Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Also, too.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

The Math Demands It!

Nevertheless, she persisted

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Verified, but limited!

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Word salad with all caps

I personally stopped the public option…

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Wetsuit optional.

This is how realignments happen…

Shocking, but not surprising.

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Sunday Pharisees Open Thread: The New Failson Falkirk Center

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Jerry Jr. (last seen defending himself against charges of real estate fraud, self-dealing, misappropriation of funds from the university he inherited, and nightclubbing in Miami Beach) has gotten together with Charlie Kirk (founder of TP-USA, last seen bulk-buying failson Trump Jr’s ‘best seller’) have a new grift, per the Washington Examiner:

Growing concerns in conservative circles that liberals are trying to convert young Christians into socialists by distorting the Bible and U.S. Constitution have prompted Virginia’s Liberty University to form a new center to push back on the media, academics, and Democratic politicians.

The new think tank, announced Saturday in Lynchburg and previewed to Secrets, was co-founded by two key leaders in the Christian youth movement, Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr. and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

The Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty, a combination of their names, will “play offense” against efforts by liberals to water down Judeo-Christian values in the Bible and Constitution in their bid to build support for big government, said Kirk.

“The fastest-growing religion in America is atheism and secularism and with that is the rise of leftism and statism and, as people veer away from the church and veer away from the Judeo Christian values that built our country, people are more likely to embrace statism,” he said in an interview…

It will operate under a 501(c)(3) charter and is owned by Liberty.

The plan to go on offense is similar to how President Trump operates, and it’s no coincidence that both Falwell and Kirk are leading defenders of the president.

Kirk, who stressed that it was an “honor” to work with Falwell in the bid to “organize an army of believers in faith and liberty,” said he expects to be attacked as he and Liberty’s president have for their support for Trump…

“If you want to be loved today as a political conservative, go against the president. You’ll get the best press you could ever possibly imagine. But if you want to stand for what’s right, if you want to stand for truth, defend our country, then you have to stand behind this president,” said Kirk, who has been accompanying Donald Trump Jr. during his book tour to colleges and universities to promote Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

All the failsons gotta hang together, it’s both natural affinity and a defense against their (many, legitimate) enemies.

That Jesus dude notoriously condemned religious profiteering, promoted multiculturalism and sharing material goods across the community, and gave away free food and healthcare. (Also, He preferred hanging with his group of fellow believers to getting an honest job, and when one of the overworked women of the movement asked for a little help in the kitchen, slanged her off for not properly valuing the worth of intellectual labor.) So: Signs point to YES!

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Sunday Show Review

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I’m driving cross country, and Sirius XM plays the audio from CNN, MSNBC and Fox, so I was able to listen to the Sunday shows. I haven’t watched them for years: as I assume most of you agree, they’re pretty damn stupid as well as wired for Republicans. Today, though, with the Trump White House and the GOP Congressional Leadership ducking the shows, it didn’t sound good for Trump. The only Republican stupid enough to go on Meet the Press, RonJon, spun up his deep state theories to a pretty unsympathetic audience in Chuck Todd. I didn’t catch the whole RonJon interview but the clips I heard were brutal, with Johnson sounding like a crank, and Todd jumping down his throat.

CNN overall, and Jake Tapper in particular, are pretty much in open revolt from the hegemony of bothsides. Tapper ended his show with a discussion of how Republicans turned on McCarthy, and used the examples of Margaret Chase Smith, who was out early against McCarthy, and Republican Majority Leader Bob Taft, who kept his mouth shut because he felt McCarthy was good for his Presidential ambitions. Jake noted that Smith’s obit led with her anti-McCarthy position, and Taft dropped dead before he could clean up his reputation. It was pretty fucking brutal and might possibly have convinced a Republican or two if any of them really did care about their reputations.

