Today's Charlie Pierce

Esquire:

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." That title is rarely—more like never—heard today. It is just "commander in chief," or even "commander in chief of the United States." This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken "for the duration." But those impositions are removed when normal life returns. But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and "the duration" has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever—more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.  —Garry Wills, 2007.

I needed to put that on the record because its basic truth was completely lost in a dark land of fear and amid the waving poison ferns in Wolf Blitzer's amygdala. First of all, none of these people will be my commander in chief. None of these people will have the job of keeping me "safe." The first priority of a president is not keeping the country safe. The first priority of a president—indeed, the only priority of a president—is to preserve, protect and defend not me, but the Constitution of the United States. So sitting there, listening to a bunch of people who never served a day in combat talk about how they're going to turn the Middle East into obsidian glass and how they will keep me safe, it was hard not to fall off my chair. Frankly, I wouldn't hire any of these people to watch my car in a valet parking lot, let alone lead the country into what they never miss a chance to call, "the Third World War." Chris Christie? Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio?

All this hyper-macho blather gets us nowhere but deeper into the hole.  I'm not saying we should never just kick ass and take names, but when that's our only approach, we've become predictable and the 'bad guys' can anticipate what our moves will be, which gives them the advantage.  Obama knows all that.

Cruz and Trump and Bush et al - they all know that too; they just don't know what all Obama knows because - you know, POTUS knows shit that you and I just don't get to know.  

So when they get up there and they start the basic Strut-n-Bluster routine, it's a lie.  They do that to keep us distracted from the simple fact that they don't have one fucking clue about much of anything going on in The Situation Room.  What they do have is mountains of feedback from polls and focus groups telling them the rubes are pissed off about having been mis-led and taken advantage of by the RINOs and others who fail the Purity Test du Jour, but also that there's no danger of them voting for the Dems because the 25-year project of demonizing Libruls plus True Conservatives Can Do No Wrong has been a spectacular success - so what it comes down to is this: Our favorite lies are no longer working for us; please give us a new set of lies.

We're jonesin', man - we're jonesin' real bad.

Winning Tweet

GOP Says: They need guns to fight tyrannical government Then: Rallies around Fascist Candidate and yells Sieg Heil. pic.twitter.com/RJz1PKD8pn

— All Things Flynn (@AllThingsFlynn) December 15, 2015

Is there really any such thing as 'Peak Wingnut'?  And even assuming there is, and also assuming we've reached it - so what?  It seems not to matter at all.

Today's Toon

Arm The Good Guys

So, again - why do we have to go to the comedy guys to get the straight story?

Today's Tweet

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Some Jesus For Christmas?

Say What?

French far right National Front 'routed' in key vote!! https://t.co/PWSNpNHepY

— Eddie Izzard (@eddieizzard) December 13, 2015

So this seems like a big thing.  Lots of us (me too) got kinda puckered when the Paris attacks went down, and it looked like it would play into the hands of the French equivalent of the Right Radicals.

But then they headed out to the polls on election day and the Nationalist Front kinda got their butts kicked.  

Shading back towards Nicolas Sarkozy isn't exactly the best of all possible worlds, but it ain't Marine Le Pen, and that's important.  

In fact this development is so important the American Press Poodles will absolutely be totally forced to ignore it completely.

Until of course the GOP reboots the French Surrender Monkeys thing (or some such), which can translate back to Dems Are Soft On Terrorism or whatever, and then we can look forward to round after round of Red vs Blue Horse Race bullshit back here in USAmerica Inc.

Too much of this is all about the Ad Revenue, kids. Too many MBAs and PR Flacks got too much ridin' on a business model totally dependent on selling a Political Soap Opera.  They can't afford to let too many of us agree on much of anything.

Jeff Sessions - International Man Of Douchery

Listen for it, and it gets a lot easier to hear it in more and more of what these Radical Right Christianists say about almost anything.  Today's little slice is all about selective application.



Sessions makes the usual head fake with "America's all about religious freedom blah blah blah", but then he goes into bail mode and tries to disguise the bigotry with "those people aren't here in the USA, so they don't qualify under the law yada yada yada..."

