Month: March 2019

Welcome back, music lovers. Last week was 1979, so let’s use 1989 as a bookend. Change was all around us, although we hadn’t quite figured out what that would mean until much later. House music was hitting the mainstream. This track by 808 State was released in the UK in 1989 on the ZTT label and later in the US under the Tommy Boy label:

This was one of those combos who hit their peak very early on. But during the waning days of the 1980s and the first few years in the 1990s, they were a big deal. Perfect chill-out music.

While this blog is a thing, I’ll keep up with the themed music cafes and hopefully can spin a few tunes as time permits. Cheers!

Chris Cillizza says, “the danger for [Joe] Biden in this [presidential] race is clear: He runs the risk of coming off like Don Draper in a Peggy Olson world. And, unfortunately for him, there’s just not much he can do about it.” I think that’s undoubtedly true. If you’re familiar with the show Mad Men, you know what that means, and if you are not I think you can imagine. We’ve reached a moment in this country where women aren’t accepting the old rules and where men are being routinely punished for things that previous generations took for granted.

Yet, I look at the White House and I see Donald Trump in the Oval Office. I can’t concede that we’re living in a Peggy Olson world. Maybe that’s where we’re headed. Maybe we are right on the cusp of that. Maybe the outcome of the 2020 election will decide which kind of country we’re living in.

The way it looks from here, more than a year out from Election Day, there isn’t much doubt which side of that battle will be waged by the Democrats. And this is why the Democratic primaries and caucuses don’t appear to be hospitable territory for older white men who spent most of their political careers in an environment that operated by the old rules.

From this distant vantage point, it’s also not clear that the Democrats will win a battle fought along these lines. An all-out cultural battle about race and gender and human sexuality could really go either way, especially against an incumbent president fighting on the opposing side.

The Democrats seem to want to focus more on kitchen table issues, including especially health care. It’s the Republicans that want to make the election about whether black athletes stand for the national anthem or non-white immigrants are committing heinous crimes. They’re running unapologetically to take away reproductive choice and on divisive issues like transgender bathrooms.  They seem to think they can win a cultural battle. They don’t want to fight about health care, as can been seen by the extremely negative reaction from congressional Republicans to the administration’s choice to oppose the Affordable Care Act in court.

In truth, the campaign will be about all of these things and many other topics, too, but it’s not clear to me that the Democrats want the campaign to be primarily about getting a verdict on whether this is a Don Draper or a Peggy Olson world. They might want it to be about a return to sense of normalcy and competency, because they’d almost surely win that battle.

Like every other Democratic aspirant to the White House, Biden has his pros and cons. He has some pretty obvious weaknesses, especially as a candidate for the Democratic nomination. He’s also a great contrast to Trump in almost every respect. It could be that there is one respect in which they are not different enough, but that will be up to Democratic voters to decide.

According to Rob Tornoe of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the federal government spent $18 million on the Special Olympics last year. That’s a very tiny line item in the context of the size of the entire federal budget. We could increase that spending ten-fold without anyone really noticing. Likewise, we could eliminate it entirely without it having any discernible impact on the nation’s financial health. We aren’t going to balance the budget or eliminate the national debt by tinkering with the funding for the Special Olympics.

That’s why it’s not easy to understand the rationale for the Trump administration’s proposal to reduce the funding by $17.6 million. That wouldn’t end the government’s support for the Special Olympics, but it would bring it down to the level of a rounding error. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was questioned about this during testimony before Congress on Tuesday, and she didn’t have many answers.

Among those grilling DeVos was Rep. Mark Pocan (D., Wis.), who left the education secretary dumbfounded when he asked if she knew how many kids would be impacted by the proposed cuts.

“I’ll answer it for you, that’s OK, no problem,” Pocan said. “It’s 272,000 kids that are affected.”

“I think that the Special Olympics is an awesome organization, one that is well supported by the philanthropic sector as well,” DeVos responded.

Reading between the lines, Secretary DeVos seems to be saying that the Trump administration’s position is that the Special Olympics should be funded almost exclusively through philanthropy.

The fuller context here is a budget proposal that would cut $8.5 billion from the Department of Education. When you’re de-investing in the nation’s education, you have an incentive to start cutting far from the actual classroom, which may be one of the more defensible ways to defend their proposal on the Special Olympics, as well as their plan to eliminate after-school programs for children in impoverished communities. On the other hand, how do they defend doing away with grants for teacher development?

