Eric The Blue

Readers write

The local rag entitles its letters to the editor section "Readers write."  Here is a recent specimen:

The May 20 letter writer who insists that "we are not all complicit" in President Trump's election and that to say we are is to "disrespect the majority who did not vote for him" seems himself to disrespect the wisdom of the founders, who designed the Electoral College precisely to avoid the possibility that we all be governed by such population centers as California and New York, both left-wing bastions and neither of which appears to be terribly well-governed itself . . . .

And the author drones on, apparently pleased with each new bit of nonsense that occurs to him.  He thought of it, therefore it must be profound, so yes, the founders foresaw in the 1780s that this new nation would expand westward to the Pacific Ocean, where millions of stupid people would settle in places like Silicon Valley and destroy the United States from within unless their benighted votes for president be diluted by the Electoral College.  The foresight! 

Maybe looking forward more than 200 years to the electoral landscape of the early 21st-century contributed to the founders' moral failure on slavery, an issue that was directly before them.  From Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution they ratified:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

This is the notorious three-fifths compromise, which allowed for counting slaves ("other Persons"), who had no political rights whatever, as partial citizens for purposes of determining representation in the Congress.  The compromise would have been less notorious if it hadn't been augmented by, for example, the provision allotting to each state two senators, without regard to population.  So the influence of small states, by and large the slave-holding ones, was undemocratically enhanced in the House by the three-fifths compromise, in the Senate by the provision allotting two senators to every state, and, in presidential elections, by the Electoral College, which, instead of just counting the votes of citizens, first divides them up by state and awards "electors" based on the state's representation in the Congress--said representation having already been tampered with so as to achieve a certain outcome that would now be duplicated in the selection of the chief executive. 

Talk about a rigged system!  It's just about perfect that supporters of Donald Trump should put it forward as proof of the genius of the founders.

Boehner mows the lawn, gains clarity

Surfing the 'Net in search of Republicans with something sensible to say, I see that John Boehner has termed Trump's presidency a "complete disaster." What is it about being out of office that removes the scales from Republican eyes?  Or permits them to acknowledge that the emperor is naked?  Now that he's not kissing up to the nuts on his right flank, I feel a few drops of fondness for Boehner.  Here he is explaining his lack of presidential ambition:

I wake up every day, drink my morning coffee, and say hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.  I don't want to be president.  I drink red wine.  I smoke cigarettes.  I  golf.  I cut my own grass.  I iron my own clothes.  And I'm not willing to give that all up to be president.

Okay, it's a little weird, inasmuch as he suggests that his love of ironing is what keeps him from being president.  It's sort of endearing that ironing made that list, however.  You have to like a Republican who does his own ironing.  We Democrats do it, but that's only because our wives refuse.

The I-Word

"Trump lawyers begin studying impeachment," announces a headline I saw somewhere.  Perhaps they were waiting for the President to admit in a tv interview that he has obstructed justice.  Of course, impeachment by the House and a vote to convict by two-thirds of the Senate would result in President Pence, whose most public and formal role to date has been that of manager of the Trump transition--which means, I think, that he signed off on Michael Flynn for National Security Advisor.  He should be less persnickety about having a cocktail out of his wife's presence and more persnickety about who has security clearances at the highest levels of our government.

Anyway, a study of the impeachment process reveals that, unless Trump loses support of Republicans, he's safe until after 2018.  (Googling "impeachment" reveals that by the time you've typed "p" the fairies in the ether know exactly what you're interested in.)  It therefore is a matter of practical interest to take note of what Republicans are saying about Trump.  Asked this morning on one of the gabfest shows about the President having disparaged James Comey in an Oval Office confab with a couple of Russian thugs, John McCain said:

I'm almost speechless because I don't know why someone would say something like that. . . .  Mr Comey was highly respected and highly regarded, so I can't explain it.  Honestly, I cannot explain a lot of the President's actions.

On NPR this morning, Representative Mike Coffman, Republican of Colorado, had the following exchange with interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

Garcia-Navarro: How concerned are you about the president--how the president has handled himself this past week?

Coffman:  For just this week (laughter)? Concerned about the president from Day 1. I think he's - I think he's so - he stumbled coming out of the block. And as far as I'm concerned, he's never recovered. He is - he's not been able to make the pivot between being candidate Trump and being President Trump, and he needs to be able to do that. And I worry about his ability to do that.

Garcia-Navarro: [T]here were reports last week that the president disclosed sensitive intelligence information from Israel to Russian diplomats in an Oval Office meeting. You're a veteran. Do you have any concerns about the president's national security judgment, just briefly?

Coffman: Well, I'm not sure why he was meeting with the Russians anyway. I think he better learn that they're not our friends, No. 1. I mean in the Oval Office. And No. 2, I think the president lacks discipline, and he needs to, you know, get that. He - I think he's still - and again, in seeing himself as a candidate Trump, one of the things I think that his basis of what appreciated about him was the fact that he sort of spoke whatever was on his mind. Well, I don't think that works in the Oval Office. It doesn't work as president. You have to be very disciplined. You have to be very deliberative. Every word matters, and this president really needs to tighten up.

