I often complain on Sunday morning that the pundits are out of sync with the news. Something big will happen on Friday, or Saturday, and it will be dominating the site and the media, while the Sunday pundit columns reflect whatever was going on back on Tuesday or Wednesday when they sharpened up their quills.
But there are some mornings when they genuinely stop the presses, clean the decks, and start again.
John McCain
Mark Salter was a member of Senator McCain’s staff.
McCain was a romantic about his causes and a cynic about the world. He had the capacity to be both things and to live with the contradiction. He had seen human beings at their best and worst — often in the same experience. He understood the world as it is with all its corruption and cruelty. But he thought it a moral failure to accept injustice as the inescapable tragedy of our fallen nature.
When he said to the Myanmar political prisoner, or the harassed Belarusan dissident, or the Ukrainian captive, “I know a little of what you’ve suffered,” it needed no elaboration. He was in league with them — united by suffering, endurance and the knowledge that the most marvelous of human achievements is to not lose hope when experience has taught you hope is for fools.
Jeff Flake on losing his senior colleague.
I’ve never known Washington without John McCain. I started on Capitol Hill more than 30 years ago interning for Dennis DeConcini, “the other senator from Arizona,” which is what they call every Arizona senator not named McCain. When I eventually became the other senator from Arizona, too, I came to understand that it’s a title that comes with being in the shadow of a giant. It was like having an older brother to protect me. The guy nobody wants to mess with.
But John McCain has been much more than that to me. Just as he taught the country the value of standing alone to do what is right, he taught me that as well. Early in my service in the House of Representatives, I managed to incur the wrath of a host of locally elected officials and newspaper columnists by challenging funding for a number of parochial spending projects. I was feeling pretty low, wondering if I was doing the right thing.
And not to diminish Flake’s words on this of all days. But that opportunity to “stand along and do what is right” … Flake had that chance. And he didn’t take it. In fact, he had it three times, and he failed the test every time.
Max Boot should take off that stupid hat for this one.
Working on McCain’s 2008 campaign as a foreign policy adviser was the easiest job I ever had, because McCain knew as much about foreign policy as anyone in Washington. He traveled incessantly to tend to America’s alliances. He was unshakeable in his conviction that America’s mission was to champion democracy and oppose despotism. Every U.S. president since the rise of Vladimir Putin in 1999 has engaged in naive reverie about working with the Russian strongman. McCain never had any such illusions. As he later said, “I looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters—a K, a G and B.”
And then Boot goes on to discuss how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should have voted for more war. Because you shouldn’t miss an opportunity.
The Washington Post on an American.
In late July 1967, he was in the cockpit of his A-4 Skyhawk fighter jet on the deck of the USS Forrestal when a rocket was accidentally launched across the deck, wreaking havoc on the ship. Mr. McCain, then a lieutenant commander, escaped the inferno, his flight suit in flames. One hundred and thirty-four lives were lost in the explosion and fire.
“After a short while,” he wrote in an affecting passage in his memoir, “I went to sick bay to have my burns and shrapnel wounds treated. There I found a horrible scene of many men burned beyond saving, grasping the last moments of life. . . . Someone called my name, a kid, anonymous to me because the fire had burned off all his identifying features. He asked me if a pilot in our squadron was okay. I replied that he was. The young man said, ‘Thank God,’ and died. I left the sick bay unable to keep my composure. . . . Men sacrificed their lives for one another and for their ship. Many of them were only eighteen and nineteen years old.”
McCain was, quite simply, the last Republican. It’s quite possible for someone to disagree on political points, even on points that seem both obvious and vital, and yet not be a bad person. And maybe the best thing about John McCain was that he knew that.
One last time …
There are people still in Washington who use the Republican title, but long ago gave up any pretense of being the party of Lincoln. When it comes time to put the pieces back together, they could do a lot worse than becoming the party of McCain.
The ‘I’ Word
Jill Abramson on the only cure for Trump.
