Not Ready for Prime Time

 

Image by Markerarts via Butt Flood Designs.

One thing to remember about Stephen Bannon's celebrated tactical principle of "flooding the zone with shit" is that, in the end, you're landed with a shit flood, which isn't what you really wanted, though that may be OK if what you really wanted was a really big fat tax cut for yourself and your billionaire clientele. Somebody else can try to take care of the backed-up sewage, if they feel like it; you're up on the higher ground of the nice neighborhood, where you hardly even smell it.

I've been thinking of 2017, when the new administration started off with a big bang of regulatory crazy, with executive orders attempting to sabotage the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act on January 20, mandating a 90-day freeze on hiring federal employees, meant to kick off a long-term reduction in the number of civil servants, on January 23, directing DHS to build a Wall of separation between Mexico and the US (they thought it might be paid for with a 20% tariff on Mexican imports) and fast-tracking environmental reviews of infrastructure projects on January 24,  cutting federal funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" that did not cooperate with ICE and banning the EPA from contact with journalists on January 26, suspending the Refugee Admissions Program and barring entry to the United States for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (not, of course, Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Qatar) on January 27, and ordering all federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for every new one they proposed on January 30 (when he also installed Thomas Homan as acting director of ICE, without bothering to try getting the Senate to confirm the nomination).

None of these initiatives had any particular consequences, of course. They were ill-conceived, badly drafted, in some cases of questionable legality, or just dumb. The idea of the hiring freeze went back to Carter and Reagan, and it was well known that it had never done any good:

For the Record: Hypothesis

 

Wallenstein's siege of Stralsund, May-August 1628, by the workshop of Frans Hogenberg, 1628, via Wikipedia.

Yes, it's wonderful how Georgia voters have responded to Republican vote-suppression efforts this year!

Here in New York nobody's trying to stop anybody from voting, so we can take a more relaxed attitude.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 28, 2022

And a hypothesis below the fold:

Hot Seat

Image by vicnt (Getty Images/Stockphoto), via ETF Trends.

Well, well, well:

WASHINGTON — 

The Senate Intelligence Committee has sent a bipartisan letter to the Justice Department asking federal prosecutors to investigate Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump confidante, for potentially lying to lawmakers during its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The [Los Angeles] Times, was signed by the panel’s then-chairman, Republican Sen. Richard M. Burr, and its ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner.

It also raised concerns about testimony provided by family members and confidants of President Trump that appeared to contradict information provided by a former deputy campaign chairman to Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Those it identified as providing such conflicting testimony were the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks.

"Has sent" actually about 13 months ago, to prosecutor Deborah Curtis in the DC US attorney's office (who transferred to Commerce Department in September 2019). DOJ didn't tell the paper what action they had or hadn't taken up to now.

The "former deputy campaign chairman" is Paul Manafort's right-hand man Rick Gates, who cooperated with Mueller and took a plea. Among other things,

Ross Goes Bannon

Via Medium.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, deeply concerned about the Democrats, as always, and showing some weird sentimental attachment to Bernie Sanders and the politics of class struggle ("The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders"):

Three months ago, Bernie Sanders lost his chance at the Democratic nomination, after a brief moment in which his socialist revolution seemed poised to raze the bastions of neoliberal power. But the developments of the last month, the George Floyd protests and their cultural repercussions, may prove the more significant defeat for the Sanders cause. In the winter he merely lost a presidential nomination; in the summer he may be losing the battle for the future of the left.

It's the usual story of the Democrats abandoning the "working class" and economic issues in favor of "elites" with their "social" concerns, except Douthat's refusal to believe that the working class has any black and brown people in it, or women, for whom racism and sexism are in fact serious economic issues, is getting really deafening at the moment:

Radio Heads

Via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

From the open tabs:

I've been meaning to say something about the awfulness of Michael Pack, the new head of the US Agency for Global Media, which is the umbrella agency for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, and other international news outlets widely recognized for the quality and independence of their work; a rightwing filmmaker (he produced the documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words) and pal of another would-be Hollywood mogul, Stephen Bannon, we're told, who is in turn an inveterate enemy of VOA:

“VOA is a rotten fish from top to bottom,” Bannon, the former leader of the conservative Breitbart news site, said in an interview. “It’s now totally controlled by the deep-state apparatus.”

