March 6, 2019--Jack: T-PAC

It's that time of year when conservatives gather for the annual CPAC conference. 

The highlight this time was the appearance Sunday afternoon of Donald Trump who spoke for nearly two-and-a-half hours! Fidel-Castro, Mussolini-length, and surely a CPAC record for the longest expletive-larded speech ever. 

Trump had a lot on his mind. Most of it from agita. 

Just a few days earlier, while Michael Cohen was testifying before the House Oversight Committee, he was on Air Force One heading back to Washington from the collapsed summit with Kim Jong-un. At about the same time the New York Times was reporting that he personally countermanded his senior intelligence advisers and granted his son-in-law top secret security clearance.

And so he seized the opportunity to get many grievances off his chest and the audience loved every minute of it. They were as one. So much so that they stood and cheered for more than a disgraceful minute when he proclaimed John McCain dead. Tearfully, it will be a moment they will share with their Republican grandchildren.

Slumped and weary-looking as if he were bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders, Trump entered stage right where a lonely American flag stood, forlorn and limp on its pole. As if just happening to notice the flag, slowly he approached it, bending to embrace it. He coddled and rocked it in his arms as if he was comforting a loved one. With a sad smile, moving his lips dramatically so all could read them, he said, "My baby."

While streaming his remarks a day or two later to see if my eyes had deceived me on Sunday, the phone rang, and, as if he knew what I was up to, I was not surprised that it was Jack.


"I was watching your favorite show," he said, without even a greeting. "'Morning Joe.' All they could talk about was that speech. To tell you the truth I agreed with Joe and his guests that the slur about John McCain was way off base. Especially coming from someone who managed to dodge the draft."

"That was the lowest of many low points," I said.

Jack said, "But off that performance, if you guys are not careful you could be looking at six more years of our president." He chuckled at the prospect.

"Enlighten me."

"One of Joe Scarborough's quests, someone from the Washington Post, called Trump insane. He said if you had an old grandfather that crazy you'd lock him up in the attic. Another guest accused Trump of being 'unhinged.'"

"That was Eugene Robinson," I muttered.

"And then Mike Barnicle chimed is to say that the only thing missing was for Trump to show up wearing paper slippers."

"He's a regular," I said.

"I actually thought that was pretty funny. But he and the others totally missed the bigger point."

"Which is?"

"Look, who am I to tell you guys what to do, but if you want to win in 2020 you need to get your act together. Not only have you given Trump a perfect person to run against . . ."

"Spare me. It's a long time before we have a candidate. Now it's just a couple of dozen hopefuls looking to gain traction. It's premature to talk about running against Trump. We first have to sort things out."

"I mean,"Jack said, "We used to have Nancy Pelosi to run against--which I admit didn't work out so well in 2018--but now we have that girl from the Bronx. I can never remember her name . . ."

"Alexander Ocasio-Cortez."

"You have initials for her, right?"

"Some people refer to her as AOC. What's your problem with her?"

"Actually it's the opposite of a problem. She's a gift that keeps on giving. Isn't she the one who wants to ban hamburgers to reduce global warming?"

"Not really, but your guys are accusing her of that."

"She's perfect to run against. She's a socialist and her ego is so large that she can't get enough air time on TV. I know she turns a lot of your people on but she's too far out for the people I assume you are hoping will vote your way. If she's the new face of the Democrat Party, Trump will be a shoe in."

"Before we declare him the winner let's see what Mueller and the House committees come up with."

"You need to remember that the more dirt that came up about Clinton the more popular he became. And he won a second term. But OAC is not your major problem. The fact that after maybe the worst month of his presidency, Trump, like Clinton is seeing his favorables going up. Just this week by three points. To 46 percent or so."

"What then is our major problem?"

"You're doing it again."

"What again?"

"Just like last time around when you thought Trump was just a joke. You couldn't imagine him beating Hillary. And guess what--he did. Mainly because she and the rest of you wouldn't take Trump seriously and looked down your noses at him and his supporters. And now you're doing a version of the same thing. Again take CPAC. Rather than trying to figure them out and especially Trump' appeal to them--they listened and cheered for him for two-and-a-half hours--you're busy making fun of him. How his speech was incoherent and that he's crazy. Things like that. By doing this you're motivating his people to stay loyal to him and are turning off a lot of people who are on the fence about him."

"I don't disagree with that," I conceded. "All during the last presidential campaign I thought Hillary and the liberal media were missing what was happening in the middle of the country and therefore we made a huge mistake by not showing respect for people who live and vote there. Rather, we too frequently mocked and disparaged Trump and those who turned out to be his voters."

Jack said, "And your reaction to CPAC shows me you're doing the same thing all over again. Which, for me is just fine. But to win you need to recognize that Trump, when it comes to politics and marketing himself, is crazy like a fox. He's totally brilliant at that. I know you think he's dumb and maybe about things you care about he is. But about appealing to his base and a lot of independents he's a version of a political genius. 