Still a lot of stupid questions, especially the “gotcha” one asking Senators whether they would vote for conviction knowing what they know today. Warren’s answer – the only smart one to that dumb question as far as I’m concerned – was a simple “Yes”. Booker and Klobuchar hemmed, hawed and hedged, ultimately wanting to say “yes” but not wanting to sound like they’re pre-judging Trump. Look, the guy has been trumpeting his guilt all over town – holding back when he’s letting fly looks weak.

I also listened to some of Chris Wallace, who’s the perfect example of how desperate people are for a Fox Newser to be somewhat reasonable that they latch on to the tiniest bit of journalistic practice like he’s the next Murrow. Wallace spent a bunch of time on the Schiff nonsense, but I admit I didn’t listen to the whole thing to avoid a traffic accident.

Overall, I guess I’m surprised that the overall tone and tenor of the shows was very negative for Trump, that (by their standards) they focused on the main issues of his criminality without getting sidetracked too far, and that there were very few hacks who would step up to defend Trump.

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The Dim Possibility of Showing Some Restraint

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Man, I hate to give Brooks any attention, but this is about perfect:


In case you haven’t been following along, Brooks did what he usually does when everything is bleak, it’s the middle of the night, he’s all alone and the dummies might be right: he masturbates onto the page, rolls over and goes to bed.

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Slings and Arrows

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So, this has kind of a coordinated feel to it, as tonight’s Democratic debate looms: Yesterday evening, Ed Rendell dropped a WaPo op-ed entitled “I like Elizabeth Warren. Too bad she’s a hypocrite.”

Rendell smarmily drags Warren for shunning high dollar donor events during the primary campaign because she did attend those type of events (including one hosted by Ed! for which he received a nice thank-you note!) when raising money for the senate and then rolled some of that money over into her primary campaign.

It’s a dog’s breakfast of an argument, IMO. Warren took a risk by eschewing big donor events during the primary. Her campaign finance chair quit over it. If she starts doing the swank circuit now, Rendell would have a point, but she hasn’t, so he doesn’t. Rendell even (stupidly) dragged President Obama into the hair-splitting:

Barack Obama, whom I consider one of the greatest presidents in my lifetime, vowed not to take any money from the political action committees of Wall Street firms in his 2008 campaign. At the same time, his campaign took in millions of dollars in contributions from individuals who worked for Wall Street firms.

But the news media basically gave Obama a free ride and didn’t point out the blatant hypocrisy of trying to win credit for shunning contributions from Wall Street firms while taking tons of money from people who work for those same Wall Street firms. Politics can make people do peculiar things.

Yeah, “politics can make people do peculiar things,” Ed, such as making you construct wholly specious arguments against better people to cover for the fact that you yourself are an old-timey bagman.

Rendell is using the same dumb argument many brainless ninnies deployed against Beto O’Rourke — implying that Beto was in the pocket of Big Oil because many of the individual folks who donated to his campaign worked for oil companies. Duh — he’s from Texas! Not too many lobstermen work in Texas.

Putting Rendell aside (with great force, please and thank you), there’s this long and prolifically sourced Politico piece that came out today that is delightfully entitled: “Why Are You Pissing In Our Face?’: Inside Warren’s War With the Obama Team.” It’s an utterly fascinating article in which many unnamed Obama administration Treasury staffers — and Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel — say Warren doesn’t play well with others. An excerpt:

The acrimonious differences between Warren and her allies, and members of the Obama team, led in part to her decision, with prodding from Obama himself, to leave the administration to run for the Senate rather than continue pursuing the leadership of the consumer-protection bureau. But they never fully abated, and now represent dueling approaches to Democratic economic policy-making, presenting the possibility that the next Democratic president will have ascended to the height of Democratic Party politics in part by bashing the previous one.

Though I recommend the Politico piece (unlike Rendell’s screed), I think that last sentence overdramatizes the schism in true Politico “let’s you and him fight” fashion. As the writer acknowledges, Warren on the trail has been complimentary of President Obama. Why wouldn’t she be? They agree on most things.

