The Commentariat -- August 20, 2018

Late Morning Update:

Jordan Fabian of the Hill: "President Trump on Monday dared former CIA Director John Brennan to sue him over his decision to revoke his security clearance. In a tweet, Trump [wrote,] "I hope John Brennan, the worst CIA Director in our country's history, brings a lawsuit. It will then be very easy to get all of his records, texts, emails and documents to show not only the poor job he did, bu how he was involved with the Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt. He won't sue!"

Caitlin Oprysko of Politico: "... Donald Trump tweeted Monday to ask why his attorney general had not fired a Justice Department official with ties to the firm behind a dossier alleging connections between Trump and Russia. 'Will Bruce Ohr, whose family received big money for helping to create the phony, dirty and discredited Dossier, ever be fired from the Jeff Sessions "Justice" Department? A total joke!' Trump wrote. It was the closest Trump had come to calling directly for Ohr, whose wife was a contractor for Fusion GPS, to lose his job. Ohr, who was demoted earlier this year, has come under fire from conservatives and now Trump over his connection to Fusion GPS."

John Wagner of the Washington Post: "President Trump on Monday referred to lawyers working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as 'thugs' and accused them of trying to affect this year's elections, further ramping up his rhetoric against prosecutors probing Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In morning tweets, Trump called Mueller 'disgraced and discredited' and said his team of prosecutors is 'a National Disgrace!' The tweets were the latest in a spate of complaints in recent days from the president about a probe into whether his campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 election and whether Trump has sought to obstruct the investigation. In Monday's outburst, Trump continued to attack a New York Times report over the weekend that White House lawyer Donald McGahn had participated in at least three interviews with Mueller's team that spanned 30 hours." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: One would think that a president* who had been on vacation for a couple of weeks would find some work to do when he showed up at the Oval on Monday. Apparently not.

If you want to know one of the many reasons Trump is such a lousy president*, see Akhilleus's sports analogy in today's Comments.

Maegan Vazquez of CNN: "Rudy Giuliani on Monday attempted to clarify his weekend remark that 'truth isn't truth' as part of his explanation for why he doesn't believe that ... Donald Trump should testify with special counsel Robert Mueller. 'My statement was not meant as a pontification on moral theology but one referring to the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements, the classic "he said,she said" puzzle. Sometimes further inquiry can reveal the truth other times it doesn't,' tweeted Giuliani...."

Chuck Todd, et al., of NBC News list the various lies Team Trump has told about the Trump Tower meeting.

*****

This Russia Thing, Etc., Ctd.

The McGahn Saga, Part 2. Helter-Skelter. Maggie Haberman & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "President Trump's lawyers do not know just how much the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, told the special counsel's investigators during months of interviews, a lapse that has contributed to a growing recognition that an early strategy of full cooperation with the inquiry was a potentially damaging mistake.... Mr. Trump's lawyers realized on Saturday that they had not been provided a full accounting after The New York Times published an article [also linked here yesterday] describing Mr. McGahn's extensive cooperation with Mr. Mueller's office.... The article set off a scramble on Saturday among Mr. Trump's lawyers and advisers. The president, sequestered at his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J., solicited opinions from a small group of advisers on the possible repercussions from the article. The president ordered Mr. Giuliani to tell reporters that the article was wrong, but Mr. Giuliani did not go that far in his television appearances.... Legal experts and former White House counsels said the president's lawyers had been careless in not asking Mr. McGahn what he had planned to tell Mr. Mueller's prosecutors. The experts said Mr. Trump's lawyers had the right to know the full extent of what Mr. McGahn was going to say." Oh, read on; it's delicious. ...

