Month: October 2019

In our April/May/June 2019 issue, Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey wrote an excellent history and defense of the U.S. Postal Service. In fact, it’s worth reading purely for its historical interest. It’s fascinating to learn that debates about the proper purpose and mission of the USPS go all the way back to George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton thought the mail should be profitable and help subsidize other government operations. Washington and Madison were more interested in establishing the infrastructure and didn’t much care if it operated at a loss.

We’re still having those debates in Congress. In a general sense, the Democrats take the side of Washington and Madison while the Republicans subscribe to the Hamiltonian view. Whichever way you swing on the issue, there’s no doubt that people send a lot fewer letters these days and the increase of online shopping hasn’t fully made up for it. The USPS is not profitable and it’s not likely to become profitable.

But, as Pascrell argued, the service is still immensely valuable. It has an unrivaled reach into every nook and cranny of the country, and therefore its infrastructure offers unique opportunities to not only the federal government but state and local governments as well.

In many American communities, the post office was historically called the “federal building,” and it served as a one-stop shop for numerous governmental needs. (Tellingly, FDR wanted Social Security to be administered through posts to assure its accessibility.) In smaller towns and cities, for example, the post office was a focal point for immigrant registration, military recruitment, and distributing income tax forms. There is no reason that America’s post offices can’t again provide a variety of important governmental functions.

Pascrell wants to utilize the postal service to enhance people’s experience with government. For example, tax forms could be supplied and IRS adjutants could be stationed in post offices around tax time. In addition to processing passports by appointment, the USPS could provide the service at all times. Meanwhile, state governments could turn the post offices into voting booths in the process of moving to vote-by-mail systems.

But his biggest proposal is to have the USPS set up postal banking. And he has now taken the ideas he discussed on our magazine earlier this year and teamed up with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to introduce a bill.

The Post Office remains one of America’s best success stories. My essay in @monthly explored how we can modernize it so it endures for generations to come — with #postalbanking playing a major part.https://t.co/TjNrabZ32w

— Bill Pascrell, Jr. 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@BillPascrell) October 30, 2019

Here’s how he explained it in our pages:

But perhaps the most promising service that post offices could provide is banking. Today, sixty-eight millionAmericans, more than a quarter of U.S. households, lack access to adequate banking services. Many are shut out by high fees tied to minimum balances, overdrafts, direct deposit penalties, and ATM charges. As a result, they are left to unregulated payday lenders and check cashers that level obscene annual percentage rates. The postal inspector general found that underbanked Americans spend $89 billion each year on financial fees. This closed system shackles families to poverty, further cementing the economic inequality tearing our country apart. 

Postal branches could offer a range of banking services—including savings accounts, deposit services, and even small lending—at a 90 percent discount compared to what predatory lenders provide, according to a report commissioned by the USPS inspector general. This would give many families an average savings of $2,000 a year while putting nearly $9 billion into the post’s coffers. 

Postal banking could even unite liberals and Trump supporters. Rural communities are America’s most bank starved: 90 percent of zip codes lacking a bank or credit union lie in rural areas. Bank branches are also sparse in poorer urban areas, and 46 percent of Latino and 49 percent of African American households are unbanked. The Postal Service is well positioned to help both communities. Some 59 percent of post offices lie in “bank deserts,” or places where there is no more than one branch. Where financial institutions close their doors to these communities, post offices remain open to anyone who walks inside. And this change wouldn’t even need the approval of Congress, requiring only the postmaster general’s consent. Pilot programs could then begin immediately—including in places like 194 Ward Street in my own city of Paterson.

Ultimately, these reforms would expand on the post’s democratic tradition. For centuries, the agency has connected far-flung parts of the country at little cost. Letting it help citizens pay their taxes, obtain passports, vote, and bank would better connect Americans with their federal government. In doing so, these reforms could help mend our citizenry’s chronically low confidence in the federal government. They could also make the agency’s contribution to public life—already enormous—more visible to the people it serves. And that would make it more difficult for anti-government zealots to tear the agency apart.

One way to unite this country is to come up with ideas that can benefit people both urban and rural areas. The postal service has done this from its inception. It makes sense that it could play a role in unifying the country in the future. The Washington Monthly is always looking for ideas that are outside the box and its rewarding when those ideas are accepted and become actual proposals or laws.

Image source: Sports Integrity Initiative

After spending weeks and weeks whining that House Democrats were exploring impeachment “behind closed doors” (as the Constitution allows) and shutting out the public, Republicans are now angry that the Democrats have taken a public vote on what the process will look like as the inquiry begins to turn to public testimony. Lindsey Graham, of course, is the model of dignity and consistency you’d expect from a man who spent his life in the closet before coming out as Donald Trump’s personal gimp.

