IN SEARCH OF WHAT TRUMP ACTUALLY SAID: A storm of critical paraphrase!

TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2019

Assessing what journalists said: Last week, Rep. Ilhan touched off a firestorm with her remarks about—well, with her remarks about whatever her remarks were about.

We won't be discussing Rep. Omar's remarks this week. We'll be discussing one part of the mainstream press corps's reaction to the ensuing storm.

As part of that ensuing storm, Donald J. Trump began to declaim about the alleged anti-Semitism of Those People, the ones in the Democratic Party, the bad people found Over There.

This involved typical bullsh*t from Trump, and mainstream reaction was swift. Especially on CNN, cable hosts and cable pundits began assailing Donald J. Trump for his own alleged anti-Semitism.

Especially on CNN, hosts and pundits referred to some of Trump's remarks in the wake of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. Trump had betrayed his true colors at that time, these hosts and pundits said. For one example, consider a presentation on Anderson Cooper's CNN show during last Friday's 9 PM hour.

Max Boot, an anti-Trump conservative, declared that Omar had engaged in "textbook anti-Semitism." He then criticized Democrats for "hesitating to call out one of their own."

You can assess that view as you wish. After Boot had had his say, Cooper proceeded to talk about Donald J. Trump:

BOOT (3/8/19, 9 PM hour): Well what Congresswoman Omar said, Anderson, is really, to my mind, textbook anti-Semitism, because she was saying that people who support Israel are pledging loyalty to a foreign country.

[...]

Unfortunately, Democrats are being just as tribalistic as Republicans and they're hesitating to call out one of their own.

COOPER: And in fact, giving President Trump an opportunity to turn the tables and be the voice calling out anti-Semitism, which is obviously—I don't know if "ironic" is even the right word, but obviously stands in stark contrast to what he said after Charlottesville about there being good people "on both sides," talking about neo-Nazis.

BOOT: Exactly, the Democrats are giving Donald Trump, of all people, an opportunity to posture as an enemy of bigotry. Which is ridiculous because, as you were pointing out, the Charlottesville marchers who were saying "Jews will not replace us," those are the people that Donald Trump was praising as "some very fine people."

It couldn't be starker than that! According to Boot, Trump had explicitly said that there were "some very fine people" among the Charlottesville marchers who have been widely seen on videotape chanting, "Jews will not replace us."

Meanwhile, according to Cooper, Trump was explicitly talking about "neo-Nazis" when he made his widely-quoted statement about there being good people "on both sides."

It couldn't be much more explicit than that! Trump had said there were "some very fine people" among the pitiful, crackpot neo-Nazis who staged a pitiful, crackpot march through the campus of UVa, chanting their crackpot slogan.

This march was held on the evening of Friday, August 11. The marchers have been widely seen on videotape chanting their pitiful crackpot slogan. According to Cooper and Boot, Donald J. Trump had then gone out and said there were fine people among them.

It couldn't be much starker than that—but did Donald J. Trump really say that? Did he really say that there were "very fine people" among the people who marched through the UVa campus chanting that idiot slogan?

We'll be trying to answer that question all week. That said, the claim was widely voiced last week, on CNN and PBS though not, it would seem, on MSNBC.

Indeed, Cooper had advanced a version of the claim at the start of last Friday's 8 PM hour, one hour before his session with Boot. On this occasion, Cooper had actually played the videotape of the slogan-chanting marchers, then moved to his stark assessment of what Trump had said:

COOPER (3/8/19, 8 PM hour): There's plenty to criticize about the Democrats' response to one of their own member's comments, and we're going to get into that shortly. But, Keeping Them Honest, it is more than a little rich to see the president criticize anyone for not condemning anti-Semitism when he had such a hard time condemning this:

CHARLOTTESVILLE MARCHERS (videotape): Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Jews will not—

COOPER: White nationalists and neo-Nazis, in public, marching in Charlottesville, chanting that and other Nazi-era slogans, "Jews will not replace us," at a weekend of protests that ended with a white supremacist ramming his car to a crowd of counter-protesters and killing a young woman.

TRUMP (videotape) You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group, excuse me. Excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did.

COOPER: "Very fine people on both sides." Which could mean he needs glasses. That's one possibility. The other is, maybe anti-Semitism doesn't really move the needle for him unless he's attacking political points.

To watch this segment, click here.

Cooper seemed to say, rather directly, that Trump had said that there were "very fine people" among those neo-Nazi anti-Semites. He played the tape of the neo-Nazi march and said Trump had spoken well of some of them.

Did Trump really say that there were fine people among those crackpot marchers? CNN's Erin Burnett had said the same thing the night before, even more explicitly. She too played the videotape of the slogan-chanting marchers:

BURNETT (3/7/19): President Trump slamming House Democrats for not officially condemning Congresswoman Ilhan Omar over her criticism of Israel that has been widely condemned as anti-Semitic...

OK, now, there is a point, but there is also this point. That comment is coming from a person who said there were good people in this group.

CHARLOTTESVILLE MARCHERS (videotape): Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!

BURNETT: So presumably some of those are good people. Joining me now are Alice Stewart, Van Jones, and Max Boot, author of "The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right."

Perhaps that was among the reasons, Max.

BOOT: That was a big one.

BURNETT: Right, I know, Charlottesville. Van, look, (INAUDIBLE) is not always the best way to look at the world. However, we just saw what was said there. The president said there were good people on both sides.

According to Burnett, Trump had explicitly said that there were good people among the blatantly anti-Semitic (and idiotic) marchers.

Variants of this claim were all over CNN by the end of last week. And sure enough! By yesterday afternoon, a variant of the claim was presented to Sarah Huckabee Sanders—presented by a journalist who, as our "journalists" may tend to do, was relying on memory alone:

ACOSTA (3/11/19): The president, after Charlottesville, saying that there are very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville, essentially suggesting that there are very fine people in the Nazis.

SANDERS: That's not at all what the president was stating, not—not then, not at any point. The president has been incredibly clear and consistently and repeatedly condemned hatred, bigotry, racism in all of its forms, whether it's in America or anyone else, and to say otherwise is simply untrue. April?

RYAN: ...That's kind of along what I was asking. Since the president did say that in Charlottesville, "some very fine people on both sides," has he, in your opinion, or has he or us, cause I don't remember it, condemned the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville for their actions against the Jewish Americans there?

To watch the full presser, click here. This exchange comes near the end, at the 29-minute mark.

CNN reporter Jim Acosta said that Trump "essentially suggested," by his remarks, that there are very fine people "in the Nazis." Working from memory rather than transcripts, CNN contributor April Ryan then said much the same thing. She left it to others to check the transcripts to see what Trump had said.

Tomorrow, we'll start by noting what Sanders said in reply to Ryan. And all week long, we'll examine the question of what Donald J. Trump really said.

Before closing for the day, let's get clear on what we won't be doing this week:
:
We won't be judging the adequacy of Donald J. Trump's remarks in the wake of Charlottesville. Believe it or not, we won't be assessing Donald J. Trump at all! (Nor will we be guessing at the possible length of Manafort's upcoming sentence.)

Instead, we'll be assessing the performances of Cooper and Burnett, and of Acosta and Ryan, not to mention Mark Shields' performance on last Friday's NewsHour. In short, we'll be assessing the journalists, as we've done at this site for the past twenty years.

We'll be asking if our journalists have been making accurate statements about what Donald Trump said. As we do, we'll ponder this related anthropological point:

In the end, especially at times which are fraught, how rational are we "rational animals," including those found Over Here?

Tomorrow: As stated by Mark Shields

Rep. Omar on Obama's drone strikes!

MONDAY, MARCH 11, 2019

Sarah Jones makes a strong point: Has Rep. Ilhan Omar been making some actual sense?

We can't offer a view on that. Last Wednesday, Kevin Drum cut Omar some provisional slack regarding the recent comments for which she's drawn a world of hurt.

Then, Rep. Omar piped up again. New York magazine's Sarah Jones offers a brief description:

JONES (3/8/19): Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, you have to admit she’s fearless. In an interview with Politico’s Tim Alberta, the freshman Democratic representative from Minnesota criticized the insufficiencies of Barack Obama’s “hope and change,” pointing to the former president’s “caging of kids” at the border and his “droning of countries around the world” as proof. “We can’t be only upset with Trump,” she said. “His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was. And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

It’s one of the bolder criticisms a Democrat has leveled at Obama, and it’s even more remarkable considering the source...

Does it make sense to describe Obama's "droning of countries around the world" as involving acts of "murder?" That's a question you won't see debated on anti-Trump cable news channels, which now devote virtually all their time to the "true crime" thrill of The Chase.

In truth, you'll see almost nothing discussed on those channels unless it connects to the thrill of The Chase. Public schools? Health care spending? Topics like these don't exist.

Do Rep. Omar's new claims make sense? We don't know, but it's worth considering a possible reason for her pungent remarks.