What gnaws at me here is the fear that this isn’t just a matter of having an ideological goal of vastly reducing federal education spending that results inevitably in some tough choices. When I see the president becoming obsessive about denying almost all aid to Puerto Rico, and consumed with a desire to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and called out as an anti-black racist by his own personal lawyer, and then I see him trying to almost completely do away with funding for the Special Olympics, which is after all a competition for people born with disabilities and deformities, I begin to wonder if this is true:

According to a 1990 Vanity Fair interview, Ivana Trump once told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that her husband, real-estate mogul Donald Trump, now a leading Republican presidential candidate, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.

“Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed … Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist,” Marie Brenner wrote.

Here’s what the United States Holocaust Museum has to say about Nazi ideology and the disabled:

The Nazi persecution of persons with disabilities in Germany was one component of radical public health policies aimed at excluding hereditarily “unfit” Germans from the national community. These strategies began with forced sterilization and escalated toward mass murder. The most extreme measure, the Euthanasia Program, was in itself a rehearsal for Nazi Germany’s broader genocidal policies.

The ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for the destruction of the “unfit” was also applied to other categories of “biological enemies,” most notably to Jews and Roma (Gypsies). Compulsory sterilization and “euthanasia,” like the “Final Solution,” were components of a biomedical vision which imagined a racially and genetically pure and productive society, and embraced unthinkable strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within that vision.

I don’t want my mind to wander in this direction. I know there’s a vast gulf between nearly zeroing out funding for the Special Olympics and forcibly sterilizing the athletes. But I can’t help but wonder if this president is behind this decision and if his well-known contempt for the disabled is part of a broader ideological viewpoint with clear antecedents. Rep. Steve King of Iowa asks, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” I thought it became offensive when Nazis started using compulsory sterilization and “euthanasia” to impose “a biomedical vision which imagined a racially and genetically pure and productive society.”

To put this another way, I think Trump wants to deny Puerto Rico any federal funding because he’s a racist. I think he wants a border wall because he’s a racist. So, it’s not hard for me to think he wants to eliminate funding for the Special Olympics because it’s consistent with a ideology based on genetic purity and fitness.

Over the years, Donald Trump has talked about his “good genes” over and over again, as can be seen in this Time magazine video:

Personally, I don’t view the Special Olympics through any kind of ideological lens, but I do recognize that they are a form of rebuke to those who put a lot of emphasis on the primacy of genetics. When people who were born with genetic abnormalities or deficiencies are able to nonetheless accomplish extraordinary things, that’s a high profile demonstration against “a biomedical vision which imagines a racially and genetically pure and productive society.”

If all these threads from Trump didn’t come together like this so cleanly, I’d be more willing to look at the decision to turn Special Olympics funding over to philanthropy as a throw-away line item drawn up by ideological bean-counters far below the president’s level. And maybe that’s all this is.

It’s just that I have my suspicions.

I don’t really understand why Trump has an affinity for the world’s most horrible leaders or why he picks fights with our allies. Back on November 13, 2008, I argued that “of all the reasons to remove President Trump from office, his love affair with Kim Jong Un is the most compelling,” and I still feel that way. It’s beginning to look like at least some Republican officeholders agree with me:

Senator Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican facing re-election in 2020, blasted the Trump administration’s handling of North Korea sanctions at a Foreign Relations Committee hearing Tuesday morning.

“We now have sanctions that are being waived by the president after Treasury, by law, issues them,” he said. “This body ought to be growing more and more frustrated with the U.S. continuing to change our policy while Kim Jong Un sits back and continues to develop fissile material, nuclear weapons without doing a doggone thing except watch the United States change its negotiating position.”

Sen. Gardner was referring to something that happened shortly before it was announced that the Mueller investigation had been concluded. On Friday, President Trump sent out a tweet that caused mass confusion and consternation:

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019

I was as baffled as everyone else. It appeared then, and it has since been confirmed, that the Treasury Department had not imposed any “additional large scale sanctions” on North Korea. What they had done is impose sanctions on two Chinese shipping companies that do business with Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime.  Somehow, the president had learned of this but had all the details garbled.