... Trump Mad at Maggie & Mike. David Nakamura of the Washington Post: "President Trump reacted angrily Sunday to a new report that the White House counsel has cooperated extensively in the Russia investigation without Trump's full knowledge, calling it a 'Fake Story' and comparing the probe to McCarthyism.In a series of tweets, the president lashed out at a New York Times report that White House lawyer Donald McGahn had participated in at least three interviews with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that spanned 30 hours." Mrs. McC: Best way to get under Trump's skin: expose his ignorance & stupidity, as the NYT story does. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Julian Zelizer of the Atlantic: "Reacting to The New York Times' story that White House Counsel Don McGahn has been speaking with Robert Mueller’s team..., Donald Trump tweeted out that McGahn is not a 'John Dean type "RAT,"' and that the story was 'fake news.' It's odd that Trump should bring up John Dean this weekend, for it was only this week that we also learned Trump has an Enemies List, just like Richard Nixon did. Unlike Nixon, though, the president is hiding nothing -- using security clearances and his Twitter account as the chief weapons to go after his opponents.... In the early 1970s, the president and his advisers assumed that doing any of this out in the open would be devastating. There was still a sense of norms that restrained an administration from publicly abusing its power in this way.... The list made it into Article II of the impeachment charges drawn up against Nixon[.]... Trump is trying to create the same kind of toxic atmosphere that Nixon produced. His explicit goal is to silence opponents and to discredit them in the public eye. If this becomes acceptable, the next steps might be even worse." More on Dean below.

     ... digby: "I wonder if people remember that Don McGahn made his bones defending Tom DeLay in a major Russian money scandal in the late 90s? He did[.]... This scandal was obscured at the time by the much more important investigation into Bill Clinton's pants. Here's the full story of DeLay's Russia money scandal. Let's just say that Don McGahn had some very special experience in dealing with Russian money being funneled into Republican campaigns."

... Rudy Deconstructs Reality -- So Derrida! Rebecca Morin & David Cohen of Politico: "... Rudy Giuliani on Sunday claimed 'truth isn't truth' when trying to explain why the president should not testify for special counsel Robert Mueller.... 'When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well that's so silly because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth,' Giuliani told Chuck Todd on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday morning. 'Truth is truth,' Todd responded. 'No, no, it isn't truth,' Giuliani said. 'Truth isn't truth. The President of the United States says, "I didn't ..."' A startled Todd answered: 'Truth isn't truth?' Giuliani: 'No, no, no.' Todd said: 'This is going to become a bad meme.'... Last week on CNN, he rejected Chris Cuomo's assertion that 'facts are not in the eye of the beholder.' 'Yes, they are,' Giuliani said. 'Nowadays they are.' In May, the former New York mayor pursued a similar line of thought in an interview with the Washington Post about the Mueller investigation: 'They may have a different version of the truth than we do.'" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Benjamin Hart of New York: "Alert: another half-chilling, half-laughable Trump administration mantra is ready to add to the trophy case, in the space just beside 'Alternative Facts' and 'What You're Seeing...Is Not What's Happening.'... Todd's wry prediction was, of course, immediately proven right. In the other noteworthy section of his interview, Giuliani once again changed the Trump administration's line on its fateful meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in 2016. He now claims, confusingly, that the sitdown was all about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton (not adoptions after all!), but that Trump officials had no idea that actual Russians would be involved (which is definitely not true). But then, what is truth, when you really think about it?" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Mrs. McCrabbie: Trumpbots are very good at magical thinking when it comes to religion, but I don't think that makes them ready for the deconstruction of conceptual systems. Just the opposite. Trumpbots deal in absolutes -- like there absolutely is a God & heaven has a lot of kitchen appliances. I don't think "Truth Isn't Truth" will go over well. Although as one wag -- Pat Shipp -- pointed out (Hart linked the Twitter feed), "I can see it now. 'TiT' hats. That ought to help capture females votes!" ...

... BUT. Steve M.: "In the eyes of the right, everyone connected to the Russia investigation is a liar. To them, it's obvious that Trump will tell the 100% scout's-honor truth if he ever testifies, and Mueller will twist it into a lie because he's pure evil, as are all his Deep State friends and associates. To right-wingers, the entire investigation is an exercise i bad faith (and a projection of guilt on the part of the Clinton campaign and the Justice Department, who are the true colluders with Russia). So, to the right, of course 'truth isn't truth,' because the people deciding what truth is are evil Democrat liars."

