Category: Political issues

One of the things that astonishes me and scares the daylights out of me, while watching the House impeachment hearings, is what the Republican Party has become. The vileness and just plain meanness of Reps. Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes are on full display as they spit and rant and bully to create sound bites for Fox News. But to Republicans, the two of them are heroes and leaders.

I have written here before about the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt and how he has tried to convince us that liberals and conservative have equal — just different — claims on virtue. Haidt actually convinced me of the opposite: that conservatives’ love of authority, their fixation on purity (where pure means just like them), and their fear and distrust of out-groups puts conservatives in constant moral peril. But it’s even worse than that, because it’s all too easy for the authority that conservatives crave to whip up their fears and suspicions and make them a danger to everyone else.

Paul Krugman, in today’s column in the New York Times, writes that Republicans are proving that there is no bottom to their corruption. Krugman writes, “I don’t think most observers realize, even now, the extent to which many Republicans view their domestic opponents not as fellow citizens but as enemies with no legitimate right to govern.”

I realize it, all right. A few days ago, in the Facebook group of the Republican Party in my county, a Republican wrote: “Too many people on the right think that the Democrats of today are good people with bad ideas. That is no longer true. They are evil people, not worthy of this country, and we need to be plotting how to forcibly deport them to Greenland, etc.” Among those who “liked” this comment were two Republicans who are running for county commissioner. This is the kind of thinking that Fox News has retailed into the provinces.

But what I want to write about here is the survival of decency when authoritarians are so corrupted and so off the rails that the American democracy is in great danger. Normally, the people who work inside the “Deep State” are anonymous and invisible to those of us who don’t work in Washington. The impeachment hearings have given names and faces to some of them — Fiona Hill, David Holmes, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Marie Yovanovich. People such as them, because of their decency and their professional ethics, have to be shoved aside for corruption to have its way. Trump slanders them. And the likes of Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes slander them to defend Trump. It is sickening to watch.

Liberals, with their focus on fairness, justice, and kindness, are in a terrible position when conservatism becomes corrupt and dangerous. How do you stop them without becoming just like them? The last defense, of course, is the law.

Adam Schiff’s closing comments yesterday were as perfect an expression of decency — and the duties of decency — as I can imagine. This video is 20 minutes long; make yourself a cup of tea. I can’t help but think that it would be horrible to be a conservative, blindly in thrall to a con man like Donald Trump, with such a sorry and corruptible sense of virtue. Schiff’s words are a great comfort to those of us whose good fortune it is not to be like that.

For those of us who have been paying careful attention to the crimes and treason of Donald Trump and connecting the dots as best we can, this morning was a milestone. When Gordon Sondland, in his opening statement to the House Intelligence Committee, threw everyone under the bus — Trump, Pence, Pompeo and all — we moved from the dot-connecting stage to at last seeing the tip of the iceberg.

If the American democracy remains strong enough to do its job, then just the tip of that iceberg is sufficient to remove Trump from office, along with his vice president (Mike Pence), secretary of energy (Mike Pompeo), chief of staff (Mick Mulvaney), secretary of state (Rick Perry), and personal lawyer (Rudy Giuliani), all of whom Sondland forcefully threw under the bus this morning.

But as disgusting as the tip-of-the-iceberg crimes are that Sondland described, it’s the still-hidden crimes down in the iceberg itself that really matter and that are truly dangerous. Those crimes revolve around the fact that this whole Ukraine affair is not really Donald Trump’s foreign policy. It’s Russia’s foreign policy. It’s not as though Trump and friends have been conspiring to bully some small country far outside Russia’s orbit. They’ve been conspiring to bully Ukraine, which is of critical strategic importance as a firewall between Russia and the western alliance. Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani are petty and provincial American crime figures with no particular knowledge of or interest in foreign affairs other than where there is money to be skimmed and payola to be grifted. Trump and Giuliani have no motives for being concerned about Ukraine, other than whatever money they or their cronies might be skimming. But who is concerned about Ukraine? Vladimir Putin, of course. Who other than Putin could have designed this little plot? Who benefits? As Nancy Pelosi said, all roads lead to Putin.