He has been pushing Trump to take control of the Voice of America since he served as chief White House strategist during Trump’s first seven months in office. Following his forced departure, Bannon has kept up the fight from the outside. (Los Angeles Times, December 2018)

Now he's sacked the heads of more or less all these outlets, in a clear effort to seize ideological control, and it's a plainly horrible thing from the standpoint of US prestige—like shutting down the Peace Corps or all the USIS libraries, among the few American things that rouse universal admiration in the flood of Trumpy embarrassments and war crimes memories—but I'm not hearing as much outrage as I'd expect.

Why? I have a feeling it's partly the outrage overload, and the fact that we don't generally watch/listen to VOA here in the states—they're not really meant for us (I should say I run into RFE written materials online all the time, and they're really well done, well sourced, good on complexities, and not tendentious), and we don't feel personally threatened by it.

And then we don't have a sense of why they'd want to destroy VOA and RFE, so it just seems more like garden-variety vandalism than anything important. For the very reason that Americans don't use them, how could they be used to further Trumpy ends? For propaganda? What's the value of propaganda that we never hear/

So, for a little paranoia, how about the following: It's not Trump that suffers from VOA and RFE and so on, but Trump's friends: Xi Jinping, Mohammad bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, and above all Bannon's Eurasianist Führer Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Some of whom have been known to provide Trump with a little election help (and Russia has been putting pressure on VOA and RFE/RL since the beginning of Trump's term, designating them as "foreign agents" back in December 2017).

Is Trump doing his friends a little favor, as friends do?

Literary Corner: Trump on Bannon

Sonnet: On Whether the Poet Talks to Stephen Bannon

by Donald J. Trump

Well, I always liked Steve
and I mean the last seven
months or eight months, I mean,
you can't have nicer statements
stated about yourself than
the things he's been saying about me,
as you know. ‘The greatest of
all time,’ you know, etc., etc.

But I haven't. You've seen what
he’s said on the various shows
and you've seen what he’s written.
And that’s very nice, and I appreciate it.
But I haven’t spoken to Steve in a while.
Haven’t spoken to Steve in a while.

I'm not going to try to explain what moves me in this piece (from a Politico interview on Friday).

Tell me a national story, Daddy!

It's not only Election Day, and the day after Guy Fawkes, but also, as it happens, Diwali, the Hindu darkest new-moon night of the year, and a festival of liminality, where doorways are fantastically decorated with colored rice powder and lit up with candles. In Singapore,where it is known after the Tamil name as Deepavali, the government policy of strenuous ethnic integration has meant that all the different kinds of Chinese, Malay, and other citizens have Indian neighbors if they live in a Housing Development Board estate, as most do, somewhere up or down the common corridor, and walk past one of these doorways as they get home. Image via. 

David F. Brooks confronts "The Central Challenge of the Age": Write an entire paragraph with only one "e":

What is the Democratic national story? A void.

Well, admittedly it's a short paragraph. It's only voids, and voids are all I have to take your heart away.

No, seriously, he's got to get out his "why Democrats have failed" piece before its sell-by date, which is coincidentally today, November 6, and the central challenge of the age is, obviously, the one he's most confident Democrats have failed to meet:

Literary Corner: Bannon

Image by David Parkin from The Economist, November 2016, via Southfront.

Since the Twitter Mob, in the form of Kevin Kruse, Chelsea Clinton, and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz, not to mention Jimmy Fallon, has driven the magazine's timid editor David Remnick into the shadows and convinced him to rescind his invitation to that Gray-Green Eminence Stephen Bannon to share the stage at the Ethical Culture Society's digs on West 64th St., I thought I should give readers an opportunity to see what they're missing—what Bannon's performance under courteous but firm questioning is like.

Below the fold, from a conference at the Vatican of the Human Dignity Institute, 27 June 2014, on the subject of "Poverty and the Common Good", from Bannon's contribution via Skype ("Should Christians Impose Limits on Wealth Creation?"), apparently representing the Tea Party movement, is his complete response to a question from Benjamin Harnwell, the Institute's founder, asking him to explain the relationship between his European allies, Ukip and the French Front National, with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

I think he's saying that Farage and Le Pen needed (in the summer of 2014) to "look at" Putin's philosophical "traditionalism", notwithstanding Putin's being an "imperialist" and the "state capitalist of kleptocracy" and his views being in some sense the precursors of Italian fascism, because he's "very, very, very intelligent", and people like the "nationalism" part, and something to do with the so-called Islamic State, and "first things first".