Jones has been a valuable "progressive"-leaning addition to the American press corps. In this passage, she authors a potent speculation:

JONES: A critical re-examination of Obama’s record is inevitable; in fact, it’s probably overdue. Omar’s latest point, about the darker aspects of his presidency, should be uncontroversial. The congresswoman taped her own interview with Politico, and though the recording she released after the publication of the piece doesn’t substantively change her quotes, it does capture her saying “that what is happening now is very different,” a clear distinction between the Obama and Trump presidencies. Nor did she conflate the Democratic Party, categorically, with the GOP...Instead, she accurately pointed out that Obama authorized drone strikes overseas and detained unaccompanied minors at the border in chain-link cages, and that these policies that did not provoke a proportional amount of outrage from Democrats because of Obama’s personal charisma...

Omar is a Somali-American and a former refugee. The most recent Democratic president’s Middle East and immigration policies are probably of more immediate and personal interest to her than they are to many of her colleagues. Despite professing to be the party more sympathetic to her concerns, the Democratic Party has failed individuals like her in certain specific ways.

Put aside, for now, the question of whether Omar's statements about those drone strikes make sense. Instead, consider the possible reason why she's the one speaking up.

"Omar is a Somali-American and a former refugee," Jones says, stating the obvious. Then comes the important speculation about the possible reason for Omar's remarks concerning the drone strikes:

Rep. Omar is a Somali-American and a former refugee! For these reasons, it may be that she actually cares, in a personal way, about drone-related deaths overseas, in a world where not everyone does.

Truth to tell, our public discourse is characterized by a great deal of tribal posing and a startling lack of real concern about a range of matters. Does anyone actually care about low-income American kids? About the looting of the public through our astonishing health care costs? About the deaths of innocents overseas?

Concerning the third item on that list, it's possible that Omar cares in a way no one else does. Consider a similar matter:

Way back in October 1999, did Mary McGrory care about our ridiculous health care system when she devoted two columns about the initial Gore-Bradley debate to mocking remarks about Candidate Gore's funny clothes?

The debate had focused on health care issues; McGrory focused on Gore's hilarious wardrobe. Did McGrory give a flying fig about the uninsured?

We reported in real time. You've had twenty years to decide.

THE TRUMP AND TRIBE FILE: Digest of reports!

MONDAY, MARCH 11, 2019

With our plans for the rest of the year: Yesterday, Frans de Waal authored an essay in the New York Times Sunday Review.

Most recently, de Waal is the author of the 2016 Times best-seller, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? In the identity line in yesterday's paper, he was identified thusly:

"Dr. de Waal is a primatologist who studies chimps and their relations."

In yesterday's essay, de Waal mused about the emotional experiences of non-human animals, not excluding your pet dog. In line with our recent focus on "the rational animal," we were struck by his closing paragraph:

DE WAAL (3/10/19): For the longest time, science has depicted animals as stimulus-response machines while declaring their inner lives barren. This has helped us sustain our customary “anthropodenial”: the denial that we are animals. We like to see ourselves as special, but whatever the difference between humans and animals may be, it is unlikely to be found in the emotional domain.

We humans "like to see ourselves as special," de Waal puckishly says. This resembles our own pronouncement, in which we've poetically claimed that we humans may perhaps be inclined to "see ourselves from afar."

We humans! At least in the west, we've tended to think that we alone possess a "soul"—even that we alone are conscious. With respect to that latter point, did Descartes really conduct vivisection experiments on live animals while assuring horrified onlookers that his subjects' (apparent) screams of pain were really just an illusion?

Brittanica.com sees to suggest that he did. Other sources seem to say that he probably didn't. But as part of our persistent attempt to "see ourselves as special," we humans, at least in the west, have tended to revel in this self-flattering claim, as translated from Aristotle:

"Man [sic] is the rational animal."

What did Aristotle actually mean by his famous translated claim? We can't tell you that! But the claim, as commonly understood, has served as part of our species' tendency to adopt the stance de Waal calls "anthropodenial."

As commonly understood, the claim says this: We're the "rational" ones over here!

At any rate, we humans! Just how "rational" do we turn out to be, setting aside our capacity for inventing technologies which actually work?

In the course of this year, we've suggested that it might be useful to adopt a skeptical stance with respect to the extent of our species' "rational" impulses and abilities. We've even dared to make this suggestion:

The irrationality isn't all located Over There, in the tents of The Others! You'll also find a lot of sub-rational conduct within our own liberal/progressive tents; at the highest ends of the upper-end press corps; and even among the most celebrated thinkers within our universities.

It's isn't just Rush and Sean, we've suggested. Given the "tribodenialism" known to all our species' tribes, this suggestion is hard to swallow for many folk Over Here.

How rational is "the rational animal?" For ourselves, we've been surprised by how instructive that question has turned out to be.

When we build a framework out of that question, can the duck start to look like a rabbit, perhaps in a bit of a paradigm shift? Again and again, we'd say that the answer is yes.

With that in mind, we plan to explore several topics in the weeks to come, even as we comment in passing on the press corps' attempts to keep us up to date 1) on who may have had consensual sex with whom, on one alleged occasion, back in 2006; 2) on the romantic behavior and marital status of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son; and 3) on the constantly shifting odds that Paul Manafort will take his last breath in prison.

That last topic has become the ghoulish focus of our tribe's favorite "cable news" show. Perhaps we're neither as moral, nor as bright, as we tend to think.

For ourselves, we don't take pleasure in dreaming about the future suffering of others. With that in mind, we'll be exploring such topics as these as the year proceeds:

Those brutal achievement gaps:

We've often claimed that nobody cares about the brutal "achievement gaps" which help define the current state of American public schools. Needless to say, every good liberal knows that this is a ludicrous claim because we so deeply care.

It doesn't look that way to us! In pursuit of this claim, we'll focus on the "Too Small to Fail" project of the much-maligned Clinton Foundation, and on the underlying question of the so-called "30 million word gap."

Is there really such a gap? If so, how can it be addressed? Truth to tell, nobody cares! Based on prevailing evidence, nobody gives a fig about that, or about much of anything else.

Mario Livio's book:

According to the leading authority, Mario Livio is an Israeli-American astrophysicist—and an author of works that popularize science and mathematics. From 1991 through 2015 he was an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope.

Stating the obvious, Livio knows a ton of physics and math. But though he's a ranking astrophysicist, he actually isn't a ranking "philosopher" or a ranking logician. We think this intriguing fact comes through loud and clear in his fascinating book for general readers, Is God A Mathematician? (It's not a religious text.)

How poorly do our leading mathematicians and physicists reason when they wander outside the confines of their specialized fields? In our view, it's important and interesting to note the fact that they tend to reason remarkably poorly. We expect to start exploring Livio's book as early as next week.

What the later Wittgenstein said:

The later Wittgenstein wrote about these remarkable gaps in logic and reasoning. He said these gaps in reasoning are especially prevalent "when doing philosophy."

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein's writing was always quite opaque. He wasn't kidding when he said the following in the preface to Philosophical Investigations:

"I should have liked to have produced a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it."

In our view, that wasn't the inscrutable modesty of a "philosophical" genius. Wittgenstein's book is quite hard to interpret and apply. In line with our study of the way our species' "rational" faculty breaks down at the highest intellectual levels, we'll be showing you one way to apply the later Wittgenstein's work as the year proceeds.

By the way, what thanks did the later Wittgenstein get for providing this valuable service? As we've noted in the past, Professor Horwich claims that "professional philosophers" have largely thrown the later Wittgenstein under the bus because he claimed that the bulk of their work was built upon "mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking."

Could such claims about our leading intellectuals possibly be accurate? Anthropodenialism to the side, we plan to suggest that it could be and frequently is!

But wait—there's even more:

In the course of this exploration, we'll take you to the world of the Harvard philosophy department, circa 1969. Readers have been fascinated by Tara Westover's "Education." We think this other alternative education is worth reviewing too.

These topics should start next week. All this week, starting tomorrow, we're going to be looking at a timely topic: What Trump Actually Said.

Prediction: Your lizard is going to rise in anger at every word we write on this topic. That said, would your lizard have so much power if we humans, and we liberals, were as sharp as we've constantly said?

Last week, we wrote about Trump and Tribe. Granted, those reports were useless, but they went exactly like this:

Tuesday, March 5: Michael Cohen knew what to say! Our tribe's pursuit of Trump.

Wednesday, March 6: Everybody knows what to say! Wallace hears a hoo.

Thursday, March 7: I know you are, but what am I? Tribal cried abound!

Friday, March 8: Mister Trump gains as Dems denounce hate! Tomasky makes war on The Others.

Starting tomorrow, What Trump Really Said. Lizards, start your engines! Prepare for a week of wrecks!

TRUMP AND TRIBE: Mister Trump gains as Dems denounce hate!

FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2019

Tomasky makes war on The Others: Slate's Jim Newell isn't a racist. Beyond that, we're sure he's redeemable.

Tribally, Newell is one of Us. He's one of the official Good Smart Decent People, the kind who reside Over Here.

Newell is nothing at all like Them. We mention these facts for a reason.

We mention these facts because Newell has criticized yesterday's "broad anti-hate resolution," the resolution which gigantically passed in the House.

"On Thursday, House Democratic leaders finally voted on a resolution condemning all forms of hatred—really, just about any iteration they could think of," Newell writes for Slate, perhaps with a slightly mocking air.