It follows that the urgent questions now are: How did Putin communicate this plan to Trump? Why was Trump obligated to attempt to execute Putin’s plan?

Another angle that is (for now, anyway) being ignored by the media is: Trump and friends, by crushing the Mueller investigation, thought that they had gotten away with stealing the 2016 election, with help from Russia. The plan for stealing the 2020 election involved exactly the same modus operandi — lies and conspiracy theories about the Democratic opponent. Rudimentary dot-connecting shows that catching them in the act of treason involving the 2020 election pretty much convicts them of their treason in the 2016 election.

Even when Trump and friends go down for the Ukraine affair, we’ll be nowhere near getting to the bottom of their crimes and treason. It’s not just that the executive branch of the American government has fallen into the hands of a crime syndicate. It’s that it’s an international crime syndicate in which Vladimir Putin is the big boss and Donald J. Trump is just another goon.

This photo, which I assume is an official White House photo, is historic. We’re going to see it for the rest of our lives, in documentaries about Donald Trump’s impeachment and how we almost lost the American republic to a gang of tawdry, slow-witted, money-grubbing little boys who grew up mean and twisted. Nancy Pelosi’s role as the heroine in this drama is now a given.

As you probably know from yesterday’s news, the photo first became public when Trump tweeted it, with the caption “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!”

Pelosi immediately made it her Twitter header photo, and the photo went viral.

Molly Roberts has a good column in this morning’s Washington Post, The Nancy Pelosi photo is a Rorschach test for an America cleaved into two. Molly Roberts is exactly right. What authoritarians like Trump and Trump supporters see in the photo is entirely different from what we liberals see.

Shortly after Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer walked out of the meeting, Pelosi held a press conference in which she talked about what happened in the meeting. (There’s a video clip from the press conference with Molly Roberts’ column.) Pelosi said, “At that moment, I was probably saying, ‘All roads lead to Putin.'”

To authoritarians, Trump is the Big Man. He is the bully-in-chief, their little God figure who belittles and pushes around all the people that right-wing authoritarians don’t like. He makes little dime-a-dozen authoritarians everywhere believe that he’s making them great again. To authoritarians, the very idea that a woman, any woman, would loom over Donald Trump at the White House cabinet table and tell the Big Man to his face that he is a traitor to the United States of America is highly offensive. If a woman like Nancy Pelosi is not supportive of Donald Trump, then she is supposed to be afraid of him. That’s the way things are supposed to work in the authoritarian utopia that we’re all expected to live in once all those feckless little authoritarians have made America great again.

On the other hand, we liberals don’t give a damn about authority and power. When authority is wrong and wicked, we stand up and say stick it up your nose. When power is corrupt and tells lies, we speak truth to it. Finger-wagging is optional, but standing up to deliver truth to power is essential. It’s the finger-wagging, though, that makes this photo so historic. Trump is being told just how little he really is. Notice how the old men to Trump’s right are hanging their heads, under the bust of Ben Franklin. The photo is perfect. It’s astonishing that an authoritarian mind such as Trump’s can think that the photo makes him look good and Nancy Pelosi look bad.

It wouldn’t hurt to keep in mind that Nancy Pelosi isn’t just anybody. She’s a very rich woman from San Francisco, and right now she is not only the most powerful woman in the country, she’s also the most powerful person in the country (and she knows it). She is third in line to the presidency as the law closes in on both Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Part of what the photo reveals is that the tables have turned. Trump’s weakness and bluster are exposed. Trump is already defeated, though the process for getting him out of the White House and off to prison will take a while longer.

Once Trump is gone, several million of his adoring followers are still going to be with us. It remains to be seen whether right-wing propaganda will try to find a new Trump and keep Trumpsters enraged or whether it will try to win them over to an old and boring standby such as Mitt Romney and a saner kind of politics. If the Republican Party should decide that yet more rage and division best serve its purposes, then we’re going to have millions of Trumpsters in our faces, their gloating turned to fury, some of them wanting civil war. Nancy Pelosi is setting an example. The law and the Constitution are on our side. We do not report to Vladimir Putin. We don’t have to take that sitting down.

Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror. Waller R. Newell, Cambridge University Press, 2016. 254 pages.