The dramatic confrontations are with people like Summers, Geithner and Emanuel. Some Democrats (your humble correspondent, for example) read those names and credited Warren for choosing her enemies wisely. It’s almost as good an unintentional Warren 2020 campaign contribution as Cramer’s “she must be stopped!” rant on CNBC the other day.

Still, the timing of all this is interesting. First lumbering griftosaurus Rendell’s hatchet job, then the moneymen have their say in Politico. If Arne Duncan drops an op-ed today, I’m going to start to get suspicious!

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Industrial clusters and thick labor markets

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I’m waiting for a huge piece of code to rerun and I should not be working on a cognitively intensive revise and resubmit on a Friday afternoon, so I want to go back to what I originally went to grad school for — urban economics and economic development — for a minute to respond to a seemingly populist and really dumb proposal to strip the federal government of expertise proposed by Andrew Yang.

Let’s think about Washington DC’s primary export industry as government and more specifically federal government leadership and top level analysis and management. The federal government is an industrial cluster in DC much like venture capital fueled technology firms are an industrial cluster in San Francisco-San Jose region, bio-tech is a cluster in Greater Boston and steel was a cluster in Pittsburgh. Clusters are interesting in that they are often positive feedback loops until they run into hard constraints or a massive external shock.

There is a huge literature on the positive feedback loops on economically successful clusters. One of the major drivers is that a cluster creates a rich and thick labor market. This means that at any given point, there are lots of good jobs available to anyone who is qualified to work in the cluster. People aren’t locked into a “good enough” job because that is the only job available that utilizes any specific human capital/education/tacit knowledge available to them, but that people can readily shift between positions to maximize their personal gain. In Washington DC, if someone is a research economist, there are a hundred opportunities within seven Metro stops of their current place of employment. If someone is a research economist in Sault Ste. Marie, there may be one or two within an hour of their current place of employment. The same applies for geneticists who work in Boston vs. geneticists who work in Boise.

Employment concentration creates specialization and optimization. It allows for work to be more productive as the cluster grows and the labor market becomes even thicker and deeper. This is all pretty standard.

There is another labor market point to make; large urban areas have lots of jobs that are not in the primary export industry. This could matter for me at some point in the future as I could easily see myself spending a couple of years working for either the federal government in the DC-Baltimore region or working for an entity that directly services the federal management and analysis industrial cluster. My wife has a skill set that could translate into this industrial sector but her current experience is in a general professional environment. If my options for moving to DC for federal work or Boone, North Carolina, my wife will far more readily find a good enough job in DC.

Dispersing the vast majority of the DC/Baltimore/NOVA government management and analysis cluster that has been built up over four generations is a great way to make the federal government less efficient and less attractive to top tier talent especially if the dispersion would be going to smaller urban clusters with far shallower and thinner labor markets.

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Late Night Open Thread: “Mostly Harmless”

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Turns out Human Ham Loaf Erick Erickson is still making bank off the beanfests TBoggs once mocked as Tragic: the Gathering. Not drawing a whole lot of mainstream-media attention, which is probably as Erickson prefers.

And yet, Recrudescence: the Homecoming was only the second most pathetic political convo this weekend. Presenting: RoseBros 4Evahcon:

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This Shouldn’t Be So Hard

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Our Maggie Haberman is not the only reporter at the Grey Lady to use the framing of facts to create crap journalism. Kevin Carey writes on higher education from time to time at The New York Times, and in his latest he describes a new move to show which choices of majors are the most lucrative in order to deter students taking on debt for frivolities like…wait for it…social work.

Here is the lede, the nut graf and the first sentences of the body of the piece:

The Department of Education on Tuesday released detailed information showing the average amount of debt incurred by graduates of different academic programs at each college in America. This focus on programs, rather than institutions as a whole, is gaining favor among political leaders and could have far-reaching effects.

With anxiety about student debt soaring — the billionaire Robert F. Smith made headlines last weekend with his surprise promise to pay off the debts of Morehouse College’s 2019 graduating class — the program-level information has the potential to alter how colleges are funded, regulated and understood by consumers in the marketplace.

