Category: Rants

As the folks at Deadspin said, the last thing the world needs is another Cletus Safari. We get it. America's crappiest crapholes are full of terrible, sad, terrible, angry, terrible people who are very stupid and will reliably say very stupid things and they absolutely love Donald Trump like I love elastic waistbands. Every journalist capable of sharing some kind of useful insight in this format has already done so, and everyone doing it now is either flogging a dead horse or short on original ideas.

Of course, they said this in the context of linking to a Cletus Safari on Politico and highlighting elements of it that are enlightening.

I agree with the premise that this is a piece the world needs no more of. I've read it a sufficient number of times from different authors in different outlets in different Rust Belt shit-pits. But like Deadspin, the explicit racism aspect of this Safari piece had some real resonance for me, personally.

Gonna warn sensitive types about some language in the following paragraph. If you're white it's probably going to sound very familiar to you though.

I grew up around what in hindsight really was a staggering, pervasive amount of racism, almost all of it directed at black people. It is not much of a stretch to say that race was a lens through which the entire world was viewed. Michael Jackson wasn't Michael Jackson, he was "that n*gger music." The Cosby Show was "that n*gger show." Any negative characteristic about any human being anywhere was contextualized with "like a n*gger." The sole, almost exclusive goal in life for many of the people in my community, who ranged from lower to upper middle class, was to get as far away from "Them" as possible. The greatest shame in life was to have to live with them, or anywhere near them, or to even have to see them. You knew you had done well if you lived in a shitty house but a shitty house on a street where everyone was white.

I've shared these experiences as an adult with some other (white) people and while some are surprised, many recognize it down to the last detail. The talking points, the stereotypes, the obsessive focus (in hindsight it's REALLY weird that people who appeared to have no contact with black people whatsoever spent so much of their time thinking and talking about black people), the pseudoscience; it's a complete package and people who recognize part of it from their own experience generally recognize the whole.

Until I was about 18, I used racial slurs pretty freely. Why wouldn't I? Everyone did, constantly. People thought it was funny. People nodded in approval when they heard it. Congratulations, you're one of us.

Vignette: My friend told me she said the n-word when she was 3 and the whole family thought it was the funniest, cutest story ever, repeated at every get-together. Her dad wanted to recount it in the toast at her wedding.

Then I moved, and I grew up (a little). I'm not embarrassed to admit that weaning from this stuff is a long process. They say that for recovering addicts, every day is a struggle to stay clean. I'm 39 and 20+ years gone from that way of seeing the world and I *still* fight it. Maybe you're looking at me in horror right now because you've never had a racist thought in your life and this seems like little more than rationalizing a neanderthal mindset. Congratulations. But when you expose people to this stuff the moment they're old enough to understand language, it becomes close to hard-wired.

Another vignette: a guy I once worked with regaled us with the nursery rhyme he liked to sing his daughter at night: "N*ggers and Jews, N*ggers and Jews, we'll never lose to N*ggers and Jews." This was 2003.

The thing about being white is that other white people think nothing of saying this kind of stuff in front of you because they assume that everyone else thinks exactly the same way they do. That is one of the foundations of their worldview; all black people hate all white people, all white people hate all black people, etc. It's tribalism. White people who don't think the same way are either n*gger-loving liberal pussies, or they agree but won't say it out loud.

When I saw the following quote in the Politico story, a lot of things came rushing back to me. It was so familiar that I could list off a dozen people I've known at some point in my life who have said the same thing, almost verbatim, in other contexts:

“Everybody I talk to,” he said, “realizes it’s not Trump who’s dragging his feet. Trump’s probably the most diligent, hardest-working president we’ve ever had in our lifetimes. It’s not like he sleeps in till noon and goes golfing every weekend, like the last president did.”

I stopped him, informing him that, yes, Barack Obama liked to golf, but Trump in fact does golf a lot, too — more, in fact.

Del Signore was surprised to hear this.

“Does he?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

Unless you are immersed in the worldview of people like this guy, this might seem either unexceptional or an example that largely serves to illustrate how stupid he is. Ha ha! He doesn't know basic facts! He just repeats everything he sees on Fox News!

While that is undoubtedly true, it overlooks the larger point. To people who structure the world this way, "lazy" isn't about who spends more time sleeping and golfing. Lazy isn't even a "code word" for black. Lazy and black mean exactly the same thing. By saying "Barack Obama slept til noon and golfed a lot" and "Trump is the hardest working president ever," he is, in his own way, simply making two statements of fact. Donald Trump is white; Barack Obama is a (redacted).

