head of the CIA were asked to weigh in on this Order.  Instead, it was written by the White House's resident white-supremacist, Steve Bannon, and Bannon's assistant and Senior Policy Adviser, Stephen Miller.

(Bannon is the guy who, mid-week, called the free press the "opposition party", which Trump then later repeated, said that it should "keep its mourth shut", and admitted he had been behind the earlier idea to ban the press from the actual White House.  As one of my friends, Jack Levin,  wrote on reading an earlier version of this post, "Why don't they just tell the truth.  Why don't they say the words 'President Bannon'?")

The refugee order and seven-nation ban is both incredibly foolish and un-constitutional.  It is foolish because it alienates our allies in the Middle East, who now must field claims that US policy is targeting all Muslims and not just terrorists, and whose adversaries -- including ISIS -- have now been handed a gold-plated recruiting tool.  And it  is unnecessary because refugees and anyone else coming to the US from the seven named nations are already subject to multi-layered review prior to the issuance of any visas. This program, initiated by Obama, has been working fine.  There have been no terrorist attacks here by nationals coming in from any of those target states, or by any refugees.  There have, of course, been attacks from those who came from other states (e.g., Saudi Arabia, which was home to fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists; the other four came from Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates), but none of those other nations were on Trump's list.

The Order is also unconstitutional because it effectively utilizes a religious test.  Trump claims this is not the case because the ban is on refugees and others from target nations, not a target religion. The targeted nations, however, are all majority-Muslim nations.  More to the point, however, the Order also instructs the Department of Homeland Security, after the 120-day hiatus on refugee entries, to favor refugee applications from those in the targeted nations that belong to minority religions, i.e., Christians.  This, of course, is a religious test, and it is unconstitutional.  Christians are by no means the only religions persecuted by ISIS (ask the Shia Muslims)  and to separate them out for favorable treatment violates the Establishment Clause.

The day Trump announced his Order, three federal judges issued stays against it.  The case filed in Brooklyn featured as a lead plaintiff an Iraqi interpreter who had worked for ten years with the American military in Iraq and who, it appeared, had been targeted for assassination. He was blocked from entering the US at JFK airport on account of Trump's Executive Order and  was released only after a federal judge ordered his release. (Meanwhile, Trump's Defense Secretary, General Mattis, is reportedly livid that he was not consulted more fully in the run-up to the Order, and is now trying to get the Order revised to exclude such individuals.)  

The next day, thousands showed up at airports and in cities across the country to protest the Order. And yesterday, Sally Yates, the Acting Attorney General (Jeff Sessions has not yet been confirmed), announced she would not let the Justice Department defend the Order because she was not convinced it was legal.  

For this act of courage, Yates was fired.  

The last time a Justice Department attorney was relieved of his job after refusing to take action to implement an illegal Presidential Order was in 1973, when Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus resigned, seriatim, from their positions as Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, respectively. 

Their boss had to resign less than a year later.

Donald Trump . . .

Meet Richard Nixon.