The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300. Brian Tierney, Prentice-Hall, 1964. 212 pages.

One book leads to another. While reading Nigel Tranter’s historical novel Sword of State, set in Scotland in the early 1200’s, one thing that struck me was the niceness of the Scottish and English kings compared with the nastiness of the pope. The pope (Innocent IV) was constantly trying to lord it over the kings, wanting money, armies, and more power. The pope’s beating-stick was excommunication, and his carrot was get-out-of-hell-free cards. The pope’s representative was forever schlepping back and forth from Rome with some threat or demand or another. The pope also was politically stupid and fell for the conspiracy theories of wicked nobles who hatched plots to pit the pope against the crown in hopes of getting the crown for themselves. As for the armies and the money, the pope needed that for his genocidal holy wars in the “Holy Land.”

Tranter’s fictional account made me wonder whether the 13th Century popes really were that bad. That led me to a classic work on this subject, Brian Tierney’s The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300. Yes, the popes really were that bad.

Part of the beauty of Tierney’s book is that he lets the popes speak for themselves by quoting from the bulls and decrees that the popes were forever cranking out. English translations of medieval church documents are not all that easy to come by, even now — especially the ugly bits. It’s strange, but much of the history of the church remains available only to those who read Latin. Most of those who read Latin — at least so it seems to me — are Catholic historians and theologians, who are happy to tell us about the pretty parts and let the ugly bits remain untranslated on backroom shelves at the older universities. In any case, the popes of the 13th Century were villains who lusted for riches and earthly power. Not only did they claim power over kings, one of them even claimed to own all the riches of the entire material world. If you crossed a pope, he’d consign you to hell, and of course people believed then that popes had the power to do that. The constant conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and Phillip IV of France was particularly vicious. Both were tyrants, and eventually they pretty much destroyed each other. Tyrant or not, I found myself cheering for Phillip IV. And frankly, I think we should be grateful to every king who ever told a pope to kiss his ass, including Henry VIII of England. Henry was a tyrant, but at least he freed England, early on, from the tyranny of Rome (if not from the soon-to-come Puritan Cromwell and the Reformation).

I considered reading more about this war between kings and popes in the 13th Century, but I realized that what I was really interested in was the history of tyrants. That led me to a quite new book on this subject, Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror.

Newell is skeptical of the idea that there is an arc of history that bends toward justice. His evidence is stark enough. That’s that some of the worst and most murderous tyrants in history are from the 20th Century. Newell describes three categories of tyrants: garden variety tyrants, who exploit a country for their own fun and profit; reforming tyrants, who often use their tyranny to do some good; and “millenarian” tyrants, who have some kind of mystical vision of a heaven on earth that can be achieved only by terror and genocide. As examples of reforming tyrants, think of Alexander the Great, or some of Rome’s emperors. The millenarian tyrant, Newell believes, did not exist until relatively recently. Robespierre was the first, followed by Stalin, Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Pol Pot.

Wikipedia’s definition of millenarian is: “the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which ‘all things will be changed.'” In our time, millenarianism has particularly close connections to Christianity.

Newell’s book was published in 2016, too early for Trump. But Newell has a great deal to say about Vladimir Putin, whom he describes as a “reformer and kleptocrat with a dash of the millenarian.” Among Putin’s worst deeds, Newell cites Putin’s treatment of Ukraine. I Googled to try to discover what Newell thinks of Trump, and all I found was this article from 2016, before Trump even took office. Newell writes that, though Trump is a demogogue “who mirrors the worst qualities of the mob,” Trump is not a fascist, as Robert Kagan had argued in the Washington Post. Newell’s point is that it’s wrong to compare Trump with a Hitler or a Stalin, who were responsible for the deaths of millions. Fair enough.

If you asked me, I would say that Trump is a garden variety tyrant. Trump is a kleptocrat, in it for the money and power and the pleasure of dominating others. Trump is far too stupid and idea-free to have any interest in reform. And though many of Trump’s base (evangelicals who think that Trump was sent by God, for example) are millenarians, Trump is just too petty, lazy, and self-absorbed to be a dreamer or utopian.