The new, more detailed debt information was created in response to an executive order issued in March by President Trump.

Other lawmakers have called for similar approaches. In February, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Education Committee and a former university president, gave a speech outlining his plans to revise the federal Higher Education Act.

There’s a lot of fig leafs within that second paragraph. “Has the potential” does a lot of work, and “consumers in the marketplace” accepts a whole conception of higher ed., that is, to put it most kindly, in dispute.

But there’s more than merely a boatload of unexamined assumptions within the piece to raise concerns.  Here, Carey clearly lays out what he thinks the story is emerging from the facts (not in dispute) that people are collecting information about income and majors (not in fact a new thing) and are doing so in the context of a phenomenon, college debt, that has economic, social, and political implications.

Carey’s story is that more data will enable policymakers and would be students to tailor decisions about money in the most efficient manner; more information will lead to better approaches to what slices of higher education gets funded and by whom.

Carey does hint that there might be something else going on around the undisputed facts (this information is being gathered and politicians are making choices):

There are still many disagreements and details to resolve. The Trump approach relies on the idea that if students have better information, choices in the higher education market will be enough to ensure quality. But there is little evidence to support this view. Even with program data, students will still be vulnerable to the deceptive marketing and aggressive sales tactics that remain widespread in the for-profit college industry.

The measures matter, too. Mr. Alexander’s plan is to evaluate programs based on loan repayment rates. But it isn’t known whether those rates are a good measure of program quality. The Obama method of comparing debt levels to student earnings, by contrast, was so accurate that many colleges pre-emptively shut down their low-performing programs before the sanctions were even applied. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is now working to repeal those regulations.

Of note: these two paragraphs are numbers 17 and 18 of 20 in this piece.  Now go back up to the opening passage above: the two measures he cites as evidence for this new move to apply data to college major choice are those he here decries as likely to be ineffective, at best: Trump’s executive order, which relies on, inter alia, the market behavior of for-profit colleges, and Senator Alexander’s, which replaces a (Carey-attested) effective Obama policy with one that reeks of bullshit.

Again: I’m not arguing with Carey’s facts. I’m quite sure that if I re-reported this piece, it would check out.  But only children and John Chait (see the GoS link re Haberman above) believe that journalism is merely the accumulation of stacks of facts like pebbles in a cairn.  The order in which a reporter lays out those facts; the qualifiers and modifiers employed; and above all, the explicit choices made about which facts to emphasize (the lede!) and which to bury (paragraph 17) construct a never-neutral account of reality. Every story is shaped thusly, and it can be done well, clumsily, and, often maliciously — whether that malign outcome is intended or not.

And so it is here: it would seem to me that the story is the Trump and GOP allies are continuing to use bad or at best untested criteria to emphasize technical education at the expense of not just of the liberal arts’ ideal of students equipped for civic and moral reasoning — but of anything that bears on social life as well, all those low-paying jobs (social work!) that do not serve the machine.

More, this version of the story fits with another, larger story: the way the Trump administration and the GOP are pursuing a broad, government-and-society-wide attack on institutions and government policies that have a conception of society large than the nuclear family. The use of selectively acquired or deployed data to undermine, say, social work (hey–it’s his example, not mine!) is not a neutral assessment of the economic value of this program or that.

There’s a lot to be argued about the liberal arts, of course, and some academic disciplines and individual departments do indeed go off the rails on occasion — no argument there.  But the point I’m making here is that Carey had a choice about how to construct his story, and he decided to present it as another advance of a data-driven approach to life, and not at least highlight in his opening the gap between the rhetoric (data! economic efficiency!) and the actual measures being offered to address the alleged problem. A better edited newspaper might have caught some of this.