Newell calls the resolution a "self-inflicted wound" for Dems. He describes the alleged boondoggle thusly:

NEWELL (3/7/19): By Wednesday, Democrats had agreed to broaden the resolution to include condemnations of anti-Muslim bigotry. That, too, wasn’t good enough for some elements of the caucus. Democrats continued adding categories to the resolution until about an hour before the vote on Thursday. By then, the list of “traditionally persecuted peoples” against whom hate was rejected in their resolution included “African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and others.”

Exactly whom did this expansion of categories please? The left didn’t think any resolution needed to be voted on because they believed Omar’s words had been twisted. Those Democrats who wanted Omar to be reprimanded in the first place couldn’t understand why they weren’t directly and exclusively calling out anti-Semitism. Republicans couldn’t resist gawking.

“I don’t know where to begin,” Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, said on the floor, wondering why they were “debating a resolution we should have learned in kindergarten"...

Is Newell allowed to say that? In Newell's view, this roll call of the nations against whom hate should not be directed constituted a self-inflicted wound. The statement was pleasing to no one.

Also according to Newell, this roll call of the nations created an easy target for Republicans. Is it possible that Newell is basically right?

Last night, we saw a Republican strategist on CNN complaining that his group, the Catholics, hadn't been included among Those Who Shouldn't Be Hated. Could this kind of conduct help re-elect Trump?

Well yes, it quite possibly could.

In the resolution, our tribe engaged in one of its less wise activities—the slicing and dicing of Us the People into endless constituent groups. Once this familiar activity starts, it can be extremely hard to stop. That's especially true when you consider the fact that we "rational animals" just aren't enormously sharp—indeed, that we're enormously inclined to engage in emotional overstatement and sad analytical error.

Traditional praise of ourselves to the side, we humans just aren't super-sharp. No moral principle is so clear we can't quickly find a way to reduce its wisdom to dust.

We humans do that all the time. Consider what happened when Don Lemon decided to discuss the claim that presidential candidate Kamala Harris may not be "black enough."

We thought Harris was quite impressive in her formal campaign debut. Soon, though, the slicing and dicing began, with fiery people within Our Own Tents saying that Harris' ancestry subjects her to tribal suspicion.

On the February 11 CNN Tonight, Lemon decided to tackle the emerging brouhaha head-on. In our view, this resulted in one of the most depressing "cable news" "discussions" we've ever seen—and in the latest example of the ways our tribe might help Trump get re-elected.

Classic shortcomings of "cable news" were on vivid display this night. That included the host's almost total inability to define the point he was trying to make; the instant squabbling which broke out, with Lemon and April Ryan constantly interrupting and over-talking each other; and the sheer foolishness of much which was said in this classic "more heat than light" cable display.

You can watch the whole thing at this Ebony site. Fairly soon, the combatants will be saying this:

LEMON (2/11/19): The people who are saying, "Is she black enough?", that's bull. That's B.S. But to—

RYAN: I know what they're saying—

LEMON: —want a distinction to say, "Is she African-American?" or "Is she black?" or "Is she"—whatever! There is nothing wrong with that. There's a difference between being African-American and being black. Latino people are people of color, but they're not black. They are brown people, OK?

RYAN: She's a woman of color, but she is a black woman.

LEMON: OK, that's fine. I agree with that. I agree with that. But is she African-American? No no no no no no no no no! But is she African-American? That is the difference. There is nothing wrong with that. No one is trying to take anything away from her.

RYAN: Let's go down into her lineage—

LEMON: I think you're falling into a trap with that. All she had to do was say, "I am black, but I'm not African-American." That's it.

Lemon manfully "cablesplained" what Harris should have said, but Ryan continued to battle. The pair kept talking over each other, thrilling the suits in the CNN booth. Eventually, Adam Serwer tried to help:

SERWER: Kamala Harris has—she has actively worked to associate herself with African-American culture, particularly by going to Howard and in other ways. So I think, II think yes, it is not unfair to make the distinction between Jamaican and African-American, but I do think that question, "Is she black enough?" is maybe not the right question for getting the information they we're trying to get.

LEMON: But I think that people lump that, is by saying that there is a distinction—

There is a difference between being Puerto Rican and being Mexican and being Costa Rican—

SERWER: Yes.

LEMON: All of them are from Latin America, and that is all fine, well and good. So what is wrong with asking someone who is of color, black, are they African-American, are they Jamaican, whatever it is? But it is not saying—

RYAN: She is a black woman in America.

LEMON: We are saying that! No one is saying she's not black! We are asking if she is African-American. There is a distinction.

Your lizard may tell you that this overall segment made sense. If so, we'll suggest that your lizard may be too tribal.

As Lemon and Ryan played "Who's on first," endlessly over-talking each other, voters were streaming to Donald J. Trump. You could also say that Lemon and Ryan were simply doing "the rational animal walk."

There is no principle so basic and obvious that we humans can't, and won't, find a way to misapply and overextend it. In the modern context, when this behavior drives The Others away, we liberals say that they're racist.

That's because we floundering humans are strongly inclined to tribally loathe The Others. Consider another example:

During Campaign 2016, Candidate Clinton bungled badly with her remark about the irredeemable people in the basket of deplorables. But so what? Three weeks ago, The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky decided to go there too.

We met Tomasky long ago; we've always liked the cut of his jib. But tribal loathing can devour us all. As Professor Harari explains, it seems to be bred in the bone.

In an astonishing essay, Tomasky undertook to explain who Those People, The Others, the Trump voters, are.

According to Tomasky's unscientific assessment, thirty percent of the public love Trump because "he's their cultural avenger." But what about the other ten percent who are supporting Trump? Sadly, incredibly, as if to guarantee Trump's re-election, Tomasky, a plainly bright and decent person, descended to saying this:

TOMASKY (2/18/19): I’m just guessing here, but I think they come in three flavors, these people. The dumb, the selfish, and the cynical.

First, the dumb. They’re the least interesting. There’s not much to say about them. They’re just… dumb. Nothing in their daily lives has changed much one way or the other, and they don’t remember anything from one week to the next anyway, so the idea that they might for example hold the memory in their heads of the stories about how the guy created a foundation and a “university” that were both total scams, among about a thousand other revolting things, is basically hopeless. They’re hopeless. Trying to get them to connect dots is like trying to teach a dog to use a toilet.

Poor Tomasky! Trying to persuade this gang "is like trying to teach a dog to use a toilet!" Unlike Tomasky himself, they're just so f*cking dumb!

In fairness, Tomasky was "just guessing" this day. That said, we don't think we've ever seen a piece any dumber than his. Still and all, it's bred in the bone. Let's recall what Harari has said:

HARARI: Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

"When Sapiens encountered Neanderthals"—or when self-impressed people within our own tribe encounter the dog/toilet breed!

We'll leave you with a videotape from last evening's Last Word. In the segment in question, Lawrence interviewed Paula Duncan, one of the jurors who convicted Paul Manafort of the various financial crimes for which he has now been sentenced.

Lawrence has interviewed Duncan before—and she bears an interesting distinction. Even though she voted to convict Manafort on all 18 counts, she's a Trump supporter.

She voted for Trump in 2016. Last night, she said she plans to vote for Trump again. Last night, she told Lawrence that she thinks Trump is doing good things, but she said she'd vote to convict him too—for example, if evidence presented at a trial showed that he had broken the law in those payments to settle Stormy Daniels' extortion demands.

(We refer to the sleazy extortion demands which, in the view of our weirdly unhinged tribe, made Daniels a "feminist hero.")

Lawrence always praises Duncan for following the law in the Manafort trial despite her partisan preference. That said, there's one other thing he never does—he never asks Duncan to explain what good things she thinks Trump has done.

We humans comically claim to be "the rational animal." Despite this familiar bit of self-praise, we're very strongly disinclined to speak to The Others. Instead, we're strongly inclined to insult The Others, as Tomasky did in taking his guess about the dog/toilet breed.

Duncan is going to vote for Trump. So will many other people. But in a hundred million years, you'll never see Rachel or Lawrence ask any such voter why.

Rachel Maddow doesn't stoop to speak to The Others, to people like Duncan, whose votes we liberals need. She's took busy dreaming of Manafort's death in prison, persuading people that our tribe is vile, as war-like tribes constantly are.

Meanwhile, Duncan would think that Lemon's session with Ryan was nuts. If you watch Lemon and Ryan argue and interrupt each other over a point which was never explained, you might not necessarily think that Duncan is wrong on that point.

Future Anthropologists Huddled in Caves (TM) have told us that this is how Donald J. Trump may win re-election. Mournfully, they say that this is what we "humans" always were like.

"Eventually there came Mister Trump's War," they've then despondently said. They communicate through nocturnal emissions which the haters compare to mere dreams.

Texas public schools versus the nation!

THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2019

Grade 8 scores from the Naep: Yesterday, we commented on a New York Times report about the Texas public schools.

We thought the Times report was weak, as the paper's reports on public schools almost always are. This morning, we decided to take a look at the most recent Naep scores from the Lone Star State.