Speaking of Trump, I have been as absorbed in the slow train wreck of Trump’s destruction as I’m sure the rest of you have. I haven’t posted about Trump for more than a week because events are moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. Plus, I think that the media (that excludes Fox News, of course) are getting things about right. Impeachment has become a media circus, a roadside crash from which we can’t avert our eyes, just like Trump’s campaign in 2016. Trump rode the media circus up back then, and now the media circus will ride Trump all the way down. There’s a sick justice in that. Television ratings enabled his rise, and now television ratings will drive the exposure of his crimes and the spectacle of his fall.

Though I admit that I am enjoying the Schadenfreude of watching Trump supporters’ taunting and gloating turn into panic and rage, I’m also trying not to gloat — not yet, anyway. I believe that Nancy Pelosi was right to say that impeachment should be respectful, solemn, and worthy of the Constitution. Not until that process is done, and the last helicopter comes to carry Trump away, can we break out the champagne and ring the church bells.

The next book I’m reading is coming in the mail today. The book is This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, by Peter Pomerantsev. Pomerantsev had an important op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday. The article is “Rudy Giuliani Welcomes You To Eastern Europe: So much about the Trump administration seems pulled from the playbook of a post-Soviet kleptocracy.” I have long been a student of propaganda, always interested in reverse-compiling propaganda to try to work out whose purpose, and what purpose, it serves. In the 1970s, I spent hours listening to propaganda on shortwave radio, including Radio Moscow. The state of the art in deception and propaganda had passed from Hitler’s Germany to the Soviet Union. But something fundamental has changed between the Soviet era and the Putin era. Pomerantsev puts his finger on it. Once upon a time, propaganda contained ideas, and its purpose was to persuade. The new state of the art in propaganda is not about persuasion. It’s about keeping us confused — so confused that we give up on the idea of objective truth. This perverts the media and paralyzes the work of democracy.

As I have said here before, it’s no longer regarded as “serious” to use the word propaganda. As an academic friend said recently in an email, “We’re not allowed to study or discuss propaganda.” It is bold for Pomerantsev to even use the word propaganda in the New York Times. As I see it, we are all swept up in a world war of propaganda (Pomerantsev calls it information warfare), but for some reason we’re not supposed to talk about it. I believe this is because our mainstream media remains stuck in dangerous journalistic ethic that requires it to repeat lies in the name of fairness and balance. This ethic is at last being challenged. Jennifer Rubin wrote about it yesterday in the Washington Post: “The media figured it out, just in the nick of time.” That’s also what we saw on Meet the Press last Sunday, when Chuck Todd berated Sen. Ron Johnson because Johnson wouldn’t answer a question and instead kept repeating “Fox News conspiracy propaganda stuff.” Note that Todd also used the forbidden word propaganda.

I remain optimistic that, when the dust settles, Donald Trump will be in prison, the deplorables will go off and sulk in their stinky corners rather than gloating in our faces, and the media will have learned a lesson about letting liars get away with lying. But we need to buckle up, because we’re not there yet.

I’ll have a review of Pomerantsev’s book soon.

Update:

Before I leave the subject of Trump and tyranny, we should remind ourselves of a point that is a little outside the scope of Newell’s book. That’s that tyrants — especially tyrants of the millenarian sort — appeal to a frighteningly large portion of the population. Tyrants depend on these people for their political support and for getting the dirty work done. Both Stalin and Hitler were widely popular, as is Donald Trump.

The history of meanness and the history of tyrants really are the same. The photo below was taken in a lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963. You can be pretty sure that those white teenagers in the photo are now old white Republicans who have hitched their meanness to Trump’s tyranny.

It is not surprising that, the morning after Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of formal impeachment against Donald Trump, the blither-blather in the media is all about politics. Impeachment certainly has political consequences. But must we agree that the impeachment process as specified in the Constitution is inherently a political rather than a legal process? To make that claim is tantamount to saying that facts and the law don’t really matter, that only the polls matter, or how senators would vote if the House sends impeachment to the Senate.