Voting to legitimize an unfair process does not make it fair.

When it comes to President @realDonaldTrump the rules seemingly always have to be different.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) October 31, 2019

Expect more of this. Soon the same people that were shrieking like ninnies that witnesses weren’t testifying in public will be trying to block those same witnesses from publicly testifying. At every opportunity during the investigation into Mr. Trump and his cabal, the Republicans will turn on every dime to oppose what they once claimed to support and to hide what they once said they wanted in the open. They will be moving the goalposts as fast as they possibly can, but it will be futile. It will be futile, because the public wants Trump gone. It will be futile because Nancy Pelosi is smarter than Kevin McCarthy (and most of the Republicans generally, and certainly smarter than their Leader and his lummoxes) and keeps giving the GOP what they say they want.

Public testimony? Here ya go. A specific process? Sure, why not.

The GOP, on the other hand, is beginning to look unreasonable because they won’t take yes for an answer (a problem for their party dating to the Tea Party takeover). That’s because the things they are demanding are things they don’t actually want. This is not a party that cares about “process” except to the extent that there’s a process at all. Same with hearings: the GOP doesn’t care if impeachment hearings are private or public, they don’t want ANY hearings whatsoever.

And so the party of rock-ribbed conservatives, the party that started down the USSR and “tore down that wall,” the party of “Black Coffee Briefings”, the party of “morning in America” is reduced to throwing itself on the floor and screaming at the top of its lungs like a 5 year old having a tantrum.

I titled this post “Moving the Goalposts.” Maybe I should have titled it “Changing the Diapers,” which incidentally is something I’ve heard Lindsey Graham has a lot of familiarity with.

Greg Sargent makes some good points:

President Trump’s explicitly stated position on the Ukraine scandal is that there was nothing whatsoever wrong with the conduct detailed in the White House summary of his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

What Trump needs right now is for as many Republicans as possible to voice this position as well. He needs them to also state unequivocally that there was nothing whatsoever wrong with that conduct, as opposed to merely attacking Democrats and the process.

Yet two new revelations underscore why this will only grow harder for Republicans: A diplomat will testify to new details about the freeze in military aid to Ukraine, and it’s now clear the “transcript” of Trump’s call is incomplete. Both will worsen the basic dynamic for Trump.

There are some, like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who are acknowledging that what the president did is deeply wrong but still insisting that it doesn’t rise to an impeachable offense. That’s earning Portman some blistering criticism. It doesn’t seem like a great piece of turf on which to stake your tent if you’re looking for safety.

Honestly, though, that is about the best the Republicans can do. Outside of some Freedom Caucus sycophants, GOP lawmakers are simply not going to parrot the line that the call was “perfect” or that the president’s conduct more generally was acceptable.

It would help them help the president if Trump would admit an error in judgment. It may infuriate most of the country, but it’s still a tenable position to argue that with an election so close at hand, it would be best to let the voters decide Trump’s fate.

That’s hard to do if it’s not the official line coming out of the White House. At some point in the near future, I think this may become an unbearable problem for many Republicans who want to either vote against impeachment or acquit him of the charges after a Senate trial.

The call with the Ukrainian president seems unlikely to remain as the main focus of the probe or the charges. We’ll be looking much more at what preceded the call and the actions of Rudy Giuliani and his Ukranian thugs. This really is the biggest scandal in American history, and the phone call is the least of it. I believe the hearings and the trial will bring this out and make it excruciating for anyone to argue that the behavior merits a mere slap on the hand.

People like Senator Portman who have staked out a middle ground will see the ground shift beneath them. He’ll be looking for a safe place, but he won’t find one. If he could argue that the president has acknowledged his error and is remorseful, it would perhaps give him a new piece of turf. But the chances of that happening are almost nil.

I continue to think that Trump’s own character and personality are the reasons he may actually get removed from office.

It’s almost an ironclad rule of American politics that the occupant of the White House’s party will do poorly in the midterm elections that come at the two and six-year points of their presidency. And when there are exceptions, there is usually a very obvious explanation. George W. Bush defied the trend in 2002 because he successfully politicized the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Bill Clinton bucked history in 1998 because he was in the process of being impeached, and the American public didn’t think he should be impeached.

In those two examples, the congressional leadership of the minority party did not fare well. After the 2002 midterms, Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota became the Senate Minority Leader before losing his reelection bid in 2004. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt stepped aside and Nancy Pelosi took over as head of the House Democrats.