MEANWHILE. William Rashbaum, et al., of the New York Times: "Federal authorities investigating whether President Trump's former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, committed bank and tax fraud have zeroed in on well over $20 million in loans obtained by taxi businesses that he and his family own, according to people familiar with the matter. Investigators are also examining whether Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance or other laws by helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. The inquiry has entered the final stage and prosecutors are considering filing charges by the end of August, two of the people said.... A cooperation agreement [between Cohen & prosecutors] would likely include a provision that Mr. Cohen also provide information to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III...." ...

... Daniel Lippman of Politico: "Lanny Davis, an attorney for ... Michael Cohen, said he has been reaching out regularly over the past few months to John Dean, the former White House counsel who helped bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon. Cohen has sent signals that he might cooperate in the investigations surrounding his former boss. The fact that his lawyer is talking frequently to Dean -- who was name-checked by Trump on Sunday in the context of recent reports that White House counsel Don McGahn is cooperating with investigators -- adds new hints that Cohen could be open to being a potential witness in any case against Trump."

Quinn Scanlan of ABC News: "... Donald Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton floated the possibility of reviewing longstanding policy of maintaining security clearances of former government officials." In an ABC News interview, Bolton implied John Brennan abused his security clearance, but when ABC's Martha Raddatz pressed him, he could not cite any examples of Brennan doing so. Bolton maintained his own security clearance when he was on a corporate board & was a Fox "News" contributor. Bolton implied he used his clearance to obtain classified information for the company, which did classified contract work. IOKIYAR. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Felicia Sonmez & Carol Morello of the Washington Post: "Former CIA director John O. Brennan said Sunday that he is willing to take President Trump to court to prevent other current and former officials from having their security clearances revoked escalating a battle over whether the president is misusing the power of his office to retaliate against opponents. 'I am going to do whatever I can personally to try to prevent these abuses in the future, and if it means going to court, I will do that,' Brennan said ... on NBC News's 'Meet the Press.'" ...

... Maegan Vazquez of CNN: "Former CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said Sunday that he'd be fine with having his security clearance revoked, as ... Donald Trump threatened to do to him and other former intelligence officials who have been critical of the President.... Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper if he too would be honored to lose his security clearance, Hayden said, 'Well, to be included in that group? Sure.... John [Brennan]'s situation is a proximate cause for all of us signing letters and protesting,' he continued. 'I think it's kind of one additional straw that's breaking the camel's back. Our complaint is not just about this. It's about the whole tone, tenor, and behavior of the administration.'"

"Slouching toward Autocracy." E.J. Dionne: "The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin's phrase 'enemies of the people' to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump's effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian's habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giuliani blurted out ... Sunday: 'Truth isn't truth.' This is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career-ending."

Not sure if this is the same photo Heffernan saw, but it is Mueller & Kerry suited up in their St. Paul's hockey uniforms.Virginia Heffernan in the Los Angeles Times: "A black-and-white photograph from 1962 shows special counsel Robert S. Mueller III when he was a student at the [very toney] St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H. It's a hockey-team photo.... One of those smug boarding-school elites..., muscular little barons on ice who become Republicans and Purple Hearts and FBI counter-terrorism experts. Everyone they know from childhood becomes a senator -- oh look, former Secretary of State John F. Kerry is to Mueller's left in the hockey photo.... I hated the classic man-of-honor stuff. I hated it until, around autumn of 2016, it became gravely endangered.... must admit that I don't begrudge [Mueller] his maleness and privilege anymore.... Right now, American institutions are occupied by pretenders who may yet devastate them. We need white men like Mueller who speak without irony of justice and honor and the Marine Corps." ...

