Scandalmongering

Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger, 1927.

David F. Brooks wishes to inform the public that it's another bothsides case: "We've All Just Made Fools of Ourselves—Again".

Democrats, or at least former congressman Beto O'Rourke and former CIA director John O. Brennan, need to make a public apology to the president for calling him something like a traitor (and O'Rourke said he did the treason "ham-handedly", which is just mean) when they "lacked the evidence". Republicans need to apologize to Washington for calling it a swamp. Everyone concerned should adopt "an attitude of humility and honest self-examination."

I love it to death when David F. Brooks starts talking about honest self-examination. He, of course, is the exception, regarding himself as having no self to examine, an affable, ego-free void.

Also it's all because of Watergate:

Mueller Said to His Man. II

Image via Xavier High School Xpress.

In a progressive meaning-degeneration like a game of telephone, Robert Mueller:

"[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

William Barr:

The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

David Greene/NPR:

The investigation did not find any like evidence right I mean there wasn't any collusion I mean do Democrats really sort of want to keep sort of beating this I mean dead horse?

That last one may not be verbatim, but the network really does keep saying the investigation "found no evidence" of collusion or of "conspiracy and coordination" if they're being a tiny bit more careful and "there was no collusion" (Rachel Martin at 6:09 repeated at 8:09) when they throw caution out the window, and that is absolutely not the case, and Barr absolutely did not say anything of the sort.

Mueller Said to His Man

Tony and John, encountered at many folk festivals in days gone by, the greatest.

Honest to god this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Barr's letter to the judiciary chairs and ranking members, Graham and Nadler, Feinstein and Collins

to advise you of the principal conclusions reached by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to inform you about the status of my initial review of the report he has prepared.

You've heard the conclusions by now, that the Special Counsel "did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election" and was unable to decide whether Trump obstructed justice or not. They might as well have put it the other way around, that it didn't find that Trump obstructed justice and couldn't decide if the campaign conspired, because it amounts to the same thing, or for that matter that it didn't find that the campaign didn't conspire or coordinate and couldn't decide if Trump was innocent. Or you could say Barr has been unable to determine what the Special Counsel did at all, which I think is unlikely, but he'd rather that's what we thought, but the evasiveness of it is just amazing. There are literally zero conclusions!

The only positive findings are the things we've known since the indictments of the St. Petersburg troll farm Internet Research Agency in February 2018 and the GRU email hackers in July. As to whether Trumpies had anything to do with these, at first you get the impression that they were looking for signs of the Trump campaign helping out with the trolling and hacking—"Hey Donald, you weigh 400 pounds and you're always on a bed, you should be good at this"—

If you've got the Mueller, I've got the beer

Backlit photo (is Trump trying to stop us from seeing his eyes?) from Kid Rock's Twitter via People.

OK, on reflection and some reading around, and an unbelievably tedious fight with a Greenwald acolyte (Glenn called it a "simple fact" that "not one single American was charged, indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election" by the Mueller team or, so far, in any of the spinoff cases, and I pointed out that until we saw Mueller's explanation for his declination decisions we could not know how simple the fact was and the acolyte called me a "conspiracy theorist"), I'm inclined to keep working on that bone we got thrown Friday night, by way of preparing myself and anybody who wants to join in for what is clearly not going to be a great big catharsis moment, but will be something nevertheless, when we start learning what's in the report.

One thing that fits in my normal frame of mind is a tweet from Richard Nixon's Michael Cohen, the ineffably proper and wholly rehabilitated John W. Dean:

Trump and his minions think they dodged a bullet. I have a notion — only a recurring though — that Mueller delivered a bomb to AG Barr, who is now trying to figure out how to tell Trump in a way that doesn’t cause him to start World War III. Barr knows he works for a psycho.

— John Dean (@JohnWDean) March 23, 2019

The Idiocy of Rural Life

Mary Pickford in Sparrows (1926), by William Beaudine. Via Fritzi.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "What Rural America Has to Teach Us", New York Times, 22 March 2019:

What rural America has to teach us is that we should all live in a county with under 1,000 residents, or so few people that everybody has to double up on official functions in government and civil society and amateur sports as well as being bank presidents or owners of a Michelin-star bakery, which fortunately takes up no more than half your time, which will go along with an insane work ethic and "intentionality", which means having a pervasive civic mind-set. Then everybody will be just about perfect, leaving their doors permanently unlocked and going to meetings all evening, except the kids who get good grades and have to leave town to find something to do, and the local immigrants who dismember our hogs, who won't go on Facebook for fear of what they might find out about our political views.