The federally-administered National Assessment of Educational Progress (Naep) has long been considered our most reliable domestic testing program. The most recent Naep data are drawn from the 2017 testing.

Here are average scores from Texas in Grade 8 math, compared to average scores from the United States as a whole. Texas kids came out pretty well:

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep
Black students:
Texas: 265.81
United States: 259.60

White students:
Texas: 297.48
United States: 292.16

Hispanic students:
Texas: 273.53
United States: 268.49

Asian-American students:
Texas: 321.52
United States: 309.52

In Grade 8 math, Texas kids tended to outperform their peers nationwide. Based on a standard though very rough rule of thumb, a five-point advantage on the Naep is said to be roughly equal to half an academic year.

In Grade 8 reading, Texas students in the four major groups didn't do quite as well. They tended to score right around the national average, though Asian-American students outperformed their peers nationwide by about half a year.

Tuesday's report in the Times may have given the impression that those lunkheads down in the Lone Star State have been screwing things up again. The Times may have a slight tendency to err in that direction when discussing the Texas public schools, dating back to Gail Collins' strange performance in connection with her 2012 book, As Texas Goes.

You'll note the large "achievement gaps" between the different groups of kids, in Texas and in the nation as a whole. The Times devotes essentially no attention to this punishing matter. Instead, it focuses on the largely imaginary task of "desegregating" the New York City Public Schools.

At any rate, Texas kids have long tended to outperform their peers nationwide, though things may have slid a bit in recent years. There was a time when we would have presented the data on that, but we've finally learned that basic information plays no role, none at all, in our public discourse.

For all Naep data, start here. Warning! Within our journalistic culture, assembling information tends to be viewed as a subversive act.

TRUMP AND TRIBE: I know you are, but what am I?

THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2019

Tribal cries abound: In a single unfortunate moment, Candidate Hillary Clinton offered the most famous example of the phenomenon to which we wish to refer.

In that one unfortunate moment, she stated a view of the 63 million people who would end up voting for Donald J. Trump.

Most significantly, she stated a view of 31.5 million of those people. Aside from her more specific assertions, some or all of those people were "irredeemable," she unwisely said:

CLINTON (9/9/16): You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic–you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks–they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

It wasn't clear if all those people were "irredeemable," or if it was only some. As Clinton continued, she said the other half of Trump's supporters "are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them...Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

This statement drew a lot of attention. It's possible to imagine that Clinton would have ended up in the White House if that statement had never been made.

(As it was, she won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.)

If Clinton had ended up in the White House, we'd currently be enduring a nightmare of crackpot congressional investigations amid a welter of crazy charges and claims, just as we did throughout the Clinton presidency and the Gore campaign.

We'd be inside an insane asylum, as we were during those earlier years. There would have been more push-back this time, but our species' capacity for irrational conduct would have been on full display once again.

Doggone us rational animals! We're strongly inclined to stampede off in thrall to tribal battle cries—in thrall to the compelling group "fictions" Professor Harari describes in his best-selling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

According to Harari, our species' ability to invent and rally behind such "fictions" explains the way our ancestors came to drive all other human species into extinction. We have no idea if that's true, but here's part of the way he describes it:

HARARI (page 17): But if the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other human species didn’t merge with Sapiens, why did they vanish? One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction...Sapiens were more proficient hunters and gatherers—thanks to better technology and superior social skills—so they multiplied and spread. The less resourceful Neanderthals found it increasingly difficult to feed themselves. Their population dwindled and they slowly died out, except perhaps for one or two members who joined their Sapiens neighbors.

Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

Oof. Is that what our species' ancestors did? For ourselves, we have no idea. But we'd have to say that Clinton's sweeping remark tends to fit Harari's template.

Clinton issued a sweeping statement concerning half of The Others. They weren't just racist, she said—though, like Michael Cohen last week, she started her portrait with that.

Half of The Others were also some combination of sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and/or Islamophobic, Clinton also said. "You name it," the candidate said, perhaps in a bit of a species-specific self-portrait.

On this unfortunate occasion, Clinton chose to be "grossly generalistic." "You name it," she cheekily said, to applause and laughter, telling members of her tribe that they could denounce The Others pretty much as they chose.

In Clinton's assessment, The Others weren't simply racist; as many as half of Trump's supporters were simply "irredeemable!" So it may have gone, Harari suggests, when the Neanderthals and the Denisovans were driven into the sea by our ancestors, among whom tolerance may not have been a defining trait.

Our species is strongly inclined to invent and pursue The Other. And it doesn't just happen Over There; it happens within our liberal tents too.

All across the globe, tribal groups within our species tend to invent and demonize The Other. Within our current liberal tribe, we tend to do so under the battle cry of "racism." This comes quite close to being the type of persuasive group "fiction" Harari describes in his book.

That doesn't mean that no one is "racist." It means that we love to issue this bomb, and tend to do so in a remarkably casual manner.

We love to call people racist! The term is applied in scattershot ways, with little need for careful assessment. Consider what happened during Michael Cohen's public hearing last week.

Late in the session, Rep. Rashida Tlaib accused Rep. Mark Meadows of being a racist, or at least of having committed a racist act. Storm and fury ensued, with Tlaib formally saying that she hadn't called Meadows a racist.

Along the way, Meadows accused Tlaib of committing a racist act herself. Increasingly, "I know you are but what am I?" is becoming the way our warring tribes pretend to debate.

That night, Lawrence O'Donnell stepped boldly into the fray. He started by assuring viewers that Tlaib had indeed called Meadows a racist. She had only pretended to walk her charge back for procedural reasons, Lawrence told us.

As he did, he brushed Tlaib's account of her own actions and intentions aside.

After "mansplaining" Tlaib's behavior, Lawrence led us into battle. "If Mark Meadows isn't a racist, no one is," he eventually said, specifically saying that Meadows was even worse than George Wallace.
.
Without any question, everyone can be seen as a racist if we want to have it that way. For one outstanding example, consider Lawrence himself.

As he teased his segment about Tlaib and Meadows, he said this about Tlaib's initial remarks and her subsequent explanation of same:

"I`ll explain why all of that happened, in the sequence that it happened, and what you need to know about the House rules that explains why all that happened. Next!"

So great! Lawrence proceeded to tell us what Tlaib had really done, brushing aside her own account of her own behavior. Why isn't that a racist and sexist act, perhaps a sign of misogyny?

The answer to your question is simple: Because Lawrence is part of our own tribe Over Here! At times like these, the heated accusations are reserved for The Others, for the irredeemable Neanderthals who can be found Over There.

Lawrence brushed Tlaib aside, mansplaining her intention. He also said that no one's a bigger racist than Meadows:

"If Mark Meadows isn't a racist, no one is. Even George Wallace eventually apologized for his racist tactics as governor of Alabama before he died."

So true! We've dealt with Hitler and David Duke, but no one's worse than Meadows! So it goes when "rational animals" expand their tribe's group "fictions."

Is Rep. Meadows a racist? Thanks to people like Lawrence, we're no longer sure we know what that term even means.

Lawrence wants Meadows to apologize for having made two comments, during the 2012 campaign, suggesting that President and Candidate Obama really did hail from Kenya. By the time Lawrence spoke, Meadows had already addressed that issue, but Lawrence forgot to say that.

It's also true that Rep. Cummings—he lives half a mile from our sprawling campus—said that Meadows is "one of my best friends" (Cummings' emphasis). Frankly, it's starting to sound like Cummings is a bit suspect too.

Is Rep. Cummings a racist? When we decide to march to war, eventually everyone is! Everyone but you and your friends, and you're no longer sure about them!

We humans are strongly inclined to behave in these slightly sub-rational ways. We'll ask the question we've asked all week:

Is it possible that this could help Donald Trump win re-election?

Tomorrow: Tomasky follows Clinton's lead; Lemon slices and dices

Journalistic coverage of public schools!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 2019

The Times covers Texas state tests: According to the New York Times, Kristen Hernandez, 9 years old, is a delightful fourth-grader in Mesquite, Texas, a "working-class suburb" of Dallas.

With that in mind, we'll ask you to imagine two states of affairs:

First, imagine that a dozen people were asked to measure Kristen's height or weight. We're talking about a pair of fairly straightforward tasks. Presumably, most of the people would report pretty much the same results.

Now, imagine a different sort of assignment. Suppose we asked a dozen people to assess Kristen's "reading level."

We're now talking about a fairly nebulous concept. In part for that reason, we don't have a single, simple, straightforward way to measure a child's "reading level."

Weight is easy; "reading level" is hard. Surely everyone can understand that. There's nothing confusing about this matter—unless you're reading the New York Times.

Yesterday, the Times ran a 1627-word report about Kristen Hernandez's reading level. Accompanied by four photographs, the lengthy report consumed the entire first page of yesterday's hard-copy "National" section.

In essence, the Times report came down to this:

On one measure of Kristen's reading achievement last spring, she was rated as merely "approaches grade level." On some poorly explained second measure, her reading achievement was rated as being "on grade level."

Let's repeat. One measure said Kristen was on grade level. A second measure said she merely approached grade level.