     ... Mrs. Bea McCrabbie: I do get where Heffernan is coming from; I've occasionally felt the same resentment myself, but probably only when one of these patricians acts like a jackass. The truth is that the "values" pushed at elite schools are older than Greek civilization & have been restated, in similar form, in almost every culture. There is little difference between chivalric "virtues" & those we admire today. What separates the men and women from the Trumps is that we try to adhere to these high cultural norms while the Trumps either never learned them or prefer to flout them.

Another Trump Fox "Guarding" Henhouse. Eric Lipton of the New York Times: "As a corporate lawyer, William L. Wehrum worked for the better part of a decade to weaken air pollution rules by fighting the Environmental Protection Agency in court on behalf of chemical manufacturers, refineries, oil drillers and coal-burning power plants. Now, Mr. Wehrum is about to deliver one of the biggest victories yet for his industry clients -- this time from inside the Trump administration as the government's top air pollution official. On Tuesday, President Trump is expected to propose a vast rollback of regulations on emissions from coal plants, including many owned by members of a coal-burning trade association that had retained Mr. Wehrum and his firm as recently as last year to push for the changes." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

All the Best People, Ctd. Robert Costa of the Washington Post: "A White House speechwriter for President Trump was terminated last week after revelations that he had spoken at a conference attended by well-known white nationalists, according to three people familiar with the decision who were not authorized to speak publicly. Darren Beattie, who was a visiting instructor at Duke University before he joined the White House speechwriting team, was fired Friday after a media inquiry about his appearance at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference, where Beattie spoke on a panel alongside Peter Brimelow. Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigrant website Vdare.com, is a white nationalist' and 'regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right,' according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.... CNN's KFile ... published a report Sunday on Beattie and his appearance at the Mencken event.... Once White House officials were informed about CNN's pending report, Beattie reportedly was confronted and urged to step down immediately. But he apparently refused to resign..., [so] the White House terminated him." ...

... Andrew Kaczynski's report for CNN is here.

Andy Kroll of Rolling Stone: "Over the past two decades -- including five years serving on the Federal Election Commission -- [Don] McGahn has become an ideological warrior battling what he sees as the tyranny of the federal government.... Trump rewarded McGahn with the job of White House counsel, a perch from which McGahn has spearheaded the administration's unprecedented campaign to reshape the American judicial system, filling courts with judges who share Trump's goals of dismantling environmental protection, rolling back civil and reproductive rights, and gutting labor laws.... 'These efforts to reform the regulatory state begin with Congress and the executive branch,' McGahn said in his speech, 'but they ultimately depend on courts.'... As of this writing, Trump has put 26 new judges onto the appellate courts, more than any other chief executive at this point in the presidency. He has also nominated over 100 district-court judges and gotten 26 of those picks confirmed.... McGahn, [Leonard] Leo [of the Federalist Society] and Republican leaders including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have steadily filled the courts with future Clarence Thomases and Antonin Scalias."

Susan Ferriss of the Center for Public Integrity: "What allegedly happened [to school counsellor Tameika Lovell when U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers detained her at Kennedy Airport] is outlined in a harrowing civil lawsuit Lovell filled in March in federal court. And the assertions aren’t unique, based on allegations in similar suits filed not just in New York but also in California, Arizona, Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania.... Lovell's lawsuit -- and 10 others since 2011 reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity -- raise timely and unsettling questions about how far border and other immigration officers can go with their considerable power to detain people at the nation's 328 ports of entry.... In these suits, innocent women -- including minor girls -- who were not found with any contraband say CBP officers subjected them to harsh interrogation that led to indignities that included unreasonable strip searches while menstruating to prohibited genital probing. Some women were also handcuffed and transported to hospitals where, against their will, they underwent pelvic exams, X-rays and in one case, drugging via IV, according to suits. Invasive medical procedures require a detainee's consent or a warrant. In two cases, women were billed for procedures." This article also appeared in the Washington Post.

Heather Richardson in the New Republic: Democrats -- led by women -- are finally starting to espouse a "new narrative" by redefining "patriotism" as a construct "built around service, community, and family loyalty."