Honest. I made up the Michelin star (in the column it's a James Beard Award), and the town he's visiting has 7,700 people, it's a bunch of other Nebraska counties that have fewer than a thousand, and the hogs are an educated guess, but other than that it's pretty much all in there: even unto

Mueller Lite? Or Mueller Heavy?

Drawing via English Update.

Took a personal day to attend to some business, leaving a quarter-finished post on some boring topic or other, and spent a few hours not looking particularly at any news, and this thing happens in the most unsatisfying way it could, of course, with a notice that there are no further sealed or forthcoming indictments from the special counsel's office, which doesn't mean nobody else is going to get indicted—ongoing investigations by the various US attorneys' offices and state attorneys general will certainly yield something—but does mean that The Report or the Principal Conclusions we might be invited to look at this weekend probably don't include any statements of culpability on the part of Junior, Kushner, and the Emperor in particular; as Rosenstein has written,

"Punishing wrongdoers through judicial proceedings is only one part of the Department's mission.... We also have a duty to prevent the disclosure of information that would unfairly tarnish people who are not charged with crimes."

If they aren't charged, we won't learn about the stuff they aren't charged with.

On the other hand, attorney general William Barr notes, the report is specifically supposed to be a report "explaining the prosecution and declination decisions", meaning that it's supposed to explain why they decided not to prosecute some cases, and a confidential report, that is one that may disclose such matters on the understanding that they aren't intended for the public, and Ari Melber (I'm live-blogging TV at this point) suggests that what actually gets released is negotiable: Mueller's gig is over, but Barr will consult him (and Rosenstein, who seems to have put off his widely reported plans to leave DOJ for at least some weeks) as to what confidential information can be revealed, with a preference, at least that's what they're saying, for revealing more rather than less.

And the congressional chairs, most notably Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee and Jerry Nadler of Judiciary, are very determined.

There's this long list of questions that look like they aren't being resolved at this point, anyhow, starting with Trump's long series of lies about his Russian business interests—the Papadopoulos behaviors, the Manafort attempts to cash in on his relation to Trump, Junior and the 9 June meeting, the inexplicable anti-Ukraine Republican platform change, Kushner and the Erik Prince matter, Manafort and the Tony Fabrizio matter, Kushner and Trump and the Mike Flynn matter, the lies of so many Trump staffers about their Russian connections, Trump's in-plain-sight secret meetings with Kislyak and Lavrov and so many times Putin himself, the endless Trump efforts to defy Congress over Russia sanctions, and so on. Are we seriously not going to learn anything about these? Just not ready to believe that. But we're not learning it today.

Well, Ari lied, anyhow

Baghdad, 2003. via a valuable article at Strategic Culture.

It's the 16th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and Ari Fleischer, the artist formerly known as the most dishonest presidential press secretary in American history (until Sarah Huckabee Sanders ran away with the title), couldn't restrain himself from weighing in:

The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed "Bush lied. People died." This accusation itself is a lie. It's time to put it to rest.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) March 20, 2019

Immediately I'm suffused with the same old helpless rage and can't think about anything else. Ari goes on, of course, for a dozen and more tweets, explaining that when "the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD" they all made a mistake, but that's not the same as lying—not mentioning, naturally, that the intelligence services of Egypt and France certainly didn't convince their governments from there that a war was necessary:

Conqueror Worm

Via Fritzi, Mae Busch in Rupert Hughes's Souls For Sale, 1923.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "Cory Booker Finds His Moment", 18 March 2019:

If you're tired of violent, angry demagogues like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, you should be glad that Cory Booker is in the race, because although he's another socialist, so I couldn't actually vote for him myself, he is patriotic, religious, and grateful, which is what I need on my TV in this unpleasant moment. 

