The Daily Parker

It took less than a week for two separate entities to challenge President Trump's pardon of racist thug former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio. Via Jennifer Rubin, the Federal judge who convicted Arpaio of criminal content has stopped short of vacating the conviction:

Instead she ordered Arpaio and the U.S. Department of Justice, which is prosecuting the case, to file briefs on why she should or shouldn't grant Arpaio's request.

Bolton has scheduled oral arguments on the matter for Oct. 4, the day before Arpaio was supposed to be sentenced.

There is case law that says a pardon implies an admission of guilt, and that will have to be argued in open court.

Rubin adds:

Meanwhile, Protect Democracy, an activist group seeking to thwart Trump’s violations of legal norms, and a group of lawyers have sent a letter to Raymond N. Hulser and John Dixon Keller of the Public Integrity Section, Criminal Division of the Justice Department, arguing that the pardon goes beyond constitutional limits.

Put simply, the argument is that the president cannot obviate the court’s powers to enforce its orders when the constitutional rights of others are at stake.

Lurking in the background is the potential for Trump to pardon associates involved in the probe of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and the possible obstruction of justice that followed. The Arpaio pardon may well have been an attempt to signal to those officials and ex-officials that they can resist inquiries with the assurance that Trump will pardon them. (Recall Trump’s unprecedented remarks that Michael Flynn should hold out for a grant of immunity.) Using the pardon power to obstruct an investigation into his own possible wrongdoing would signal a constitutional crisis.

A crisis that the Republicans in Congress could resolve simply by, I don't know, doing their fucking jobs. But the Party of Lincoln is happy to allow the President to destroy his office for personal gain, as long as they get their tax cuts.

Makes you long for the more-ethical days of Caligula and Nero, doesn't it?

Articles I haven't got time to read until later:

• Tropical storm (and former hurricane) Harvey has dumped more rain on Houston than the city has ever seen, and it's still coming down.
• The Chicago Tribune recaps last night's Game of Throne finale. (I've already read the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vox.)
• Greg Sargent says President "Trump is dragging us towards a full-blown crisis" which leaves open the question what the ongoing crisis actually was already.
• On the same topic, James Fallows explains why the Arpaio pardon matters. And Brian Beutler points out that the Republican Party completely owns it.
• Josh Marshall asks, in all seriousness, "Should we be punching Nazis?" A hint: "On a basic philosophical level, embracing violence to combat political and moral evils like racism and fascism is simply not equivalent to embracing violence to advance these evils."
• Burger chains are leaving Chicago. Darn.

That's all for now. Busy weekend behind me, another one ahead.

Example of why, from last Saturday:

I've watched Scott Adams defend President Trump for years now, and I'm always fascinated by his ability to accuse people who disagree with him of any number of mental deficiencies. I am surprised that it took until today for him to pipe up about Trump's latest self-inflicted wound, but not by how he approached it.

In today's post, Adams continues his longstanding argument that, when it comes to Trump, we're experiencing a "mass hysteria bubble." How does he know? Because lots of people disagree with him:

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.

The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play. If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble. If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.

Right. So, if you agree with Adams, you're not hallucinating. If you disagree with him, or if you agree with the proposition he leads with ("the United States intentionally elected a racist President"), you're hallucinating.

First, let's remind ourselves that the United States has intentionally elected racist presidents about 40 times. I'm trying to think of the few who weren't racist in the sense that we typically use the word, and the candidates I come up with are: Lincoln, Obama, Carter...maybe Truman? Possibly Teddy Roosevelt? On good days, LBJ and Kennedy? (I don't think Ford was racist but he was never elected.)

Second, the fact that a candidate is racist doesn't typically come up in elections because most of them in the past 50 years tried to keep that to themselves, and before that it would never have occurred to anyone to care. Casual racism has been a feature of American life since two hundred years before the country was founded. Hallucination? Not so much.

Third, people have known about Trump's racism since he was a young adult throwing black people out of his apartment buildings. So this isn't exactly news.

But all of that together lands on a pretty simple theory: people who voted for Trump didn't care that he was a racist, or knew and approved of it. I would bet the proportions of those two groups were 80/20. People who cared and disapproved of it most likely voted for Hillary Clinton.

Adams then sets up a set of straw men to torch:

One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis and “fine people.” Crazy stuff.

Let's parse that. In the three historical examples Adams lists in the first paragraph, people contemporaneously identified the insanity of what was going on, but there were not-so-crazy incentives for people to keep the "mass hysteria" going. Salem had land disputes at its core; McMartin was as much about attention-seeking as it was about child abuse; the tulip bubble was a pyramid scheme that we would call criminal today. So even before we get to Adams' straw men, we have to deal with his oversimplification of some pretty disturbing historical events.

And then he posits as the issue before us that people believe Trump is a Russian puppet. But actually, that's not the fear of people who know Russian methods and tactics. That Trump got elected was a bonus to Russia's rulers, not their goal. They want to discredit Western democratic systems to bolster their own internal political controls, not because they care about the West per se. Supporting Trump and interfering in our election was about that, not about Trump's allegiances, which they know as well as we do are entirely to himself.

Moreover, even if Trump didn't intend to do so, his words have emboldened the far-right groups that threaten not just our institutions and values but our property and lives, too. So whether Trump actually said Nazis are fine people, that's what the Nazis themselves heard, and why any other President would have slammed the door on the crazies.

