Sunday, April 9, 2017

Sunday Reading

What A Week — Charles P. Pierce.

The final dismal act in the perpetually dismal drama through which the late Antonin Scalia was replaced on the Supreme Court by Neil Gorsuch played out in a U.S. Senate in which everybody couldn’t wait for their super-secret afternoon briefing about the big boom-boom in Syria that, in the words of CNN’s eternal sucker, Fareed Zakaria, “made Donald Trump the President of the United States.”

So, with the old Senate rules on such matters having been shitcanned on Thursday afternoon, Gorsuch slid through with 55 votes. For some reason that is both sadly inevitable and completely unfathomable, after all that happened, Democrats Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, and Joe Donnelly all voted in favor of the nominee. And thus does poor, frozen, Alphonse Maddin, who committed the fireable offense of saving his own life, or so determined the latest associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, pass from history as someone who really doesn’t count anymore. He was political grist in a political battle that was foreordained.

“There should be no vacancy on the Supreme Court to fill,” said Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, stating the obvious for the last time in this sorry episode. “President Obama nominated Merrick Garland. Republicans engaged in unprecedented obstructionism that made it possible for this confirmation process to be conducted. It’s always important to remember that the only reason there was a vacancy to fill is the Republicans put in place a process that made it possible to steal this seat from Barack Obama, and they have now successfully delivered it to Donald Trump.”

Simply put, what happened to Merrick Garland has not happened to any other nominee to the Supreme Court, ever. Over the past few weeks, the word “unprecedented” has been thrown around in the debate over Gorsuch in ways that have clouded the meaning of the word. But, yes, presidents have nominated people during their final year in office who were confirmed. Justices have been filibustered for “partisan political reasons.”

(The opposition to Abe Fortas was really about his relatively liberal record on civil rights, not his ethics problems. That’s the reason Richard Russell pulled his support, along with his dissatisfaction with President Lyndon Johnson’s delay at filling a federal judgeship in Russell’s native Georgia, which certainly was political.)

None of those things were “unprecedented” which, if it means anything at all, means that something happens that never happened before. Merrick Garland’s inability to even get a cup of coffee with any Republican senator was truly unprecedented.

And, of course, it worked like a charm. It worked like a charm because there was no way for the strategy to fail. If Hillary Rodham Clinton had been elected, the Republican majority in the Senate would have Garlanded any nominee she put up. (I mean, Garland himself came recommended to President Obama by Orrin Hatch, who then spent the past two years saying what a bad idea his nomination was. This debate really sucked a great amount of pondwater.) But the president* squeaked through, so McConnell could finish the act of stealing the seat quickly.

The only way that McConnell could have been foiled would have been the election of a Democratic Senate majority in either 2014 or 2016. Considering those incoming classes included such stellar additions to the Senate as Deb Fischer of Nebraska and my new pal Joni Ernst from Iowa, McConnell got his way. Once you’ve done away with integrity, J.R. Ewing once cautioned us, the rest is a piece of cake.

Once McConnell committed himself to an unprecedented act of obstruction that actually was unprecedented, and once the great, indolent American electorate gifted him with a continuing, sheeplike Republican majority, it was an easy slide to what happened on Friday. He knew that the likes of John McCain could be relied upon to give him the mournful cover he needed to destroy the rules of the Senate in order to get Gorsuch confirmed. Any Republican who expresses sorrow at what happened to the filibuster in this process is either lying or terrified of a primary. There wasn’t a single defector, either on the vote to change the rules or on the confirmation vote. In fact, the pious murmuring over what “we” had done to the Senate was probably the most gorge-rising element of a fairly nauseating exercise.