Comically, he doesn't provide any evidence that Booker is grateful, only that he should be, because his "family story" is a "success story", unlike Donald Trump or Kamala Harris I guess:

The Reprehensible and the Comprehensible

Two separate warnings this morning, from former US attorney Preet Bharara on NPR (doing a book promotion) and Georgetown Law professor and former OLC staffer Martin Lederman in Washington Post (cited in Raw Story): Mueller's report, to the extent there is one, is not going to contain a nicely wrapped case for the indictment of Donald Trump for crimes committed in the collaboration with Russian agents in the 2016 election.

For more than one reason, but the main thing is that it isn't in their remit to do such a thing, given the Justice Department ruling that a sitting president isn't supposed to be indicted, as Lederman concludes:

it would be surprising if it included any express conclusions about whether Trump’s conduct did or did not satisfy the elements of any particular criminal offenses. As long as Trump is in office, it will be up to the committees themselves — and Congress as a whole — to (in the words of the Jaworski road map) “determine what action may be warranted . . . by [the] evidence” presented in Barr’s notification.

That's probably too categorical; they could signal an opinion on his chargeability in indictments of other people, as an unindicted co-conspirator, as they've already done in regard to Michael Cohen and the Paramour Payoffs (can't decide whether that's the first novel in my detective series featuring a troubled metropolitan lawyer or a band name). But that will be ancillary to what I do hope will be an indictment of Donald Junior, if anything. I still believe he would be indicted in a case where his guilt was transparently unarguable—if he really killed that guy on Fifth Avenue—but this isn't one of those cases. The language in which he agreed to the basic bargain of Russia's assistance with the Moscow hotel and US election projects, if Mueller has it (and we know what he has from Cohen, not too damn much, and we know Manafort and Junior have said little and nothing respectively) will be couched in code, like all those mobster communications, and the way he tried to live up to his end by removing sanctions obscured inside a web of plausible deniability, opinions from foreign policy advisers and lawyers that he's entitled to do what he wants so he can argue he was just doing what he was told.

I guess I'm beginning to understand how unlikely it is that our story is going to have any kind of clean ending, where the public gasps, "OMG he did that?" and the president just has to leave.

For the Record: The End of Omar

Under pressure of extreme irritation from some Twitter guy I assembled a lengthier set of thoughts starting with Representative Ilhan Omar and carrying it somewhere I haven't entirely been before. It probably duplicates some stuff I've said before, especially in the earlier bits, but I'd like to keep it here for the record in this format.

Somali Muslim Ilhan Omar complained when Irish Catholic Kevin McCarthy pressured her to show "allegiance" to Israel. She said nothing about Jews and "dual allegiance". It is time to stop misinterpreting this story. https://t.co/FZef1EiwJk

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

That's all Democrats have to do is apologize, not the same for Conservatives

— Maria Gillette (@mariapa1776) March 16, 2019

Do you have a reading disability? Relevant text highlighted in screenshot: pic.twitter.com/VBfARYUkq4

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

She and Tlaib were put under particular pressure, threatened by McCarthy. No Jews are singled out as having "dual loyalty". pic.twitter.com/CkDJ9BWeeo

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 16, 2019

I probably should have realized at this point that I wasn't going to be able to make him understand what I was talking about.

The End of Meritocracy

Architects' rendering of plans for a parking lot in Harvard Yard. Just kidding: prank picture from the Harvard Satyrical Press, March 2009, attributed to the Committee For Endowment Preservation by Any Means Necessary.

Looks like the competition for which New York Times opinionist will be first to come out in defense of the millionaires who bribed their kids into Stanford and USC has a winner, and it's not David Brooks, as I was predicting—

Can't wait for David Brooks column explaining how this is a good thing, fostering intimate connectedness among all instead of crass calculation of benefits. https://t.co/QRTXtkNZSM

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 12, 2019

—or Bari Weiss, but Harvard's finest, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("The Scandals of Meritocracy"). Oh, he doesn't quite come out and say it, and he adds a trollish recommendation for racial quotas just to keep you confused as to whether he's joking or not, but I think that's what it is:

The “more meritocracy” argument against both legacies and racial quotas implicitly assumes that aptitude — some elixir of I.Q. and work ethic — is what our elite primarily lacks.