"Hard working" is a synonym for white the way "corporal punishment" is a synonym for spanking. The former is merely a more socially acceptable way of saying the latter. "Lazy" and "Hard Working" are both totally independent of any characteristic about Obama and Trump other than their race. Trump is white. Therefore all positive descriptors apply to him. Obama is black. Any bad characteristic a person can have applies to him. He is irrelevant as an individual, because regardless of what he is or does he is, above all else, one of them.

I've sat through enough "hard working vs. lazy" arguments in my life to recognize what Cletus is saying here. I did not enjoy reading this piece, not because it has any inherent flaws but because it reminded me of a lot of things I don't like to remember.

If anything good comes out of the Trump Experience it will be a broader recognition that the centrist discourse fetish is a fruitless strategy. You don't "reach out" to people like this. You can't communicate with them because their mental universe is based on rules that don't apply to reality. All that is to be done is to out-vote them. They, like the places they live, are dying out. To the extent that I have any hope for the future, it is based on the idea that the politics of today are the last hurrah of people who cannot, or perhaps will not, see the world in any way other than as a simple racial dichotomy. White = good. Black = bad. All events and information are shaped around that basic worldview.

If you’re to the political left of, say, Mussolini, enjoy celebrating the overall good results Democratic candidates had in Tuesday’s elections. The much-hyped Virginia gubernatorial race was over almost the moment the polls closed, depriving the evening of drama. That’s OK; after more than a year of non-stop bad news, liberals will gladly take the win.

Now, the bad news: special and off-year elections receive far more attention than any scattered batch of state-level races deserves, and the urge to over-interpret the results is irresistible for the media and political class. Whether you were pleased or upset on Tuesday evening, take a deep breath and remember that if not for the odd timing of these races – in an off-off-year – they would barely have been noticed.

The media likes elections. Elections are more interesting to news consumers than the standard non-electoral political fare, and content providers have the ratings and clicks to prove it. If the 24-hour cable networks can find an election to cover, they will give it saturation coverage.

Sometimes the only elections available are oddly timed special elections – last month’s Alabama Senate primary was a good example – or a few state-level races. They end up filling a vacuum in the ability of political news outlets to provide election coverage. Talking about 2016 gives most of us a migraine at this point, and it’s too early to go H.A.M. on the 2018 election stories yet.

So, elections that are important but not Earth-shattering end up receiving the kind of grand, breathless coverage and punditry that blow what is happening out of all reasonable proportion.
These races deserve coverage. They are important. But they’re not nearly as important as the Hot Take industry is going to claim over the next few days. There is something to be learned from these races, but maintaining perspective is important.

For Democrats, who seem destined to struggle to control the narrative of elections, Tuesday night was a no-win situation for the 2018 storyline. Had Democrat Ralph Northam lost in Virginia, the “No matter what the liberal fake media says, REAL ‘Mericans support Trump and his agenda!” storyline would have carried the day. This would reinforce the idea that no matter how bad things seem to go for the Republicans, Democrats will screw it up.

Now that Northam won – and it is worth noting that Hillary Clinton won Virginia handily in 2016, so Northam would have had to be spectacularly inept to lose – jubilant Democrats took to the internet immediately to proclaim, as journalist and political analyst Dave Wasserman did, that Tuesday’s results lead to the conclusion that Democrats are likely to take the House in 2018.
He concludes, “You can't really look at tonight's results and conclude that Democrats are anything other than the current favorites to pick up the U.S. House in 2018.” With due respect to a good journalist, that is truly spectacular overreach. A year ahead of the 2016 election, nobody could have predicted Trump’s victory. Much can happen in a year. We have no idea where we will be one year from today. Given the way Trump is operating, we may not even be alive (or having elections) in a year. Chill. Virginians picking a governor is not, as some pundits are excited to say, a nationwide referendum on Donald Trump.

This serves no positive function for Democrats. Idle chatter about one party being the favorite can lead only to complacency – marginal voters failing to show up because they’ve heard for a year that the candidate they support is going to win – or unhelpfully high expectations. Bold assertions that they will overcome a forty-five seat GOP majority in the House will feed the eventual narrative of Democrats doing well…but “not as well as we expected.”