Translation:  Unless it's illegal to treat you like shit because of your religious beliefs, we're gonna treat you like shit because of your religious beliefs.

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Bowden's Trump

It's not a long piece, so I just grabbed the whole thing.

From Vanity Fair, by Mark Bowden:

Over a long weekend on assignment for Playboy Magazine, Mark Bowden found that behind the garish Trump façade lies only more ugliness. --MARK BOWDEN

I spent a long, awkward weekend with Donald Trump in November 1996, an experience I feel confident neither of us would like to repeat.

He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?

His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.

Before I met him back in 1996, I felt bad for him. He’d had a rough 10 years. He had just turned 50 and wasn’t happy about it. He looked soft, from his growing jowls to the way his belt bit deeply into the spreading roll of his belly. As a businessman he had crashed and burned, rescued only by creditors who had to bail him out lest they be dragged down with him. His enterprises were being run by court-appointed managers, who had put him back on his financial feet mostly by investing heavily in Atlantic City, which was then on the rise.

He had insulated himself from failure with bluster. In public he was still The Donald—still rich, still working hard at being a symbol of excess. I was working on a profile of him for Playboy, which was his kind of magazine. He considered himself the magazine’s beau ideal, and was inordinately proud of having been featured on the magazine’s cover some years before. His then wife, Marla Maples, told him, sardonically, that he ought to buy the magazine: “You bought the Miss Universe Pageant; it’s right up your alley.” He must have figured it was a safe bet to agree to cooperate for my story. But well before I left him, we both knew he probably wouldn’t like the final product.

I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home—prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane—calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see . . . what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to Maples (they would split months later).

It was hard to watch the way he treated those around him, issuing peremptory orders—“Polish this, Tony. Today.” He met with the lady who selected his drapery for the Florida estate—“The best! The best! She’s a genius!”—who had selected a sampling of fabrics for him to choose from, all different shades of gold. He left the choice to her, saying only, “I want it really rich. Rich, rich, elegant, incredible.” Then, “Don’t disappoint me.” It was a pattern. Trump did not make decisions. He surrounded himself with “geniuses” and delegated. So long as you did not “disappoint” him—and it was never clear how to avoid doing so—you were gold.

What was clear was how fast and far one could fall from favor. The trip from “genius” to “idiot” was a flash. The former pilots who flew his plane were geniuses, until they made one too many bumpy landings and became “fucking idiots.” The gold carpeting selected in his absence for the locker rooms in the spa at Mar-a-Lago? “What kind of fucking idiot . . . ?” I watched as Trump strutted around the beautifully groomed clay tennis courts on his estate, managed by noted tennis pro Anthony Boulle. The courts had been prepped meticulously for a full day of scheduled matches. Trump took exception to the design of the spaces between courts. In particular, he didn’t like a small metal box—a pump and cooler for the water fountain alongside—which he thought looked ugly. He first questioned its placement, then crudely disparaged it, then kicked the box, which didn’t budge, and then stooped—red-faced and fuming—to tear it loose from its moorings, rupturing a water line and sending a geyser to soak the courts. Boulle looked horrified, a weekend of tennis abruptly drowned. Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.

“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.

“Pretty much,” I told him.

This apparently worried him, because on the flight home a day later he had a proposition.

“I’m looking for somebody to write my next book,” he told me.

I told him that I would not be interested.

“Why not?” he asked. “All my books become best-sellers.”

The import was clear. There was money in it for me. Trump remains the only person I have ever written about who tried to bribe me.

As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.

I got a call from his office some days after my profile of him appeared in the May 1997 issue of Playboy. I had already heard how he’d blown his stack to Christie Hefner. I was traveling at the time, working on my book Black Hawk Down. The call came to me in a motel room in Colorado, from his trusty assistant, the late Norma Foerderer.

“Mr. Trump would like to talk to you,” she said.

I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.

Foerderer came back on the line. She said:

“He’s too livid to speak.”

The Radical Libertarian