The walls have suddenly caved in on Donald Trump’s presidency. First came Michael Cohen’s stunning plea agreement, in which Trump’s longtime fixer and trusted legal gun admitted in a federal courtroom in Manhattan that he had committed crimes at the direction of the president. Then, in Alexandria, Virginia, Robert Mueller’s prosecution team notched a big win with the guilty verdict on eight counts reached by the jury against Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager. …
A third wall crumbled over the weekend, when the New York Times revealed that the White House counsel, Don McGahn, had spent 30 hours providing information to Mueller. On Sunday, the president himself invoked Watergate in one of his fevered tweets. Referring to the man whose testimony led directly to the vote to impeach Richard Nixon, Trump tweeted that McGahn was no “John Dean type ‘RAT’” in a panicked effort to dispute and discredit the Times story.
And that was before word got out that Allen Weisselberg, CFO of the Trump Organization, had been given immunity in exchange for his testimony. Trump is right. He is being “Al Capon’d.” In the sense that Capone was guilty.
The past week could go down in history as being just as consequential as the crucial period in the spring and early summer of 1973, when everything caved in on Nixon. It was then that Dean began cooperating with the Senate Watergate committee and Nixon was forced to fire his closest aides, John Erlichman and Bob Haldeman, the architects of the criminal Watergate cover-up. It was downhill from there until Nixon’s resignation on 9 August, 1974.
It’s just a damn shame that John McCain can’t be the one who walks up the hill to tell Trump it’s time for him to leave. But hey, maybe Barack Obama can stand in. Trump would love that.
Richard Wolffe is ready to see Trump’s sizable posterior getting smaller in the distance.
To lose one of your inner circle to criminal charges may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two on the same day looks like carelessness.
Donald Trump is nothing if not careless. His type inevitably gets like that as their escapades grow ever more preposterous. Sooner or later, their delusional sense of power and smarts ends in the kind of concrete solitude now being contemplated by Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort. The laws do not apply to them until, suddenly, they do.
Of the two legal calamities befalling Trump, the plea bargain of his personal fixer is even more disastrous than the guilty verdicts slapped down on his campaign chairman. Although let’s be honest: the scale of both disasters makes it a close call.
And again … Weisselberg. From before the election, the Trump Organization CFO has been pointed out as the man who knows all the secrets going back to when the Trump at the top of the tower was Donald’s father. Michael Cohen may buried the bodies, but Weisselberg paid the bills. And kept the receipts.
Campaign finance crimes of this kind are not trivial matters: under federal guidelines updated at the end of last year by Trump’s own justice department, a campaign finance crime committed knowingly and willfully amounting to more than $25,000 is what they call a five-year felony.
Just one of Cohen’s payments, made at Trump’s direction, amounted to $130,000.
And those penalties are compounded by efforts to obstruct the investigation. Efforts that are still ongoing.
Ian Samuel doesn’t think Trump is going anywhere any time soon.
Cohen’s guilty plea, along with the conviction of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort of unrelated tax and fraud crimes, have undoubtedly left some thinking that the net is finally closing around Trump, and that the global nightmare of his presidency is at last entering its final hours. Surely, proof that the president was personally involved in a criminal conspiracy to violate the election laws will be the last straw, won’t it?
Of course not. But dammit, that’s a whole lot of straw.
But while it is surely to the good to bag a few swamp creatures, whether it places Trump’s presidency in any actual danger is a much different question. That is because (despite what you may have learned on The West Wing) politics is not about being right, or virtuous; it is about power. And to endanger Trump’s grip on the presidency, these convictions would have to somehow endanger the concrete powers that keep him there.
Looking around the House floor now … Nope, he’s not in trouble. But check with me again in November.
Economy
James Galbraith on the incredible robbery that’s going on every day.
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute calls attention to the hardy perennial of how much America’s corporate titans make: bosses of the top 350 firms made an average of $18.9m in 2017. That’s a ratio of 312-1 over the median worker in their industries. Big bucks to be sure. And a big change since 1965, when the ratio was just 20-1. But what does it mean? And if there’s a problem, what is it, exactly?