So now, there is a full nine-person Supreme Court, and there is a reliably right-wing bloc consisting of Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts. Once again, Anthony Kennedy gets to be a Very Important Person on every important case. This is what everybody said they wanted—a “balanced Court,” a wish that mysteriously seems to materialize only when a Democratic president seeks to nominate someone. I still come back to Alphonse Maddin, the lost plaintiff, and the fellow whose plight prompted the most memorable moment in Gorsuch’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

As Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, says, summing up not only the case of Alphonse Maddin, but of the entire process by which Neil Gorsuch will sit on the Supreme Court until after I’m dead:

When using the Plain Meaning rule would lead to an absurd result. It is absurd to say that this company is within its rights to fire him because he made the choice of possibly dying from freezing to death, or by causing other people to die by driving an unsafe vehicle. That’s absurd. I had a career in identifying absurdity and I know it when I see it.

The plain meaning of “unprecedented” covers what happened to Merrick Garland, who disappears from history as surely as poor Alphonse Maddin. The absurdity exception was rendered null and void in this process long ago.

Don’t Fall For It, Liberals — Joan Walsh on the praise of bombing Syria.

It shouldn’t be surprising, but it is to me nonetheless: Plenty of liberals who’ve long criticized Donald Trump as unfit to be president are praising his strike on Syrian airfields.

On CNN’s New Day Thursday, global analyst Fareed Zakaria declared, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States” last night. To his credit, Zakaria has previously called Trump a “bullshit artist” and said, “He has gotten the presidency by bullshitting.” But Zakaria apparently thinks firing missiles make one presidential. On MSNBC, Nicholas Kristof, an aggressive Trump critic, said he “did the right thing” by bombing Syria. Anchor Brian Williams, whose 11th Hour has regularly been critical of Trump, repeatedly called the missiles “beautiful,” to a noisy backlash on Twitter.

While The New York Times posted several skeptical, even critical stories, it gave us this piece of propaganda: an article initially titled “On Syria attack, Trump’s heart came first,” buying the president’s line that his opposition to anti-Assad military action was reversed by seeing the heartrending photos of children struggling to breathe after a chemical attack.

“Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,” Trump declared. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” (No word how he felt about ugly babies.) The piece also failed to even mention that Trump is keeping refugees from the Syrian war, even children, out of the United States. Victims of chemical weapons are “beautiful babies”; children trying to flee such violence require “extreme vetting” and an indefinite refugee ban. After a public outcry, the Times changed the headline.

Even some Obama administration veterans praised Trump’s action. “President Donald J. Trump was right to strike at the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using a weapon of mass destruction, the nerve agent sarin, against its own people,” Antony Blinken, a deputy secretary of state under Obama, wrote in The New York Times. Blinken went on to say, correctly in theory, that what must come next is “smart diplomacy.” But he knows that Trump has shown himself incapable of doing anything smart, especially diplomacy.

Remember just last week, phantom Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in Turkey: “I think the…longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.” The Kremlin-funded Russia Today described that as “a U-turn from Washington’s long-held policy” that Assad must go. Six days later, Tillerson was telling reporters, There is no doubt in our minds, and the information we have supports, that the Syrian regime under the leadership of Bashar al-Assad are responsible for this attack. It is very important that the Russian government consider carefully their support for Bashar al-Assad,” because “steps are underway” to muster international support for a strike. Russia Today seemed disappointed that the United States believes Assad is behind the gassing of his people, arguing that the source is the international rescue group White Helmets, which RT shockingly calls “al-Qaida affiliated.”

Any liberal who praises these missile strikes has to account for what comes next. Obviously, Trump cares little about diplomacy, leaving Tillerson out of key meetings and slashing the State Department’s budget. On Wednesday night, the White House released a photo of his team receiving a briefing on the Syria attack. At the table were Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross; Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin; Goldman Sachs alum Dina Powell, deputy national-security adviser; along with Jared Kushner; Steve Bannon; and Bannon’s sidekick Steven Miller. Why are the Commerce and Treasury secretaries there? What explains why Tillerson, who was in Palm Beach with the president, was not?