TL:DR Framing matters. And in this case, the choice of frame glosses a set of pre-existing beliefs never clearly stated or interrogated, while burying the actual news of more GOP taking advantage of a crisis (student debt) to achieve other goals (fucking higher ed)(..  It’s bad journalism, in other words, not because it’s wrong or even because it points to stuff I don’t like, but because it makes it harder, not easier, to understand what its facts actually mean on the ground.

Image: Gerbrand van der Eeckhout, Scholar with his Books, before 1674.

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Late Night Cheap Laffs Open Thread: Glib Takes for Shallow People

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Yes, it’s from Politico, but I’m liking this Bill Scher review…

Have you lived through the past three presidents and managed to still believe that Republicans and Democrats share a single corporatist overlord? Do you casually use “neoliberal” as an insult, even though nobody has spotted a neoliberal in the wild since Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign? Do you enjoy history lectures, but only when they are delivered by sarcastic, self-righteous people who conveniently omit anything that conflicts with their ideological worldview? Well then do I have the book for you!

The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason lives up to its ironic title. The freshly published polemic is co-authored by the hosts—Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, Brendan James, Will Menaker and Virgil Texas—of the socialist, satirical podcast Chapo Trap House. The podcast rakes in six figures a month from more than 20,000 Patreon subscribers. It built its following on withering takedowns of insufficiently leftist liberals who serve up “thin, flavorless gruel” in the dying news media.

The book, which aims to expand the reach of “the Chapo Way,” begins with a self-consciously over-the-top sales pitch. By imbibing the authors’ words, “you’ll become an initiate in the Chapo Mindset and take control of the neurons that govern your weak, fragile emotions.” Apparently, we should take our “Ironic Left” cult leaders seriously, but not always literally.

Yet by the end of the book, it’s hard to escape the nagging feeling that Chapo—the podcast and the book—is, at bottom, an actual, unironic infomercial scheme. They make bank by selling you a candy-coated version of socialism, one that may offend real socialists even more than liberal gruel-peddlers like myself…

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The Opposition To The Iran Deal Is Intellectually and Morally Bankrupt

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Reuel Marc Gerecht has an article titled “The Iran Deal Is Strategically and Morally Absurd” at the Atlantic website. It is a good example of the repetitive and tendentious tripe that the opponents consistently offer up.

I am not fond of the bloggy format of dissecting a piece of writing sentence by sentence by sentence, although Gerecht’s piece could easily provoke such a response. Each sentence presents a misrepresenation or other ugliness that it seems wrong to allow to pass. But I’d like to make my response more succinct.

Since the title begins with “The Iran Deal,” one might expect that that would be the subject of the article. But few words are expended on the substance of the deal compared to, for example vituperation against Barack Obama. The personalization of Gerecht’s argument is typical of criticism by opponents on Twitter and elsewhere.

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Blog Chewtoy Long Read: “Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller?”

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What committed activist could resist the lure of a long-form profile in a glossy NYC-based magazine, nestled between full-page ads for Rolex watches and Broadway hits? Unfortunately, despite Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s best beat-sweetening efforts, Greenwald’s logorrheic arrogance and simmering resentment of all the mundanes who fail to appreciate his brilliance make him sound less like Andrew Sullivan and more like Ted Cruz:

It’s 10:45 p.m. Rio de Janeiro time. Glenn Greenwald and I are finishing dinner at a deserted bistro in Ipanema. The restaurant, which serves its sweating beer bottles in metal buckets and goes heavy on the protein, is almost aggressively unremarkable (English menus on the table, a bossa-nova version of “Hey Jude” on the stereo). Greenwald avoids both meat and alcohol but seems to enjoy dining here. “I really believe that if I still lived in New York, the vast majority of my friends would be New York and Washington media people and I would kind of be implicitly co-opted.” He eats a panko-crusted shrimp. “It just gives me this huge buffer. You’ve seen how I live, right? When I leave my computer, that world disappears.”