Nancy Pelosi’s short statement yesterday was a masterpiece. Clearly she was speaking to history, focused on the law, the evidence, and the Constitution. No doubt Nancy Pelosi has done, and is doing, plenty of political calculus. But politics is secondary. Regardless of the political consequences, Donald Trump must be taken down because he is a dangerous criminal whose goal is to turn the American democracy into a Russia, with Donald Trump as the American Putin. Even if bringing Trump to justice is somehow politically damaging to the Democratic Party, as some of the blither-blather predicts (I disagree), then impeachment must be done anyway. As Nancy Pelosi said, no one is above the law.

One of the factors that makes this morning’s blither-blather ridiculous is the assumption that the impeachment investigation in the House of Representatives won’t uncover and prove the facts of Trump’s crimes. It will. Those facts will be devastating to Trump and will horrify the American people, with the exception, of course, of the 22 percent or so (the “base”) that will unquestioningly follow Trump all the way to hell.

Regular readers here know that my expectation for a long time has been that Donald Trump is going to prison and that he is not likely to even finish his term, let alone run again in 2020. I hold that view simply because Trump has committed so many crimes in so many jurisdictions. His being installed in the White House surrounded by goons gives him many ways to throw sand into the machinery of investigation and justice. Part of his strategy is to posture as such a Big Man that the law and mere snowflakes in the Democratic Party can’t touch him. But Trump will be brought to justice, and he will go to prison. If he doesn’t, then the American democracy and the rule of law will have been defeated. We will have become Russia. But I don’t believe that will happen.

You can be certain that the Republican Party is doing political calculus. For example, yesterday the U.S. Senate was very quick to hold a 100-0 vote on a resolution calling for the release of the whistleblower report to Congress. That was a warning to Trump about how quickly the Republican Party will turn on him, when that becomes necessary. It will become necessary when Republican political calculus sees that Trump is going down and that Trump must be thrown under the bus to try to salvage the 2020 election. My expectation continues to be that Trump will resign sometime before March 2020, when the first state primaries will be held. An earlier resignation would benefit the Republican Party, because states with early primaries have filing deadlines in late 2019. The Republican Party has repeatedly shown that party power is all that matters. The moment Republicans determine that Trump is a loser, they will turn on him. The Republican Party will do everything it can to avoid chaos in fielding a new candidate for 2020 after Trump goes down.

Yes, Trump will be looking for some kind of deal in exchange for resignation. But no deal will keep him out of prison, because his crimes in New York State cannot be pardoned or bargained away. Trump’s dream, of course, is a criminal dynasty with Ivanka or Junior up next. But they’re going to prison, too.

I am not claiming to have a crystal ball. I hold the views I hold because I believe that the law is much bigger than Donald Trump, because many of his crimes have already been exposed (if not yet proven and displayed to the American people) and are sufficient to keep him in prison for the rest of his life, and because I see Nixon’s resignation as a template for what the Republican Party will do upon concluding that Trump is doomed.

To qualify for a concealed carry permit in my state, one must get 21 of 30 shots inside the “7” line. That’s not difficult, frankly. The green lines show how my 30 shots were clustered during my shooting trial. Only two of my shots were in the “9” area, and the others were much closer to the bullseye. I tend to shoot slightly to the left because the sights on my gun need adjusting. But I think it would be fair to say that I’m a liberal sharpshooter. Click here for high-resolution version.

For us liberals, guns are a touchy subject. I even hesitate to write here about guns, partly because I know that Europeans see the gun question in a different way than we Americans. I wish that we Americans were more like Europeans in our attitudes toward guns. But, here in the U.S., it’s not just me. There is evidence that American liberals are rethinking the question of guns for their own self-defense. It’s not hard to imagine why. I’m not saying that this is a good thing. I’m only observing that it seems to be happening, and that I’ve gotten on board, though with some doubts and worries.

There have been a number of articles about this recently, including this one at the Guardian: ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms.

While Obama was president, right-wingers rushed to buy guns, having been convinced by the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association that Democrats would take their guns away. The “prepper” market also flourished, because racist right-wingers naturally assumed that a black man in the White House could only cause a collapse of society. After Trump took office, gun sales slumped, either because Trump makes his supporters feel safe, or because gun-lovers weren’t as afraid that Democrats would take their guns away. After Trump, the bottom fell out of the prepper market. Right-wingers feel all cuddly and hunky-dory with a criminal lunatic in the White House who incites his supporters to violence. The rest of us don’t.

