Month: September 2019

Playing chess has become a defense mechanism for me.  I finally understand this. Increasingly, I will read something about the Trump administration and instead of writing about it I will just start playing some anonymous and similarly rated person in chess. Most often, this person will be from India or Brazil or Norway or the Maldives. It doesn’t really matter because we rarely use the chat feature anyway. But they’re not from here and they’re probably thinking about something completely different than what Rudy Giuliani just said on cable television. For ten to twenty minutes, we’ll be thinking of little else but pawn pushes and discoveries and how to avoid an endgame when we’re behind on time.

It’s an escape from this madness. But it’s also a purification of my mind. My brain wants to do computations. It wants to analyze. It likes the exercise. It’s why I write about the complexities of politics. But, when I’m subjected to a constant drumbeat of spin and illogic, it begins to actually clutter my mind and diminish my ability to think clearly. I used to solve this problem by drinking a lot of alcohol late at night to shut down my thought process and help me sleep. Instead of waking up hungover, I’d generally wake up clutter-free and ready to tackle another long day of blogging. But I gave up drinking five years ago because it eventually took its predictable toll on my health. The result has been about 99% positive, but the one percent that has been negative has been the inability to properly purge myself of garbage thinking.

I find myself spending too much time sucked into conventional surface-level thinking where I’m just reacting to things rather than seeing through them. The Trump Era has been particularly tough in this respect, because the man is just constantly asking for a response. And it grinds me down.

Vacations help, but I don’t have much paid vacation and I actually like writing so I don’t enjoy taking a break from it as much you might think. Chess has become a vacation I can take for twenty minutes, but those twenty minutes have started adding up to a loss of productivity. I need this man removed from office so I can get back to doing what I do, and doing it well.

One positive is that my chess rating has gone up about 200 points in the last two months. Here’s a game I played today as black when I should have been writing about a dozen different breaking stories. My opponent was from India. The computer really liked it, telling me I made zero blunders, zero mistakes, and only one inaccuracy. I think it shows an uncluttered mind. If only I could make it last longer than twenty minutes it might be a real solution.

1.  e4 e5

2.  Bc4 Nf6

3.  Nf3 Nxe4

4.  Nxe5 d5

5.  Qe2 Bc5

6.  d3 Bxf2+

7.  Kd1 O-O

8.  dxe4 dxc4+

9.  Bd2 Bd4

10.  Nxc4 b5

11.  c3 Bf6

12.  Ne3 Nd7

13.  Na3 Re8

14.  Ng4 b4

15.  Nxf6+ Nxf6

16.  Nc2 Bg4

17.  cxb4 Bxe2+

18.  Kxe2 Nxe4 (computer wanted Rxe4 but I was trying to create possible discovery opportunities with the knight/rook tandem).  

19.  Be3 Qf6

20.  Rhf1 Qxb2

21.  Rfc1 Nc3+

22.  Kf2 Ne4+ (computer says Ne4+ is excellent, but when I followed with 23. Nd6, it forced me to give up my queen). 

23.  Kg1 Nd6 (I did not see the queen trap coming, but was able to get enough compensation it didn’t matter and the computer didn’t care). 

24.  Bd4 Re1+

25.  Kf2 Rxc1

26.  Bxb2 Rxc2+

27.  Kg3 Rxb2

28.  h3 Rxb4

29.  a3 Rb3+

30.  Kh2 Re8

31.  a4 a5

32.  Kg1 c5

33.  Kh2 c4

34.  Kg1 g6

35.  Kh2 Re2 (white resigned)

 

Image: Matt Johnson

An embattled President Donald Trump on Sunday had a full-fledged meltdown that culminated in a call for another civil war if he’s not re-elected.

….If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Pastor Robert Jeffress, @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2019

It is a preposterous, self-pitying statement on its face—but it makes me wonder. Who, exactly, would march, fight, and presumably die to preserve the Union prop up Trump’s flagging presidency—because it wouldn’t be about saving the country. There are PLENTY of people, and not all northerners or Democrats, who would be only too happy to let the old Confederate states leave. Ever since Trump was elected, I’ve seen tons of jokes saying “let’s build a wall—along the Mason Dixon Line” and “maybe we can join up with Canada.”