Or, shorter still, we should adopt Putin's "Eurasianist" philosophy as part of our public relations strategy for combating ISIS first, and worry about whether it turned us into fascist kleptocrats afterwards.

This could have some relevance to us today, come to think of it. Have a look:

Annals of Culture Change: Kaepernick to Bannon

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

I think the Kaepernick news, if true, that the Nike company is using the otherwise unemployed quarterback and effective protester against police brutality against the black community as an ad model, is very cool.

It looks like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick is starring in a new ad campaign for Nike. He shared an image on his Twitter Monday of a close-up of his face with the words: "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything." Nike's Twitter account later retweeted his post. Nike has represented Kaepernick since 2011, but hasn't featured him in ads for two years...

Not, I mean, that it's going to convince me that Nike is the corporation that will save the world from not having nice corporations, though for all I know the long struggle to get them to provide decent working conditions for the people in developing countries who make their products may well have paid off to some extent—Wikipedia's bibliography on the subject pretty much comes to an end in 2011, but includes an article from 2018 reporting (on the basis of research published in 2009) that

Demeritocracy

Gray-green Eminence: Stephen Bannon as depicted on the cover of Time. 2 February 2017, via Flickr.

Actually why is Stephen Bannon important again?

Exclusive: I’ll be interviewing Steve Bannon on @ThisWeekABC Sunday morning. His first live Sunday show interview ever.

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) June 15, 2018

Really?

I started noticing something like a Bannon comeback around a week ago, when he turned up in back-to-back articles in the Times as a crucial window into the Trumpian mind, that hilarious Mark Landler piece on Trump's deep study of the North Korea issue—

“To the president, ‘duck and cover’ and the Cuban missile crisis were formative experiences,” said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist. “He knows the Korean War hasn’t ended, and he can accomplish what destroyed his idol, General MacArthur.”

And the next day in the latest iteration of the "Trump feels emboldened and is taking over now" theme, by Maggie Haberman and Katie Rogers:

Literary Corner: Trump, Preparing

Salvador Dalí, "Le Jeu Lugubre", 1929, via.

There's been a lot of online mockery directed at Mark Landler's political analysis in the New York Times, "Meeting With Kim Tests Trump’s Dealmaking Swagger", for its lede suggesting that the president is right to feel he shouldn't waste time preparing for his summit with Marshall Kim Jong-un of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, because "in his own unorthodox way" he's "been preparing for this encounter his entire adult life."

It's amazing how this sort of crap gets by editors at the NYT. Is it really that hard for reporters to restrict themselves to reporting on what people do and say and providing actual evidence as opposed to absurd speculations for which they have zero basis? https://t.co/hsZtwFMQ95

— Dean Baker (@DeanBaker13) June 10, 2018

And yet when poor Maggie Haberman reports on what people do and say and refuses to construct fancy philosophical explanations they just dump on her.

I think that cold conventional news-story presentation has confused people as to what Landler is trying to achieve here, which might be better understood as—ah—poetry, as follows, omitting the longueurs of the article itself and focusing on the first and last paragraphs:

Trump Has a Point

by Mark Landler

When President Trump declared that he did not really
need to prepare for his legacy-defining meeting
with North Korea’s leader, he drew sighs
or snickers from veterans of past negotiations.

But he had a point: In his own unorthodox way,
Mr. Trump has been preparing for this encounter
his entire adult life....  “To the president,
‘duck and cover’ and the Cuban missile crisis
were formative experiences,” said Stephen K. Bannon,
Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist. “He knows the Korean
War hasn’t ended, and he can accomplish
what destroyed his idol, General MacArthur.”

For the Record: Bannon Song

Hotel Tweet Tweet Nest in Pattaya, Thailand. Via.

Stephen Bannon: “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor, because every day we get stronger and they get weaker.”

Steve Bannon to French Far-Right Party: “Let Them Call You Racist” https://t.co/zzhtGzWuKA

— Nicholas Mitchell (@puxxled) March 12, 2018

Let me call you racist
I'm so tired of you
Let me hear you whisper
That you hate me too
Let me see some panic
In your eyes of blue
As you realize you're
Going to drown in poo https://t.co/cbpwT15jeW

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 12, 2018

That last line really should have read

When you realize that
 I'm a filthy (((globalist))). 

And odds and ends and some Dinesh below the fold:

Schiff Memo update: Two conspiracies?

Doom Patrol 96 (June 1965). Via.