Greenwald, now 50, has seemed to live in his own bubble in Rio for years, since well before he published Edward Snowden’s leaks and broke the domestic-spying story in 2013 — landing himself a Pulitzer Prize, a book deal, and, in time, the backing of a billionaire (that’s Pierre Omidyar) to start a muckraking, shit-stirring media empire (that’s First Look Media, home to the Intercept, though its ambitions have been downgraded over time). But he seems even more on his own since the election, just as the agitated left has regained the momentum it lost in the Obama years.

The reason is Russia. For the better part of two years, Greenwald has resisted the nagging bipartisan suspicion that Trumpworld is in one way or another compromised by a meddling foreign power. If there’s a conspiracy, he suspects, it’s one against the president; where others see collusion, he sees “McCarthyism.” Greenwald is predisposed to righteous posturing and contrarian eye-poking — and reflexively more skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community than of those it tells us to see as “enemies.”…

Thanks to this never-ending hot take, Greenwald has been excommunicated from the liberal salons that celebrated him in the Snowden era; anybody who questions the Russia consensus, he says, “becomes a blasphemer. Becomes a heretic. I think that’s what they see me as.” Greenwald is no longer invited on MSNBC, and he’s portrayed in the Twitter fever swamp as a leading villain of the self-styled Resistance. “I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow,” he says. “And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.” His view of the liberal online media is equally charitable. “Think about one interesting, creative, like, intellectually novel thing that [Vox’s] Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein have said in like ten years,” he says. “In general, they’re just churning out Democratic Party agitprop every single day of the most superficial type.” (Reached for comment, none of these people would respond to Greenwald.)

All this has led to one of the less-anticipated developments of the Donald Trump presidency: Glenn Greenwald, Fox News darling. For his sins, Greenwald has been embraced by opportunistic #MAGA partisans seeking to discredit the Trump-Russia story. When alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich sat for a 60 Minutes interview last year, he praised only one journalist: Greenwald. “My opinion of Glenn ten or 15 years ago was entirely negative,” says Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who now heralds him as one of the “clearest thinkers” in media.

This, by the way, is the reason we’re eating dinner so late on a Tuesday: Greenwald has to be at a TV studio in a few minutes to be interviewed by Carlson. We leave the restaurant and head across the street to the garage where he parked his Mitsubishi Outlander. Unexpectedly, the gate to the entrance has been shut and the attendant is missing. Mild panic sets in. Greenwald begins rattling the gate. Even if we catch a cab to the studio, his TV clothes are in the car, and he is currently wearing shorts and an old polo shirt. “How,” he frets, “can I go on Fox News dressed like this?”…

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(Another Wolff) Open Thread: King Leer in Winter

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.

And he’s surrounded by the loveliest people. This tidbit has gotta sting…

BIG ambitions, our Princess Ivanka —

I wouldn’t worry too much about that succession, just yet, Javanka…

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In Which The New York Times Epic Search For An Intellectually Rigorous Conservative Goes, Again, Unrequited

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So, Bret Stephens has another column explaining why he remains a never-Trumper.  It is, I guess, churlish to dump on someone who has consistently weighed in on the right side of that particular question.  But, frankly, that’s a low bar. The fact that so many of his co-conservative-cultists have failed to surmount it is their shame, and while I’m surely not criticizing Stephens for his stance, I’m not sure how many cookies he’s earned just yet.

And so, I’m unwilling to let this pass unscorned:

Tax cuts. Deregulation. More for the military; less for the United Nations. The Islamic State crushed in its heartland. Assad hit with cruise missiles. Troops to Afghanistan. Arms for Ukraine. A tougher approach to North Korea. Jerusalem recognized as Israel’s capital. The Iran deal decertified. Title IX kangaroo courts on campus condemned. Yes to Keystone. No to Paris. Wall Street roaring and consumer confidence high.

And, of course, Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

What, for a conservative, is there to dislike about this policy record as the Trump administration rounds out its first year in office?

That’s the question I keep hearing from old friends on the right who voted with misgiving for Donald Trump last year and now find reasons to like him. I admit it gives me pause. I agree with every one of the policy decisions mentioned above.