Jennifer Bendery of the Huffington Post: "Four months after abruptly quitting Congress amid a sexual harassment scandal, former Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) still doesn't think he did anything wrong. In fact, the former GOP lawmaker says he 'took a bullet for the team' by resigning. He insists he's right not to repay $84,000 in taxpayer money he spent on a sexual harassment settlement. He ripped the House Ethics Committee for not caring about facts. And he blames f[uck]tards' and the Me Too movement for driving him out of a job.... And that's just a sample ofFarenthold's comments in an Aug. 1 deposition he gave in a lawsuit over his new job at a Texas port authority.... What's clear is that he blames everyone but himself for his downfall and that his reasons for not repaying the $84,000 are bonkers. You can read 79 pages of his deposition yourself, here...." Mrs. McC: Sadly, I have retired my Pajama Boy photos. I blame fucktards for that decision. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

AP: "Minnesota Democrats are standing behind U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison and his bid for state attorney general, with the state party giving him an endorsement Saturday amid an allegation of domestic abuse from an ex-girlfriend.... Ellison received 326 votes, or 82 percent of delegates on hand at the party's state executive committee meeting Saturday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Chico Harlan of the Washington Post: "Pope Francis said in a letter released Monday by the Vatican that the Catholic Church has not dealt properly with 'crimes' against children and needs to prevent sexual abuses fro being 'covered up and perpetuated.' 'We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them,' Francis wrote. The 2,000-word letter ... marks one of Francis's most direct attempts to address the painful abuse cases that have eroded the Roman Catholic Church's credibility and prompted sharp calls from inside and outside the church for improved accountability. Francis did not lay out any concrete steps the Vatican would take, but he acknowledged that systemic change is needed."

Way Beyond the Beltway

Griff Witte of the Washington Post: In Poland, judges stand up to the Law & Justice party by refusing to apply for positions on the country's supreme court, which the party is attempting to turn into a rubber-stamp.

Comments

[Ken Winkes]

The heltering of skelter:

I would guess the now-lamented strategy of "full cooperation" with Mueller was initiated by the Pretender's initial team of attorneys because the Pretender told them there was absolutely no collusion so he had nothing to hide. Rather than call him a liar, despite all the evidence the Pretender's previous shaky relationship to the truth provided, they took him at his word and acted accordingly.

If so, considering how the "facts have changed" since then, that may turn out to be the Pretender's most damaging lie of all.

I doubt the Pretender's current crop of attorneys even pretend to believe anything he says. Hence the Mueller interview that will never happen and all the talk of perjury traps.

[Marie Burns]

@Ken Winkes. Right. Trump is in danger of falling into a "perjury trap." Apparently he long ago fell into the "compulsive liar's trap." Instead of telling his lawyers the truth about his bad acts so they might adequately represent him, he lied to them about what he did, and they proceeded based on those lies & assurances. A lawyer who knows his client is in legal jeopardy will take a different approach to the matter than will a lawyer who has an "innocent" client.

Trump deprived himself of a competent legal defense, partly because he chose hilariously terrible lawyers, but mostly because he has hilariously terrible lawyers who regularly find out how "over time, facts develop." That's poetic justice.

[Akhilleus]

In her story about the dangerous dearth of decency, responsibility, and discipline in the Trumpy guv’mint, Virginia Heffernan lists a number of basic things that Trump likely has never done, among them, made a bed. I must point out to Ms. Heffernan that this is probably the only responsible thing the little dictator has ever done. In fact, he got a medal for it! A big shiny one with the inscription “Cadet Donnie can really tuck those sheets”. This was while he was prancing around at that military school in his poncy War of 1812 uniform which he seems to think was the same as being in the real military, thus giving him the ability to claim that he is smarter than all the generals.

However it now occurs to me that little donnie probably paid some other kid to make his bed then pocketed the medal. But first had the kid sign an NDA. That’s just his speed.