The media and the professional readers of political tea leaves have no incentive to follow Tuesday’s results with careful conclusions that invoke context and the dangers of overstating limited evidence. They prefer to grab your attention with bold, unqualified statements that this. is. HUGE. But that does not make it true. Give it a month and there is a good chance that Tuesday’s elections will be largely forgotten.

The valid, sober interpretation of these races is simple: Democrats won some races they very much should have won, and they can feel good about getting their base to show up and follow through.
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You can’t win the hard races if you’re unable to pick up the ones that should be slam-dunks. So, Tuesday was a good night for a party and a group of supporters that needed badly to have a win to boost morale.

For the GOP, they will shrug the races off as unimportant but behind the scenes a lot of people who have to run in 2018 will learn from Ed Gillespie’s mistakes in Virginia.
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He engaged in a shameless campaign of Trump-style race baiting and immigrant bashing and it accomplished little except to bolster pro-Democratic Latino/a voters. Rather than rushing to embrace the preferred strategy of a President who is currently about as popular as genital herpes, Republicans should ask if pandering to the worst aspects of the GOP base has run its course. Trump is loud and monotonous. Voters may just be tired of the act. Why imitate it?

In the end, what we learned on Tuesday evening consists largely of things we already knew. If Democrats can get their base out, they can win.
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Pandering to white populist sympathies is only a useful strategy for Republicans in solidly red states. And the President is a delusional, gutless sack of lame excuses and Taco Bell Mild Sauce.

What we didn’t learn is who will win a year from today. We didn’t learn what Americans think. We didn’t learn any universal truths about politics. These races are not unimportant, but the urge to draw large conclusions from a small sample is dangerous.
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It is impossible to see the diametrically opposed reactions to the terrorist incident in New York (8 killed, perpetrator from Uzbekistan) and the one in Texas on Sunday (26 killed, good ol' Angry White Guy perpetrator) as anything other than thinly veiled blood-and-soil nationalism. There is no other way to interpret being outraged at the idea of an Other killing Americans but willing to shrug off Americans killing other Americans.

One idea that always fascinated me – and almost led me to grad school for psychology, until I realized modern psychology is all weird fMRI shit that is inadvertently feeding the next wave of invasive universal surveillance (just wait until the TSA is scanning for Anger in 20 years once the technology improves) – is the lack of logic behind fears. I've always been terrified of two things: spiders and bridges.

Even as a kid I was able to recognize how little sense it made to be afraid of those things.

My odds of having my life negatively impacted by a spider are so small that they can't even be measured (especially in the Midwest). Fewer people have been killed or injured by a bridge than by lightning strikes. The old cartoon scenario of a piano falling from the sky and landing on me is vastly more likely than either scenario.

But we all know from personal experience that logic is a poor tool against someone's fears.

You can explain how statistically safe air travel is to a person who is afraid of flying and it is highly unlikely to make a dent in their irrational fear. Most fear is at least somewhat irrational, because we base it on our perceptions more than our experience. We recoil from things that are threatening, but how do we learn what is a threat? We combine anecdotal evidence with second-hand information of dubious reliability.
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If you're afraid of being killed by a random act of violence in the modern United States – which, of course, you should not be, since it is low on the list of things that are going to Get You – it is difficult to wrap my mind around any kind of logic that would justify subdividing it into Foreign and Not Foreign for the purposes of determining the appropriate reaction to it. Right now there are millions of people walking around this country afraid that a brown non-citizen named Mohammed is going to drive a truck over them but relatively unconcerned that a white guy named Chad is going to shoot them with guns that are ridiculously easy for him to acquire.

Worse, people justify this with the fantasy that while there is no way to stop Mohammed other than to adopt Festung America border policies, Chad can be stopped if we all pack heat and shoot back. We hear this message explicitly from people in positions of authority. Don't worry about Chad – just shoot back.

Don't worry about the neighbor or the co-worker with 75 guns. That is not a threat. That can never hurt you. Focus on the real threat, which is immigrants and Strapping Black Bucks and Thugs and MS-13 and basically anyone with a darker complexion than Mike Pence or a Funny Accent or a different church.

Isn't it better to die at the hand of Our Kind than to die at the hand of the Infidel?
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Damn right it is. Don't fear death. Death isn't scary. Living to see the pollution of our blood and sacred soil…now THAT'S nightmare fuel.