Among liberals and leftists, new groups are forming. Among them are the Socialist Rifle Association, the Liberal Gun Club, the John Brown Gun Club, and an LGBTQ group, the Pink Panthers.

Though I have owned a pistol for about ten years, it mostly sat in a drawer, unused. A few months ago, with the encouragement of Republican neighbors (with whom I get along great because we focus on our own neighborhood and don’t talk politics), I resolved to get proper training for shooting and to get a concealed carry permit. These neighbors have made a shooting range down in the woods where the road ends. I practiced my shooting for three months and shot several thousand rounds of ammunition to prepare for the concealed-carry process. I learned to shoot a rifle when I was a boy (I was taught by my dad and my older brother). I was a good shot then. I’m even better now, with both rifles and pistols.

My state, North Carolina, has tough requirements for getting a concealed carry permit. You must attend eight hours of safety and legal training, pass a shooting test, go through a background check and mental health check through the State Bureau of Investigation, and have your fingerprints taken. People with shady intentions are not going to apply for concealed carry permits. If you ever do lawfully use a gun to defend yourself (that’s much more rare than gun-lovers would have us believe), then holding a concealed carry permit is the best possible way to demonstrate that you are a responsible gun owner and that you are competent to use a gun.

I did put a lot of thought into the decision, including talking with some of my liberal friends about the ethics involved (they all said go for it), and getting advice from conservative friends who already hold concealed carry permits. I also learned that people who hold concealed carry permits are five to seven times less likely than the general population to be involved in gun crimes.

At this point, I have no plans to carry a concealed weapon. But I like knowing that I could, should I ever feel the need. Am I afraid that right-wing militias will start targeting liberals? No, not at all, though I can imagine a dystopian future, if as a country we don’t have a change of course. In rural areas, the greatest dangers are associated with drug use, drug dealing, and the crime that involves.

Part of my motivation is public relations. I want the local Republican Party to know that the local Democratic chair has a concealed carry permit. That serves two purposes. For one, it lets them know that the Democratic Party is aware of the Second Amendment and is not going to take their guns away, no matter what the NRA says in order to stimulate gun sales and stoke right-wing paranoia. For two, it gets the word out that I may be armed, that I am a crack shot, and that I’m not to be messed with. Crimes against Democrats and liberals in this county have not risen above the level of insults and defacement of our roadside political signs (which is very common). There are a lot of guns in this county, and the vast majority of gun owners are law-abiding and responsible, whatever their politics. We have an excellent sheriff and sheriff’s department.

There are people who carry guns with them illegally. I consider that very dangerous. A month or so ago, there was a story in the news about a woman somewhere in North Carolina who, while putting a pistol into her purse, accidentally shot herself and died. Proper training in gun safety should prevent that sort of thing. It’s highly likely that her pistol was either old or poorly designed, or that she was storing it in an unsafe condition. I would never under any circumstances have a gun near me that is ready to fire. How to safely store a gun is part of what one learns in a concealed carry class. For those who do have a pistol and carry it illegally, I would say: Don’t do that. Get a permit. Carrying illegally exposes oneself and others to risk, not only safety risks, but also legal risks.

I have decided not to join any organization for liberal gun owners. That’s not because I think such organizations are a bad thing, but because all of them seem to have some kind of manifesto that I don’t necessarily agree with. I’m also not suggesting that anyone ought to get a gun. But I am saying that anyone who does have a gun should be trained in how to use it and should know and honor the regulations that apply in the state you live in. And though I do not believe that more guns make us all safer, I do believe that we have a natural right to defend ourselves and others.

It is rare to be an observer at an important event and then to see how the media report on it. I watched the Mueller hearings yesterday, as well as the Democrats’ press conference afterwards. What I saw was not what the media are reporting — at all.

What I saw was a dignified and meticulous accounting of a vast array of damning evidence against Donald Trump. What the media saw was a “flop” and a “fizzle” and “such bad TV” (Politico). The Washington Post wrote, “The Mueller testimony didn’t deliver the spark the Democrats wanted. That puts the onus on House leaders and heightens the stakes for next year’s presidential election.” The New York Times wrote, “For all the dismal reviews of his performance, the day did not end talk of impeachment.”