In 1998, Trent Lott was still fresh in the job leading the Senate, having replaced Bob Dole only two years prior, and he retained his position. But Newt Gingrich was quickly forced out and announced his retirement. That immediately led to a war of succession.

The early frontrunner to replace Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House was a representative from Louisiana named Bob Livingston. But there was an obvious problem. Gingrich’s unfaithful behaviors had made it awkward to impeach Clinton for lying about his infidelities. When Hustler Magazine owner Larry Flynt obtained evidence that Livingston had also been cheating on his wife, it immediately sunk his chances and led to his resignation from Congress. He made the dramatic announcement just prior to the House’s vote on Clinton’s impeachment, and the Republicans quickly settled on Illinois congressman Dennis Hastert as their leader. Hastert would later go to prison for child molestation. Livingston became a powerful lobbyist representing foreign clients like Egypt and Turkey in Washington, DC.

Livingston has created a nexus between the 1998 impeachment and the one to come in 2019.  He’s in the news now because everyone will soon want to know who was paying him to seek the ouster of American ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as early as mid-2017.

Robert Livingston, the former Republican congressman turned lobbyist, repeatedly told a foreign service officer assigned to the White House that the American ambassador to Ukraine should be fired because of her association with Democrats, the officer plans to tell impeachment investigators on Wednesday.

The officer, Catherine M. Croft, will testify that she “documented” multiple calls from Mr. Livingston about the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, while she was working at the National Security Council from mid-2017 to mid-2018. She plans to say she informed two other officials — Fiona Hill, then the senior director for Europe and Russia at the council, and George P. Kent, a Ukraine expert at the State Department — about them at the time.

“He characterized Ambassador Yovanovitch as an ‘Obama holdover’ and associated with George Soros,” she will say, referring to the billionaire liberal philanthropist, according to a copy of Ms. Croft’s opening statement reviewed by The New York Times. “It was not clear to me at the time — or now — at whose direction or at whose expense Mr. Livingston was seeking the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch.”

The direction and expense to oust Ms. Yovanovitch could very possibly have come directly from the Kremlin. If not directly, perhaps it came in a more roundabout fashion.

Let’s look at a different nexus. This one involves Rudy Giuliani, Bob Livingston and George Soros. This is from a Washington Post article Emily Tamkin published on September 30, 2019:

Last week, when Laura Ingraham of Fox News Channel asked Giuliani why he, and not the FBI and the Justice Department, had been sent to [Ukraine to] investigate alleged corruption, the former New York mayor said that it was because he is Trump’s personal lawyer. This, of course, prompted another question. How does investigating former vice president Joe Biden involve defending Trump? In response, Giuliani claimed that Biden had called for the firing of a prosecutor who was involved in the investigation of “an organization that was collecting false information about Donald Trump, about Paul Manafort, and feeding it to the Democratic National Committee.” If that sounds improbably complex, all you really need to know is the name he shouted out next: “That organization,” he said, “was run by George Soros.”

Giuliani repeated the claim on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “November of 2016, [the Ukrainians] first came to me, and they said, ‘We have shocking evidence that the collusion that they claim happened in Russia, which didn’t happen, happened in Ukraine, and it happened with Hillary Clinton. George Soros was behind it. George Soros’s company was funding it.’”

Needless to say, this is Kremlin disinformation that Giuliani has been spouting. It looks like Robert Livingston began promulgating these lies even earlier than Giuliani. The difference is that Giuliani has ostensibly been working on behalf of the president while Livingston very clearly makes his career serving foreign clients.

It looks like this is a distinction without a difference.

Image: “Vintage Crescent Wrenches And Wooden Pulley,” Lynn Palmer

This is kind of a meta post, so those of you looking for something dealing with the Ongoing Emergency may want to move on. Or maybe this is political, I don’t even know anymore.

Besides my presence at the old Booman Tribune digs, I think most of you longtime readers remember me from my now defunct blogs Brendan Calling From the Underground (circa 2003-2008) and Brendan Calling (I still have the database for the latter somewhere). I regret that what I wrote there has been lost forever. But c’est la vie: neither of those blogs did much to further my career as a writer anyway. A short stint at the Philly Weekly back in 2009 or so, big fuckin’ deal.

A couple of years ago, I got a nice job over at Raw Story, but it ended in layoffs this May. I have been looking for a steady writing or copy-editing position ever since, and have come up dry. It’s been nearly six months. Even with places where I have contacts, with people like Martin writing me glowing letters of recommendation, I have received no response. In the case of one progressive “news” outlet (and by that I mean “bottom-feeding liberal clickbait” who I should name but won’t), I received an unnecessarily harsh, dismissive, and just plain nasty response when I did some follow-up.