Now we have a better idea of what happened. A Chinese shipping company called Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd. was identified as having a business relationship with a North Korean company, thereby violating international sanctions. Another Chinese company called Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd., was similar in violation for “operating in the transportation industry in North Korea.” This came up in National Security Council meeting, and John Bolton decided that the Treasury Department should punish these two Chinese companies, which they did.

The sanctions on the two Chinese shipping companies were the subject of a National Security Council principals meeting last week, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Robert Blair, a national security aide to White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, warned that he didn’t think Trump would support issuing the measures. But National Security Adviser John Bolton, a North Korea hawk, disagreed and argued he knew Trump better than Blair, the two people said.

After the sanctions were announced, Bolton publicly applauded the move.

“The maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea’s illicit shipping practices,” he said in a tweet, adding that “everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Korea’s sanctions evasion.”

The next day, Trump’s tweet shocked former Treasury officials, who said it risked undercutting the entire U.S. sanctions effort only to benefit North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s regime.

We can probably make a decent guess at the series of events that unfolded between the National Security Council decision and the president’s tweet rescinding a completely different decision that was never made. Robert Blair probably had something to do with it. He was the one who argued in the meeting that Trump would not support sanctioning the Chinese companies. He is the one who was overruled on the basis that John Bolton knew the president better than he did.

However it actually went down, the president wound up behaving as Blair had predicted he would, but he got all the details wrong. He sent out his tweet and no one knew what he was talking about.

At that point, the White House went into damage control. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee didn’t know what the hell was going on, so she rationalized the decision: “President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary.” But no one knew which sanctions she was referring to.

Look at this disgraceful spectacle:

Trump stunned current and former government officials Friday afternoon with a tweet saying he had “ordered the withdrawal” of “additional large scale sanctions” against North Korea. For hours, officials at the White House and Treasury and State departments wouldn’t explain what he meant.

The president in fact intended to remove penalties Treasury had announced the day before against two Chinese shipping companies that had helped Pyongyang evade U.S. sanctions, according to five people familiar with the matter. Trump hadn’t signed off on the specific measures before they were announced but had given Treasury discretion to decide some sanctions as it saw fit, according to one person familiar with the matter.

Later Friday, in the wake of Trump’s tweet, the administration sought to explain away the move with a statement — initially requesting no attribution to anyone — that said the penalties against the Chinese companies hadn’t been reversed but the U.S. wouldn’t pursue additional sanctions against North Korea.

There were no additional North Korea sanctions in the works at the time, according to two people familiar with the matter.

So, as things stand, the sanctions against these two Chinese companies will not be rescinded, but North Korea has been reassured that the president will punish them only with the most severe reluctance. They’ve also had it reiterated to them that our president is “a mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”

So, when Sen. Gardner says “This body ought to be growing more and more frustrated with the U.S. continuing to change our policy while Kim Jong Un sits back and continues to develop fissile material, nuclear weapons without doing a doggone thing except watch the United States change its negotiating position,” it’s hard to argue against his point.

Yet, that still doesn’t explain why Donald Trump “likes” Kim Jong Un or why he wants his regime to preside over “one of the great economic powers” in the world. We can argue about Trump and Russia as much as we want, but there’s no way anyone reasonable can defend Trump’s behavior when it comes to North Korea.  Although I have suspicions, I cannot explain it. All I know is that this is definitely the biggest risk factor we’re facing from having this man serve as our president.

I haven’t seen the Mueller Report. No one I know has seen it. None of the columnists and pundits were are opining on it have seen it. What they and I have seen is a self-serving memorandum that attorney general William Barr sent to the chairmen and ranking members of the congressional judiciary committees. This is one reason that I won’t be joining my colleague Joshua Alvarez in his end zone dance that “the Mueller report [didn’t] amount to much of anything.”

If you want to know what part of the Mueller investigation matters, it’s not the part that sought to prove that Trump told the Russians to hack into the DNC, DCCC and John Podesta’s email. It’s not the part that looked into any possible coordination in how and when that hacked information was utilized. It’s not the part where they tried to discover if the Russian fake-news troll factory in St. Petersburg coordinated with the campaign in some way.  These theories were floated and run down by Mueller’s team, and they seem to come up short of anything they were willing to bring into a court room.  It’s these theories that could collectively be called “collusion” and that William Barr was able to inform Congress had not been proven.