So here, I’ll confess.  This whole post is an excuse to publish this:

An amazing resemblance, right?

OK. Let’s go through Stephens’ list:

Tax cuts? You mean tax increases on at least 53% of American households w/in the life of this bill.

Deregulation? Like this? Because, of course, no one needs less oversight than those who can wreck an entire coastline.

More for the military? Because, of course, there is no upper bound to the transfer payments to be made to what Eisenhower knew to be a danger to democracy.

Less for the UN?  Because, of course, unilateralism is our best defense.  I take this catchphrase as a synecdoche for the wholesale abandonment of multilateral ties, from hammering NATO to the blanket disdain of multi-nation trade negotiations to the gutting of the State Department.  This is the fever dream of American exceptionalism, and without turning this whole post into Bronx cheer on this one point, I’ll just say that those who’ve actually had self and others at risk in the world tends to think that a gazillions for defense and none for soft power approach is the way of keyboard kommandos and dangerous buffoons.

ISIS crushed in its heartland? I blame Obama.

Assad hit with cruise missiles? And…? (Also, Yemen.)

Troops to Afghanistan? OK — he did that. And…?  This is a success, how? There’s an end goal of what?

Assad hit with cruise missiles? And…? (Also, Yemen.)<

Arms for Ukraine?  This is perhaps the most interesting of the alleged foreign policy successes.  How much of this was forced by the need to be seen not to be in Putin’s pocket? History may relate.  Perhaps this will end well, confounding the sad record of the region.

A tougher approach to North Korea? Really? I mean, Bret, seriously?  Just today the news broke that Trump’s Russian friends are supplying fuel to the North Korean regime.  NK’s nuke program continues to display itself at regular intervals.  Trump managed to make Kim look rather the more self-controlled leader — a task that takes some doing.  Tell me one aspect in which the Trump approach to North Korea has advanced US interests or enhanced the security of our allies?

I’m waiting…

Jerusalem recognized as Israel’s capital.  Well, NYT colleague Chunky Ross sees the lack of overwhelming Arab anger as proof that this is all going to turn out OK, but, again, tell me one US interest this advances.

I’m still waiting.

The Iran deal decertified? This is good because absent that deal there’s no barrier to the creation of an Iranian bomb? This is just tribal stupidity, of course. And it reflects the state of “conservative” “intellection”: the second step in the chain of reasoning needs never to be expressed.  Decertify Iran and then…what? Profit? As the cartoon has it…

Title IX gutted? Because sexual assault is such a messy problem….(This one is going to look less and less good with each passing day, I reckon, but what do you expect from, as Stephens himself puts it, “

the party of the child-molesting sore loser” and its allies, heirs and assigns.)

Yes to Keystone? Come on, Bret. Not even trying here. This truly is just checking off the in-group markers.

No to Paris? Because what is an incorrigible (literally) climate denialist to say? You’d think after the last year even Stephens might be a bit diffident here, but no, that would be to ignore the key aspect of his branding.  He’s the reasonable conservative who is on the merits dubious about the science of climate change, and if he were to admit he were wrong, how much else in the edifice would fall? (All of it Katie.) (And no, I’m not going to bother here to relitigate climate science.  I refer anyone whose interested back to my column of some time ago, and to, well, pretty much the entire research output of the field.)

Wall Street roaring and confidence high? Ladles and Jellyspoons, I give you not so much September 2007 as roughly 2005-6.  It all looks great until it doesn’t, and while all the circumstances of the Great Recession are not (yet?) present, there are a lot of assumptions I wouldn’t be altogether comfortable with lying behind current financial judgments.  I can tell you that in my book-in-progress about the South Sea Bubble, I’m just about up to June, 1720 — and I can tell you it looked just as good from there, so much so that even Isaac Newton was fooled.  I don’t think Bret Stephens is smarter than my man Izzie.