We can think of no conceivable reason to be surprised or discombobulated by this wholly unremarkable state of affairs. That said, the Times built a lengthy report around the idea that those dueling assessments represent a perplexing problem. Along the way, the Times even managed to be surprised by this:

GOLDSTEIN AND FERNANDEZ (3/5/19): Just a few questions on the test can make a big difference for a student. One of Kristen's schoolmates, Jacob Weempe, missed the cutoff between ''approaches grade level'' and ''meets standards'' by a single question. When his mother, Joanne Nagahiro, a medical assistant, found out his score, she signed him up for private tutoring. It cost $200 per month and, along with Saturday classes at the school, took up much of Jacob's weekend for a time.

If Jacob had answered one more question correctly, he would have been rated as "meets standards." But as it was, he was rated only as "approaches standards."

Almost surely, the fact that he missed the cutoff by one answer is a matter of complete and total insignificance. Apparently, no one told his mother this. Then too, the New York Times seemed to think that this pseudo-conundrum represents a problem with the Texas state tests. Just to be honest, it almost surely doesn't, except to the extent that people fail to understand and explain the inevitable lack of precision in measures of this type.

According to the Times report, "there are four categories of performance" on the Texas state tests. The lowest category is ''did not meet grade level,'' which means the student in question failed the test.

Our view? Yesterday's full-page report "did not meet basic journalistic proficiency level." But so it goes, again and again, when the Times makes one of its periodic attempts to report on the public schools.

Subscribers believe that the New York Times is a very smart newspaper. The paper's branding pushes that shaky idea.

Yesterday's report was basically sad. We're simply trying to tell you the truth about the current state of the culture at its highest journalistic end.

Final question, for extra credit:

Just how sharp are we "rational animals?" We'll let you decide!

TRUMP AND TRIBE: Everybody knows what to say!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 2019

Wallace hears a hoo: When Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee last week, he knew right where he should start.

He started with a portrait of the man for whom he'd served as a "fixer" and goon. And when he described this "Mr. Trump," he started with the current "most preferred claim" of our liberal and anti-Trump tribes:

COHEN (2/27/19): I am ashamed of my weakness and my misplaced loyalty, of the things I did for Mr. Trump in an effort to protect and promote him. I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump's illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience.

I am ashamed, because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat.

First of all, Mr. Trump was said to be "a racist." This was the first thing Cohen said. He'd failed to listen to his own conscience when he served as a goon for this man.

For ourselves, we regret the fact that Cohen will be going to prison. We don't think we've ever been glad to hear that someone is going to prison, though we'll acknowledge that punishment regimes are still a necessary part of our social arrangements.

We're sorry that Cohen did the various things he did, including the $4 million in personal tax evasion to which he pled guilty last August. (He didn't do that for Mr. Trump; he did that for himself.)

As far as we know, none of our consciences guide us in a perfect manner. We're sorry that Cohen's "own conscience" failed him in the fairly substantial ways it did.

That said, Cohen seemed to know what to say when he testified last week. He said that Donald J. Trump is a racist. If you want to curry favor with our largely malfunctioning liberal team, it is, at present, the perfect thing to say.

Is Donald J. Trump a racist? As we've probably said in the past, we feel the term has been used in such promiscuous ways that it's largely ceased to have a definable meaning.

We'd like to see a moratorium in which we liberals would have to say what we mean without use of that all-purpose bomb. In the meantime, though, everybody—and we do mean everyone, even Cohen—knows it's the term to which they should quickly turn is aligning themselves with our team.

Consider what happened last Friday afternoon on the popular MSNBC show, Deadline: White House. The program is hosted by Nicolle Wallace. She opened Friday's program by delivering a somewhat mannered R-bomb of her own.

As you may know, Wallace made her bones helping George W. Bush get re-elected by staging all those anti-gay marriage propositions on all those state ballots in 2004. Today, though, she knows how to play the game Over Here, within our own liberal/anti-Trump tribe, as you can possibly see by choosing to click here.

Wallace opened Friday's program by spotting another racist. Michelle Goldberg quickly jumped in to confirm Wallace's view—Goldberg, who found her way to her current spot at the New York Times by never, ever saying a word about what the newspaper did, for twenty-five years, to both Clintons and to Candidate Gore, leading to Candidate Hillary Clinton's eventual defeat.

Goldberg wasn't even willing to speak when the Times ran that astounding, 4400-word front-page report about the way Candidate Clinton had sold her soul in the matter of Uranium One. Instead, she joined TV's Chris Hayes is declaring the front-page gong-show a "bombshell"—and today, she stars at the Times.

We don't know what Goldberg was thinking when she failed to condemn that obvious front-page gong-show. As a general matter, though, this is the way the game has been played within the "career journalistic community" for a great number of years.

Simply put, this is the way Homo sapiens tends to play, as Professor Harari tends to suggest in his best-selling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

According to Harari, our species came to rule the planet through our ability to create and promulgate sweeping group "fictions." These "fictions"—"myths," if you will—are standard, frequently fact-free beliefs to which we humans will swear allegiance, allowing us to cooperate in large groups.

According to Harari, chance mutations gave our ancestors the ability to form these "fictions." According to Harari, it's an ability which other human species didn't have.

We have no idea how to evaluate these claims, but remember—Harari's book has been endorsed by Bill Gates and Barack Obama! Meanwhile, there's no doubt that Harari is describing the way we modern humans tend to function all over the globe. Here's one passage, in his own words:

HARARI (page 27): How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold [of cooperation in large groups], eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples' collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag...

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.

Say what? Our modern institutions are founded on belief in ghosts and spirits? Is Harari allowed to say that?

Apparently yes, he is.

Did our ancestors drive other human species into extinction because our species, and ours alone, had developed the ability to invent and promulgate this type of "fictions?" We have no idea.

Today, though, human groups do march forward under various signs and group beliefs—and those compelling group beliefs are often formed on a very shaky factual basis.

According to Harari, it was this ability, mixed with a strong dose of "intolerance," which led to the end of the Neanderthals and the Denisovans as our own ancestors, Homo sapiens, marched triumphantly on.

We don't know if that really happened, but we do know that our own current tribe is marching beneath a stirring belief about The Others. Everyone knows to recite this belief, even folk like Cohen and Wallace, who we'd all be calling "bigots" if they hadn't agreed to sign on.

Cohen knew what he should say first, aided perhaps by Lanny Davis. Wallace knows that she must ostentatiously showcase her alleged hatred of racists of every possible stripe.

In fact, every pundit Over Here knows that he or she must do that today, just as our pundits knew, at one time, that they must pretend that Candidate Gore was the world's biggest liar, and that he had "hired a woman to teach him how to be a man."

At one time, they all said that. Now, they all are eager to say they hate the racists.

Not long ago, the creeps you see on cable TV marched repetitively on beneath those earlier "fictions." Today, everyone knows they should start by dropping an R-bomb or twelve.

This is the way our modern tribe rolls. Is it possible, in any way, that this and other types of group conduct could possibly help Mr. Trump win re-election next year?

Tomorrow: The inevitable misapplications (Lemon around the bend)

Lawrence O'Donnell gets it right!

TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2019

Cable star cites Lee's book: In our view, Lawrence O'Donnell got it right on his Last Word program last night.

On Saturday, Donald J. Trump had made a weird, weirdly endless speech at the annual CPAC convention. As he started a pair of segments about Trump's address, Lawrence cited a book which has been widely ignored:

O'DONNELL (3/4/19): The dangerous case of Donald Trump was once again on public display this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

"The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" is a bestselling book in which 37 psychiatrists and mental health experts assessed the president of the United States. Those 37 mental health professionals began taking notes on Saturday before Donald Trump opened his mouth at CPAC.

The actual number is twenty-seven, but then again who's keeping score?

In yesterday's post, we ourselves discussed The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a compilation of essays which was compiled by Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee. The book explores the possibility that Trump is mentally ill, even dangerously so.

Given the way our press corps works, it would be extremely hard to have a serious discussion of such a challenging topic. But given the way Trump behaves—as in Saturday's endless speech—it seems to us that it may be dangerous not to conduct that discussion.

Last night, O'Donnell called attention to the widely-ignored book. For example, why did Trump start Saturday's speech by hugging the American flag?

"This book explains it," Lawrence said. "This book catalogs Trump`s serious mental impairments that are untreated and most likely impervious to treatment. This book explains what Donald Trump was doing on the stage on Saturday, better than any of the news reports of what he said."

Lawrence may well be right. As he continued, he quoted one of the high-profile psychiatrists who contributed to Lee's book:

O'DONNELL: Jerrold Post is now a professor of psychiatry, after serving 21 years in the CIA. He wrote the CIA's personal profile of Saddam Hussein. In this book, he writes "Trump has a mirror-hungry leader personality which feeds on the adoration of his followers."

[...]

According to the psychiatrists who have been studying Donald Trump, and according to all the public evidence we've seen, the place Donald Trump goes for love is the CPAC stage and the Trump rally stages, where he stands out there alone, surrounded by thousands of strangers who he believes loves him and do indeed appear to love him. And Donald Trump has never even suggested that he looks for love anywhere else.