What we need to do here is to take a step back and reflect on how these theories all got started in the first place. In the summer and fall of 2015, few people were taking Donald Trump seriously as a candidate for the Republican nomination, but he was getting a lot of attention from the press mainly because he was famous and outrageous.  He said a lot of politically incorrect or unorthodox things, but one of his themes was particularly curious. He kept saying nice things about Vladimir Putin and making excuses for his murderous behavior.

In 2015, most American politicians were concerned that Russia had been busy interfering in elections and boosting far-right white nationalist parties on two continents, downing passenger jets, throwing journalists out of windows, poisoning and assassinating people in their homes on foreign soil and killing others with radiation and military grade nerve agents. But Trump was different. He approved of Russia’s move into Syria on the spurious rationale that they would fight ISIS there rather than prop up the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad. He doubted that Putin really had any journalists killed and stated that even if he did it was no worse than the things the American government does on a routine basis. In addition to being crazy, these comments made no political sense.

Trump’s rhetoric about Putin was odd enough that it aroused suspicion that he had some hidden financial motivation that explained it. In October 2015, Republican donor Paul Singer, through his magazine The Washington Free Beacon, contracted with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS to investigate Trump’s foreign business ties, including with Russia. This contract ended when Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, but the suspicion didn’t go away and the Clinton campaign retained Fusion GPS to continue their investigation.

As it turns out, the suspicions were correct. The same month that Paul Singer hired Glenn Simpson, Trump signed a letter of intent to build the tallest building in Europe. The location was Moscow.  For more than three years afterwards, Trump would deny that he had any financial ties to Russia or was pursuing any business deals there.  Every one of those denials was a lie.

So, to summarize how this began, Trump said things about Putin and Russia that made people suspect that he was either protecting or pursuing business interests there. That is precisely what he was doing.  He lied about it. The Russians knew he was lying about it. This gave the Russians leverage over Trump, because they could reveal his lies at at any time. They could have sunk his chances of winning either the Republican nomination or the general election, but they refrained from doing that.  Instead, they sent emissaries to talk about sanctions relief. They launched a massive multi-faceted campaign to damage Hillary Clinton and assist Donald Trump.

Without rehashing all the familiar contacts between Russia-linked operatives and the Trump campaign (which now number 102), we shouldn’t have any difficulty understanding that Russia cultivated and assisted Trump because they wanted to get out from under the sanctions that were imposed on them after they annexed Crimea. Putin also felt a personal animosity toward Hillary Clinton, but that was secondary and still related to the issue of money.

If you stop and think about the rumored “pee tape” for a minute, it’s clear that the reason people were willing to believe it is because they needed some explanation for Trump’s behavior. It seemed obvious that Putin had something he was holding over Trump, so maybe it was good old fashioned kompromat with hookers from the time Trump went to Moscow to host his beauty pageant.

But it didn’t need to be that at all. Trump was pursuing (and then hiding) his Moscow Trump Tower deal, and that alone was enough to compromise him.

After the intelligence community established that Russia was responsible for hacking the Democrats, Trump inexplicably refused to credit their findings. He did this on the campaign trail, in the presidential debates, and even after he had been given detailed intelligence briefings. He continued to do it when he was president-elect. He even resumed doubting the evidence after he had officially accepted it.

After the election, the intelligence community went further and declared that Russia had intervened on Trump’s behalf, and at that point he may have felt that it was a way of denying him full credit for his victory, but his denials began the day that the leaks were first blamed on Russia, way back in June 2016.

Once elected, he immediately signaled that he would move to lift sanctions on Russia, even as the Obama administration was putting down new sanctions as punishment for the election interference. The contrast is what caused the first scandal of the Trump administration and the resignation of his national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Since Trump has been in office he has continued to say and do things that indicate or strongly suggest that he is indebted somehow to Vladimir Putin. Here are some examples:

1. Advocating that Americans pull their troops out of the Far East.
2. Advocating that Americans pull out of Syria and arguing that the Russians only want to be there to fight ISIS.
3. Arguing that Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia because many ethnic Russians live there.
4. Saying NATO is obsolete.
5. Refusing to commit to the protection of former-Soviet NATO members in the Baltics.
6. Refusing to commit to the protection of NATO member Macedonia.
7. Attacking the European Union.
8. Calling the European Union a “foe.”
9. Supporting the United Kingdom’s split from the European Union.
10. Supporting the same Euro-Skeptic far right white nationalist parties that Putin supports.
11. Attacking and undermining the governments in London and Berlin, which present the strongest resistance to Putin’s influence in Europe.
12. Attacking the U.S. intelligence community and federal law enforcement agencies to undermine their credibility with the American public.
13. Decimating the Department of State.
14. Pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

He also arranges to meet with Putin privately whenever he can, and the results have been suspicious every single time. When my colleague Joshua Alvarez says that the “the narratives of Trump-the-Manchurian-Candidate” and “Trump-the-Russian-Agent,” have been debunked by the Mueller Report, he doesn’t have much to support his claim.