What it means, as the EPI economists carefully document, is that the top US corporate chiefs are paid overwhelmingly with stock options, and their income fluctuates with the market. About 80% of the pay packet is in stocks, and the rise of 17% in 2017 after two flat years surely suggests that the top CEOs (not unreasonably) sensed the market peaked last year. So they cashed in. On the other 20% of the pay packets, no gains occurred.
For those Democratic candidates still looking for something to talk about this November. I suggest this: Let’s tax the hell out of the rich. I don’t mean increase the taxes on a billion bucks by 2 percent, with some nice deductions. I mean tax The. Hell. out of them. Like … 90 percent on all income over a million. It’s a start. And they still get all the deductions they want, so long as those deductions are called “pay someone else or spend it on improving your business and don’t take it home in your own pocket.” And then maybe we fix a bridge, or build some new schools. But first The Hell. Taxed. Out of them.
Is the US really so exceptional? Compared to Japan, probably so; the Japanese have largely retained the successful industrial model that displaced major American industrial firms a generation back. Compared to Germany, we can’t know; German firms are in greater proportion privately held, so they don’t report, and German elites have memories of the that induce caution and discretion, not advertisement of their wealth. Compared to British bankers, likely there’s not much to choose between the ultra-wealthy of London and New York. Let’s not get started on Russian oligarchs or Saudi princes, compared to whom US CEOs earn a pittance.
But until we figure out how to tax those oligarchs and princes … tax The Hell out of the wealthy here at home. If that 90 percent thing seems off, we can always just take it all.
Jefferson BEAUREGARD Sessions III
Dana Milbank on the hour’s least likely hero … because he’s so, so not.
Let us now praise Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
Rejected for a judgeship by the Senate over accusations of racism, the Alabamian later became a senator known for hostility toward the Voting Rights Act, outspoken opposition to (even legal) immigration, and being the first senator to back Donald Trump for president.
The racist jerkwad who is also an occassional thorn in Trump’s side, is still a racist jerkwad. And if you forget that for a moment, just wait. Sessions will certainly take action to remind you.
For the umpteenth time, Trump this past week attacked his attorney general, whom he once dubbed “Mr. Magoo,” over Sessions’s proper decision to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation. “What kind of a man is this?” Trump asked on Fox News. The assault continued Friday morning. …
This week may turn out to have been a turning point. It was the moment the justice system landed two blows against an unfit leader: the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on charges related to bank and tax fraud, and the guilty plea by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who implicated Trump in a campaign finance crime. More significantly, Trump’s own people began to turn against him.
When Trump falls, I really do want them to give him a phone so he can continue to tweet from prison. Sessions’ name is going to come up. A lot. I don’t follow Trump’s Twitter account now. But lock him up, and I’ll be there.
Brett Kavanaugh
Lawrence Tribe on why Kavanaugh’s hearings shouldn’t be heard.
… Imagine a Trump appointee to the court — one named as impeachment clouds were gathering and seemingly selected with a presidential eye focused sharply on his pro-presidential writings — casting the deciding vote in a future case against Trump, involving an issue such as the president’s obligation to comply with a subpoena to testify or the president’s amenability to indictment.
If that doesn’t sit right with you, you’re not alone: It didn’t sit right with the framers, either.
The framers built the Constitution on the premise that men aren’t angels, and they did not trust a president’s nominees to the Supreme Court to be impartial in determining whether he should stay in office. At the Constitutional Convention, Virginia’s George Mason thought judges “surely” ought not preside over the impeachment trials of presidents to whom they owed their jobs; Connecticut’s Roger Sherman agreed. So the framers came up with a solution: They assigned the impeachment power to the House and the power to try impeachments to the Senate.
George Will also wrote about Kavanaugh this morning, and he used the exact same picture as Tribe for his column. Don’t they coordinate at the Washington Post? Don’t Larry and George get together and … no, no. Probably not.
Miscellaneous Trumpian Nightmare Mishmash
Colbert King tries to imagine how it’s going to go in churches that send their voters out to support Trump.