What is a "mirror-hungry leader personality?" Lawrence didn't explain. But in his second segment, he quoted Post again:

O'DONNELL: Since World War II, psychiatrists and social psychiatrists have been intently studying the relationship of leaders like Donald Trump and their followers.

In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the book that I mentioned, former CIA psychiatrist Jerrold Post writes, "The relationship between Trump and his hard-line followers represents a charismatic leader-follower relationship whereby aspects of the leader's psychology unlock, like a key, aspects like his followers' psychology."

And having unlocked them like a key, Donald Trump is now putting in their minds the words he wants them to say when Michael Cohen publicly testifies about Donald Trump committing crimes, or when the Mueller report comes out, or when the Democratic House committees continue to pile up incriminating evidence against the president.

There is one word that Donald Trump needs everyone at CPAC and all of his followers throughout the country to say all at the same time and he said it to them on Saturday...

The word in question is "bullshit." Trump said the word two times in his speech. NBC policy wouldn't let Lawrence repeat it. He just had to show us the tape.

According to Lawrence, Trump wants his supporters reflexively saying "bullshit" when the Mueller report comes out, or when Democratic-led committees conduct their investigations. Lawrence said Trump was priming his supporters last weekend. We'll assume that Lawrence is right.

That said, is there anything our own team is doing which might enable or reinforce such a strategy? We'll ponder that question this week.

Trump may be dangerous, Lee's book says. Is there anything our own tribe is doing which may be helping him out?

TRUMP AND TRIBE: Michael Cohen knew what to say!

TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2019

Our tribe's pursuit of Trump: Appearing before the House Oversight committee, Michael Cohen, the former Trump "fixer" and goon, knew what he should say.

Before he was finished, he would say several things which possibly didn't quite make perfect sense. But as he started his prepared remarks, he quickly voiced the key part of our liberal tribe's current group "fiction:"

COHEN (2/27/19): Chairman Cummings, Ranking Member Jordan, and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me here today. I have asked this committee to ensure that my family be protected from presidential threats. And that the committee be sensitive to the questions pertaining to ongoing investigations. I thank you for your help and for your understanding.

I am here under oath to correct the record. To answer the committee's questions truthfully, and to offer the American people what I know about President Trump. I recognize that some of you may doubt and attack me on my credibility. It is for this reason that I have incorporated into this opening statement, documents that are irrefutable and demonstrate that the information you will hear is accurate and truthful.

Never in a million years did I imagine, when I accepted a job in 2007 to work for Donald Trump, that he would one day run for the presidency to launch a campaign on a platform of hate and intolerance and actually win.

I regret the day I said yes to Mr. Trump. I regret all the help and support I gave him along the way. I am ashamed of my own failings and publicly accepted responsibility for them by pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York.

I am ashamed of my weakness and my misplaced loyalty, of the things I did for Mr. Trump in an effort to protect and promote him. I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump's illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience.

I am ashamed, because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat. He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop on Democratic National Committee emails. I will explain each in a few moments.

Donald Trump is a racist, Cohen said. When he ran for the presidency, Trump had "launch[ed] a campaign on a platform of hate and intolerance."

Donald J. Trump is a racist. This was the first thing Cohen said when he began to tell the committee "what Mr. Trump is."

Forgive us if we aren't thoroughly sure how to react to Cohen's remark. Was Cohen a secret anti-racist during the years when he worked as Donald Trump's goon?

Was Cohen a secret anti-racist when he spoke with The Daily Beast's Tim Mak in July 2015? At the time, Mak was investigating an earlier legal claim by Trump's ex-wife, Ivana Trump, that she had been "raped" by Trump during their marriage.

Mak spoke with Cohen by phone. Ignoring his high-minded personal values, Cohen offered these thoughtful remarks:

COHEN (7/27/15): Mark my words for it, I will make sure that you and I meet one day over in the courthouse and I will take you for every penny you still don't have, and I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know. Do not even think about going where I know you're planning on going. And that's my warning for the day.

[...]

So I'm warning you, tread very f***ing lightly because what I'm going to do to you is going to be f***ing disgusting. Do you understand me? Don't think you can hide behind your pen because it's not going to happen. I'm more than happy to discuss it with your attorney and with your legal counsel because motherf***** you're going to need it.

To hear the tape of the phone call, click here. For Mak's real-time report, click this.

That transcript helps explain why we've added the term "goon" to the conventional term "fixer" in our description of Cohen. That said, was Cohen a secret anti-racist when he was making phone calls like that in service to Donald J. Trump? Were his personal values superior to the attitudes conveyed by his recorded remarks?

We ask this for a reason. Cohen seemed to know exactly where to start in his remarks last week. When he described Donald J. Trump, he started with the claim our tribe loves best at this time—the claim that The Others are racists.

Was that presentation by Cohen sincere, or was he just striking a pose? In part, we ask because Cohen said other things which seemed like pure bullroar this day.

Forget about Cohen's portrait of Trump! Instead, consider Cohen's self-portrait:

COHEN (2/27/19): Over the past two years, I have been smeared as a "rat" by the president of the United States. The truth is much different. And let me take a brief moment to introduce myself.

My name is Michael Dean Cohen. And I am a blessed husband of 24 years and a father to an incredible daughter and son.

When I married my wife, I promised her that I would love her, I would cherish her, and I would protect her. As my father said countless times throughout my childhood, "You, my wife, and you, my children, are the air that I breathe." So to my Laura, and to my Sami, and to my Jake, there is nothing I wouldn't do to protect you.

I have always tried to live a life of loyalty, friendship, generosity and compassion. It's qualities my parents ingrained in my siblings and me since childhood. My father survived the Holocaust thanks to the compassion and selfless acts of others. He was helped by many who put themselves in harm's way to do what they knew was right. And that is why my first instinct has always been to help those in need. And Mom and Dad, I am sorry I let you down.

Has Cohen always tried to live a life of generosity and compassion? We'll say that may not be wholly accurate.

Beyond that, we'll express some doubt about Cohen's claim that he was swept away from his basic values by loyalty to Mr. Trump. Last August, Cohen pleaded guilty to five counts of tax evasion, for concealing more than $4 million in personal income. We'll guess that he gilded the lily a bit in last Thursday's stirring self-portrait.

Michael Cohen has been a rather shady guy. That said, he knew what he should probably say, right off the bat, when he profiled Trump.

For ourselves, we regard Donald J. Trump as a disordered, dangerous man. We regret the fact that he's disordered—that he may be mentally ill—but that doesn't mean that he isn't a danger. This raises the stakes concerning the way Trump is being pursued.

Over Here, within our liberal tents, our tribe's pursuit of Donald J. Trump has taken at least two basic forms:

We're strongly inclined to portray Trump, and his tens of millions of voters, as slobbering racists all. We're also deeply invested in the headlong legal pursuit of Trump—in the idea that he can be indicted for crimes, or impeached by the House.

Michael Cohen seemed to know one basic way to our hearts. That said, is our current pursuit of Trump a good, strong, solidly "rational" program? Or is it possible that we're chasing a dangerous man in a way which could make him stronger?

In his best-selling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Professor Harari paints a somewhat gloomy picture of our self-impressed, war-like species. We run on "gossip" and "fiction," he seems to say, mixed with a healthy dose of "intolerance."

By way of contrast, Aristotle is widely said to have said that we're "the rational animal." Just how rational is our tribe's current approach to Trump?

Tomorrow: Everyone knows what to say

We're offering a rather short entry today!

MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2019

Maureen Dowd uses a word: Yesterday, Maureen Dowd used a word in her New York Times column.

The column appeared on the front page of the Times' Sunday Review. The word in question is considered quite potent, except when it's used as a lark.

Dowd used the word in her column itself, in which she quoted Michael Cohen's testimony from last week. The powerful word also appeared in the headline atop her long column:

DOWD (3/3/19): The Sycophant and the Sociopath

[...]

“Mr. Trump is an enigma,” Cohen said. “He is complicated, as am I.”

Actually, Trump is simple, grasping for money, attention and fame. The enigma about Trump is why he cut off his lap dog so brutally that Cohen fell into the embrace of Robert Mueller and New York federal prosecutors. Trump is often compared to a mob boss, but Michael Corleone would never turn on a loyal capo, only on one who had crossed him.

The portrait Cohen drew of Trump was not surprising. It has been apparent for some time that the president is a con man, racist, cheat and liar. (See: Jared Kushner security clearance.)

What was most compelling about the congressional hearing was the portrait of the sadistic relationship between the sycophant and the sociopath.

Is Donald J. Trump a sociopath? That's the powerful word Dowd used, in the body of her column and right up there in her headline.

Is President Trump a sociopath? Dowd may have wanted that to be seen as an eye-catching, throw-away term.

Beyond that, "sociopath" doesn't seem to be an official diagnostic term. In July 2016, The Atlantic's James Hamblin wrote this:

HAMBLIN (7/20/16): [S]ociopathy and psychopathy—which are similar, and sometimes used interchangeably—are not formal psychiatric diagnoses. The terms “sociopath” and “psychopath” do tend to be thrown around casually by people in need of an insult that carries an air of empiricism. “My boss is a sociopath” is to say that this is not just an opinion or judgment, but a fact. But different people define the terms differently, with understandings converging around the feature of lacking “a conscience.”