Lately I've been aging myself a lot. Or perhaps I just feel it more acutely because the odometer made another turn on Monday. But with classes full of students born between 1995-1999 it's amazing the things I find myself having to explain lately, like what "cable TV" means as opposed to traditional network TV. Give it another decade and the kids raised on streaming and on-demand won't even know the basics of how TV delivers content. Sunrise, sunset.

It has really increased my interest, though, in taking advantage of more opportunities coming my way to write about things that the current under-30 generation remembers only hazily or not at all. Since I was all of four or five when it happened, there is a huge swath of Americans out there who have never heard of the latest thing I'm trying to pitch: the 1983 invasion of Grenada.

Yes, the time that the United States invaded a pitifully small country explicitly to cheer itself up. Because our fee-fees were hurting from Vietnam. And since Reagan was president and "Woo! U-S-A #1!" passed for a policy white paper in those days, we didn't even try especially hard to make up a cover story for doing so. We settled on "They have a runway Soviet bombers could use" without mentioning that Canada and Britain built it for them, not Russia, and "There are some American students at a medical school campus there" without mentioning that they were in no danger whatsoever and, like the State Department routinely has to do, they could have simply been loaded onto a plane and evacuated if necessary.

Let's just say it wasn't a good cover story and leave it at that. The real reason was to give couch potato America something to cheer about. It was a sad spectacle. You have to squint pretty hard to look at the invasion and overthrow of a tiny island with a population the size of Joliet, IL and see a great military accomplishment. It was the equivalent of LeBron James playing one-on-one with a six year-old.
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But that didn't stop the Reagan administration for whooping a high-fiving like it was V-J Day or something. Nineteen Americans and around 100 Grenadian and Cuban personnel died. One military commander famously said American troops were at far greater risk of being shot by one another than by the opposition.

In hindsight it reads a bit like a preview of Trumpism. Politically the comparisons are thin; compared to the current mess, Reagan's administration looks like Churchill's war cabinet. But the core part of the electorate that so loved Reagan – the suburbanites and "Reagan Democrats" were that decade's version of "White Working Class" trope today – is the same part of our society that is responding so well to Trump. They were and are exactly the kind of people who would think starting a war to show everyone (read: mostly themselves) that America still kicks ass is a good idea.

It's the kind of person to whom it would never occur that people dying (not to mention millions upon millions being spent) to provide what is essentially a national pep rally for impotent middle-aged white men who associate military power with self-esteem and virility may not be worth it. That beating up a country that didn't have an air force so that people butthurt about Vietnam could feel big and strong again was, well, pretty goddamned pathetic.

At the time it was kind of a blip.
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It was over almost as soon as it began. Looking back, it looks like a preview of everything that would prove to be a nightmare about 21st century American politics.

I traveled for most of today, so I was largely limited to Twitter for getting news updates throughout the day. On the plus side, airports are among the few places in which I can get in some good, quality Fox News watching time.
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It is impossible to understand politics in this country without watching Fox News on occasion. By that I mean the beliefs and words of people who watch it for hours and hours every day or consume smaller amounts but with great regularity will never make sense unless you watch it on occasion. It isn't pleasant to watch, admittedly. But you could have watched Fox News from sunrise to sunset today without being aware of what two Trump campaign staffers were indicted for and the (very significant) revelation that a third already plead guilty to lying to investigators about campaign contacts with Russian officials and people they believed to be relatives of Vladimir Putin.

If you're totally out of the habit of watching it, give it another shot. Lately it has been on another level. I'm used to them crowd-testing right wing talking points as excuses for prominent Republicans, and I expected more of that today. Instead, as is becoming increasingly common regarding the network and Trump, their approach is simply to ignore it.
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Maybe they hope that if they don't answer the front door, the bill collector will go away.

Seriously, it was largely absent from their programming for most of the day. What they did say about the day's news was vague and gave no real impression of what happened or the seriousness of it.
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It (predictably) veered immediately into accusations about Hillary Clinton (the REAL Russia scandal) and then quickly to something else. ANYTHING else. At one point this afternoon, I shit you not, they spent 20 minutes talking about emojis, something about a cheeseburger emoji. As I type this, Tucker Carlson is interviewing "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams about "The real Russia scandal." I'll give you three guesses what it is.