In retrospect, that specific nasty reply may have been my tipping point as to whether to continue seriously pursuing work in this field. It takes time (for me at least) to write a good cover letter and properly tweak my résumé, creating a package that’s tailored to the position at hand. Sometimes it can take hours to get the proper balance between groveling and confident self-promotion. Y’all have heard the phrase “who do I have to blow to get a job around here?” Well, if cover letters were blow jobs, I have personally sucked off dozens—perhaps close to one hundred—editors, managers, recruiters, publishers, and blog owners. At least the sex worker gets a few bucks for their time and energy slurping on wangs. Most of the time I don’t get so much as an automated “your application has been received, and if you meet our requirements, we’ll be in touch.”

This says nothing of how futile it feels when you’re submitting your qualifications through some third party site that’s likely based on AI, knowing the work you put into this application will likely never even get in front of a real human being, because you didn’t use the proper keywords.

Also psychologically and emotionally taxing is going back to my well of references—again—to once more ask them to vouch for me, because I’m still looking for a job. Yeah, that last one didn’t come through. Nah, I have no idea why. They never responded. After all that work, getting a reply that was the equivalent of “go fuck yourself, asshole” forced a whole re-evaluation. Why am I doing this? Do I deserve to be spoken to like a schmuck? Haven’t I paid ENOUGH FUCKING DUES that I don’t get treated like a piece of shit by some miserable wretch at some third-rate liberal clickbait site? How many more of these letters am I going to send out? These thoughts were coupled with a few concerns more pressing than properly kissing a managing editor’s ass: I need to pay my child support. I need to pay for my shitty Affordable Care Act Insurance. I need to pay my shitty student loan. I need to put food in the hole in my face.

About a month ago, a guy I know here in Nashville who knew I was looking for work asked me if I had any experience as an A/V tech or stagehand. As it happened, I did—so he gave me his boss’s phone number, and after one single call I had work lined up for the very next day. Within the next six hours, I’d submitted my tax information, I-9 forms, and all the other stuff they needed. I didn’t get interviewed til two days after I started working, and didn’t go through orientation til three weeks later. In the meantime, I’ve had plenty of work, with no negative consequences for declining a particular job. After a few weeks of taking any job available, I got a better handle on my skills, and when I told my boss I was a C3 carpenter (which commands a better rate than a lowly C4 carpenter’s hand) he duly moved me up. No questions asked.

Another friend in the field tells me I’m more than qualified to join the IATSE—I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but it’s on the agenda. Apparently that means a pension at some point, which is more than writing ever got me. In Nashville, after 90 days of work, I get a guaranteed hourly wage of $22 and change.

One of the things I enjoyed about Raw Story was that I got to write—however superficial the tone—about politics every day. And because eight hours a day was spent watching the sausage getting made, I had the time and steady paycheck to write on my downtime too. Heck, even this summer when I was doing some ghost writing, I had more time for watching TV and reading various opinion and reporting outlets. But it’s been awhile since I’ve had that luxury.

The fact of the matter is I’m not only tired of writing letters that, at best, get no response and at worst get a middle finger—I simply can’t afford to do it anymore. I literally have a choice of sitting around all day writing letters that no one is likely to read, or going out and making a few bucks. So fuck it—now I make a living putting together sets and building lighting trusses. That necessarily means not only less time for regular writing, especially when coupled with the various and sundry responsibilities of daily life, outside interests, etc.

Earlier this week, I worked til well past midnight breaking down after what was the equivalent of a weekend-long political fan fair. At some point in the evening, I was loading drapes behind the scenes as Charlie Kirk—a known liar and fraudster, a dishonest man with fewer ethics than a 19th century freak show carney barker—engaged a smarmy and phony debate with some equally vapid counterpart on “the left.” I marveled at this talentless ass clown, and wondered for a moment how much he was getting paid to spout bullshit he likely does’t even believe to a convention hall full of political fanbois and other assorted fools. Then I went back to pulling couplers and cotter pins, because any field that rewards a piece of shit like that guy while ignoring my own appeals for work is not a field I want to belong to anyway. And if producing its counterpart, progressive media, makes you such a curdled, rotten, shitty person that you’d respond to an employment follow up with a middle finger, well maybe I don’t want to watch my soul curdle, rot, and turn into shit either.