But is that really our upper class’s problem? What if our elite is already diligent and how-do-you-like-them-apples smaht — the average SAT score for the Harvard class of 2022 is a robust 1512 — and deficient primarily in memory and obligation, wisdom and service and patriotism?

In that case continuity and representation, as embodied by legacy admissions and racial quotas, might actually be better legitimizers for elite universities to cultivate than the spirit of talent-über-alles. It might be better if more Ivy League students thought of themselves as representatives of groups and heirs of family obligation than as Promethean Talents elevated by their own amazing native gifts.

That's extremely interesting, the view of what problem "meritocracy" is supposed to solve, the problem of practical improvement, or building an elite of higher quality.

I mean interesting to me, at least, because I've literally never thought of it before, not that it doesn't make some kind of chilly sense.

Literary Corner: Area Man Bites Reality

Willem De Kooning, Inerchange, 1955, via Wikipedia.

In the press availability with the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on Thursday morning, our poet branched into a strange and dark new territory in which reality really begins to dissolve:

Songs of Zero Tolerance

by Donald J. Trump

I. Are Your Immigration Policies Cruel?

No, I don’t think they’re cruel,
I think they’re the opposite of cruel.
They become cruel because they’re so
ridiculous and it hurts people. It actually

does the reverse of what they’re supposed
to be doing. But no, they’re actually meant
to be the opposite. And they’re hurting people,
they’re really hurting people. A lot of people.

Comment

Dinesh D'Souza's response to the terror attacks on Muslim Friday prayers in Christchurch: Even though it's true and his story is imaginary, it's of the family of "fake news" because he feels it has the wrong emotional resonance. In this way he's the real victim, because now everybody's missing the point he would like to have made.

I sent him a question and he replied, in fact, after googling an example of a church that got attacked as proof that the media don't care:

Breaking

Caucus Race. Emily Carew Woodard, 2015, via Classic FM.

1

A little literally breaking news on BBC News Hour, reporting on ongoing debates in the House of Commons: what the government is proposing to do after they lose the next vote they're going to lose, which will be to seek a longer extension (beyond 29 March) to the Brexit process than the one they were seeking before, and to use "the first two weeks" of that extension to try to "find a majority" either for her deal (which will be trotted out as a zombie, I guess, since it's pretty clear there will never be a majority for that) or for some unnamed cross-party alternative, as if the parties themselves were going to stand down from the debate and the MPs take over as individuals.

As if it were starting to sink in for them what we've all been seeing from the outside, that the deepest problem is the political incompetence of all the UK political parties as currently constituted, but who knows what's really going on. May herself has evidently understood that just asking for more time isn't a solution, so that's progress.

2

Also in semi-breaking news from Washington, the return of the rumor that the Mueller investigation is about to end, this time more convincing than usual, as the top money-laundering prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, leaves the team:

Just Deserts

A kind of poignant thing about this college admissions scandal is the way the kids themselves were protected, in many or most cases, from knowing that they were involved in a fraud:

Sitting very still and wearing a dark suit, [master criminal William Singer] described how he arranged for students’ SAT and ACT results to be falsified by sending them to take the exams in Houston or Los Angeles, where he had bribed test administrators. He described the students as believing they were taking the tests legitimately, but said that his test proctor would correct their answers afterward. Mr. Singer said he would tell the proctor the score he wanted the student to get, and he would achieve that score exactly....

Mr. McGlashan’s son was unaware of the scheme, according to court documents....

Mr. Singer told Mr. Caplan that his daughter would not know that her standardized test scores had been faked.

“Nobody knows what happens,” Mr. Singer said, according to the transcript of the call. “She feels great about herself.”

Some students may have been directly slipped test answers, but more of them just were given to understand that they'd succeeded in the test on their own, whether a confederate was changing their answers or simply retaking the test to replace their original scores; some participated in photo sessions where they were posed as star athletes, but they didn't necessarily know what the purpose of it was, and others were just entirely in the dark while their parents photoshopped their faces onto stock pictures of high school sports, but neither they nor the college administrations were aware that they were supposed to be star athletes, and nobody questioned why they didn't sign up for the soccer team or crew.

A little horse-race pablum for the junkies

Colonel John C. Frémont, Republican candidate for the presidency in 1856, in a campaign lithograph, via.

So Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is back on the theory that Donald Trump is Jimmy Carter.

No, really, this has been going on for a couple of years. Just around the time of the inauguration, Julia Azari, Scott Lemieux, and Corey Robin wrote pieces suggesting that the Trump presidency was likely to be what Steven Skowronek called a "disjunctive" presidency, that is one that takes place at the time when an old order or "regime", the long-term ordering of the ideologies and interests on which the politics depends, is falling apart and a new one is not yet clearly emergent; like Buchanan's, before the cataclysms of the Civil War and Reconstruction, or Hoover's, before the New Deal, or Carter's, before the beginning of what you might call the Era of Miniature Government.

Ross, with an authoritarian's inability to grasp a discussion of systemic factors, took this to mean that Trump must be personally like Carter in some respect, as in this from his contribution to the Times inauguration coverage, committed to the proposition that Trump is as smart as Carter was, with a "vision" that is similarly "new", though unlikely to succeed:

One such president was Jimmy Carter, who tried to maintain the creaking New Deal coalition while also grasping at a new vision for liberal governance. He failed because his party simply couldn’t accommodate the tension, and he himself couldn’t effectively blend the old and new.

Right now Trump looks like he might be similarly disjunctive. Like Mr. Carter with the ’70s-era Democrats, he has grasped — correctly — that Republican politics desperately needs to be reinvented. But his populist-nationalist vision has seemed too racially and culturally exclusive to win him majority support, and it’s layered atop a party that still mostly believes in the “populism” of cutting the estate tax.

Combine those brute political facts with Trump’s implausibly expansive promises, and a Carter scenario — gridlock, disappointment, collapse — seems like the most plausible way to bet. 

Which is pretty amusing in retrospect: whatever we may think about Trump's intelligence and vision, he's turned out to have an amazingly firm hold on his party, in spite of the claims to independence of a few crabby pundits. Today, anyway, Ross isn't going for retrospection, but instead prefers to look ahead, toward the question of who's going to play the "reconstructive" Reagan in this remake ("Bernie Sanders, Socialism's Reagan?"):

Timelines: A Buried Lede

Image via Irish Examiner.

Here's a peculiar one, brilliantly reported by Christina Willkie at CNBC (but not so well edited, the story is extremely hard to follow), about one of the more purposeless-sounding lies Paul Manafort told prosecutors when he was pretending to cooperate after the first trial, about the origins of a payment of $125,000 that went to one of his lawyers in June 2017.

The money was obtained, it seems, from an old comrade called Laurance Gay who Manafort had put in charge of the Tom Barrack–created superPAC Rebuilding American Now (where he seems to have done exceptionally well, raising $24 million, the best performance of any Trump superPAC, though three quarters of the money came from just four donors—wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon for $6 million; Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus for $5 million; Hollywood real estate tycoon Geoffrey Palmer, not previously a well-known donor, though his experience in campaign money laundering goes back to 1991, for another $5 million; and the Arkansas poultry magnate Ronald Cameron, whose experience with campaign money laundering through his "Jesus Fund" is very extensive, for $2 million).

Gay got it from a company, Multi Media Services Corporation, or MMSC, which earned $19 million as the chief ad buyer for the Trump campaign, and whose silent owner turned out to be Tony Fabrizio, another old Manafort associate and the Trump campaign's main pollster, with whose company Gay had a slightly dodgy-sounding relationship:

Otherwise Blameless Life: Postscript

Andrew "Chef" Glick, ex-president of the Cape May branch of the Pagan Outlaws Motorcycle Club, knew enough about the 2012 hired killing of April Kauffman, a local radio host and doctor's wife who had threatened to expose the illegal opioid prescription racket her husband was running with the Pagan Outlaws, that he could have been arrested as an accessory. Cops instead charged him with crimes unrelated to the murder plot, illegal possession of methamphetamines, cocaine, and weapons, for which he could have gotten up to 40 years, according to the Philly Voice, and he testified against the murderers and did no time in his own case. That's what Manafort was supposed to do. It's not that complicated.

Also on the Manafort subject, I hope this isn't too obvious, but the fact that none of the crimes with which Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been charged with  feature direct collaboration in a Russian conspiracy doesn't mean they never committed any crimes on those lines.