Seriously, who would send their sons and daughters, or put their own lives on the line, for the likes of Donald Trump and his disgusting family, Steven Miller, or the Conways? I mean, right now the president is essentially shrieking on Twitter, dropping an all-caps tirade about whistleblower laws that drips with panic and flop-sweat. Does that inspire confidence in his strong and steady leadership?

I think most people would wave a not-so-fond farewell. And in my fondest imagination, the northeast, the Pacific northwest, California, and even a few northern midwest states respond with “fuck it” and become part of Canada. You can’t have a civil war if the folks you’re ostensibly fighting just wave it off and say “nah, you go do you.”

Y’all can have Ohio though. I don’t need your civil war.

No one should be shocked that a person who evidently believed Barack Obama was not born in Honolulu and was somehow, therefore, ineligible to be president, would also believe other idiotic conspiracy theories that don’t hold up to the barest scrutiny.

President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats.

I thought about this over the weekend when I saw that Ambassador Joseph Wilson had died of organ failure. The loss felt a little personal to me because Wilson was perhaps my most famous fan. He reached out personally in 2006 to thank me for my dogged coverage of the Bush administration’s destruction of his wife Valerie Plame’s career as an undercover CIA operative.

He had been sent to Niger in 2002 by the CIA to check out a conspiracy theory that was being promulgated by warmongers who wanted a pretext to invade Iraq. Supposedly, Saddam Hussein had been surreptitiously purchasing yellowcake uranium for a secret nuclear weapons program despite being under international sanctions and suffering a permanent no-fly zone over half his country. Wilson quickly discovered that this story was highly implausible and he reported back his findings to Langley. Nonetheless, President Bush repeated the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address in what came to be known as the infamous “16 words.”  That prompted Wilson to go public, as he knew very well that the public was being deceived. The Bush administration responded by revealing that his wife worked at the CIA and sought to discredit him by suggesting his trip to impoverished Niger had been little more than a taxpayer-funded luxury vacation.

Rudy Giuliani’s trips to Ukraine (and Paris and Madrid) were both similar and different. Like Wilson, he was working on a conspiracy theory. Unlike Wilson, he wasn’t sent to investigate the theory but to enlist people in promulgating it. Wilson was supposed to figure out if there was a real national security threat for our nation. Giuliani was supposed to bolster a bunch of fabricated claims to help the president damage a political opponent and rehabilitate Russia’s international image.

This would be cynical and unpatriotic in the best of scenarios, but it’s probably worse than that. Trump seems to believe these conspiracy theories. As Jackson Diehl reports in the Washington Post, Giuliani has been selling the president on them for months and months.

Though Trump never had a positive view of Ukraine, the trouble really started with Giuliani, who has a record of working for and with the very Ukrainian actors that U.S. policy has aimed to marginalize: shady business executives and corrupt politicians with ties to Russia, organized crime or both.

Beginning early this year Giuliani began gathering what the Russians call kompromat — dirt — on Trump’s present and potentially future political opponents. His prime sources were a pair of state prosecutors who were universally regarded by reform advocates in and outside Ukraine as corrupt.

This is what led Trump to unilaterally suspend military aid to Ukraine and to make its resumption contingent on getting confirmation of Giuliani’s ridiculous theories.

When Giuliani began spreading his poison to Trump and conservative media, U.S. officials were, as the whistleblower put it “deeply concerned.” At first, some were inclined to dismiss the former New York mayor as a sideshow. But by late May, they realized he had done real damage. When members of the U.S. delegation to Zelensky’s May 20 inauguration reported back to Trump at the White House and expressed enthusiasm about the new president, Trump launched into a tirade about Ukrainian corruption and a supposed Ukraine-based conspiracy to prevent his election. He then refused to schedule a meeting with Zelensky.

Again, this is criminal and impeachable behavior, but it’s probably most disconcerting that the president doesn’t seem to be doing this as some Machiavellian plot, but rather appears to buy into it as reality. Of all the myriad reasons that he should be removed from office, the most convincing is that he’s insane. This was on full display on Sunday as he took to the Twitter machine to unveil his innermost pathologies and insecurities.