This isn’t some goodbye letter or anything, by the way. Nothing’s changing about my contributions. I write here because I love writing here, and because Martin has always given me not only a home, but the flexibility to write… well, occasional columns like this, which have fuck-all to do with the state of the country. I just felt that I owed y’all an explanation for why I sometimes have a lot to say, and why it’s sometimes radio silence. My current employment situation revolves around trusses, decks, and backdrops. It doesn’t revolve around news. I don’t get to mainline the stuff like I used to, and that’s had an impact on my output.

Peace out. I’m working a few half-shifts this week, and will probably have some shit to say about something. In the meantime, here’s some Merle.

H.L. Mencken’s reputation has suffered in recent years as people have realized that his bigotry extended far beyond his famous contempt for Biblical literalists, but no one has revoked his reputation as a wordsmith. When he arrived in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 to cover the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, he claimed to be pleasantly surprised by the inhabitants:

The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on the horse blocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town of charm and even beauty….

But this didn’t mean he had any respect for their point of view on the teaching of evolution. Remarking on the influence of prosecuting lawyer Williams Jennings Bryan, Mencken showed his true feelings:

He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. Now with his political aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theologic bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan…

In other words, Donald Trump is not the first American politician to hold these folks in his thrall. But, for former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, Trump’s influence is far more problematic. His most recent concern arose after he spent some time perusing the results in the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2019 American Values Survey and discovered some things that trouble him.

Republicans who are WEPs [white evangelical protestants] are the most likely group to say that immigrants are invading America and changing its culture. More than 90 percent of WEPs favor more restrictive immigration policies. They support the policy of family separation at the border more strongly than other religious groups and more strongly than Americans as a whole.

How have we come to the point that American evangelicals are significantly crueler in their attitude toward migrant children than the national norm? The answer is simple enough. Rather than shaping President Trump’s agenda in Christian ways, they have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself.

Here are some more findings that make Gerson uncomfortable:

According to the PRRI poll, nearly two-thirds of WEPs deny that Trump has damaged the dignity of his office. Ponder that a moment. Well over half of this group is willing to deny a blindingly obvious, entirely irrefutable, manifestly clear reality because it is perceived as being critical of their leader. Forty-seven percent of WEPs say that Trump’s behavior makes no difference to their support. Thirty-one percent say there is almost nothing that Trump could do to forfeit their approval. This is preemptive permission for any violation of the moral law or the constitutional order. It is not support; it is obeisance.

An extraordinary 99 percent of WEPs oppose the impeachment and removal of the president — which probably puts me in the smallest political minority I have ever had the honor of occupying.

During the Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan’s political heyday was behind him. He had tried and failed three times to become the president of the United States, and he would ultimately die six days after the conclusion of the case.  But, for Mencken, he was still a powerful and charismatic spokesman who commanded the obeisance of his followers:

This old buzzard, having failed to raise the mob against its rulers, now prepares to raise it against its teachers. He can never be the peasants’ President, but there is still a chance to be the peasants’ Pope. He leads a new crusade, his bald head glistening, his face streaming with sweat, his chest heaving beneath his rumpled alpaca coat. One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities. It is a tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a hero and to end it as a buffoon. But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that lies in his black, malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice. He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no other man among us can shake and inflame them, and he is desperately eager to order the charge.

In Tennessee he is drilling his army. The big battles, he believes, will be fought elsewhere.

It’s not really clear that Bryan and Trump are so different, or at least different in the ways that Gerson would have us believe.

If Trump survives the impeachment process, and somehow wins a second term, many explanations will be offered. It may be that the Democratic Party went too far left, or picked a nominee with a glass jaw, or couldn’t swim against the political tide of a good economy. But there will be one reason behind all of these reasons: because evangelicals lost their taste for character and gave their blessing to corruption. And this grand act of hypocrisy would mark them for a generation.

Mencken left Dayton, Tennessee two days before the conclusion of the trial when a conviction of Scopes no longer seemed to be in any doubt. He issued the following warning:

[Defense attorney Clarence] Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton. But it seems to me that he has nevertheless performed a great public service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way. Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law. There are other States that had better look to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates.

By contrast, Gerson provides a different but still resonant warning:

But we should not underestimate the cultural trauma that many leaders of the religious right have inflicted. It is in the order of things that a younger generation should challenge the views and values of its parents. It is a source of cynicism and social disruption when an older generation betrays civilizing values in full sight of its children. Many evangelical leaders now lie drunk, naked and exposed.

The main difference between Gerson and Mencken’s takes is that Gerson blames the evangelicals for following Trump while Mencken emphasized Bryan’s efforts to lead them. But, in both cases, the evangelicals were easy to lead.

