Quote of the day: Special Fact-Check Edition

(Updated below.)

They are truly floundering now, and it's a marvel to see, like watching armadillos try to swim.

- Charlie Pierce, the Sultan of Similes, the Ace of Analogies, and Master of Mammal Metaphors, marveling at the dreadful performance byTrump surrogates in the run-up to Election Day.

It's a wonderful image – suggestive of plummeting to the bottom of the lake with a minimum of satisfaction and a maximum of splash. And that's certainly the situation Trump surrogates find themselves in these days.

But as it turns out, it's not the situation that actual living armadillos find themselves in. The Google thing took less than a second to point me to a web page called Armadillo Fact File (yes, of course it exists) in response to my three word search query: can armadillos swim? (Click to enlarge. )

One tinkers with brother Pierce's prose at one's peril, but I modestly – humbly – suggest that the position that Trump surrogates like Gingrich are finding themselves in is less like a happy armadillo skillfully crossing a river (although the disturbing image of “gulping air into their intestines” sounds nearer the mark than any of us should find comfortable) and more instead like a luckless, lumbering creature trying desperately but unsuccessfully to avoid a particularly unattractive Nemesis.

Perhaps it's more like watching an armadillo try to outrun a 1958 Buick Roadmaster.

Just a suggestion.


(Updated, later the same day:

Okay, now I'm flattering myself that Pierce is just messing with my head. Here he is, reflecting on the $100 eponymous signature cocktail at the newly opened Trump International Hotel, a few blocks away from -- and as close as Trump'll ever get to -- the White House:

I'm really not ready for someone to tell me that the problem with my Bloody Mary is that there isn't enough winter-wheat in the Yeltsin Juice. But it is of a piece with the candidate himself, who has the over-aesthetic taste of a Bonobo in a $1,000 tux.

Yes, the somber, sad-eyed bonobo does look dreadful in a $1000 tux.

Ì Googled it.)

Quote of the day: Trophy kills

Adventure tourism for the idiot rich

- Matt Tiabbi, describing the buzz driving Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The description could be applied just as appropriately to the “big game” African safaris of his two sons. The only difference would be that the carcasses left behind by the father include the traditional transfer of presidential power, the modern Republican party, and the very idea of an American political commonwealth, whereas his sons left behind a trail of needlessly dead elephants, leopards, et cetera.

Donald Jr. (that's the one who takes his hair grooming tips from early-1990s Bret Easton Ellis serial killers rather than from his father) even carried on the family tradition of Love for the Little Guy by insisting that “the villagers were so happy for the meat which they don't often get to eat. Very grateful.”

Quote of the day: The great white absence-of-hope

If all the jobs are moving overseas, why wouldn’t the white working class vote for Trump? What good reason do they have for not doing so? I know why the black and Latino working class won’t–because of the racism of the Trump campaign. But if you have no hope except for being white, why not vote for your racial dominance? That’s what Trump offers.

- That's Erik Loomis, putting it about as clearly as I've ever seen it. Jeezus.

Quote of the day: And for this America should be grateful?

With every new poll that is released, I comfort myself with the knowledge that Donald Trump is not willing to put in the hours to be a competent authoritarian, which is cold comfort, I know, but you take what you can get.

That cannot be said of the next guy to try it, and there will be a next time, because the basic tectonic plates beneath our democracy have shifted so as to make the next guy inevitable.

- Charlie Pierce, who sees the fault as not being in The Media, but in our apathetic,lassitudinous selves.

No big, funny mammal analogies today.

Quote of the day: This must be some new use of the term "explaining" I wasn't previously aware of

In explaining the decision, Comedy Central president Kent Alterman said Monday it came down to the show's inability to register with viewers. "Unfortunately, it hasn't connected with our audience in ways that we need it to," Alterman tells The Hollywood Reporter, "both in the linear channel and in terms of multiplatform outlets and with shareable content and on social platforms as well."

- That's the head of Comedy Central "explaining" why Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show was abruptly canceled.

"Both in the linear channel and in terms of multiplatform outlets"?

"In terms of multiplatform outlets and with shareable content and on social platforms as well"?

General David Sarnoff would have chased this guy up a tree and set fire to it.

Quote of the day: Lost causes

Quote of the day: Hearts and minds, greeting us as liberators, yada, yada, yada

“Today I feel so happy,” said Salim Hamid, 44. “It is like a wedding to me to see the person who destroyed my country being nervous because of being asked a lot of questions.”