Imagine watching this all day, every day. Imagine getting your news from there and nowhere else. What would the inside of your brain look like? How many key pieces of reality would be missing from your worldview? Everyone has a relative or friend who has been lost to Fox News, and just a little dose is enough to remind me how it could happen. It's not, as it has often been in the past, a different spin on the news anymore. It is a complete, self-contained alternate universe. No wonder it's impossible to talk to Uncle Steve anymore.

Here in the real world, the Papadopolous thing is huge. Really. Look at the timeline, and ask yourself what purpose was served by arresting him in secret. I'd be VERY surprised if he wasn't scared shitless and then easily talked into wearing a wire for six or eight weeks. And I, for one, can't wait to hear what's on the tapes. The plot is thickening.

Maybe this is all Aaron Sorkin's fault.

The Big Speech has always been a powerful tool in politics, and no format is more consistently attention-getting than the public J'accuse/Emperor has No Clothes soliloquy. Speechifying probably peaked in American politics in the second half of the 19th Century, when (aided by the lack of widespread literacy or any form of electronic entertainment) the "Four hour speech" was a cornerstone of party and campaign strategy.

Have you ever tried to talk about something for an hour or more without interruption?

It's not easy. Now imagine you're an 1870s machine politician who probably isn't real bright but knows a few big words. You can imagine the kind of empty yet florid rhetoric that produced.

We are looping back to the Gilded Age in more ways than it is comfortable to recognize, notably with our zeal for deregulation, immigration restriction, and wealth worship. And I have to wonder if even in this noisy media environment (which I suppose is weakly analagous to the cacaphony of newspapers around the turn of the 20th century) elected officials are rediscovering the power of the pretty, totally empty monologue.

It works, after all. Look at the fawning media coverage Flake's two years too late declaration that he has some very important principles for which he absolutely MUST stand up right after he works with Mitch McConnell to steal a Supreme Court appointment and OK maybe let's hold out a few more months to see if we can get some tax cuts out of this too. No? Well voting to allow forced arbitration for nursing home patients is a pretty good consolation prize.

This generation of elected officials may simply have watched far too much West Wing and other politics-themed dramas. In those, the big dramatic speech is always an integral part of the story. It keeps the audience's attention and is a really basic device for advancing the plot because after the Big Speech something changes. The speech by Senator Everyman causes three plot dominos to fall and create new narrative possibilities for the screenwriters. In that world you change things by giving a big, earnest, hushed-audience speech. After it, things are different.

In real life, speeches like Flake's, or John McCain's biannual Soul Unburdenings, serve a function. But they don't serve that function. They don't change anything. You give them, pundits slobber on you, your positive rating goes up a little in focus groups, and you get free advertising for a couple days.

What doesn't happen is anything meaningful. It changes nothing. People admire briefly the pretty words and then it disappears. And whatever grave social ills it inveighed against are right where you left them. Maybe a few more people glanced at them for a minute, but nothing changed.

Change happens in government when people do things, not when they talk about the things they don't like. But, as doing things is hard, talking about them is a tempting alternative. That is not new. What is new is the troubling sense that these people believe that talking pretty is the substantive part. It isn't. It's some varnish. It's a top layer. It's for the cheap seats and the casual observer who doesn't care to hear about the process behind the rhetorical curtain. We see United States Senators who give every indication of believing that after they express their vaunted principles, they dust off their hands and declare, "Job well done!
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"

Thank you for the pretty words, Senator Flake. But you have not done anything. Talking didn't solve the problem. Do something. If you need some hints, consult the Constitution.

I wrote the following back in January:

(One) of the most worrying aspects of this new Age of Nationalism, with far right movements and their leaders flourishing in Europe, India, Asia, Russia, and now the United States, we will shift the ideological spectrum even further to the right. Far enough that basically anyone who isn't a fascist is going to look like a progressive. While it is fair and accurate for observers to claim that just about anyone would be better than Trump, when Paul Ryan starts to look like a reasonable statesman or Rick Perry stands out among the Cabinet as a voice of reason and professionalism, you've seriously lowered your standards. And just as the public got used to centrist Rockefeller Republican types like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as the most extreme conceivable political left, give this five or ten years and we may be living in a world where Paul Ryan is a liberal firebrand.

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No, I don't mean that Ryan will be moving to the left. I mean that if you stare at the Le Pens and Trumps and Putins and Dudas and Modis of the world for long enough, just about anyone is going to look like Eugene Debs in comparison.

What this means, in essence, is that a further erosion of what "the left" and "liberal" mean is as likely to be the result of this as any kind of left wing rebirth and resurgence.