And Neil Gorsuch? Well, Bret, let me just say this. In a column in which Stephens argues that culture and character are vital to the long-term fate of the United States, let me simply say that the fact that Merrick Garland is not now a Supreme Court justice is exhibit [n] that Trump isn’t the cause of any erosion of American political culture.  He’s the symptom of the damage a deranged party chasing power over principle can do.  That would be the party to which you pledge fealty, the Republicans, who blocked Garland in order to pack the court themselves.

Stephens plays on honest conservative broker on the pages of the Times.  He’s actually something less interesting but more revealing:  a case study to show how knowing the answer makes you unable to understand the questions, or reality.

/rant over.  I know that this is all pointless.  Stephens is part of the guild and all of us dirty hippies will never grasp the eternal sunshine of the spotless discourse therein.  But I guess I still want it on the record, some record, that what passes for argument in Stephens’ neighborhood, isn’t.

Image: Facsimile of a miniature from a ms. in the Bibl. de l’Arsenal

In Which The New York Times Epic Search For An Intellectually Rigorous Conservative Goes, Again, UnrequitedPost + Comments (80)

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: They Come Out At Night

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More like Speechwriter for Evil, Speaker for Evil, and Chaotic Evil, to be honest.

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: They Come Out At NightPost + Comments (144)

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: The Loneliest Monster

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The Media Village Idiots at Politico are trying on a new narrative: Trump is just a uniquely “self-contained” individual, who doesn’t respond to normal primate responses like ‘friendship’ and ’empathy’. He’s not really a monster, he’s just isolated, poor thing!

As someone who also has trouble connecting with humans, I will attest that this is the biggest load of shit since Ringling Brothers disbanded its animal acts. Trump, like any other circus performer, is an entertainer. He’s spent his entire life crafting a “Donald Trump” character, a media-friendly mock-up of everyone’s nightmare Big Boss Business Guy… the guy behind the curtain is just a meatsack that craves familiarity and doesn’t want to be touched.

The tragedy, for the rest of us, is that just as the aging monster’s physical and mental decline became inevitable, a confluence of Republican venality, American stupidity, and Russian cupidity propelled the Donald Trump Show into the White House. Great news for the parasites, not so much for the rest of us:

He’s increasingly isolated in the White House, but for Donald Trump, being alone is not a liability. It’s where he’s most comfortable…

His critics might see his growing isolation as a product of his political inexperience—an aversion to the norms of the legislative process, a penchant for topsy-turvy management. But as unprecedented as this might be in the annals of the West Wing, it’s merely a continuation of a lifelong pattern of behavior for Trump. Take away the Pennsylvania Avenue address, the never-ending list of domestic and international crises, and the couldn’t-be-higher geopolitical stakes—and this looks very much like … Trump throughout his entire existence. Isolated is how he’s always operated…

“One of the loneliest people I’ve ever met,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He lacks the emotional and sort of psychological architecture a person needs to build deep relationships with other people.”

It’s been this way always, because he’s always been foundationally, virulently untrusting. “There’s a wall Donald has that he never lets people penetrate,” a former associate told me. Trump has a dark, dour view of humanity. He considers the world “ruthless,” “brutal” and “cruel.” Through this zero-sum, dog-eat-dog lens, friends aren’t friends—there’s no such thing. “They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you,” he wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big. “… they want your job, they want your house, they want your money, they want your wife …” Why he’s like this is the subject of vigorous discussion among psychology experts. The deep-seated influence of his formidable father? The wound of the alcohol-fueled death of his more mild-mannered older brother? Simple genetics? Trump is not self-reflective—“I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,” he told a biographer several years back—but he can be self-aware. And on this front, he’s been quite clear, and remarkably consistent.

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Late Night Roundup: Statler, Waldorf & Groucho Review Trump’s “Afghanistan” Speech

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“Let’s Get This Over With” edition:

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Late Night Roundup: Statler, Waldorf & Groucho Review Trump’s “Afghanistan” SpeechPost + Comments (26)