Indeed, we know at least two cases in which Manafort and Flynn absolutely did collaborate in a Russian conspiracy: Manafort in that cigar bar meeting with Kilimnik of August 2016 when he passed him the 75 pages of polling data, Flynn in those phone calls with the Russian ambassador in December 2016 when they spoke about sanctions. That seems like a clear violation of the 1799 Logan Act

Socialist Surrealism

Drawing most likely from the time of Milwaukee's first Socialist mayor, Emil Zeidel,  1910-12, though the city had two more of them, from  1916 to 1940 and 1948 to 1960. Via Milwaukee Independent.

Six weeks ago there was presidential candidate-flirt Michael Bloomberg:

Speaking with reporters after a second New Hampshire event, Bloomberg was asked about the wealth tax proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. He said the presidential contender's plan was potentially unconstitutional, and compared it to socialism. "It's called Venezuela," he added.

Only there are no wealth taxes in Venezuela.

Then around the same time there was Mr. Bret Stephens, economic theologian, laying down the catechism of orthodox socialism ("Yes, Venezuela is a Socialist Catastrophe"):

The Rightness Lag

Via.

David Brooks has changed his mind ("The Case for Reparations"):

Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind. What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron?

But I have had so many experiences over the past year — sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 — that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.

Then he calms down a bit. He's got the theological idea, which I really do, no snark, appreciate, that systemic racism is a sin, for which white society needs to atone, but he's more interested in Christian confession and absolution for himself than Jewish atonement and repair for the victims: looks like it's not the money that he expects to do the job, but the process of talking about it:

Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.

It'll make him feel all tingly, as David Brooks might say. So that's nice, and better than what his friends have done with the Universal Basic Income idea (used it as an excuse for planning the devastation of the social safety net), but it's pretty Brooksish in the end, and I'm not swooning.

Also it occurs to me that at the beginning of the week he seems to have read something about the Sanders "Medicare for All" proposal with "mild disagreement" and "all sorts of practical objections" and concluded that it was an "impossible dream". Does this mean that sometime in 2024 he's going to decide that it needs to be done, or at least discussed, after he has a conversation with an elderly diabetic who's been condemned to death by the price of insulin?

Come to think of it, wasn't it around 2008 that Brooks decided George W. Bush had made some "bad calls" at the beginning of the Iraq war? (He was applauding the "courageous and astute" 2007 surge)? Is Brooks installed with some kind of five-year rightness lag?

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Otherwise Blameless Life

Obligatory: Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, 1985. Photo by Harry Naltchayan/Washington Post.

I have to laugh at Judge Ellis remarking that Paul Manafort had led an "otherwise blameless life" except for the period between 2004 and 2018 when he committed all the crimes he's charged with in the Virginia and DC cases. Does he believe Manafort went to Ukraine and suddenly became a professional criminal at the age of 55?

I have my doubts, above all over his work for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, reported by Ken Vogel in Politico Magazine back in June 2016, not long before Manafort's promotion from convention manager to campaign manager (the article was published literally the day after the meeting in Trump Tower with the anti-sanctions campaigner Natalia Veselnitskaya where he was reported to have fallen asleep, seemed later to have been taking desultory notes on his phone, and possibly, as Emptywheel pointed out, recorded the whole thing, which would now be in the hands of the Special Counsel, with Manafort's other electronic devices):

November 2020

Not linking, but you can buy these little God-Emperor guys from Amazon. I like how his left hand in particular looks bigger than his head.

After Michael Cohen's testimony last week repeated the story that Trump didn't expect to or want to win the 2016 election, various people raised an issue they hadn't particularly raised the first time evidence of that was brought out, in Michael Wolfe's book, as here in The Hill, where it's used to suggest that Trump must be innocent in the Russian conspiracy:

On Russia: Cohen wouldn’t even venture to say that Trump “colluded” with Russia and said he was unaware of evidence that would prove such a thing occurred. Cohen claimed that Trump didn’t want to win the presidency, and didn’t think he would win. That undercuts the notion that Trump would have also conspired with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win.