So today Trump threatened a whistleblower, accused one or more of his top nat sec aides of being spies, demanded a House Chair be interrogated on suspicion of treason and threatened to foment a civil war if he is removed from office.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 30, 2019

There will probably always be people like Rudy Giuliani who are willing to bend every rule and promote every kind of misinformation in the pursuit of ideological ends and raw power. It’s not as certain that there will always be whistleblowers like Joe Wilson to combat them.

We may not know the identify of the person who came forward to blow the whistle on Trump and Giuliani, but we should celebrate them. And we should take a moment to celebrate Joe Wilson, too, on the occasion of his passing.

Sometime in the future I will probably feel compelled to write more thoroughly about Hunter Biden’s decision to accept a job on the board of directors of a Ukrainian natural gas company, but for now I just want to make a rather obvious observation. If you have the right connections in this world, you can get paid a ton of money for doing almost nothing. Whether in this country or abroad, offering someone a job on a corporate board of directors is often a way that rich people help other rich people. It’s a small insulated world, and you’re lucky if you can be a part of it.

Hunter Biden might have received such a offer as the son of a longtime senator. Other people receive such opportunities because they’re ne’er-do-well son-in-laws who have no more legitimate prospects. But he almost certainly received the offer because he was the son of the sitting American vice-president.

There is something inherently unfair and foul-smelling about such arrangements, but this case smells worse because there is a political aspect to it. The reason he should have declined the offer is not because it was illegal or particularly far out of the ordinary. The reason is precisely what we’re seeing now, which is political fallout for his father.

As a political clan, the Bidens should have avoided this. There are other ways to make money. But the Republicans could not help themselves. They took what was a legitimate appearance problem and turned into a tapestry of lies and misinformation, and enlisted foreign government officials to help them spread their lies.

So, now, there’s really no alternative but to defend Hunter Biden because what he is being accused of doing is a lie. What Joe Biden is being accused of doing is a lie. And those lies now constitute clear and convincing rationales for the removal of the president and the imprisonment of Rudy Giuliani.

Eric Levitz is a great writer, thinker and analyst, and part of me is envious of his piece on the Sanders/Warren divide on the left. But part of me is glad that I didn’t attempt to write anything like it, because I’m no longer willing to indulge left-wing fantasies. Specifically, I’m not willing to meet these folks on their own terms and use their framing and terminology.

Levitz has to expend a tremendous amount of energy to accomplish this and it’s necessary, I guess, because he seems to be writing for an audience that is already immersed in this debate and in this worldview. I have no interest in writing for anyone who’s immersed in something so dunderheaded, so if I want to write about this debate I am going to do it for outsiders that want to know what all the fuss is about.

The most important thing to understand is that we’re talking about a group of people who believe they have the luxury of wanking while the world burns. You’re not going to find very many people who are on the true margins of society who have the slightest interest in what they’re discussing. Levitz makes this point in several ways without ever saying it outright. He does so primarily by explaining that these voices are loud but have few numbers behind them, and they fight like dogs, but over distinctions of little difference and ideas that will not come to fruition during the next presidency.

A simple way to understand is to see one faction as dedicated to ideological goals rather than electoral outcomes. At times, they suffer from being out of time in the sense that they’re having a conversation that has almost no connection to the present. At other times, they freely admit that they’re focused on long-term goals and are willing to accept short-term disasters along the way. Some even see disaster as part of the recipe for getting where they want to go. This faction sees capitalism as the problem that needs to be fixed, and what they want is to achieve a socialist revolution.

The other faction identifies many of the same problems and diagnoses many of the same faults with capitalism, the American left and the Democratic Party. But they still see the main problem as the Republican Party and the system that they empower and that, in turn, empowers them. They feel like they know what to do and just need the power to do it. A socialist revolution is not a prerequisite for this, but some structural reforms probably will be required. The first job, then, is to beat enough Republicans that their resistance can be overcome.

Warren represents the latter faction, and she comes prepared to wage a bureaucratic battle that paves the way for later progress. Sanders represents the former faction, and he at least theoretically can bring an army of ideological fighters into the highest echelons of government where they can speed up the process of revolution.