[Marie Burns]

@Akhilleus: Yes, I caught that bed-making error, too. To me, one of the most curious things about Donald's Excellent Career is that he seems to have disappeared between his days in military school & his emergence as a rent enforcer for his father. With previous presidents & even other merely well-known politicians (like Ted Cruz & Mitt Romney), we heard a great deal about their college years, but all we seem to know about Donnie is that he supposedly went to Fordham & U. Penn & supposedly got a degree from Penn. No anecdotes from classmates who couldn't stand him, no remembrances of boyish fuck-ups. (Oh, wait, here's a story about Candace Bergen, who went on a "very short" date with Trump when they were both at Penn. He showed up in a burgundy suit & burgundy boots & in a burgundy limo -- maybe he thought she was Candace Burgundy, sister of Ron).

[Jeanne]

Okay, now I am going to have to read the story about what the presidunce has never done...I was trying to avoid thinking about what a flaming a-hole he must have been while attempting to be a college student. We all knew people similar to him, but honestly, I bet he was a STAR a-hole and pity the other people who had to matriculate with him. I wonder if he has EVER done one thing to make his mother proud... I wish his golf courses included cliffs over which a golf cart could tip...

[Patrick]

"It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent. I have no further comment."

... saith Mr. Beatty, recently on the WH speech staffel, in Kaczynski CNN story linked above.

Apparently one needs to utter such shibboleths on the way out of DiJiT's lair if one is to be employed by a wingnut welfare "think tank" or other such landing pad.

Insincere persons uttering such words would gag, giving themselves away.

[Marie Burns]

@Patrick: Exactly. That "no further comment" was probably worth about a $150K annual stipend to Mr. White-Supremacist there. Unless you know enough to write a trashy tell-all book & have a flair for TV appearances, a fawning remark is the best employment resume' an ex-Trumpie can have.

[PD Pepe]

The piece above re: the invasive searches by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers is, in a word, shocking! The humiliation and trauma that these women––no men here had to spread their cheeks?––would have long lasting effects. Last year when my son and one of his daughters came for a visit from Germany, the 15 yr. old felt extremely uncomfortable with the body search although it was the normal hand going over the body, not invasive. Yet, those stranger's hands "feeling you up" gave her "the creeps." This procedure by the way had not been experienced in the other years when the whole family came here.

I learned three new things yesterday:

1. Since record/disk stores have closed their doors musicians have no problem with selling their tunes to companies for their ads––something that was frowned on before–-it was considered "selling out." Now musicians, along with the ad selling, make tons of money doing concerts. ( like Akhilleus, I used to be "cool and with it" music wise–-now I'm "who dat?" I do know, however, that boy bands are on the wane and girls are front and center.

2: Eric Swalwell is thinking about a possible run for the presidency in 2020.

3: Bats are immune to scorpion venom. Something to ponder on dark nights whilst trying to come up with metaphorical delights.

[Ken Winkes]

See Rudy is working at cleaning up yesterday's "truth isn't truth" mess, a pattern I might add that could keep him employed for a long time to come.

But I think I have it. Ignore this morning's tweet about theology and morality. Rudy meant what he said the first time. When the Pretender says (like taking an oath to tell..) he's telling the truth, he's not. He's only pretending. Hence truth isn't truth.

And that, folks, is the whole truth and nothing but.

[forrest morris]

Would love to see Darren Beattie connected to a lie detector and
asked to repeat his love statement. The machine would probably
explode. No doubt the only true part is "I have no further comment."

[Akhilleus]

Another Home Run

This weekend I chatted with an old friend who got into a bit of "Remember when?" He and I have been friends for many years and at one time we played together in a very competitive amateur baseball league. The "remember when" bit coincides with a thought about the Trump Bed Making Medal and also his many claims to be the smartest man around and having graduated first in his class from Wharton (a claim he now says he never made, but, as usual with Trump, a quick internet search makes a liar out of him once again).

He's the best at everything. In fact, according to the little dictator, he was the best sportsman he's ever seen. He could have been a superb major league baseball player if he had decided to go that route. Likewise, even today, if he decided to go out on the PGA tour, he'd be among the best golfers in the world. I'm not sure they allow cheating on the PGA circuit though, which could be a problem for Trump, a well known cheater at golf.