I learned many things during my years in the newspaper business. For one, I learned that reporters are not the smartest people in the world. They tend to be dim bulbs for thinking in terms of ethics and principle. But in matters of perception and reaction, they are perceptive. They also are a blind herd. They come together as a herd very swiftly to align their narratives, and once they all begin reporting essentially the same thing, they cannot imagine that they might be wrong. Remember the Iraq war?

Our media also have become addicted to spectacle. In many ways, we owe Donald Trump for that. A more ethical, more principled, and more thoughtful media would reject spectacle and focus on substance. Notice the unconsciousness in the words of the New York Times: “dismal reviews,” which reveals more than they mean to reveal about how they evaluated the Mueller hearings. Politico was more conscious of the low standard they were applying, the circus standard: “such bad TV.”

Once again, our mainstream media have become a clueless herd, as when they caught war fever and helped Bush and Cheney deceive the nation into war. Now our mainstream media have caught Trump fever, and we can’t hold Trump accountable for his crimes because it might make bad TV.

A friend sent me a quote from Twitter. I am unable to identify the source, but the quote is spot on: “Who can forget when a flood of Americans responded to the election of a racist wannabe authoritarian by backing the New York Times so it could tell us that the author of the most damning indictment of a president in our history wasn’t good enough on TV.”

As a young editor, I was given special training in media law, and, along with it, responsibility for holding the line against sloppy reporting that could get us sued. I have often said that, to do that, you don’t really need to be able to cite case law such as New York Times v. Sullivan. Rather, you only have to apply some ethical principles, to use the words of a wise old editor I once worked for: Be fair, and don’t lie. I have sometimes walked a story back to a reporter, pointed to a particular passage, and asked: “Is this fair?” Inevitably I would get a blank look. Most reporters don’t think that way. They just write what the rest of the herd is writing.

Was Mueller slow and halting yesterday? Yes he was. He was trying very hard not to make any errors. He knew quite well that many questions would try to lead him to say more than he could say, based on principle, the law, and the authority that was given to him. I also believe that he might have a hearing problem, and that because of noise in the room and his distance from the questioners, he often had to ask for clarification to make sure that he had heard correctly. He wrote the report, but does that mean that we expect him to have it memorized?

Our media long ago stopped caring about Trump’s obvious stupidity, which Trump puts on display for us every day. But a careful slowness on Mueller’s part is big news — “halting and faltering,” according to the Washington Post. The questions from Democrats were meticulously aligned with fact and law. Democrats treated Mueller with great respect, and they also got the answers that they expected and wanted. But the media couldn’t care less, because it “lacked the dramatic moment” (New York Times) that Democrats were assumed to have wanted. That Republicans lied and bullied and demeaned Mueller is not even being reported, based on what I’ve read this morning. Lying and bullying by Republicans is no longer news. It’s just the new normal.

During the Iraq war, I watched virtually the entire newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle catch war fever. The same thing happened in almost every newsroom in America, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. (The McClatchy Washington bureau was the only news organization that did not succumb to war fever.) Once a news person succumbs to one of these psychic epidemics, I have found that it is impossible to get through to them. It was years before most people in the media were able to awake from their madness, admit that the war was a disaster, admit that we had been lied into the war, and admit that the media were grossly guilty of being complicit in misleading the U.S. into war, that the media had been duped and played. As I said above, reporters are not the smartest people in the world.

Once again, we are in a state of media madness. The media have now normalized Trump to such a degree that sober, rational Democrats in House committees leading us through evidence and law is weird, because it’s not a circus. Everyone wants a circus now — except those of us who want to be well governed. I commend the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. History, at least, will be able to see what they did yesterday to try to save us.

I am ashamed of our media. And I am terrified that some very bad things are going to have to happen before we awaken from this mass psychosis.

Update: As pundits and the media continue to blindly expose themselves as fools today, at least one piece gets it right — Lillian Rubin in the Washington Post. The piece is “Mueller didn’t fail, the country did,” and a link is below.