Well, sure, except if that wasn't the conspiracy—if the conspiracy from Trump's point of view, at least initially, was rather, as some of us have been saying, and as Cohen's testimony completely reinforces (see Emptywheel), for Trump to follow Putin's playbook in contributing maximum publicity to the debate over Ukraine and sanctions, in return for which he'd get that Trump Tower Moscow built at last. He wasn't supposed to get elected in that scenario, but he was still Trump, and he'd still need desperately to look good. He can't bear to be laughed at. He constantly courts humiliation and dreads it more than anything, at the same time. I'm sure he wanted to come close to winning. Ideally, there'd be an outcome where he and his adoring following would feel he'd won, but he wouldn't have to move to Washington and go to all those meetings and be president in those horrible respects.

So what occurred to me then is that that explains all the talk toward the end of the campaign about how the election was going to be rigged in Clinton's favor, as his fabulation on Election Day itself, in a Fox interview:

Less information for you and me, more information for whoever Jared writes to

In my email, from Foreign Policy:

Trump to Cease Reporting Drone Deaths Top News: U.S. President Donald Trump has revoked a 2016 Obama-era executive order which required intelligence officials to publish the number of civilians killed in drone strikes outside of designated war zones, in places such as Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan. The requirements were a bid to increase transparency around drone strikes, which increased ten-fold under Barack Obama. U.S. President Donald Trump looks to be on course to exceed that, launching substantially more drone strikes than Obama did in his first two years in office. The Trump administration described the rule as “superfluous” and “distracting.”

But at least Trump can be relied on not to use improper methods of email storage, since he doesn't know how to use email, what better assurance could you have, though I guess we can't say that for Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller—you don't suppose they'd ever send classified information to the wrong places, do you?

Dual Loyalty Postscript

Also Kevin McCarthy is the most classic Elders-of-Zion believer in the House. Him accusing anybody of anti-Semitism is like Joe McCarthy calling somebody a drunk.

The fact that Kevin McCarthy is allowed to comment on and criticize Ilhan Omar with a straight face is absolutely wild pic.twitter.com/jfrDHVWwF0

— the fair contract ratifier (@pblest) March 6, 2019

I'd completely forgotten about that ghastly meme of the three Jewish billionaires (Steyer's only half-Jewish, like me) threatening to buy the entire US political system which you could only save by sending Kevin McCarthy money, #MAGA.

And he's never apologized, unlike Ilhan Omar, merely denied:

Asked by Fox News Channel’s Harris Faulkner about his October tweet, McCarthy responded, “Well, that had nothing to do about faith; that was about Republicans versus Democrats.”

"Nothing to do about faith"! "Faith"! That smarmy word. No indeed, it was about race. Speaker Pelosi, please reprimand this man.

Dual Loyalty

Illustration, coincidentally, from this morning's installment of Roy Edroso's ongoing study of "Grandpa's Inbox". Note how the rightwing bottom-feeder scum associate one of the congresswomen with the theory that there's an incredibly wealthy Jewish financier working to bring the entire world under his secret personal control.

So much stuff I really don't want to think or write about, from the presidential campaign, above all Bernie and Biden, to the whole tsuris over Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born freshwoman from Minnesota who wears the hijab, and her rhetorical approach to the pro-Likud lobbying forces in US politics, as described with some initial restraint by Jonathan Chait:

Earlier this month, Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!” in response to a report about AIPAC, a pro-Israel organization. Omar’s tweet echoed a longstanding anti-Semitic trope — in particular, the implication that Jewish political influence operates entirely (“all about”) through money.

After wide condemnation, Omar apologized. It seemed fair to read her tweet generously: Perhaps she was not familiar with the particular vein of anti-Semitism she happened to echo. Indeed, progressives often make crudely reductive statements about the influence of money in supporting policies they oppose (to wit: everything Bernie Sanders says), so it wasn’t necessarily anti-Semitic for Omar to extend that thinking to Jews. Her apparently sincere apology seemed to set to rest a minor offense.

Chait is right about the more simple-minded of us progressives attributing everything bad in politics to money influence, but has the story itself completely wrong, in fact: there was no report about AIPAC. There was a report about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had issued a vague threat against Omar and another new congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, who had done something he didn't like which he equated with Iowa Rep. Steve King's remarks about not understanding when white supremacy became a bad thing:

Limerick

Photo byAP/Jose Luis Magana via The Nation.