The noisiest outrage against the Syrian attack isn’t coming from the left, but the right—particularly the alt-right. Trump’s noninterventionism and his friendliness to Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin were big selling points to white nationalists. Now that he seems to be challenging both men, his former acolytes are enraged. On Twitter, alt-right white supremacist Richard Spencer called it a “total betrayal”; the white nationalists at VDARE blamed it on the “boomercucks” in the administration. Ann Coulter went apoplectic:

It was disappointing to see Hillary Clinton say Wednesday afternoon that she thought air strikes on Syrian airfields were an appropriate response to the chemical-weapon attack. She was always more hawkish than I wished, and that shows it. But it’s wrong to insist she’d have done the “same thing” as Trump. Clinton’s secretary of state wouldn’t likely have told Assad we were no longer concerned about removing him; if she did fire missiles at Syrian airfields, she would have done so with a clearer notion of what comes next. Trump appears to be clueless.

Senator Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, didn’t quite oppose the Syrian strike, calling Assad a “war criminal” and lamenting his murder of civilians with chemical weapons. But noting that “it’s that it’s easier to get into a war than get out of one,” Sanders demanded that Trump “must explain to the American people exactly what this military escalation in Syria is intended to achieve, and how it fits into the broader goal of a political solution, which is the only way Syria’s devastating civil war ends.”Senator Kirsten Gillibrand sounded closer to Sanders than Clinton on the airstrikes, decrying Trump’s “unilateral military action by the US in a Middle East conflict” as well as “the absence of any long-term plan or strategy to address any consequences from such unilateral action.” Like Sanders, she demanded that Trump seek authorization of military force from Congress. By contrast, her New York colleague Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump’s move “the right thing to do.” Schumer may find that many constituents think it was the wrong thing.There remains the possibility that some of this is theater. It should be said: Some observers, besides RT, say it’s unproven that the chemical weapons attack came from Assad; rebels could be behind it. There’s also the possibility of a kabuki performance from Trump, Putin, and Assad. We already know the United States warned Putin of the coming missiles, and that Putin warned Assad, whose military moved airplanes and other military equipment away from the intended target. Trump, plummeting in the polls, his domestic health-care and tax plans on the rocks, the investigation into Russian election meddling closing in on his team, really needed a boost; maybe they gave it to him. Trump’s sudden about-face on Syria makes it hard to judge.

However, according to Syrian state media, nine civilians, including four children, were killed in the air strikes. That is not kabuki. Trump has said nothing about those “beautiful babies,” nor will he. Liberals have to sober up and stop being besotted by beautiful missiles and presidential cruelty. Trump is the same Trump he was Tuesday, and that should scare all of us.

Mike Pence’s Other Rules — Ethan Kuperberg in The New Yorker.

In 2002, Mike Pence told the Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife. —the Washington Post.

Two women who are not his wife

One woman who is not his wife, and one man who is short

Photographs containing women who are not his wife

Men who have the same name as his wife

Dictionary open to the page containing “wife,” “sex,” or “vagina”

Curvy lampshade

The Temptations’ “Greatest Hits” album

Sofa with more than two pillows

Sofa with one long, buxom pillow

Peanut butter (smooth)

Shag rugs

“Will & Grace” DVDs

Legislation that benefits women other than his wife

Paintings of ripe fruit

Jared Leto

Garlic, a crucifix, direct sunlight, or a vampire hunter other than his wife

Windows with views of hills that, if you squint, look sort of like sideways breasts

Dogs that are not German shepherds

A blank white wall where an image of a woman other than his wife could be projected

Peanut butter (chunky)

An empty tissue box that he could stick his dick in

Poor people

Doonesbury — Evil is as evil does.

One bark on “Sunday Reading

  1. Another to add to the mike pence list of don’ts without my wife present: Bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s Syrup. I saw this on another blog & thought it was funny. It had him sitting at a table with the bottle & he looks very uncomfortable. Oy Vey!!

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