So, lo those many years ago, I was pitching in a game and up to bat comes a guy we all had heard about. He had had a cup of coffee in the pros, the Pittsburgh Pirates, if I remember correctly. So I decided to go right at him. I was no Sandy Koufax, by any stretch, but I had thrown a couple of no hitters and the year before won a championship game with a one hitter. The guy hit my best pitch so hard the right fielder didn't even bother to move. He just looked over his shoulder as the ball rocketed into the ether. We still laugh about that today.

Around about the same time, my brother was playing in a ferociously competitive city basketball league. The guys in this league were crazy good, most were gym rats who ate, drank, and slept basketball. One night another team showed up with a ringer, a guy who had been a backup center for an NBA team for a few years. He wasn't much in the pros but he swatted these guys around like mosquitoes. He wiped the court with the biggest hot shots in that league.

The point here is that the best people you've ever played with, no matter how good, are light years beneath mediocre players at the pro level. The worst guy in major league baseball is so much better than anyone playing amateur ball, it isn't even funny.

Which brings me to the smartest, best, most competent man on the planet, by his own reckoning. When Trump goes up against guys like Putin and Kim, it's not even funny. These guys are pros. Trump throws them his best pitch and they clobber it. But here's the thing. It's one thing to have your opponent crush your best pitch, it's another thing to later claim that you struck the guy out, or at worst, battled him to a draw. Especially when everyone on the field and sitting in the stands watched that ball disappear over the fence. But Trump does this time and again.

And to extend the analogy a bit further, here's another difference. My brother and I and our teammates were all deeply entrenched in our sports. We were serious about it and we knew all the ins and outs. We knew what we had to do and how to do it, so when we got beat badly by someone of a much higher caliber, it wasn't because we were bumbling jamokes. We were just outclassed. And that's the thing. Trump IS a bumbling jamoke. He doesn't even come up to beginner level and yet he puts himself in a class with experienced, canny characters who eat and drink this stuff. On one hand it's funny and ridiculous, but it's also dangerous.

We have a guy who claims he was first in his class at Wharton, or at least, among the smartest there. But no one remembers him. My college didn't have a valedictorian, but I knew half a dozen people who graduated Summa and if you mentioned a few more I'm sure I would probably at least recognize the names. But Trump? At a relatively small class like the Wharton School, it seems highly unlikely that no one would recognize him as among the best or THE best.

But it's a waste of time to play that game. He's a bully, a liar, and a braggart. Which was fine as long as he was pretending to be a big shot on a reality TV show produced to make him look good. Who cares what he says? But when that bully and braggart is the president of the United States, it's much different.

So here we are, the US team, going up against other nations and our pitcher is a guy who doesn't even know the basics of the game, and doesn't care. And worse? He thinks he's the best player on the field.

Oh look, there goes another ball over the fence. Good hit Bob!

[Whyte Owen]

I usually shrug off Nader's boilerplate preaching, but his latest provides a diagnosis to the Dems' illness, which does not seem to be improving:

https://nader.org/2018/08/15/4692/

[Akhilleus]

Giuliani and Philosophy

You've probably seen all those books that attempt to suss out particular philosophical problems derived from pop culture sources. "Harry Potter and Philosophy" or "The Simpsons and Philosophy". I haven't actually read these books but scanning them in bookstores, they appear to have at least a serious interest in exploring things like epistemology and ontology as they relate to, well, Harry Potter and Homer Simpson, among others.

And if considering how weird must be Homer Simpson's approach to epistemology (how we know what we know) you happen to wonder how great dunderheads deal with factual information, you may light on one Rudolph Giuliani, mob lawyer to the Trump Gang.

Last week Marie posted a clip from the Simpsons in which Homer is amused to find a country on a spinning globe named U R gay (Uruguay).

That's not too far off, apparently, from Rudy's approach to knowledge.