"If you want to win, first, you need to not nominate one of your crazies who Trump will mock 24/7. But you also need to get more comfortable with at least a segment of his followers. To see them as fellow Americans who have some legitimate issues, including some you share. Like worrying about how their children and grandchildren will fare as the economy changes and how the demographics of America are becoming more diverse than even some of your people are comfortable with. Don't fool yourself into believing all your liberal friends are so happy about these changes. 

"So you need to find a way to talk about this that's not bigoted and condemning. You need to have and show more understanding of the views and fears of people who you disagree with. You have to stop pointing fingers of contempt at them. Again, I'm talking about just some of Trump's people. From your perspective most are, to quote Hillary who was right about this, irredeemable. One of your problems is that you assume everyone is or should be as tolerant as you try to be. Well, you know what, in this regard you and your friends are far from perfect. You need to take a hard look at what's really in your heart." 

I finally said, "I've been attempting to make that argument for years. Liberals are more tolerant, every poll shows that, but there are a lot of closeted progressives who aren't happy about all the changes you mentioned. But in regard to immigrants and people of color Trump and the CPAC crowd are way out of line. There's no way to paper over that"

"I'll tell you what was really going on with the CPACers."

"I'm all ears."

"They were marking the end of the traditional Republican Party. It's now Trump's party. They could call themselves T-PAC. And his speech, if you can call it that, was like an inaugural address or a comedian's stand-up spritz to celebrate the victory of this new party. That explains the John McCain crack. They saw his death as if it signaled the end of the old Republican Party. A party that they saw him as representing. But again what they did was disgraceful. No two ways about that. 

"But here's the bottom line," Jack continued, "Trump and many of his people are really anarchists. You should call them out for that just as they accuse all of you of being socialists. But you should make a distinction between that part of T-PAC and the others who aren't so radical. As I've been saying, you need to find a way to reach out to and appeal to some of them. You also need to recognize that a large part of Trump's appeal is that he's entertaining. Which politically is not a bad thing. We are an entertainment-obsessed nation and you should look for someone to run against him who average people can enjoy listening to."

"I agree with that."

"Otherwise you're cooked."

March 2, 2019--New Feature: Saturday's Rats

Viewed from his perspective, after the worst week of Trump's presidency, the wall that counts, the one he built around himself and his family is collapsing.

Michael Cohen's powerful testimony and corroborating evidence, the collapsed summit with Kim Yong-un, his despicable comments about Kim not knowing about the torture and murder of Otto Warmbier, and the story about how Trump overrode his senior advisors to unilaterally grant son-in-law Jared Kushner top secret security clearance is a brief summary of this week's self-inflicted troubles.

Sensing this is the beginning of the end, expect to see how those who claim they would take a bullet for Trump rush for the gangplank.

As a new Saturday feature I will try to chronicle this--"Saturday's Rats."

First deserting the SS Trump is my almost favorite snitch, Devin Nunes.

Numes, chair until January of the House Intelligence Committee (when it comes to him that's an oxymoron) was a very useful butt boy for Trump, passing along to him copies of any incriminating documents he thought Trump could use to defend himself.

For someone famous for skulking around in the shrubbery on the White House grounds so as not to be seen when hand-delivering these documents, at this week's CPAC convening, out of character, he called for the entire Mueller report to be publicly released.

He said--

“I want everything that Mueller did made public. I want every email, everybody that they wiretapped, every warrant that they got.

“I think the White House is going to ultimately have to get involved in declassifying all documents,” Nunes said, adding that he doubts the Justice Department will declassify all the documents, based on its previous reluctance to declassify other documents related to the investigation. 

Expect to see along the way, as things get more dire for Trump, that even Mark Meadows will be pushing his way to the front of the gangplank. And how could I forget Lindsay Graham.

February 22, 2017--Milo Yiannopoulos

More evidence of implosion--

General Michael Flynn is gone, fired as National Security Council Advisor, replaced by an adult, and with him goes some of the paranoia and conspiratorial thinking that pervades the West Wing.

Many on both sides of the aisle are hoping that chief strategist, Stephen Bannon and his protégée Stephen Miller will soon follow. Kallyanne Conway has already been marginalized. Have you seen her recently? Is she still being "counseled" and reeducated for hawking Ivanka Trump's schematas? Is she the next one to be jettisoned?

If so it could be that there is some low-wattage light flickering at the end of the very long Trump tunnel.

More good news--

The ever-hypocritical Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) has just withdrawn its invitation to senior Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos to address their upcoming convention.

Greatly "admired" by Bannon, according to the New York Times, for his alt-right orthodoxy which includes dollops of racism and anti-Semitism, Milo has been in the headlines recently for having been driven away from speaking at Berkeley where protesting students proclaimed with some violence, forgetting the free-speech history of their institution, that there is "no free speech for hate speech."