With the firing of FBI director James Comey, the intelligence community made a decision that they could no longer avoid the main topic raised by Trump’s behavior with respect to Russia. He actually crowed to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in an undisclosed Oval Office meeting the next day that he’d fired Comey and thereby released great pressure off himself. While he was doing that, he divulged sensitive information about Syria that we had obtained from the Israelis.  New FBI director Andrew McCabe authorized a counterintelligence investigation into Trump within the week.  Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein quickly authorized a Special Counsel investigation which then inherited the counterintelligence investigation.

This wasn’t a look at what the Trump campaign had known about the hacking or how they might have coordinated with the Russians during the campaign. It was a look at whether the president was compromised in some way and under the influence of a foreign power.

This is the “real” Mueller Report, and we have not yet heard a peep about it. Before anyone does any end zone dances, we need to see the conclusions of this report. And, as NBC News reports, that will allegedly happen soon:

Two senior U.S. officials told NBC News on Monday that the FBI is prepared to brief congressional leaders on the counterintelligence findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into President Donald Trump, and the letter sent to Congress on Sunday by Attorney General William Barr about the Mueller probe is silent on the question of whether investigators found that Trump or anyone around him might be compromised or influenced by Russia.

The officials said they expect the FBI to brief the so-called Gang of 8 — the leaders of the House and the Senate and the chairmen and ranking members of the intelligence committees — in closed session.

No briefing has been scheduled, a third U.S. official familiar with the matter said, but one of the officials said it could happen within the next 30 to 60 days.

In the weeks and months before the Mueller investigation concluded, I began to worry that Trump had succeeded in making everything think the main concern was “collusion.” On January 22, I wrote A Compromised Administration Is as Bad as a Colluding One, and on March 20, I wrote, It’s Not the Collusion, Stupid! It’s the Compromise. These were efforts to refocus people’s minds on the primary thing that matters. What matters is not what William Barr reported on to Congress. What matters are the counterintelligence findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

As a public relations matter, Trump had a fantastic week and now he seeks to demolish his enemies for seemingly having come at the king and missed. In this, he’s being inadvertently assisted by a lot of pundits and reporters who bought into the idea that the problem is that Trump may have cheated in the election. The problem has always been far deeper and more serious than that. The problem is that Trump is appears to be compromised and unable to fulfill the duties of his office.

Obviously, we must see the evidence of obstruction of justice that William Barr dismissed, and clearly Trump is facing investigations into everything from his charities to his hotels to banking, wire and insurance fraud to the conduct of his inaugural committee. But the main thing we must see is what our counterintelligence experts have concluded about the president. That’s the real Mueller Report.

Well, the Mueller investigation did not find that “the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” To that limited extent, the president has been vindicated in arguing that there was “no collusion.” Attorney General William Barr has decided not to prosecute the president for obstruction of justice irrespective of whether a president can be prosecuted, even though the report apparently details many examples of what could easily be considered obstructive acts. His rationale is in part that there was no underlying crime. So, as a result, the president has gotten a pretty clean bill of health, and we can all look at the report someday soon and see all of the bad behavior but we won’t have much recourse.

As for whether the president has been compromised by a foreign power, the letter William Barr sent to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees is completely silent on the matter. And, yet, this is the primary thing the American people need to know. To get any insight into the answer to that question, it appears that Mueller and members of his investigatory team will have to be asked to testify before Congress.

The Deep State has so far proven to be toothless. It looks like Congress (one half of it, anyway) is on its own. This will now most likely be settled at the ballot box, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions and tasks that need to be taken on. Congress needs to figure out how to better protect against foreign interference in the next election. And they will have to do their best to carry on their own counterintelligence assessment, as difficult as that will now be.

In the meantime, everyone else needs to knuckle down for the most brutal and consequential political battle of our lifetimes.