When Trump apologists say things like "facts develop over time" and "truth is not truth", my brain does a double take. At first I think of a few famous examples of philosophical problems of description and truth, the liar's paradox, for example: "Everything I say is a lie". Or Bertrand Russell's head scratcher "The present king of France is bald" which prompts the recognition that, while thinking of bald men, the present king of France is certainly not in that group since there is no present king of France.

But all this is way above the basic grunginess of "truth is not truth". Clearly Rudy skipped out on classes in logic and never read Plato who agrees with other early Greek thinkers that the truth value of a statement must be directly proportional to the correspondence of that statement to actual facts in the (real) world, otherwise known as the correspondence theory of truth. So things in the real world, i.e., facts, must be present or accounted for in any statement purporting to be truthful. Guess that leaves out almost everything Trump and Giuliani say. So, what to do with that?

But then Thomas Aquinas arrives to clear it all up with his adequation theory: "Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus".

The short version is truth requires the intellect of the knower to be adequate to the thing. Another way of thinking about it is to say "If you're a moron, you'll never be adequate to a truthful description of the world."

Problem solved.

They're fucking idiots.

[Akhilleus]

Rudy Redux

Reading Rudy's "clarification" about his "truth is not the truth" statement, we get some crazy-ass twaddle about "pontification on moral theology".

What in the bloody hell does that even mean? His original comment had to do with the truth value of certain statements. That's an epistemological argument and/or a critique, sad as it is, of logical semantics. Who said anything about a belief in god or morality?

I suppose you could make a case (in your sleep) about the immorality and amorality that define Trump World, but questions of morality are only tangential to Giuliani's truth statement. What he is really saying is that truth is no longer a contingent quality. In other words, in his Trump World estimation, truth is not reliant on connection to facts and can be whatever you want it to be.

Never really thought of the Trumpies as post-modernists, but for a bunch that rail against namby-pamby academics for whom all things are relative, this sounds pretty fucking namby-pamby relativistic.

But hey, what do I know? Moral theology, teleology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, existentialism, logical positivism, phenomenology, rationalism, skepticism, ismism, it's all just words that mean whatever Trumpies want them to mean, so pontificate the fuck out of it all.

Jesus, these people get stupider by the hour.

[Jeanne]

To AK: I was wondering where I had heard those types of nutsy declarations a la Rude-ee, when it came to me:
Lewis Carroll, I believe. See caterpillar speeches or Red Queen or some such, where one can believe many impossible things all at the same time... No reality needed, don'tcha see?

[forrest morris]

Lewis Carrol. He was way ahead of his time. Orange Marmalade.
He was predicting our current president* with his orange face.
Then there's Down the Rabbit Hole. That's where he and all of
his supporters should be, down the rabbit hole. I'll even help
with the shoveling to fill in that rabbit hole.

[PD Pepe]

@AK: I sent your wonderful baseball analogy to the son who started playing baseball at a very young age, was in all sorts of leagues, was a star in high school and was actually recruited for Wesleyan because of his prowess. He now coaches on his son's teams in his spare time. I know he'll appreciate your post.

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.

"I do," Alice hastily replied, "at least ––I mean what I say––that's the same thing you know."

"Not the same thing a bit," said the Hatter.
"Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as "I eat what I see."

and we end with:

"The short version is truth requires the intellect of the knower to be adequate to the thing. Another way of thinking about it is to say "If you're a moron, you'll never be adequate to a truthful description of the world."

Problem solved.

They're fucking idiots.

Praise be!

[Akhilleus]

The difference of course between Lewis Carroll and logical and lexical lummoxes like Trump and Rudy is that Carroll knew what he was about. As a serious mathematician and lover of problems of logic, he entertained himself with corkscrew versions of logical conundrums and word games. Think of Tweedletrump and Tweedlerudy:

'I know what you're thinking about,' said Tweedledum; 'but it isn't so, nohow.'

'Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'

Yeah. What he said

The Tweedles at least provided the knowing reader with a wink and a nod. Trump and Rudy are just Dum and Dummer.