CPAC made a big deal of this, totally enjoying the irony at Berkeley and, mounting their high libertarian horse, invited Milo to address them as evidence that conservatives are less politically correct and more constitution-minded than liberals.

They were OK with the hate speech part of Milo's repertoire but when it leaked out that he also has spoken positively about man-boy pedophilia, including among Catholic priests, that was too much even for CPACers. They pulled the plug on him and made frantic rounds of the morning talk shows to try to explain away their hypocrisy.

They are for free speech but not when it "crosses certain lines." Clearly one of those lines doesn't include forbidding a CPAC speaker to hint with winks and nods that it's all right to be a white supremacist or anti-Semite.

Does this foretell Stephen Bannon's fate? With Yiannopoulos on the loose and CPAC at a boil, Bannon's presence, whispering in Trump's ear, may embolden Bannon's White House enemies (Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner among others) to put pressure on Trump to do a little more house cleaning.

July 20, 2015--Great Scott!

Great Scott? Scott Walker the legendary governor of Wisconsin who managed to get voters in the Badger State to keep him in office in spite of fierce and well-financed attempts by unions and other progressives to recall him because of his political glee at, to quote Hillary Clinton, "stomping on working people," particularly unionized state workers. Everyone, that is, but the police and firefighters whose support he did not want to jeopardize.

He gave one impressive speech a few months ago at the annual show-and-tell meeting of the conservative action committee, CPAC, and that propelled him into the lead among the other 15 to 16 Republican candidates. But since that time, because he dawdled about getting into the race officially, Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, and perhaps Ben Carson jumped into the lead in the polls and the big GOP money began to drift elsewhere.

So his formal announcement last week that he's running was awaited with considerable interest since some pundits feel that his blue-collar, evangelical roots and lack of formal education are assets in this discombobulated time and that he, or Marco Rubio, might be the two best Republican candidates to do well against Hillary. Since by their age and grayless hair if not their ideas and ideology they claim they are from the next political generation.

Walker's announcement was noteworthy for a least three reasons--the first and most predictable and boring was that in his 40 minute speech he ticked off literally every conservative Republican talking point from his call for the repeal of Obamacare to tax cuts for the affluent to prime the trickle-down pump to opposing the deal with Iran (even before it was struck or read) to opposing same-sex marriage and abortion.

Second, in this era where only he and Ben Carson speak without teleprompters or notes, he droned on in his jeans and tieless shirt not making any gaffs (he is prone to them) nor stumbling for words. This gave what he had to say a tincture of authenticity.

But, third, and most interesting, he began by saying, and repeating that he is an American and loves being an American. As if he is running against a Kenyon president who hates America but loves it enough to want to overthrow the Constitution by invading Texas and after that turning the USA into a socialist dictatorship.

Stories about veterans he knew when growing up were laced as a motif throughout his remarks. First, he told of an old fellow who served in both world wars. And subsequently a neighborhood Vietnam vet who taught little Scott about liberty and patriotism and love of country.

Virtually wrapped in the flag they both fought to defend, Walker did not say anything about why, so inspired by these two remarkable veterans, he himself never showed up at the recruiting office or why he decided not to serve. He and The Donald and Jeb and Marco share that gap in their resumés.

He also didn't mention that, though anti-governement by choice and nature, he has never had a job other than as a taxpayer-supported government official. Beginning from when he was just twenty-two. So, ironically, he has been on a public payroll of one sort or another for more than any other candidate. For fully 26 of his 48 years.

Considering his lack of foreign policy experience, in March, when he was an all-but-declared candidate, at an event in Phoenix he was pressed to explain what qualifies him to serve as commander in chief.

By a friendly interlocutor he was asked--

"Does the prospect of being commander in chief daunt you?"

Before reminding you what he said at that time, earlier in March, at the CPAC gathering, on the same subject, he said he was prepared because he had stared down union workers and their supporters. He said that, "If I can take on 100,000 protestors, I can do the same across the world." He was referring to ISIS, claiming he could do the same thing to them he did to drivers license bureau workers, tax collectors, building inspectors, and such.

This did not go down well so a few days later in Phoenix, in regard to the commander-in-chief question, he was better prepared--

"That's an appropriate question," he acknowledged, "As a kid, I was in Scouts. And one of the things I'm proudest of when I was in Scouts is I earned the rank of Eagle."

That did not seem to qualify him to hawkish voters so last week, to emphasize his social conservatism, and change the subject, he criticized Boy Scouts of American for voting unanimously to allow gay men to be Scoutmasters. Though when confronted about that he again backtracked.

Clearly, going forward he needs to get his act together or the Iowa caucuses, where he needs to come in in the top tier, may be the first and last stop for him. I feel certain that the Koch Brothers are watching closely and if they haven't already, will soon be moving on.