It was on my mind all weekend after ex-President GW Bush released a fairly blunt anti-Trump statement to positive reviews late last week. We got to the point I was referencing in January – David Frum and Bill Kristol as voices of reason, W sounding like a master orator, gutter-dwelling GOP Senators elevated to the position of heroes – a lot more quickly than I expected. And it's probably going to keep getting worse.
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Think about this for a second and consider how alarming it is. Bush, Frum, and Kristol – three of the primary architects of a strategy to fabricate and cherry-pick intelligence to justify a war that we're still involved in 15 years later – look at the way Trump treats the truth and are (or at least present themselves as) horrified. It's good that they're willing to be critical. I wonder, however, if they have any conception of what role they played in paving the way for Trump to happen. They were the ones that elevated Fox News to the gospel truth, treated all disagreement as unpatriotic slander, and gleefully took advantage of the basest parts of the GOP electorate. If they're learning a lesson from this at all, it's that next time they need a tighter grip on power within the GOP.

These are not good people. These are not people with pure motives or anything resembling ideological moderation. They are the same far-right neocons they were in 2002 and the only difference is that a plurality of the GOP base has lurched far enough to the right since then to make people like Rumsfeld, Bush, Ashcroft, and that whole cast of bloodless hacks look moderate in comparison. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party continues to think that the path to success points toward the right. They're beginning to wobble on immigration the same way they always accepted the consensus against gay marriage and deregulation – soon "getting tougher" on immigration will be yet another issue that Everybody agrees upon.

"It could be worse" has always been a key component of politics in a two-party system. Now that we've reached a point at which it can't get a whole lot worse, anything and anyone who looks better than our mental worst case scenario looks good. And that's as dangerous in the long term as the current administration.
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Imagine a future in which Ted Cruz and Bob Corker, because they criticized Trump a handful of times, portray themselves as moderates and the media plays along.

Some days I'm convinced that I won't live to see the damage being done right now undone.

If nothing else, this presidency is teaching the public about some of the less prominent parts of the Constitution. I never thought I'd see a day with features in major newspapers about the 25th Amendment.

With Bob Corker's semi-public semi-meltdown still causing a few faint ripples in the Beltway pond, it is clearer than ever that even the people who go along with and enable this disastrous farce see it for exactly what it is. It seems like there are more than just a handful of prominent Republicans who really would like to be rid of this guy. Unfortunately they'd like to be rid of Trump in the same sense that most of us would like to lose weight or save more money; that is, we want it consistently but apparently not enough to do anything about it. Bob Corker is me talking about how I need to eat healthier and take better care of myself as I wait for the bartender to bring me another order of hot wings.

Everyone on the right who hasn't chugged the Kool-Aid seems to want to be rid of Trump, sincerely, and they all have some kind of fantasy about how it will happen without Republicans in Washington having to do anything. Maybe Comey will take care of it somehow! And then there's Mueller, Mueller can probably find some way to indict him or something!

Or maybe the 25th Amendment! The Cabinet is unelected, so they can do that 25th Amendment thing and absorb the political fallout!
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Oh hey look here's General Kelly – he's tough or something, look at his uniform! He'll straighten this all out, probably! Hey what about resigning? Is that plausible? He looks and sounds miserable, so maybe he'll just quit? Yeah that could happen! And if all else fails, the guy's 71 and fat and always exploding with rage. Maybe an aneurysm will do our constitutional duty for us!

It appears never to occur to these people, or at least it fails to do so in any way that sticks, that as sitting members of the United States Congress there is in fact something they could do about this. They seem to speak from some alternate reality in which they are expecting us to sympathize with them, each of them on the verge of turning to the camera like Jim Halpert and making the "Do you see this shit I have to deal with?
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" face.

Yes, we see it. We are living it. We are all too aware of it, probably even moreso than members of Congress since their power and money insulate them from much of the real life the rest of us can't avoid. Stop expecting the public to see you as some sort of helpless victim and wailing about how you wish upon a star that someone would come along and fix this.

Either shut up and admit that you're happy to enable it with silence or shut up. Nothing is more frustrating than listening to someone talk (for the nth time) about how much they're suffering when experience demonstrates that they refuse to take any action to improve the situation.

Thanks for airing your true feelings, Senator Corker, but there's no way to get out of this without breaking a sweat. Put on the big boy pants and do your job.