The closest thing to psychopathy or sociopathy in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)—the book that defines every mental illness and outlines how mental-health professionals should make the diagnosis—is either Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder.

"Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder." Hamblin went on to consider the applicability of those diagnostic terms to then-candidate Trump.

This very occasional discussion sputtered forward from there. In September 2017, Harvard psychiatric Lance Dodes seemed to tell Salon's Chauncey DeVega that Trump meets the general criteria for "sociopathy" as generally understood:

DEVEGA (9/12/17): Clinically, if we were to look at the checklist for sociopathy, what are some of the indicators that Trump is presenting?

DODES: It is people who lie and cheat. Everybody lies some of the time, but in this instance we mean people who lie as a way of being in the world, to manage relationships and also to manage your feelings about yourself. People who cheat and steal from others. People who lack empathy...the lack of empathy is a critical aspect of it. People who are narcissistic.

Trump’s case of narcissism is particularly severe because he also is out of touch with reality whenever he becomes upset. When he says, “I had the largest crowd at an inauguration in history,” it does not matter that you can tell him that it is not true, he still insists on it. Well, that is very troublesome because what it means is that he needs to believe it. He is able to give up reality in exchange for his wished-for belief. Sometimes we call that a delusion. We have not used that word much with Donald Trump because that does get confused with people who think that they are Napoleon. But Trump has a fluid sense of reality, which is a sign of a very sick individual.

Sociopathy itself is a sign of a very sick individual, someone with a lying, cheating and emotional disorder. The intersection of those two occurs in sociopathy. It is not just bad behavior that people have to lie and cheat the way he does, it is an incapacity to treat other people as full human beings. That is why his focus is on humiliating others to aggrandize himself, as he did in the Republican primaries when he was debating and calling people names. The same thing applies to Hispanic immigrants and separating the children from their parents. That is a very, very serious mental and emotional problem. Normal people have normal empathy. It is part of being a human being. Lying and cheating and humiliating others and grinding them into dust in order to triumph is not just bad behavior. It is a serious mental illness.

Dodes is one of the psychiatrists who wrote essays for The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book edited by Yale's Dr. Bandy X. Lee. The book was widely ignored by the press.

Is President Trump in the grip of "a serious mental illness?" After this editorial early last year by the New York Times, the mainstream press corps generally agreed not to debate or discuss that question.

That said, is the president "dangerous?" We can't necessarily say.

Last week, Cohen said that, if Trump is defeated for re-election, we may not have a peaceful transfer of power. Four days later, Dowd used a powerful term.

Sometimes, if it weren't for the lack of public discussion, our society would have no public discussions at all. We were struck by the appearance of that word in yesterday's Sunday Review, but we've come to accept a powerful norm:

Our mainstream political punditry is built around issues of body language, wardrobe and personality quirks. (Also, who may have had sex on one occasion with whom.)

Issues of hair may also arise. It's not clear that other things matter.

Gene Lyons' column from last week!

SATURDAY, MARCH 2, 2019

Yes, he actually could: Could Donald J. Trump get re-elected?

Yes, he actually could! Then again, something quite different could occur, possibly unconnected to any election.

With that in mind, Michael Cohen said the following to the House Oversight Committee:

COHEN (2/27/19): Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to appear before you today.

Cohen fears that there will never be a peaceful transition of power? Does that make any sense at all? Is that just totally crazy?

We're not entirely sure. We believe that we ourselves have mentioned that possibility in the past—and yes, Donald J. Trump does hold the nuclear codes.

We're not saying that Donald J. Trump would actually use those codes. We've just said it's a possibility, given the fact that the sitting president seems to perhaps and possibly be some version of "mentally ill."

Nor would this president likely take well to impeachment, or to attempted removal from office. Sectors of our liberal tribe are currently in love with those thrilling possibilities. Like Dr. Bandy X. Lee, we regard the sitting president as potentially "dangerous."

These peculiar things having been said, a new election is underway, and with it "election coverage." With that in mind, we strongly recommend Gene Lyon's syndicated column from last week.

Because we'd been called away from our sprawling campus on a mission of national import, we missed the column in real time. In his essay, Lyons brought his pungent wit to bear on the way our presidential elections have been "covered" over the past thirty years:

LYONS (2/20/19): [T]he kinds of insulting trivialities the nation's self-infatuated pundit class have long used to ridicule previous Democratic candidates are already in evidence. Remember Al Gore's bald spot and three-button suits? John Kerry windsurfing and his choice of the wrong—indeed, downright "inauthentic"—cheese on his Philly cheesesteak sandwiches?

Meanwhile, everybody supposedly wanted to have a beer with George W. Bush, a down-to-earth regular guy (and recovering alcoholic). And, quite coincidentally, the worst American president since the mid-19th century.

Until now.

Gene, who is a long-distance friend, had alerted us to the Washington Post's Power Pundit Rankings, the pitiful but highly familiar nonsense on which his column focused. As he continued, he stated several important points:

LYONS (continuing directly): Because an American presidential election is above all a TV show, print pundits must go to considerable lengths to get noticed (and, if possible, appear on TV). Hence the Post's made-for-TV power ratings. Readers are treated like so many children watching Saturday morning cartoons, candidates like animated characters.

So anyway, here we go. Right down the slippery slide to mass-market inanity: clothing, hairstyles, food choices, sexual peccadillos. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand eats fried chicken with a fork (inauthentic). Sen. Corey Booker is a self-righteous vegan (snob)...

And so on, but also so true! We the people actually are "treated like so many children" within modern pundit culture (though it seems we don't much notice).

And yes, a modern White House election actually is "an [extremely long-running] TV show." Stars are paid millions of dollars per year to keep viewers tuning in over the course of two years.

(How many millions of dollars? You aren't permitted to know! You're only asked to be concerned about the possible effects of large sums floating to Trump.)

The sheer stupidity Lyons describes has been the norm for decades. No, it didn't begin this year because we have an array of (highly capable) female candidates, though a wide range of modern liberals are eager to tell you that.

Lyons speaks well of E. J. Dionne at one point; we'll offer a demurral. Dionne doesn't play these reindeer games, but he has also never been willing to say one word about them. In fact, almost no one speaks up about this endless destructive nonsense. Within the press corps' sprawling guild, such things simply aren't done.

The gruesome gong-shows Lyons cites sent Bush, then Trump, to the White House. "Liberal" journalists refuse to tell you that this occurred. A code of silence has long been in place, and it gave us President Trump.

There's much, much more to say about this. We'll resume next week, though we'll make one guarantee right now:

Absolutely nothing will change! This is the established culture of our upper-end "rational animals" as of this rather late date.

The greatest mainstream column: Long ago and far away, E. R. Shipp served as the Washington Post's ombudsman. In a brief column called Typecasting Candidates, she actually described the way this idiocy works:

SHIPP (3/5/00): [R]eaders react—sometimes in a nonpartisan way, more often not—to roles that The Post seems to have assigned to the actors in this unfolding political drama. Gore is the guy in search of an identity; Bradley is the Zen-like intellectual in search of a political strategy; McCain is the war hero who speaks off the cuff and is, thus, a "maverick"; and Bush is a lightweight with a famous name...As a result of this approach, some candidates are whipping boys; others seem to get a free pass.

We'd register one objection. Candidate Bush was briefly treated in that dismissive way by the bulk of the mainstream press. As soon as Candidate McCain was dispatched, the press corps returned to treating Bush in the respectful, admiring way Lyons described last week.

That said, Shipp described the basic system. Our "journalists" tend to "typecast" candidates, treating them as characters in a novelized drama.

They get assigned their stereotypical roles; from that point on, the facts are sifted, invented and rearranged to make the story-lines work. This typecasting is routinely based on the silly trivia Lyons mentioned last week.

Shipp wrote a very brief, highly insightful column. In line with the rules of this reindeer game, her piece was completely ignored.

Are we humans "the rational animal?" That's the role we've long assigned ourselves in self-admiring columns and books!

SOUTHERN FRONTIERS OF THE RATIONAL IMPULSE: Bring on the porn stars, Cooper said!

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2019

White House elections are fun: Could Donald J. Trump get re-elected next year?

Actually, yes—he could. That doesn't mean that he actually will. But actually, yes, he could.

That said, our somewhat dreamy tribe is dreaming of more thrilling outcomes. We're dreaming of seeing Trump frog-marched away. Wednesday night, after Michael Cohen spoke, Lawrence was dreaming that for us:

O'DONNELL (2/27/19): The Democrats now have the smoking gun. Today, Michael Cohen wrote the first article of impeachment against President Trump in his testimony in the House of Representatives, the place where impeachment of a president begins.

Democrats believe Michael Cohen gave them the smoking gun today. That's what Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna called this exhibit that Michael Cohen introduced in the all-day hearing in the House Committee on Oversight.