Following up on yesterday's post:

1. Marcy has spoken, and she doesn't think there's much new stuff for us to learn from the Schiff memo, except for the one thing, or set of things, about international man of mystery George Papadapoulos, the mook whose boasting with High Commissioner Downer in the Kensington Wine Rooms in May 2016, reported by Downer to his government that July, launched the FBI's investigation of Trump campaign collusion with the (already known) Russian efforts to mess up the 2016 presidential election.

The question of what emails Joseph Mifsud and the Russians he introduced Papadopoulos to in April 2016 were talking about, the "thousands of emails" that were going to damage the Clinton campaign; Marcy is now convinced that, as I speculated in December, Papadopoulos wasn't told at all what they were, only that they could be helpful to Trump. He could have imagined it had some connection with the emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's private server in 2012 when she was leaving the State Department, which in the fantasies of rightwingers would have concealed all sorts of evidence of corruption, but we have no evidence that he did.

This allows me to go on assuming that the Russians were talking at that point about about the emails stolen from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's computer, which the Fancy Bear team had just concluded with that March (as opposed to the theft of the Democratic National Committee emails, which which was mostly from April and May), and which were ultimately published by WikiLeaks (more or less simultaneously with the revelation of the Trump Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing monologue) and weaponized into use as evidence (with material from the transcripts of Clinton's paid speechmaking of 2013-14) of Clinton's supposedly corrupt ties to the banking industry and generally evil neoliberal intentions, as a way to discourage people on the left from voting for her or voting at all.

Bannonished

Update at bottom 1/8

Image vis dollarandsense.sg.

Looks like Rupert Murdoch is a little sorry about all the rude things he said about Trump to Michael Wolff: Not that this Michael Goodwin column in Murdoch's New York Post mentions any of them (for instance, "'What a fucking idiot,' said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone"); Goodwin focuses more on Stephen Bannon, and it's all good, anyway, because Bannon has only wrecked his own career. Trump will be more popular and successful than ever!

Bannon’s decision to go out in a blaze of personal attacks on the president and everybody else in the White House does Donald Trump and the GOP a giant favor. Bannon may live to fight another day, but, thankfully, Bannonism is dead.

But what of Trumpism? Is “Fire and Fury,” the Michael Wolff book where Bannon [not to mention Rupert Murdoch—ed.] leaks and vents, the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency?

Maybe — but probably not. After all, every previous media-hair-on-fire moment has come to a forgettable dead end.

And think of how much worse things would be if Hillary Clinton were president! Sorry, Trumpism is Bannonism is Republicanism; they may fight among themselves, because power is the main thing, but the main theme is taking down the New Deal and the Great Society and the Obama presidency

Trump comes out a bit later to salute Goodwin's brave work:

The Wolff is at the door, but is that inside or outside?

Wolf attack. German engraving, 1517, via Wikipedia.

In March 2017, Kellyanne Conway is telling Olivia Nuzzi what she meant by the peculiar term she'd used in January to explain her contention that Donald Trump was right to claim that a million or million and a half people had attended his inaugural address in the National Mall, compared to a million for Barack Obama's first inaugural in 2009, though aerial photos clearly showed a much smaller audience for Trump—the "alternative facts":

“Two plus two is four. Three plus one is four. Partly cloudy, partly sunny. Glass half full, glass half empty. Those are alternative facts,” she said, further defining the infamous phrase as “additional facts and alternative information.”

Which doesn't make a lot of sense. The expressions "3 + 1 = 4" and "2 + 2 = 4" aren't "alternative facts", they're alternative ways of stating a single fact. The numbers Sean Spicer proposed, 250,000 plus 220,000 plus another 250,000 for different regions of the Mall, don't add up to a million or more no matter how many times you calculate it, and the total 250,000 of the Vox estimate based on the photographs isn't an alternative way of saying "one million". It's a different number.

In April, Conway had refined the explanation, in an interview with Molly Ball:

Fire and fury like the world has never seen

Good times! The "fucking liar", as Ivanka calls him, and the "queen of leaks", as Bannon calls her, photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters via Telegraph.

On today's Guardian story pre-publicizing Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which certainly looks like it's going to be fun, when Stephen Bannon is quoted as saying the Trump Tower meeting between Junior-Jared-Manafort and Natalya Veselnitskaya in June 2016 was "treasonous", "unpatriotic", and "should have called the FBI immediately" and "bad shit"—

Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

—don't think he means that like it was a bad thing or something. He means they did it wrong: they shouldn't have gotten caught, and Bannon should preferably have made some money out of it:

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

And while hating Jared and Ivanka is fun, Bannon still hates them because they're Jewish. That's what "globalist" means ("Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is quoted as saying: 'It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.'"). Enjoy them squabbling and trying to knock each other off as they skitter down the ropes, but they're all bad people.