Mr. Hamid said he wished he could throw a shoe at Mr. Blair — a grievous insult in the Arab world — just as an Iraqi journalist did to President George W. Bush when he visited Baghdad in 2008.

- Salid Hamid, Iraqi citizen and a man after my own heart, reflecting on the Chilcot Report forcing former British Prime Minister and Bush Administration lap poodle to take "full responsibility" for Britain's part in Bush's invasion of Iraq, which he adds he would do all over again if he were faced with the choice, so that's nice.

p3 Pro tip: Mr. Blair, never repeat the charge while denying the charge.

Quote of the day: And Kicking off George Bush's sorta sad week

(Updated below)

Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.

- That's the first sentence of the preface to Jean Edward Smith’s biography of George W. Bush. After this, one supposes, Smith really settles down to rendering a judgment on Bush's presidency. (Hat-tip to Thomas Mallon's review in The New Yorker.)

Smith's line is also being added to my collection of great opening sentences (non-fiction division).

Poor Dubya hasn't been having a very good week, has he? Smith's bio came out on Monday the 4th. Then, on Wednesday, the day Bush turned 70 – a day when more reflective people than Dubya (which is to say, almost anyone) might want to pause and consider how they've spent their time on this old world – the Chilcot Report dropped, providing a withering assessment of the British role in the Iraq War (pdf).

The Chilcot Report mainly takes the actions of the Blair government to task, leaving to the US the task of producing a similar official accounting of the mendacity, incompetence, and barefaced illegality by the Bush Administration before, during, and after the war. (Not gonna happen, I'm afraid.)

I should note that the Report has a pretty pedestrian first sentence: "We were appointed to consider the UK’s policy on Iraq from 2001 to 2009, and to identify lessons for the future." Less of a Jane Austen, as these things go, more of a Richard Nixon. So it wasn't placed in competition with other worthy opening lines. But you don't have to read far into the executive summary to get to the zingers – and they seem all the more harsh to my American ear by their understatedness.

(Update:  And here's the last sentence of Smith's biography. Serves me right for waiting until the book comes to my local library:

Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

Quote of the day: Conservatives, politics, and the personal

(((

(Updated below.)

I've written about this before: Conservatives' sense of empathy is similar to Tip O'Neill's take on politics: It's all local.

Conservatives tend not to have empathy until they’re personally impacted. When Arlen Specter got sick, he became a champion of the National Institute of Health, and when Rob Portman discovered he had a gay son, he suddenly saw the light on gay marriage. If Republicans think the Watch List only inconveniences Muslims from Dearborn, Michigan, they’ll never have any interest in fixing its flaws. But if it impacts one of their assault-rifle loving constituents who can’t figure out how to get taken off this list? That will interest them.

- Booman, in an aside from his discussion of the calculating use of the dreadfully flawed no-fly list as leverage to push congressional Republicans to finally take up basic gun control legislation.

I wish that there were some other way to get this leverage without paying lip-service to the due-process disaster that the no-fly list(s) represented from the earliest post-9/11 days, but I haven't figured out yet what it might be.

On my behalf, though, I didn't stumble onto the problem this week, like a lot of commentators. Here's my take on it from almost ten years ago – although, ironically, it was triggered by concern for the possible fate of a friend as much as by my respect for the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Maybe O'Neill was right.

To Booman's list I would add former Oregon Republican Senator Gordon's Smith's ephemeral epiphany that federal spending on social programs can play a positive role, such as in addressing the problem of youth suicide – an insight that didn't come to him until after his son took his own life, and seemed to depart again shortly thereafter.

I get no pleasure from the thought of the Smith family's terrible loss; I can't even imagine the pain of it. I just find it tiresome when conservatives' appreciation of the idea of a commonwealth, a political community existing for the common good, begins and ends – as it so often does – with the moment when disaster strikes them or their family directly.*

(I'm not aware of any other social program legislation Smith supported during his Senate career, but I'm willing to have my memory jogged. Most of his work is better exemplified by the 30,000 dead Coho salmon left behind in his 2002 re-election bid, and his tireless work for the end of Net Neutrality – a cause near and dear to the hearts of industry groups such as the National Association of Broadcasters, an organization he has been president and CEO of since shortly after he lost re-election in 2008.)

* Updated: And don't even get me started on Nancy Reagan.