This is the basic difference between the two groups, and probably the only important one. The distinctions between the health care plans or their soak-the-rich tax proposals are virtually meaningless since they’re more signaling devices than things that will be enacted into law at any point in the first half of the next decade.

Perhaps it is because their actual differences are exaggerated and relatively unimportant at the moment that the two factions fight like cats and dogs over them in what amounts to an unseemly masturbatory display. They’d like you to believe that they’re vastly different candidates but they’re constantly providing a misimpression of how they differ.

Their movements are more distinct than the candidates themselves or the policies they’re proposing. If you strip out all the unrealistic stuff, what you’re left with is two politicians who would be in different universes if inaugurated as president in January 2021.

While both would have a huge dead-on-arrival list of legislative goals, Warren would be prepared to fight on the inside to change the system into something where the left could compete on a more level playing field. She’s have the support of most of the party for this. Sanders would not match her in this. He’d find himself isolated and close to friendless in the White House, dependent on rallying public opinion many standard deviations away from where it presently stands.

At worst, Warren would represent a kind of lost opportunity by being too accommodating to the system. But it’s hard to see how Sanders could have any successes of any kind. And, if he did, they’d be the same kind of successes that Warren would pursue using the agencies of government and the courts to do what the legislature will not.

If you believe the system needs further shocks and that the main goal is to defeat capitalism, then Sanders is probably your candidate. Just know that you’re looking for an inside straight. If you think things need to calm down a bit and we need a methodical reformer to set the conditions for later change, then Warren is probably your candidate.

The biggest mistake is to think either of them is going to come in like FDR, LBJ or even Obama, and sign a bunch of transformative legislation. That’s not possible in the near future, and certainly not the kind of far left legislation they’ve been proposing.

So, let these folks fight among themselves while the rest of the country focuses on what’s actually happening, which is the impeachment of the president of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using (mine) is seen directly
below. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now added some brown paint to the various buttes and darkened the shadowed areas a bit. The rock to the right
received a similar treatment. The tree to the left has been overpainted with some green and blue. The sky has been
revised.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

One thing Pelosi did by opening up impeachment is signal everyone that now is the time to strike. The leaks are coming fast and furious, and conviction in the Senate already looks like a possibility, albeit still one with a low probability. I’ll try to keep up with things and keep you informed of where I think thing are headed, but first I have to coach a soccer game and attend a baseball practice.

If you see something I should read when I get home, please leave a link here.

Democracy Corps surveys are usually pretty interesting, and their latest is no exception. Their basic finding is that Biden and Warren look to be solid contenders against Trump. Sanders looks fairly good but less certain. Each of them has a different way of winning, and Biden and Warren do it largely by doing relatively well with white working class voters, particularly women:

One of the reasons both Biden and Warren are proving to be electable is the surprising result with white working class voters. While Biden has more of a working class base in the Democratic primary, the 2020 election is being shaped by bigger forces. In this combined sample of white working class women (643 respondents), Biden loses by 9 points (50 to 41 percent) and Warren by 10 (51 to 41 percent). Both are gains on 2018 and a sea change from 2016. That means the 13-point shift to the Democrats in the off-year has continued another 4 points now.

They both lose to Trump among white working class men (combined sample of 562) by a much bigger margin — 31 points and 33 points respectively. As daunting as that appears, the trend with men is encouraging as well. Democrats gained 14 points in 2018 and Biden would take those gains 3 points further. Warren holds the 2018 gains, as there is no evidence of working class voters going back to the 2016 Trump margins.

These results confirm my basic intuition from the very beginning of this campaign. Biden rather obviously has some strengths with white working class voters, but I believed that Warren would be able to reach them, too. As for Sanders, I always expect him to get crossover votes from working class folks, although mostly from the pox-on-both-houses variety of voter. Sanders actually does better than Biden among libertarians, for example, while he loses true independents even as Biden and Warren carry them.

The strongest Democratic candidate is the one that can limit the damage in rural and small town areas without suffering and corresponding loss in the suburbs or among moderate swing voters. I suspected that this made Biden and Warren the best options for Democrats from a strict electability point of view, and that is currently supported in the data and for the very reason I suggested.