This check, made payable to Michael Cohen, carries the now recognizable signature of Donald Trump and was signed by the president six months into his presidency. It marks the first time in American history that we have seen a check signed by a president for an illegal purpose.

[...]

The crime, as described by federal prosecutors and in Michael Cohen's guilty plea testimony, took place weeks before the presidential election when Michael Cohen used his own funds to arrange a payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to buy her silence.

What America learned from Michael Cohen today is that that criminal scheme extended forward in time into the presidency of Donald Trump because President Trump arranged a reimbursement schedule for Michael Cohen that included 11 checks delivered to him during the first year of the Trump presidency.

Some of those checks were signed by President Trump. Some of them were signed by Donald Trump Jr. and by Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump businesses.

The smoking-gun check, the one with Donald Trump's bold signature, will now take its place in popular culture. You will be seeing it in tweets forever. You will be seeing it on T-shirts. It will be imprinted on toilet paper, on coffee mugs, and it will take its place in history as the most important check Donald Trump has ever written because it is the check that could end his presidency.

Lawrence, an excitable man, was very excited this day. To watch this full segment, click here.

(He's been this excited before. We recall the time he went on the widely-viewed McLaughlin Report, in October 2000 no less, to trash Candidate Gore as a liar once again. He misstated an accurate statement by Gore to establish his well-scripted point. Then too, there was the time he adopted his working-class Dorchester accent to challenge Mitt Romney's son to a fight, right there on the cable TV. Let's not forget his various rants about Mormonism, for which he agreed to apologize several times. His meltdown during Campaign 2004, for which he was suspended for several months, is still his greatest, of course.)

At any rate, Lawrence was highly excited this night. He said Democrats now had "the smoking gun"—rather, "the smoking-gun check."

According to Lawrence, we're going to see that smoking-gun check on the toilet paper of the future! When Cohen presented that check, he "wrote the first article of impeachment against President Trump."

Or so Lawrence now said. As he did, we less than fully rational liberals were being led, by a top entertainer, seductively close to the southern frontiers of our tribe's rational impulse.

Will Donald J. Trump be frog-marched away because pf that smoking-gun check? Because he submitted to an apparent act of extortion by a money-grubbing hustler who has now been adopted, by our somewhat pre-rational tribe, as a "feminist heroine," even "a feminist hero?"

Everything is possible! That said, we hadn't seen Lawrence this excited since the night he went on TV and helped elect George W. Bush by repeating the sound of his master's voice.

Obedient players like Lawrence will serve you the latest script. In Wednesday's script, Trump would soon be frog-marched away. It's an image which mightily pleases certain cable viewers.

Will Donald Trump be frog-marched away? We're going to guess that he won't be—or at least, that he won't be frog-marched away on the basis of that check.

Lawrence kept saying that the check was part of a "crime" and a "criminal scheme." He based his Maddovian statement on the authority of prosecutors in the Southern District of New York—and on the authority of Michael Cohen himself.

To Lawrence, the check was part of a crime. But Cohen's behavior became a "crime" only because he copped a plea to the crime with which he'd been charged.

Cohen agreed to cop a plea to the alleged crime in question. But on CNN, that very same night, one observer offered an analysis of that transaction, an analysis to which we liberals will never be exposed on MSNBC.

Rick Rantorum said the behavior in question wasn't a crime. In our view, it isn't clear that he's wrong:

SANTORUM (2/27/19): The only reason the Southern District got that conviction— They could have gotten him to plead guilty to far worse things than a campaign finance reporting violation. But the only reason they got him to do that is so they could bring in Trump. Let's just be honest about this. That's the only reason they wanted to do this.

TOOBIN: Not because he was guilty of a crime?

SANTORUM: Because can I tell you, every campaign finance violation that I've ever heard of, and I've been aware of a lot of them, get fines. You don't get indicted for a campaign finance violation. You get a little fine.

COOPER: But isn't this a kind of a special kind of campaign finance violation?

SANTORUM: Well, they're making it a special kind of campaign finance violation, when in fact I don't believe there is one. If you look at the [John] Edwards case, there isn't—

COOPER: But, I mean, how many times is it a candidate paying off a porn star to be president of the United States?

SANTORUM: Well, at least one other— Well, not a porn star but, you know, somebody else. It does— But here—

BERNSTEIN: Well, I mean, it takes place several days before the election, the most crucial period.

SANTORUM: OK, but what is the most important requirement? It did take—and that's very important. Why? Because according to campaign finance laws, they would not have had to disclose that payment until after the campaign. That's the time frame they had to disclose it. So it would not have had any impact, even if they did file [on time].

COOPER: All right, we've got to take a break.

Before we consider what Santorum said, let's consider the foolishness of Anderson Cooper, who rolled over for Trump several times during the "cable news" ratings grabs of Campaign 2016.

Man [sic] is the rational animal? According to Cooper, Trump's alleged campaign finance violation is "kind of special"—it stands out from the pack—because "how many times is it a candidate paying off a porn star?" To Cooper, any other alleged love connection would be a lesser deal!

Carl Bernstein chipped in with some piffle of his own. We could have learned about the porn star's allegation right before we voted, he said. To Bernstein, this seems to have made this violation especially egregious!

Let's summarize. According to Cooper and Bernstein, we could have heard an allegation from a porn star! Even better, we could have heard from the porn star right before a White House election! What could be cooler than that?

In such ways, we rational animals are handed our frameworks by our cable thought leaders. As voters, we need to know if a candidate has ever (allegedly) had sex with a porn star on one occasion ten years before! It's the very last thing we voters should hear before we cast our votes!

Having noted this foolishness, let's turn to what Santorum said. Conservatives will hear this interpretation on Fox. This will affect the way this matter is viewed by the public as a whole. Over here in our liberal tents, Lawrence will shield us from it.

According to Santorum, it isn't clear that those "hush money" payments to "silence" Daniels were some big-deal violation at all.

According to Santorum, the prosecutors forced Cohen to cop to that charge because it let them go after their actual target, Trump. Instead of charging Cohen with more serious crimes, they charged him with an alleged crime with which they could pursue Trump.

Did the SDNY really do that? We have no way of knowing. But if you say that our federal gumshoes would never do such a thing, we can only answer with this:

"Who's being naive now, Kay?"

Santorum's larger point is simple. Cohen wasn't convicted, by a jury, for the alleged crime in question. And it isn't clear that Donald J. Trump would ever be convicted either.

Santorum repeatedly noted the fact that John Edwards wasn't convicted by his jury when he was was tried on a similar charge in 2012. That's the only precedent, Santorum said, and it didn't produce a conviction.

(Carrie Cordero largely agreed. See below.)

Cooper quickly went to break; the point was discussed no further. On programs hosted by Lawrence and Rachel, you'll never hear this point of view expressed or debated at all. That's the way we liberals get served on Our Own Cable Channel

Soon after Cohen's appearance, up jumped MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade, offering a ridiculous legal analysis in The Daily Beast.

"If if if if if if if," McQuade kept saying, dreaming of ways in which various people could be charged with various crimes. The pleasing pablum carried these headlines:

The Legal Case Against Trump Has Never Been Stronger After Cohen Testimony
The president’s ex-fixer credibly accuses him of felonies that, pending more evidence, should result in impeachment and indictment.

The headlines were tribally pleasing. Unfortunately, "If if if if if if if," McQuade repeatedly said in her actual essay. (Note the key words in those headlines: "pending more evidence.")

Alas! This is the way we liberals now dream, especially since we aren't permitted to understand the ways we've lost past White House elections. That includes the election in which Lawrence worked to elect George Bush. We liberals aren't encouraged to know that any such thing ever happened.

Should Donald J. Trump get frog-marched away because he paid a bribe to Daniels, submitting to an extortion? Should he be impeached for that, as Lawrence now dreams? Should he be linked to Cohen's unadjudicated "crime?"

We'd be disinclined to say so. But our tribe now dreams of losing elections, then sending the winners to jail!

Trump is disordered, and has been forever, but so are key players all over our "press corps." Beyond that, Trump is dangerous.

That said, who knows what the future might bring? But Rachel and Lawrence will continue to please us liberals as we stumble and fumble about, ignoring the way the world has worked over the past thirty years.

That smoking-gun check in response to extortion? According to Lawrence, we'll see that smoking gun check on future toilet paper! So said an entertaining man, not too far from the southern frontiers of our tribe's rational impulse.

Bring on the porn stars, Cooper said. White House elections are fun!

What Carrie Cordero said: Earlier, CNN legal analyst Carrie Cordero agreed with Santorum's broad point:

CORDERO (2/27/19): So just to pick up on that point. So I think Rick is correct in that there is not a wide body of settled law that the particular payments in question are campaign finance violations.

The Justice Department is clearly taking the position that it is, because they charged and Michael Cohen pled guilty to that.

SANTORUM: The Edwards case says it wasn't.

CORDERO: But the Edwards case had different facts.

SANTORUM: Similar facts.

BORGER: Is it the right thing to do?

"Is it the right thing to do?" So asked Gloria Borger, getting the kids back on track.

No one asked if Trump was extorted. Only on Fox are viewers allowed to hear that question asked.