Quote of the day: Shotgun blues

Indeed, if ever there were a sign of perilous times, this would be it: debates, raging for the past two weeks in prominent media channels, over whether Donald Trump is himself a fascist. Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan says it's a fair characterization (“Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader…in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation.”) Neocon historian Michael Ledeen, in Forbes and elsewhere, says fiddle faddle. ("Being a strong leader isn't enough to make you a fascist.”)

But even this debate is just a spat about how many Nazis can fit on the head of a pin. One scholar looks to 20th-century Europe for dire cautionary tales. The other enumerates the many reasons, from the dictionary of political science, that the comparisons are specious -- all amounting to this:

Robert Kagan: “Look out! He's got a rifle!”

Michael Ledeen: “You fool. That's a shotgun.”

Next: Blam. Blammm.

- Media critic Bob Garfield, on American journalism shirking its most fundamental responsibility.

A few years ago, Kevin Drum summed up one aspect of this situation in this way: If you're denying, you're losing. Last month I ran a post on the same general principle.

Another thing illustrated by this exchange is that Donald Trump's prospects for the general campaign are going to be terrible if his management of surrogates is any kind of yardstick.

But the overriding danger, as Bob Garfield points out, is that the members of our political media seem content to watch from the sidelines as the penguins have armed themselves.

Quote of the day: And what is best in life, Donald?

Make no mistake. It is only He, Trump who is dealing from strength here. He has crushed the royal enemy, driven it before him, and now listens to lamentations of their women.

- Charlie Pierce, having a little harmless fun watching the feckless attempt by House Speaker Ryan to find some way to rein in the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. (Spoiler: Pierce is not optimistic, and despairs of the rebranding.)

For those of you – can there be many? – who don't get the joke, Brother Pierce is drawing a sly comparison to another candidate who counted on name recognition and a career in entertainment to get him in office, although the Barbarian was indeed elected, while the Vulgarian's odds don't look quite so promising.

Quote of the day: My enemies I do not fear, but my friends I fear greatly

Please, God, save the old charter from its friends.

Charlie Pierce, reflecting on the danger posed by many of those who claim to love the Constitution most. Come for the Mercy Otis Warren and Pete Townshend; stay for the Tailgunner and the pencil-necked Tory who occasionally writes about baseball to prove he's really a man of the people.

And Pierce didn't even have time to get around to this retrograde asshat.

Or this one.

(Title quote shamelessly lifted from vintage John le Carré.)

Quote of the day: Litigation for the hell of it

The same fellow who proudly gave this quote --

As he's admitted recently, Trump enjoys suing people just to make their lives pure hell.

"I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more," he told the Washington Post. "I did it to make his life miserable, which I'm happy about."

– is the one who also piously said this:

We have to give great respect, far greater than we are right now, to our really fantastic police.

Well, they do [see police brutality]. And, you know, they sue. Everybody sues, right? They see excessive — I mean, they go out, they sue. We have so much litigation — I see the courts, I see what they’re doing. They sue, and you know what? We don’t want excessive force. But at what point — you know, either you’re going to have a police force that can do its job…

Putting aside the obvious taste for thin-skinned bullying this displays, there's another point to be drawn here.

I probably wouldn't compare the average Trump voter to Fitzgerald's ideal of "a first-rate intelligence," but there's no question that many – most? – of the short-fingered vulgarian's supporters long ago cleared the "ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function" hurdle with ease.

In fact, to use an expression that modern times have worn thin, it's a feature, not a bug. Yeah, he's talking out of both sides of his mouth – what are you gonna do about it?

Worrying about self-contradiction is for wimps and losers.

(h/t to Digby for both quotes, although she was headed somewhere different in each case.

Quote of the day: Footprints

But Cruz is cut from roughly similar cloth. He wears his ambition on his sleeve and is not highly charismatic or relatable. In high school, he could have been voted most likely to be seen walking on the beach in his dress shoes.

- Richard Lowry, comparing the unlikeableness of Ted Cruz to that of Richard Nixon, who, as Digby diplomatically notes, "overcame the political disability of having an extremely unpleasant personality to win the White House twice."

Lowry's analogy reminded me of a great gag from, of all things, a 1976 14-episode Rich Little TV series. As nearly as I can recall, the bit was a five-or-ten second bumper before a commercial break, and showed Nixon – head bowed, hands clasped behind his back, and, of course, wearing a suit and dress shoes – walking away from us along a beach obviously meant to be San Clemente. As Nixon moved away, into the frame behind him came a couple of aides in suit and tie, diligently sweeping away their boss's footprints in the sand. And two more men entered the frame behind them, sweeping away their footprints, and so on.