Donald Trump's October Revolution

Feast of the Supreme Being, France 1794, via AlphaHistory.

Or, Ten Days That Snooked the World. Or, in David Brooks's own headline formulation, "The Week Trump Won". Trump is apparently Lenin, Bannon is Trotsky, Mitch McConnell is the hapless Kerensky of the defeated Mensheviks, and I guess the Democrats must be the bewildered nobility, not yet regrouped, or fleeing to France and Germany with our diamonds sewn into the lining of our immense fur coats:

One hundred years ago on Friday, John Reed was in St. Petersburg watching Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolsheviks take over Russia. It was interesting to read his account, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” this week — the week when Donald Trump and Steve Bannon solidified their grip on the Republican Party and America’s national government.

No, I'm really not seeing that. I'd say it's ten days in which, if anything, Mitch McConnell won some signal victories against the forces of what he regards as Bannonite chaos and darkness, from the calls Trump made last week to Senators on Stephen Bannon's kill list, John Barrasso of Wyoming, Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, promising them endorsements, to the House's 216-212 vote to approve the Senate-passed budget resolution yesterday morning, and let's just say nobody's talking about Bannon's proposal for a 44% marginal income tax rate (his Breitbart home page headlines don't include any mention of the budget or tax proposals at all: it leads with praise for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate Trump unsuccessfully opposed, and attacks on Obamacare, immigrants, and Jared Kushner).

For the record

Jackson in 1844 or 1845, via Wikimedia Commons. He'd have been 93 at the outset of the Civil War.

I want to add, to yesterday's poem, that Trump's rewrite of history isn't just silly ignorance. Who introduced Trump to the history of the Jackson presidency, as Peter Baker reminds us in today's Times, is Stephen Bannon, and as Baker fails to remind us, it's a pretty sinister, white supremacist story. Trump himself doesn't tell it right, so, in brief:

President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2017

Donald doubles down. This isn't just pulled out of his ass, though he doesn't understand it very well or at all. Maybe from #PresidentBannon https://t.co/RHyhxRB29m

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 2, 2017

What part of "deconstruction of the administrative state" don't you understand, Brooksy?

Age of Wonders 3, just right for Yale Professors of Grand Strategy, screenshot.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks (his formerness may not be obvious as he continues to drool down the Times pages twice a week, but the evidence remains) has the hottest of hot takes on Emperor Trump's endorsement of the Ryan tax cut health care bill and the "skinny budget" proposal the White House released yesterday. He thinks he sees a pattern in the devastating cuts proposed in more or less everything constructive the government does, and it's that working-class hero Stephen Bannon has lost all his influence on the Emperor ("Let Bannon Be Bannon!"):

[Bannon's] governing philosophy is being completely gutted by the mice around him. He seems to have a big influence on Trump speeches but zero influence on recent Trump policies. I’m beginning to fear that he’s spending his days sitting along the wall in the Roosevelt Room morosely playing one of those Risk-style global empire video games on his smartphone.

Because instead of doing what Brooks heard the No True Conservative say he was going to do, sticking it to the "hedge-fund guys" taxwise, insuring everybody, and mounting that trillion-dollar infrastructure plan ("Many of us wouldn’t have liked that agenda—the trade and immigration parts—but at least it would have helped the people who are being pummeled by this economy"), Trump seems to have signed on to the most reactionary agenda you can imagine, as if—as if he were some kind of Republican!

Gaslight

With new improved ending (h/t Jordan for making me revise it)

Charles Boyer as Stephen Bannon snatches the President's Daily Briefing out of the dainty hands of Ingrid Bergman as Donald J. Trump in the classic thriller. Via uafairbanks

Or not exactly, the Ingrid Bergman character was a sweet and deserving lady, not a violent emperor, but you know what I mean. Struggling through the trees of yesterday's long post, I wasn't clear what kind of forest we were contemplating, but I see now that it belongs to this family of stories.

Everybody gaslights Emperor Trump in one way or another, in fact. It's the only way you can live with him, he doesn't have garden-variety human relationships. You have to whisper him into modeling some kind of simulacrum of a relationship that you can work with.