As I have argued repeatedly, all other things being equal, the Democrats will do better as a party if they have broader geographical support than if they just do a better job of winning a polarized base election. With the former kind of electorate, they will win more state and local races and do better in the U.S. House of Representatives. With the latter electorate, they will have fewer legislative seats nationwide, control fewer legislative bodies, and be more susceptible to winning the popular vote and still losing the presidential election due to the Electoral College.

It looks like Biden and Warren can both achieve the better kind of win, and perhaps Sanders can, too, although that is less certain.

If Biden’s model, he loses more Democrats than Warren due mainly to defections from the far left, especially among supporters of Sanders. But he gets more Republicans than Warren to cross the aisle. For this reason, he still looks like the strongest candidate if we’re only concerned about coattails.

Of course, we need to project forward since the campaign will not remain static and there are concerns about how each of the three frontrunners would hold up both to the rigors of the campaign and the attacks brought by the Republicans. Biden is now at the center of an impeachment inquiry, and that can both help and hurt him, and it will probably have different impacts depending on whether we’re talking about a primary, where people may rally to support him, and a general, where endless innuendo about his son’s time working with a natural gas company in Ukraine may take a toll on his image.

Biden has been showing his age a bit more than Warren and Sanders, so we can question how well he will perform as a candidate over the long haul of a general election campaign. On the other hand, Republicans will have a much easier time going after Warren and Sanders as extremists who are out of step with mainstream political beliefs. They’ll claim that about any Democratic nominee, but it’s not something that will stick to Biden. In fact, Biden does better at attracting Republicans precisely because he’s seen as a mainstream Democrat even by his Republican enemies.

It is beginning to feel like Warren is best positioned. She comes close to matching Biden’s performance geographically and with independents, and she holds the party together better than he does. She seems to have more enthusiasm behind her campaign, too. That’s probably in part because she’s not old news. Biden and Sanders have been through this before, and people kind of know what to expect from them.

My feeling is that Warren is slowly answering the biggest doubt about her, which is whether she can win over the middle and hold down Trump’s geographical advantages. That makes it easier to judge her against Biden strictly on personal ideological preference. I know where I stand on that.

After I learned that there was a whistleblower report pertaining to the president, I naturally wanted to know more. I became especially curious when I realized that it centered around a phone call Trump had in July with the president of Ukraine. When I finally saw a partially redacted transcript of the call, there were many things that caught my attention but only one thing that genuinely surprised me.

President Trump’s words about Marie L. Yovanovitch, his former ambassador to Ukraine, were ominous. In a telephone conversation that has set off a political crisis for Mr. Trump, he told Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, that she was “bad news.”

“She’s going to go through some things,” he added.

Those words–“she’s going to go through some things”– were what I’d expect to hear on the surreptitiously recorded conversations of an old school mob boss. The brash John Gotti might have said he had someone “whacked,” but the more traditional godfathers would just say, “you won’t hear from him again.”

Ms. Yovanovitch had already been recalled from her post in Kiev in May, two months before Trump suggested that she’d soon be having some problems. What more was the president planning to do to her?

Her name had already been dragged through the mud. First she was accused by Pete Sessions, now a former congressman from Texas, of privately saying disparaging things about the president to Ukrainian officials. In truth, Rudy Giuliani was orchestrating a coordinated attack on her. He seems to have enlisted not only Pete Sessions but also lawyer Joe diGenova, Donald Trump Jr. and the president himself. It’s likely that Giuliani was pulling the strings when former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin claimed in an interview with The New York Times that “Ms. Yovanovitch had blocked his team from getting visas to the United States to deliver damaging information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter to the F.B.I.”

Don Jr. called her a “joker.” Giuliani called her a “stooge”and suggested that she was a puppet for George Soros who was sponsoring anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine. Right-wing media outlets picked this up and  they argued that Viktor Shokin was an excellent prosecutor who had been wrongly forced out by Joe Biden to cover up alleged crimes committed by his son Hunter. In truth, Shokin was considered so corrupt in the West that the European Union also wanted to see him replaced. He had not been investigating the natural gas company Hunter Biden worked with for more than a year before he was removed by the Ukrainian parliament. There’s absolutely no truth to the suggestion that Ambassador Yovanovitch even had a motive to deny Shokin and his team visas to visit the United States.