I am increasingly proud of the Democrats in Congress, who displayed yesterday the concern for reason, fairness, and equal justice that are among the defining characteristics of liberals. Those characteristics also happen to be among the founding values of our democracy. The media, having taken leave of its collective mind, somehow expected the Democratic Party to behave toward Donald Trump yesterday the same way that the Republican Party behaved toward the Clintons, including with the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Whereas Republicans yesterday put on full display their reliance on distortion, their contempt for law and process, their sheer meanness, and their willingness to embrace and protect criminality and corruption to preserve their power, Democrats showed that we remember who we are and that we remember and respect what America is supposed to be about.

As I have said here before, Republicans who support Trump have lost all claim to being considered decent human beings. They proved that yesterday. Who knows how long justice will take. But at least we liberals showed yesterday that we are not like them.

Mueller didn’t fail. The country did.

Twitter, Christine Pelosi

“I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison.”

A lot of people who want justice for Donald Trump have been grumbling about Nancy Pelosi, because Pelosi seems to be dragging her feet on impeachment. However, I don’t see anything to grumble about. A lot of politics is tactical and scripted. My interpretation of Pelosi’s tactics is that she wants a widespread, bottom-up outcry for impeachment. The more she seems to be resisting impeachment, the harder she is pushed. That’s exactly what she wants. She wants history to record that, as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, she brought justice to the most dangerous and most criminal president in history.

This morning, in Politico, Pelosi revealed — and I believe she is serious — what she really has in mind for Trump: prison.

The Politico article is Pelosi tells Dems she wants to see Trump in prison.

Republicans just naturally assume that because Republicans try to inflict political damage on Democrats with endless witch-hunt investigations, that that’s what Democrats are doing. Republicans, as usual, are delusional. The difference is that Republicans never had anything on Hillary Clinton, and the investigators knew it, even if the ignorati didn’t. Lock-her-up Republicans are quick to gloat, but slow to learn. Whereas Trump is not just a criminal, he’s a crime lord who must be held responsible for a long list of state and federal crimes — financial crimes, tax crimes, obstruction, conspiracy, and, in my opinion, treason. His financial crimes aren’t just about real estate. Trump also is deeply and criminally involved in the financial crimes of the global billionaire oligarchy, to whom he clearly owes dirty money, and lots of it.

Nancy Pelosi, we should keep in mind, has access to more information about what’s going on behind the scenes than any Democrat in the country. Her strategy, I believe, is to first politically destroy Trump by exposing Trump’s criminality in televised House hearings. She has about nine months to do that, because Trump must be politically destroyed before next year’s presidential primaries, so that the Republican Party can pick another candidate. I continue to believe that the odds are close to zip that Trump will be around to run for a second term. Rather, I think Trump will resign once 60 percent or more of the American population see his criminality, and once the Republican Party sees that Trump is doomed and turns on him. Trump will try to cut a deal for his resignation. But even if Trump manages to evade prosecution for his federal crimes, New York State has enough on him to lock him up for the rest of his miserable life.

Nancy Pelosi does not need to bluff, because she has more power here than Trump does, and she knows it. Trump, propped up by Republican propaganda and by stooges (such as William Barr) in key positions, has enough power to slow things down and to throw sand in the works, but ultimately it’s Trump’s criminal guilt that will take away all his power and ensure his doom. Pelosi’s task is that she must expose Trump’s crimes for all to see, on television. She has everything she needs to do that. She has the power of Congress, and the law, behind her. State law — not only in New York but probably also in other states — are a backstop against Republican dirty tricks and presidential pardons.

When Nancy Pelosi used the word “prison” yesterday, she knew exactly what she was saying and what she was doing. Now we get to watch as she plays her hand.

Update: Jennifer Rubin, at the Washington Post, drawing on another article by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, describes an actual legal structure for what Nancy Pelosi may have in mind. The article is, Forget impeachment. Tee up prosecution.

Part of the argument is that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has already prejudged the case for impeachment. Republicans would look the other way and blame Democrats no matter what Trump has done. So, by this kind of road map, the House would investigate Trump’s crimes, concluding with a resolution referring the case and all the evidence to prosecutors as soon as Trump is out of office.

That sounds like a plan to me.