Will religious leaders, credited with high moral standing, address the matter of a president who lies, disrespects cherished institutions and now stands accused by a subordinate in a court of law of having directed the subordinate to break a federal law? …
Religious leaders, among their biblically mandated duties, have a responsibility to speak out about criminality, abuse of authority, and immorality, including serial lying by America’s moral leader, the president of the United States.
The current crop of right wing religious leaders might speak about those things … but only to explain how they’re all just peachy when you’re pwning the libtards.
Most clerics, I dare say, are familiar with Proverbs 17:7 — “Eloquent lips are unsuited to a godless fool — how much worse lying lips to a ruler.” They could, I imagine, spend a month of Sundays preaching about a president who brazenly and repeatedly makes false statements, sometimes because he doesn’t know what in the world he is talking about, but often with the obvious intent to deceive.
Wait a sec. Franklin Graham is trying to keep up with you. What is this pro-verbs of which you speak?
David Von Drehle stares in horror at how Trump squanders every opportunity.
The burdens of the presidency are so great as to make one question the mental balance of anyone who would voluntarily take up residence in the gilded cage of the White House, accept the constant criticism and slimings, and condemn not only himself or herself to a lifetime of bodyguards and scrutiny, but the entire family, too.
Seriously … I doubt it. You want to see someone under stress, don’t go to the frickin’ CEO. Go to the line worker who is trying to keep her family fed and maneuver between three part time jobs and deal with health care that rich bozos keep trying to take away and attempting to schedule her life around hours over which she has almost zero control. Being the boss is the easy job. If that wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be truckloads of people lining up for the position.
But it seems to me one of the consolation prizes is the intellectual and cultural smorgasbord a president can enjoy. The whole world is at your beck and call. A president need not be content with reading about the future of nanotechnology or the progress of Broadway’s next blockbuster in a newspaper or magazine. A president can have leading scientists or artists drop by for a chat. …
Trump could fill [his hours] with the best of American art, music, drama and ideas he prefers to spend within the wasteland of so-called cable “news.” Every insider account of today’s White House, no matter how self-interested or backbiting, agrees on this point. Trump’s (ugh) Twitter feed relentlessly confirms it. Early in his administration, he was a channel surfer, dipping into Fox News for a shot of groveling lickspittle, clicking over to CNN long enough to figure out what to deny, then — like a tongue drawn compulsively to a sore tooth — switching to MSNBC to mourn the lost friendship of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski .
Von Drehle shouldn’t worry about Trump. It’s clear he knows how to get beck and call girls when he wants them.
Kathleen Parker and the that Manafort juror who loves Trump, blames Mueller, but still voted guilty.
“Finding Mr. Manafort guilty was hard for me,” she said during a recent Fox News interview. “I really wanted him to be innocent, but he wasn’t. That’s the part of a juror; you have to have due diligence and deliberate and look at the evidence and come up with an informed and intelligent decision, which I did.”
But for one holdout juror, Manafort would have been convicted of 10 other counts, Duncan said. The 12th juror couldn’t get beyond a reasonable doubt on the other counts, according to Duncan, which contributed to four days of tense, emotional deliberations.
I would like to hear that argument. Except, it’s hard to imagine there really was an argument. Just eleven people pointing at a stack of paper the size of Fort Knox, and someone shrugging.
In what seemed a reflexive nod to Trumpism, Duncan couldn’t end her media tour without tipping her hand and taking a jab at special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
“Certainly Mr. Manafort got caught breaking the law, but he wouldn’t have gotten caught if they weren’t after President Trump,” she said.
Translation: This is all Mueller’s fault.
If not for the “witch hunt,” in other words, everything would have rocked along in its usual fashion. No special counsel, no probe, no trials, juries or guilty verdicts. Nothing but high-fives in Trump world.
Which seems to ignore that other part of her courtroom experience. The part where she had to admit that Manafort was guilty. Which, as she said, she really didn’t want to do.