Then there's the conservative commentariat.  Jonah Goldberg, in National Review:

The idea that the media or some shadowy cabal of "Never Trumpers" forced the president to fire James Comey in a comically incompetent manner is ludicrous.  No one was holding Ivanka hostage in a Motel 6 when Donald Trump confessed to Lester Holt that his administration's explanation for why Comey was fired was a lie or forced Trump to admit that he fired Comey for his handling of the Russia investigation.

Ross Douthat in The New York Times:

[A president] needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.

Trump is seemingly deficient in them all.

David Brooks, on NPR:

To me, the story of today, you know, we used to have a better class of criminal.  When a president obstructed justice, he didn't brag about it.

Can't remember the last time I heard so much good sense from Republicans. 

Trump primes pump

My favorite topic for household homilies concerns how my moaning roommates should calm down, maybe call to mind the problems of other people for a change, and quit exaggerating the degree of woe settling over their own souls.  "It's not the end of the world," I hear myself intoning, repeatedly.  (Only the end of the world is the end of the world, and it's never happened yet.)

But our president.  I'm beginning to credit the people who think he could take the country down.  Here's a thought experiment.  Let's say that either he's right, and "the Russia story" is "fake news," or the suspicions of his most wildly gesticulating critics are right, and he is himself guilty of collusion with a hostile foreign power, i.e., treason.  Judging from Trump's own actions, which is more likely? 

That's an easy one.  His behavior only makes sense if he's trying to hide something vile.  Mental illness might have something to do with it, too.

It's not as if there isn't anything to enjoy, however.  Trump riffing on "priming the pump," claiming he'd invented the phrase and eliciting someone's tweet, "From what I hear, trump coined the phrase 'primed the pump' over dinner with Frederick Douglass just before the Bowling Green massacre."  In addition to being a liar himself, he is the reason that lies are in others.  With Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes, he waved in Mike Huckabee's daughter from the bull pen, and she told the assembled White House reporters that she'd been taking call after call from disgruntled FBI agents whose opinion of Comey is lower than Trump's.

Yes, yes, when you work at the FBI, and you don't care for your boss's boss's boss, you pick up the phone, dial the White House, and stay on the line while your call is forwarded to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the understudy of the press secretary, aka substitute liar.  I suppose people even dumber than she might think this is plausible but that doesn't account for the other 97% of us.  For two days their story about why Trump fired Comey was that he (Comey) had been unfair to Hillary Clinton.  Then Trump gave an interview to NBC in which he said that wasn't the real reason, of course--it's more like the garden-variety obstruction of justice that everyone had assumed.  Whew!

The spectacle is kind of enjoyable in a sickening sort of way.

Self-selecting

The Gallup organization, best known for its surveys of public opinion, has a product called StrengthsFinder that seems to be quite a hot commodity in corporate America right now.  If your employer pays Galllup, you get access to a website where you can click, click, click about yourself.   After you're done clicking, you get in your in-box a list of your five top strengths.  I think there are around 35 possible strengths.  It might seem that there would be more upside to identifying your weaknesses and working to bring them up to a respectable level, but that would be such a downer.  I, for one, am not going to try and bone up on turning the world on with my smile, which, in the StrengthsFinder lexicon, is known as being a Woo.

I tend not to like Woos.  Woos are shallow, self-seeking manipulators whose charms must be resisted by the power of reason.

Yes, I scored high in "analytical."  My other strengths included "intellection," "context," and "learner."  Amanda says my results explain why having a conversation with me is like trying to talk to HAL, the voice of the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  "No, Amanda, we do not need a new car.  You want a new car.  Allow me to explain the difference between need and want."  All in the voice of . . . HAL.

But I'm not the only one.  At work, I had to collect the results of my colleagues, so that I could forward them to a certified StrengthsFinder Team Convener, or whatever the title is of the guy who would construct our StrenghthsFinder Team Map.  It was amusing to watch one similar profile after another pinging into my in-box.  What a bunch of pointy-headed puzzlers we are in my office! 

It seems obvious that this is not any kind of a coincidence.  There is a self-selection principle operating.  The work that we do requires these strengths; or, reversing it, people with different strengths would never choose our kind of work.  If our job was to sell stuff to people, our Team Profile would be very different, and none of us would work there.  This self-selecting principle must be generally applicable and there is no reason to suppose that it's limited to peoples' strengths.  The celibacy requirement for the Catholic priesthood makes it attractive to men whose sexual proclivities are unacceptable and so must be hidden away in any event.  That police work involves carrying a gun and telling other people what to do tends to attract the kind of person who might discharge a rifle into the car of some African-American kids leaving a house party.