On the July 25 phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump repeated a version of these theories, including the suggestion that Shokin had been an excellent prosecutor, “I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that is very unfair.” Trump is about the only person who believes that Shokin was a good prosecutor. Trump and Zelensky also discussed Ambassador Yovanovitch, agreeing that she was “bad.”

Zelensky had been prepped for this conversation, but again his source was Rudy Giuliani who did a conference call with one of his assistants, Andriy Yermak, prior to his conversation with President Trump.

By July 25, Ms. Yovanovitch had been “going through some things” for a while, but the president said more was coming. It’s been more than two months since he made that promise. I wonder how he’s gone about keeping it?

She’s working at Georgetown University now and refusing all press inquiries. While her recall from Ukraine was perceived as punitive by most people in the State Department, some believe that it was done at least in part for her own safety since she was under attack by the president, Giuliani and Ukrainians they had enlisted in their smear campaign.

She appears to have been collateral damage. She was caught up in a scheme to rehabilitate prosecutor Shokin in order to make it suspicious that Joe Biden wanted him removed. I hope she’s seen the worst of what the president can do to her, but I’m not so sure he’s done making her life miserable.

On Thursday morning, President Trump made an appearance at the Intercontinental Hotel in New York City where he was supposed to show his appreciation to UN ambassador Kelly Craft and her staff for their hard work and dedication during his time holding meetings this week at the United Nations. Instead, per the Los Angeles Times, he launched into an unhinged diatribe.

Speaking at a private event in New York, Trump described reporters as “scum” and raged at the Democrats’ new impeachment proceedings, which were spurred by the whistleblower’s complaint alleging that Trump tried to strong-arm Ukraine’s leader to interfere in the 2020 election…

…“Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call — heard something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw — they’re almost a spy,” Trump said.

“I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” he continued. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Trump was clearly expressing his desire to have some people executed for causing him problems. He then repeated a now familiar refrain that he usually reserves for campaign rallies:

“You know, these animals in the press,” Trump went on. “They’re animals, some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet.”

I’m not sure that a private reception in Manhattan among career government employees was the most effective or sensible setting for these outbursts, but he appears to have had at least one sympathetic ear in the audience.

Someone in the room shouted out “Fake news!” egging the president on.

“They’re scum,” Trump continued. “Many of them are scum, and then you have some good reporters, but not many of them, I’ll be honest with you.”

To be clear, the president of the United States thinks someone should be killed. If not that whistleblower, who the New York Times is reporting to be a highly regarded CIA analyst once detailed to the White House, then the people who talked to the whistleblower should be dead.

Aside from the obvious moral depravity on display here, it’s a further demonstration that the president cannot understand basic facts. According to the Washington Post, his behavior leading up to the July 25 call with Ukrainian president Zelensky call was so concerning to people in the White House sought to prevent the call from happening at all. The reason the whistleblower knew about the conversation is because it set tongues wagging throughout the White House and national security team, as it confirmed their preexisting worst fears.

It wasn’t a closely held secret that Giuliani was acting on behalf of the president with Ukraine, in part because Giuliani advertised it to the world and in part because it was causing problems for the State Department requiring them to try to clarify to Ukrainian officials America’s true position on important matters, including future military aid. The suspension of military aid was itself a topic of widespread confusion and speculation, with responsible officials only informed that the decision came directly from Trump.

A future tip to Trump is not to employ an untrained media hound like Giuliani to carry out clandestine dirty tricks campaigns. It’s delusional to think that news of the call slipped out due to one or two “spies.” A wide group of people responsible for Ukraine policy knew about it because it helped explain things they urgently needed to know, like what to convey to the Ukrainian government about where they stood and when they might expect to get their assistance.

People talked because we can’t run a government or state-to-state relationships based on some ridiculous and private scheming between the president, his friend/lawyer and a corrupt attorney general. There was never any prospect that this would all be kept secret, and the only question was whether Congress would receive the information is a credible and usable form.

The administration tried to prevent that from happening, too, and failed miserably.

If the president wants to blame someone for his present difficulties, he should blame himself for setting up a Keystone Kops version of a spy mission.

In any case, I doubt he’ll take the blame or accept the kind of punishment he thinks it “smart” to dole out to others.