Mencken remarked of Dayton’s citizenry that “this is a strictly Christian community, and such is its notion of fairness, justice and due process of law” and “what Bryan says [against the theory of evolution] doesn’t seem to these congenial Baptists and Methodists to be argument; it seems to be a mere graceful statement to the obvious….”  It’s hard not to hear the echo in Gerson’s words: “American evangelicals are significantly crueler…than the national norm…they have become involved in a political throuple with Trump and Fox News, in which each feeds the grievances and conspiracy thinking of the others. The result has properly been called cultlike. For many followers, Trump has defined an alternative, insular universe of facts and values that only marginally resembles our own.”

Mencken believed that the leading citizens of Dayton hoped that the trial would revitalize their town which had been losing population over the preceding couple of decades; “It is believed that settlers will be attracted to the town as to some refuge from the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrah.” But what is Fox News but this exact kind of refuge?

Nearly a century has passed since the Scopes Trial and most things have changed in dramatic ways. For one, towns like Dayton, Tennessee are less likely to be as idyllic as Mencken described:

It would be hard to imagine a more moral town than Dayton. If it has any bootleggers, no visitor has heard of them. Ten minutes after I arrived a leading citizen offered me a drink made up half of white mule and half of coca cola, but he seems to have been simply indulging himself in a naughty gesture. No fancy woman has been seen in the town since the end of the McKinley administration. There is no gambling. There is no place to dance. The relatively wicked, when they would indulge themselves, go to Robinson’s drug store and debate theology….

Today, these towns are shells of their former selves, with opioid addiction more the norm than debates about theology.  In this limited sense, Gerson may be onto something when he argues that there has been a lowering of standards and moral leadership within the evangelical community. But the grievances and conspiracy thinking remain largely the same. The contempt for “fairness, justice and due process of law” is the same. The desire to be free of “the atheism of the great urban Sodoms and Gomorrah” is unchanged. The alternative, insular universe of facts and values that only marginally resembles our own” is only enhanced and weaponized by conservative media and a Republican Party that feed and rely upon it.

The big difference, of course, is that unlike Donald Trump, William Jennings Bryan never won a presidential election. This is the primary reason that Trump is the bigger threat. Another reason is that Bryan pursued at least some policies that would genuinely help the little guy. Trump never does that.

On the whole, however, once you reject science and the reality-based world, you can be led down any path. One day Trump will be gone and evangelicals will be led in a new direction.

If Saddam Hussein had ever been booed at an Iraqi national soccer team’s event the way Trump was booed on Sunday night at the World Series, he probably would have had his security forces lock the gates and burn all the spectators alive. We can be grateful that in America those kind of orders would not be followed. And, precisely for that reason, people felt free to express their disdain for Trump on national television and even unfurl banners and hold up signs calling for his impeachment.

What I find odd is that there are people who strongly disapprove of Trump and feel like he urgently needs to be frog-marched out of the White House who are nonetheless furrowing their brows and expressing discomfort with the way Trump was serenaded with abuse.

I can’t really decide on what basis someone would conclude that Trump is an inherently better person that Saddam Hussein. He’s constrained in what he can do, but that’s not an inner constraint. The people still have the right to boo him and the freedom to get away with it. Why wouldn’t they take advantage of this?

The idea that people should respect an office that is being defiled holds no water with me. Martin Luther King Jr. said “the ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Silence is an objective moral failing here–even a tragedy.

Donald Trump is one of the worst world leaders we’ve seen, and freed from constraints he would demonstrate this beyond any dispute. The people of Washington, DC know him better and more intimately than most, and they rendered the verdict at the World Series.

He’s a pariah and he should be removed from power immediately. The more people who use their chance to say this, the better.

If you missed the World Series last night—and I did—you missed President Donald Trump getting lustily and gleefully booed by the crowd, who also had a take on a familiar chant.

In his first appearance at a Major League Baseball game since taking office, Mr. Trump was not invited to throw the first pitch when he showed up Sunday night at Game 5 between the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros. Instead, when he was shown on the stadium’s large screen, the crowd booed robustly and began chanting, “Lock him up!” In the upper decks, fans held up a giant “Impeach Trump!” banner.

Here’s footage:

WATCH: President Trump met with loud boos as he is introduced at the World Series in Nationals Park on Sunday night. pic.twitter.com/4RTW8ZqxqP

— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 28, 2019

I hope you’ll click the link, because it is delightful to watch. Almost as delightful as the sullen ten second silence on the other end of the phone in Marsha Blackburn’s D.C. office when I called and asked “Why was the president booed at the baseball game?” Mr. Gloomypants told me “I don’t know,” so I offered some suggestions: perhaps it was Deep State Night at the ball game, or perhaps the stadium was filled with liberals. If you have a Republican congressman or Senator, I DO encourage you to google their office phone and give them a call.