When I lived in Indiana, I took my sister's small children on more than one occasion to the very good children's museum in Indianapolis. It is a five-story affair with a large central spiral ramp, sort of like a normal museum but with a miniature Guggenheim in the atrium to connect all the levels.

The museum came up with one of the best ideas for emptying out at closing time that I've ever seen for a facility that deals mostly with children. An employee dressed in full drum major regalia started at the top floor and loud circus / parade / marching type music started playing on the PA. Every kid in the place ran to the atrium and got something (a mask, a pennant, a yo-yo, a noisemaker, etc) to join in the "parade." As the drum major slowly worked his/her way down the ramp engaging in Antics of the kind children would like, every kid fell in behind making spectacular amounts of noise and generally running wild. The parade continued all the way down to the main lobby, then out the front door, then a short way around the block toward the parking lot…where employees were waiting to gather everyone's parade props.

The first time I saw this I was floored at how clever it was. They tricked a thousand toddlers into filing out of the building quickly and in relative order.

Imagine how long it would otherwise take every parent to corral their kid in what is essentially a giant building of toys. Come on, honey, they're closing! No, you can't play just one more game! Leave the Legos there! No, get back here! We have to leave!

Instead, five minutes of the Bozo marching music and the building is ready for the night crew to clean up.
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Brilliant.

I keep thinking of this example as I read the increasingly numerous and alarming stories about our toddler-president and how hard the inner circle of people around him supposedly has to work to keep him from killing us all.

Apparently DC Republicans are as aware that we are dealing with a child as the rest of us have been since Day One. So I, a childless man, wonder why we aren't using more of the tricks available to us for manipulating the behavior of toddlers. Apparently parents and professionals who work with children have a deep reservoir of tactics that are mysterious to the rest of us. What else have you got?

Maybe if every day the White House had a parade for Trump and everyone told him how great and wonderful and special he was, they could lead him outside and lock the door behind him. Maybe while he stuffed his pockets with candy someone could slip his phone out of his pocket. Maybe they could feed him so much cake and ice cream that he'd go on a titanic sugar binge for 40 minutes and then crash hard for hours while other people hurriedly did Governing Stuff.

What I'm saying is, we as a nation have a child. It is up to us to parent him, apparently, since life is not fair and the adults who are supposed to do it are being deadbeat dads.
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What are some of your ways to trick a 4 year-old into behaving well or at least being distracted? And can you send a quick note about it to Gen. Kelly?

There is real hope that the Supreme Court could deal a blow to partisan gerrymandering schemes during this term, which bodes well for the aftermath of the 2020 Census.

But it wouldn't be 2017 if I let you get excited. Don't get very excited. This isn't going to end gerrymandering or even partisan gerrymandering; it may put an end to partisan gerrymandering so blatant, so "Ha ha fuck you what are you gonna do about it" bad that when the map is rejected in Federal court one can only say, "You could have gotten away with it, but you got greedy."

Look. Gerrymandering is no longer an art. It is a science, thanks to GIS software, massive data mining of social and demographic data, and bitter partisanship. People who are good at this sort of thing could gerrymander a Republican majority in the Illinois State Legislature (which is currently 2/3 Democratic). If you think I'm kidding, trust me – I'm NOT an expert and I can do it. As long as one throws shame out the window and is willing to draw the most patently ludicrous districts without any reference to reality or legal precedent, it can be done.

The era of party bosses eyeballing wall maps and drawing districts with a marker are gone.

This is block by block, house by house precision. The technology has made political power and sheer gall the only impediments to gerrymandering the hell out of a state.

Turning 45% of the vote statewide into 60% majorities in the state leg as Wisconsin Republicans did may no longer pass muster if the Court does rule against the state. However, defining what is and isn't "partisan gerrymandering" will not have a clear definition.

Like many things dealing with this topic it will have to be treated on a case by case, "I know it when I see it" basis. The Courts have long recognized that race is a relevant factor in redistricting, so…I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to draw districts in a way that favors your party while using "Well, we were just keeping Communities of Interest together!" as cover.

A favorable ruling would be a rare bit of good news in this otherwise abysmal year, but go into it with your eyes open. This is, at best, going to end only the most comically over-the-top abuses of the redistricting process. All of the ordinary gamesmanship and attempts at system-rigging will putter along.
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That would be a net positive, but certainly no reason to have a ticker-tape parade.