There once was a dotard called Trump
Who thought flags were a good thing to hump
Though he only got pally
With flags at a rally
'Cause you can't hump a girl on the stump. https://t.co/YsTx9kgVAM

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 4, 2019

Instead the poor flag got wrapped in fascism. It did not look comfortable. https://t.co/biloNjS0xx

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 4, 2019

Timeline: Monsignor sets up a Steele trap

Amerigo Vespucci next to a Map of the Americas and East Asia. Detail from Universal Cosmography world Map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published April 1507, via reddit/map porn.

Now that so much material has come out on the Trump-Russia conspiracy that wasn't known or knowable to Christopher Steele, from George Papadopoulos's antics in the spring of 2016 through the Trump Tower "adoptions" meeting of 9 June to the odd fact that Paul Manafort sent some 75 pages of sensitive US election polling data in August 2016 to his old henchman Konstantin Kilimnik to transmit to two very wealthy Ukrainians, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov (the richest man in Ukraine and the man who introduced Manafort to the Party of Regions in 2004-05) from whom he was at the moment expecting a payment of $2.4 million to come in November, though he'd had no money from Ukrainian politicians for well over a year, and if you think that polling data was just for Lyovochkin's and Akhmetov's personal entertainment and wasn't destined for somebody in Russia, I don't know what to tell you (Emptywheel thinks she has some solid evidence that it was going to the Russian Oleg Deripaska as well but refuses to speculate on the thing that interests me, who the end user might be)—

Now, I was saying, that we've heard a couple of hours of the testimony of Michael Cohen that Special Counsel Mueller thinks it's safe for the public to hear, though not the several hours that the House and Senate intelligence committees have heard in secret, to say nothing of Cohen's seven visits to the Special Counsel's office since he offered his guilty plea, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd St. ("The State of Russiagate"), thinks that

it’s worth returning for a moment to the document that established the darkest interpretation of all the Russian weirdness swirling around Donald Trump: the intelligence dossier created by Christopher Steele, late of MI6, on behalf of Trump’s political opponents, which brought together the reports and rumors that Steele deemed credible about the then-candidate, now-president’s Russia ties.

Literary Corner: New Republican Poetry

"We are already able to reach the notorious hamburgers of San Diego!" Via  Anita Pitsch, Australian National University Press.

Formal elegance meets wry surrealism in some of the new entries, like this Ionesco-like fantasy by Dr. Gorka, from the CPAC conference:

Joe Stalin's Dream

by Dr. Sebastian Gorka

They want
to take your pickup truck,
they want
to rebuild your home,
they want
to take away your hamburgers.

This is what Stalin dreamt
about but never achieved.

Strictly speaking, I don't believe Comrade Stalin had any interest in rebuilding my home at all. I think he would have relished the uncontrollable overheating, the poor ventilation in spite of gaps exploited by wind and rodent, the ceiling fan in which only one of the four light bulb sockets actually works because of some crazy fault in the wiring. He would have seen it as irrefragable evidence of the collapse of the decadent West, as the contradictions of capitalism become too gross to ignore. I don't have a pickup truck, but I doubt he'd be interested in the occasional hamburger I consume, beyond asserting (no doubt falsely) that Soviet hamburgers are much, much better. Just saying.

For the Record: Baron von Troomp and the Mysteries of Authorship

Image via Express, August 2017. The book, from 1893, is real.

A funny word usage of Trump's on the Twitter this morning went toward answering a question Jordan has asked—Steve and I figured out a boringly rational explanation of why Trump believes he himself wrote The Art of the Deal and other books published under his name:

Aside from everything else, Donald thinks books originate as "transcripts" https://t.co/4a7zXBoKPo

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2019

Right. And he has no idea how much work Schwarz had to do with it after the interviews, because he hasn't read it.

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2019

Ghostwriters probably gave him copies of their interview transcripts before they started the actual writing, and he gave these to the lawyers tasked with making sure he hadn't said anything that would get him in trouble and washed his hands of them, and felt his work was done. Obviously a man of his responsibilities can't sit down and type the thing, or whatever it is they do, but he's very confident that he authored it.