On a more serious note, please call Delaware Democrat Chris Coons and tell him his concerns about people yelling “lock him up” at Trump are overblown and wholly inappropriate for the moment.

“Well, forgive me, I’m enough of a sort of traditionalist about our institutions that even at a time when there is a lot that our president does that I find disturbing, offensive, unconventional, I have a hard time with the idea of a crowd on a globally televised sporting event chanting ‘lock him up’ about our president,” Coons said in an appearance on CNN’s “New Day.”
“I frankly think the office of the president deserves respect, even when the actions of our president don’t,” Coons added.

I respect where Coons is coming from, but he is wrong in this instance, and for a few reasons. As for the boos, I agree that the office of the president should be respected. But this president has so disrespected the office as to make a mockery of it. He has used the office to enrich himself and his family. He has used it to prosecute his personal vendettas. He has used it to vilify his political opponents. Before this is all over, we may well find out he carried out openly corrupt, self-enriching activities in the Oval Office itself, acts so profane they’ll make Bill Clinton’s blow job look like a walk in the park. Perhaps Coons might consider that the people booing last night weren’t booing the presidency, but the cuckoo that has taken the office or himself.

As for the chants of “lock him up,” there is a similar rebuttal to be made to the well-meaning Senator and his sense of civility: it was Mr. Trump who encouraged these chants to begin with. This is the Golden Rule in action: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Perhaps it is disconcerting to see the president catcalled, but he brought it on himself and has done so since day one.

Finally, Coon is utterly wrong on the optics. Since the election, Trump has been able to keep himself afloat with his base by telling them that any negative stories about him and his presidency were “fake news,” made up by the media and its Democratic allies who are jealous and only want to bring him down.

Last night was a REAL “the emperor has no clothes” moment. The sheer hatred that Americans feel for Trump and his abuse of his office was on display for all to see. It was not fake news: it was live on TV. Thousands of people booing and screaming insults at one of the worst presidents in history (and I lived through George W. Bush).

So watch the video. Call your congresspeople and Senators. Tell them how much you loved seeing it, that you agreed with the people yelling at him, that it’s high time someone spoke out and “why haven’t you?”

From the earliest days of the Mueller investigation, there’s been almost a consensus that it would not matter what kind of evidence was turned up against Donald Trump– the Republican-controlled Senate would never vote to convict him in an impeachment trial and thereby remove him from office. This has always seemed like a safe bet and the least risky prediction for any analyst worried about protecting their reputation for foresight.

I have always argued, however, that there are circumstance under which Trump could be convicted by the Senate, although they would have to be extreme. As of this moment, we are not yet there. But, based on the reporting of Robert Costa and Philip Rucker in the Washington Post, we may not be too far off.

Privately, one Republican senator characterized their situation as “a horror show.” Costa and Rucker described the Senate Republicans as “lost and adrift” and “frustrated by the absence of a credible case to defend [Trump’s] conduct and anxious about the historic reckoning that likely awaits them.”

They report that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is still leading the way, most interested in protecting their majority in next year’s elections. Presently, that means sticking with the president:

“They’ve decided that they’re going to take it all grudgingly — and privately, perhaps, in disgust — but they’re not going to give up the farm,” said Al Cardenas, former chairman of the American Conservative Union. But, he added, “It’s been piling on, piling on, piling on, and I see defense fatigue on behalf of the Republicans in the Congress.”

If this is correct, support for Trump is based on a tenuous calculus that the GOP’s hold on the Senate is better served by doing what the base seems to want, which is to fight back against the Democrats’ charges even if they privately agree with them.  This isn’t about any principles other than self-preservation and power, which means that the support could evaporate overnight if the calculus changes.

In hushed conversations over the past week, GOP senators lamented that the fast-expanding probe is fraying their party, which remains completely in Trump’s grip. They voiced exasperation at the expectation that they defend the president against the troublesome picture that has been painted, with neither convincing arguments from the White House nor confidence that something worse won’t soon be discovered.

People are generally not exasperated about the expectations placed on them if they feel like they’re being asked to do something sensible or productive. They don’t feel that way if they have confidence that what they’re being told to do is actually in their own best interest. It’s true that people often have to do thing in their work that they morally question, and they do them to protect their job, but they don’t like it. If the moral conflict becomes too much to bear, people will begin looking for a new employer.