I want to hate on this column, but then again I don’t want to hate on it because it is in many respects quiet incisive. But let me tell you what I don’t like about it.

I don’t like it when people talk about whole generations of people like an astrologer, suggesting that we’re all a certain way because of when we were born. I don’t like it when someone who was born in 1976 speaks for all of Generation X, using references that had no relevance to my formation because I was already out of high school when they became a thing. I don’t like it when being a white man is presumptively defective, and having lived a middle class or better life is delegitimizing.

To me, going to high school in the 1980’s was different enough from going to high school in the nineties that it’s hard to classify both groups as part of the same generation. When I graduated from high school, the Berlin Wall was still standing and the prospect of nuclear annihilation was our climate change-level rationale for anti-authoritarianism or even nihilism. By the time the Class of 1994 graduated from high school, people were beginning to believe that democracy had triumphed over authoritarianism and the end of major conflict was nigh. For that reason, being a skate punk in 1985 had a different meaning than being a skate punk in 1993.

What both groups shared in common was a rejection of the establishment often inherited from hippie parents who had battled through Vietnam and Watergate, but without anything on that scale to organize their resistance. That hippie boomers sold out and made careers and families was a cliche, but one their children were reluctant to follow with enthusiasm. You can call that “having a problem with authority [that is] more about being appealingly subversive than having experienced real oppression at the hands of people who abuse authority,” or you can just write it off as the privileged finding it “easier to project a willingness to subvert norms than to actually subvert them.” What I call it is growing up.

Elizabeth Spiers describes young Beto O’Rourke somewhat dismissively as a “sometimes lost, arty type, skeptical of institutions and playfully rebellious, but not antisocial.” That really describes anyone who was basically a good, law-abiding kid who was born with a healthy amount of skepticism and a bit of sensitivity. Was his skepticism illegitimate because he wasn’t experiencing ” real oppression at the hands of people who abuse authority”? Were his aimlessness and drift suspect because they didn’t devolve into anti-social behaviors? Are the only people with a valid point of view those who were breaking windows to protest the WTO?

Elizabeth Spiers sums up her problem with a simple sentence: “Beto O’Rourke is a very familiar kind of Generation X white dude.” She doesn’t say that like it’s okay. In fact, her whole column is an effort to explain what is wrong with it and why it’s not a good fit for someone who wants to be the president of the United States.

Typical Gen X white dudes are all about posing and affectation, pretending to be ironic and rebellious when they’re really being coddled at home. They demonstrate their unearned authenticity by wearing eye-liner for three weeks, listening to thrash punk skater music and slacking off to the point that they reach their mid-20’s with no goal established for their lives. Spiers says, “I don’t object to this, personally. I’m a Gen Xer, too,” but she actually objects to it rather strenuously.

But O’Rourke so completely — and hilariously — embodies the stereotype of a white male Xer that if someone wrote him into a dystopian fantasy about a youthful 40-something ex-punk-rocker dropped into politics (reluctantly and with some conflictedness, of course) to save America from a selfish boomer narcissist who failed upward into the presidency despite a history of corruption and incompetency, the character would be way too on the nose.

The worst part of her piece is also the best part.

Since he declared that he was running for president, O’Rourke has spent a lot of time standing on things. Not because he needs to; he’s 6-foot-4, but he still often climbs atop furniture to talk to crowds. Or he climbs up and then perches kneeling to address a specific potential constituent, while emanating something akin to a cool camp counselor vibe that says: I’m here to listen to you and fix your problems. And I also maybe have a pot stash everyone knows about that I’ll consider sharing because you seem cool, and I know you won’t narc on me. The posture is a little subversive — diner counters are not for standing on! — but not too much so. O’Rourke isn’t taking a baseball bat to the counter, he’s just demonstrating that he’s not hemmed in by restrictive traditional notions of where people should stand. And because he’s charismatic and maybe a little emo, he can pull it off without seeming horribly awkward. It works for O’Rourke partly because it feels like a generational affect and thus of a piece with the rest of his persona.

But it also works for him because Gen X affectations don’t have much downside for straight white men.

I like this writing and I think it’s insightful about what makes Beto tick, why he has a certain appeal, and how the privileged are free to act in ways that are severely punished in others. But it really amounts to an argument that O’Rourke’s earnestness is somewhere between a shallow illusion and a paternalistic scam.