Quote of the day: The moron vote

I don’t think that Trump can win, frankly, because I don’t think there are enough morons to elect him. A certain percentage of the American public is just morons; that’s the way it is. When you divide the public in two and then divide the voters in one of those halves among five candidates or more, a candidate can win by dominating the moron vote because it only takes about one-seventh of the total population to take the “lead” under those circumstances. But when you’re talking about needing 51% of the WHOLE population, rather than needing 30% of half of the population, you run out of morons. I hope we will; I hope Trump will lose because I hope that he runs out of morons to vote for him.

 - Bill James, founder of Sabermetrics, known as one of the pioneers of the analysis of baseball and in-game statistics, on an updated version of fooling some of the people some of the time.

And for those p3 readers who don't buy Crackerjacks anymore, here's your free prize:

Quote of the day: Mental progress -- tricky business.

Yesterday, Carson figured out his campaign was little more than an elaborate fundraising grift and tonight he realized how awful the GOP debates are for everyone. It’s like we’re approaching the midway point of Flowers for Algernon.

- John Cole at Balloon Juice, providing what could be the definitive take on Dr. Ben Carson, intermittent 2016 GOP presidential candidate and idiot savant. 

Quote of the day: And then all of this happened

It turns out that what has held together American government is less the elaborate rules hammered out by the guys in the wigs in 1789 than a series of social norms that have begun to disintegrate. Senate filibusters were supposed to be rare, until they became routine. They weren’t supposed to be applied to judicial nominations, then they were. The Senate majority would never dream of changing the rules to limit the filibuster; the minority party would never plan to withhold all support from the president even before he took office; it would never threaten to default on the debt to extort concessions from the president. And then all of this happened.

- Jonathan Chait, taking time out from his many other responsibilities to personally depress the living daylights out of me.

Chait's New Yorker piece from which this is excerpted is going on the p3 Reading List, at right.

Quote of the day: How do we solve a problem like The Donald?

"This whole thing is a disaster,” said Curt Anderson, a former Republican National Committee political director and veteran operative. “I think I’ll write a book about it.”

- A GOP "veteran operative" sensing, perhaps, the wisdom of the Hunter Thompson maxim: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

The entire Politico article, by Alex Isenstadt, is hilarious and includes such gems as the characterization of the mutual recriminations among campaign directors, major donors, super PAC chairs, spokespersons, pundits, movers, shakers, hacks, and flacks, as "a ferocious round of finger-pointing."

And this gem:

"Cruz's crew should’ve done it. It was incredibly shortsighted. The longer [Trump] goes, the harder he is to kill,” said Brad Todd, a veteran Republican strategist who until recently worked for a super PAC that supported Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign."

When you're getting armchair quarterbacked by someone connected with Bobby Jindal's sad little fizzle of a campaign, it's time to stop and rethink things.

And this:

"In some instances, anger has begun boil to over. Earlier this month, during the RNC’s winter meeting, Holland Redfield, a party committeeman from the Virgin Islands, rose during a private breakfast to vent to Priebus about Trump. During the impromptu speech, Redfield complained of the pressures to not speak out, saying, “We’re almost terrorized as members of our party.”

In an interview, Redfield said that other RNC members had privately applauded him since his speech became public."

Yes, they "privately applauded him since his speech became public." What towers of Jell-O.

No wonder Trump is making them give him their lunch money.

Quote of the day: On being superior

That massive long-ago mistake has instilled in me a quality that is sadly too rare in today’s political journalism — humility.

- Walter Shapiro of Roll Call, recalling the night he blew the 1984 New Hampshire Democratic primary call for Newsweek. I don't know if he's ever flubbed a primary prediction since, but at least he's now able to reflect with some modesty that humility like his is a pretty rare thing in his line of work. So I suppose that must ease the sting of that memory at least a little.

Perhaps he meant it in the Hemingway sense.

Quote of the day: Featuring the p3 obligatory annual reference to pro sports

I don't blame He, Trump for coming out in favor of brain damage this way. It is, after all, an issue affecting his primary constituencies.

- Charlie Pierce, on the Short-Fingered Vulgarian's recent lament for the good old days when manly NFL officials threw fewer flags and there were a lot more dirty hits and head shots -- just like the days when America was great, the way Trump wants to make it again.

And, for whatever it's worth: Last week I mocked Trump by asking when he specifically thought was the era of American greatness to which he would return us all once he becoms president. Perhaps we now have at least part of the answer: It was when Dick Butkis was still playing.