My impression is that Senate Republicans have an impossibly high tolerance for this kind of moral conflict, but they are still human beings and are ultimately driven by the same kinds of considerations that govern the behavior of ordinary citizens.

Trump and his allies have strained to focus the debate on the process, but Republican officials have struggled to answer for the substance of the startling statements made by the growing list of credible witnesses from the national security and diplomatic realms.

“There’s frustration. It feels to everyone like they’re just digging a hole and making it worse. It just never ends. . . . It’s a total [expletive] show,” said one Republican strategist who has been advising a number of top senators..

This is a pretty unstable situation, and there is still plenty of time for things to get knocked off the axis.

For one thing, the Republicans have so far been complaining that the House investigation is taking place behind closed doors, but this has been hugely beneficial to them. It has not only given them a talking point to rally around, but it has kept them from having to respond to powerful televised testimony. That will change sometime in mid-November, and when it does their concern about the “total [expletive] show” will grow in leaps and bounds.

Between now and then, however, more damaging information will be collected by House investigators. There could be more indictments coming out of the investigation of Rudy Giuliani and his Ukrainian gangster friends. The set of facts we have now is probably tame compared to what will ultimately be presented to the people and the Senate.

It’s also unlikely that Trump’s behavior will improve or grow easier to defend. It’s doubtful that his foreign policy will become more palatable to the Caucus. The resentment and unease that Republican senators presently feel will surely increase. And the calculus of self-interest could change as a result.

They not only face the prospect of acquitting the president of what they consider clear crimes, but also of having to follow that up by holding a Republican National Convention where he will be renominated as their standard bearer. It’s almost as hard for me to envision the Senate Republicans going along with that as it is for me to picture them removing Trump from office.

I don’t see how that really fits with their theory of self-preservation. Until now, Republicans who have broken with the president have tended to either announce their retirement or change their party registration to independent. But that’s part of the problem. It’s not safe to be a lone antelope on the prairie. It’s much safer to move as a herd. And if the whole herd is threatened by the impeachment process, they need to consider that many the safest course is moving collectively to convict. Surely this is better than having a convention where they’re all expected to extol the virtues of Trump and argue for another four years.

I think the truth of the matter is that the Senate Republicans are truly undecided about how to best preserve their majority. And that is why they aren’t more forceful in defending Trump.

“The picture coming out of it based on the reporting we’ve seen I would say is not a good one, but I would say also, until we have a process that allows for everybody to see this in full transparency, it’s pretty hard to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions,” Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), another member of leadership, said, “To some extent, we need to be thoughtful about waiting for the House and whatever conclusions they reach. For us to express concerns about process is totally appropriate. But reaching conclusions based on anybody’s select information at this point probably isn’t a helpful place for us to be.”

I think they’re already convinced that Trump should be removed from office, but they’re not yet ready to take that step. Yet, they’re also unprepared to rule it out.

“What’s causing the most pause is, what else is out there? What is around the corner?” said a second Republican strategist in regular contact with congressional leaders. “If they say something in defense of the president or against the impeachment inquiry now, will they be pouring cement around their ankles?”

Maybe the most important factor is that they simply dislike the president and want to be free of his influence. In the end, this could be what tips the balance and leads them to surprise all the pundits.

Naturally, you can look at the following survey results and ask yourself, “what the hell is wrong with the South?” But the numbers still are quite bad for the president.

The South is continuing to stick with President Donald Trump, though 47 percent disapprove of how he’s handling his job, according to results from a new NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll.

That’s a slight uptick from the 45 percent who disapproved of the president in the July poll. The new poll found that 52 percent approve of the president’s work.

But support for impeachment in the region does not mirror that disapproval number. Only 44 percent said Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 54 percent opposed it.

NBC News|SurveyMonkey polled voters and residents in 11 states across the South…

It’s absurd that a majority of any population of any species in any region of the solar system would give Trump good marks for his job performance, but the 11 states of the South are his best region on this planet or any other. That he’s barely above water there tells you that the man is about as popular as a case of chiggers.

As for impeachment not mirroring his approval numbers, that’s an absurd observation. Why would anyone expect disapproval levels to perfectly match sentiment for removal from office? The truth is, the numbers are shockingly similar. In the South, 47 percent of the people think Trump is doing a crap job and 44 percent things he should be sent packing as a result.

Those are terrible results. What this means is that more than 4 out of 10 people you encounter in the Piggly Wiggly think Trump is so awful that he should be frog-marched out of the White House. I can’t see how that is good news for the sadist-in-chief.