If you would prefer that our next president not be white or not be a man or not be from a specific generation or not have spent part of their youth with the luxury of being aimless, that’s your right. But these are not good reasons to criticize people and dismiss what they are trying to bring to the table.

It’s tough enough to get through your teenage years and become a functioning adult. The idea that you never had a chance to be taken seriously because of your gender, your skin-tone, or when you were born? That’s not something we should want to enforce. Do we want to dismiss people because their parents provided them a good enough life that they could “waste” some of it playing in a punk band or perusing the works of Joseph Campbell?

Even having made all these critiques of the article, I still think it’s a good piece of writing with more than a few good observations. It’s more the genre I hate than the piece. And I can’t stand self-loathing, especially when its generational.

What’s that?

You say that you missed Pt. I?

Well…it wasn’t labeled as such, but that’s what it was about.

Strange Bedfellows.
.
That original post was titled Beto O’Rourke-When The National Review and WAPO SIMULTANEOUSLY Attack You…

And the following line was “You’ve gotta know you’re on the right track!!!

The National Review and WAPO…on first glance, a dyed-in-the-wool William Buckley-style conservative rag and the so-called “liberal” Washingtoon Poist heartily agreeing with each other..

But of course, they are just two of the many faces of the Permanent Government, and as soon as someone comes along who threatens to upset the PermaGov applecart, there they are.

Wanking as hard as they can, and thick as thieves.

And I do mean “thieves.”

It’s plain as day.

Read on.
So…I’m perusing the headlines tonight and what do I see?

The National Review and…this time…the NY Times agreeing on another movement that threatens the stranglehold that the two current parties and their owners have on the “elected” Federal Government.

The National Review first:

Abolishing the Electoral College Would Be a Mistake

Followed by a scary, scary picture!!!

Elizabeth Warren persisting to talk sense.. (If you missed it…she wants to get rid of the Electoral College.)

I yawned…same old same old National Review.

And a little later, this one caught my eye:

From the NY Times:

A Case for the Electoral College

Oh.

Here it is again!!!

Written by the unfortunately named Ross Douthat.

Is that short for “Doubt Hat” or “Doubt That?” I’ve never really been able to figure that out.

Maybe Charles Dickens…the greatest “namer” in all of English literature with the possible exception of Terry Southern…is still alive and kicking?

I hope so.

Anyway…

I am sure that the “Strange Bedfellows” meme will continue to be alive and kicking until the last anti-neocentrist political outlier is media-marched off of the stage of current history.

If of course this time is not different from 2016 and all of the other, previous presidential U.S. Elections, where being only a couple of inches further left (or right) than the Chosen Ones was grounds for massive non-personing efforts from the bought-and-sold media.

They’ll keep bedfellowing, and I’ll keep pointing it out.

Bet on it.

“Left?”

“Right?”

Phhhhhfffft!!!

Later…

AG

P.S. [Update]-I just ran across another version of the “Strange Bedfellows” meme, this time by the reliably neocentrist Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.

As with the Washingtoon Post, I refuse to give these Wall Street Journal thieves any more money than they have already stolen, so I could only copy the teaser. But…with Noonan, the teaser is more than enough. She doesn’t hide her alliances, she revels in them.

Congress’s Mean Girls Are Trump’s Offspring

Omar and Ocasio-Cortez equate roughness with authenticity. So does the man they despise.

By Peggy Noonan – March 21, 2019 7:11 p.m. ET

We’re in a time of absorbed but subtle and not fully noticed shifts. Old-time liberals and conservatives seem to understand each other more deeply, more generously than they did in the past: In some new way they see the other’s basic political decency. On the other hand the parties they’ve been aligned with offer constant confusion and…

Thar she blows!!!

“Old-time liberals and conservatives” do not “seem to understand each other more deeply” these days, they have simply been forced into publicizing their long-time alliances by pressures from the Trumpist right and the New Dem left.

May this situation continue until the scales have been ripped from the U.S. electorate’s eyes!!!

P.P.S. Yeah, right, Peggy!!!

Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t learn their “roughness” from Trump!!!

They learned it on the hard streets of America. Women of color. Minority women. A hijab-wearing Muslim woman, in Omar’s case, one that spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp as a child. It was get rough or get lost.

Trump?

The most difficult task he has ever had to do was to learn how to effectively (and no doubt criminally) use the silver spoon that was shoved up his ass at birth.

Give me a break!!!