Adams seems to concur in part: "If you already believed President Trump is a racist, his weak statement about Charlottesville seems like confirmation. But if you believe he never offered moral leadership, only equal treatment under the law, that’s what you saw instead. And you made up your own mind about the morality," he writes. Maybe people made up their minds about the morality because of the weak statement itself, not because they imagined Trump was supporting the racists?

Adams concludes: "If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble, you might see what I am doing in this blog as a valuable public service. If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, I look like a Nazi collaborator."

No, Scott, you are neither providing a valuable public service nor are you a Nazi collaborator. You are, however, an apologist for a deeply flawed president who is, intentionally or not, exacerbating the divisions in our country to increase his own power and personal wealth.

Huffington Post Global Editorial Director Howard Fineman explains how President Trump dividing the country is a feature, not a bug:

Having risen to power by dividing the country, his party leadership and even, at times, his own campaign team, his aim now is to divide or discredit any institution, tradition or group in his way.

Donald Trump seems perfectly willing to destroy the country to maintain his own power. He is racing to undermine the federal political system — if not all American public life — before still-independent forces (for now, the federal courts, the press and Congress) undermine him.

The goal, as always with Trump, is to win amid the chaos he sows, to be the last man standing in rubble. And “winning” is rapidly being reduced to the raw, basic terms he prefers: brute survival. With a record-setting low approval rating, world crises everywhere and a special counsel on his tail, the main victory he can hope for is staying in office.

Fineman goes on to enumerate the ways we can expect Trump to continue this strategy.

This is how people with deeply unpopular messages come to power in democracies. It's important that we keep this in mind. (That Trump is openly siding with people who venerate Adolf Hitler makes it a lot easier to see, of course.)

It doesn't help that the Republican Party continues to abet his behavior, even if only by keeping quiet. It's time for them to disband. As commentators across the spectrum are pointing out, the Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln; it's the anti-Lincoln party.

Those of us saying for years now that President Trump is a racist twat and that you should apply Occam's Razor (or Trump's Razor) to his behavior got quite a shock yesterday when he proved our point spectacularly. We can't pretend anymore that his policies and rhetoric come primarily from "inexperience" or "stupidity." Josh Marshall lays it out plainly:

The simpler explanation that accounts for all the available facts is not always right. But as Occam noted, it is always to be preferred. What we need is a Copernican revolution in our understanding of Trumpism, or at least some of us need it. The breakthrough for Copernicus was in positing the unimaginable, indeed the terrifying possibility that the Earth is not the center of the universe but rather a peripheral, secondary celestial body. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place.

With Trump, he has a revanchist racist politics because he is a revanchist racist. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place. All the heroic and increasingly nonsensical perambulations of misunderstandings, inexperience, missed opportunities, stubbornness and all the rest are not needed. It all falls into place.

What we have in this Times article is the more direct evidence, a confirmation of what we should already know. His advisors know this is what he thinks. They apparently hear it frequently. They were shocked to here him say in public “opinions that the president had long expressed in private.”

Stop pretending he's going to learn or grow. He won't. This is the president. Supporting him means supporting these views, which should not be aired—or held—by any serious politician anywhere. And it's shocking that people like Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn can stand next to him.

Apparently, life went on in the US while I was abroad last week. First, to James Damore:

• Via Deeply Trivial, The Guardian's Holly Brockwell points out that the first programmers were women.
• The Times summed up reader reactions.

Of course, that wasn't the big story of the weekend. About the terrorist attack and armed ultra-right rally in Virginia, there have been many, many reactions:

• From New Republic, Ryu Spaeth says President Trump is killing us, and Brian Beutler says the neo-Nazis are Trump's troops.
• Josh Marshall points out that Trump is one of them.
• From Citylab, Kriston Capps says the ultra-right are waging a war against public space, David Dudley talks about the Dodge Challenger as a killing machine, and Yoni Applebaum advocates taking all the Confederate statutes down.
• Krugman flat-out calls Trump un-American, which, it turns out, is like calling Parker a dog.
• Meanwhile, prominent Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Trump's tepid response, with Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying the attack met the legal definition of terrorism.
• Fox News is bending over backwards to cover the story as non-politcally as possible. In some cases, they're succeeding. Though I have to say, it looks like a challenge for them.

Can we have a discussion about domestic right-wing domestic terrorism now? Before we have another Oklahoma City?

I'm back from the UK, and I hope my laundry will be done soon because my body thinks it's 1:30 in the morning.

I did want to note the horror in Virginia over the weekend, and James Fallows' observations about the President's abject failure to respond appropriately:

Donald Trump had an opportunity yesterday to show that he was more than the ignorant, impulsive, reckless opportunist he appeared to be during the election. To show, that is, that the  burdens and responsibilities of unmatched international power had in fact sobered him, and made him aware of his obligations to the nation as a whole.

Of course, he failed.

And those who stand with him, now, cannot claim the slightest illusion about what they are embracing.

It was so tempting, being at O'Hare with my passport and a packed bag, just to hop on another plane...

President Trump, our hypocrite in chief, is taking the first official vacation of his presidency, after spending 41 of the last 196 days away from the White House. This is a man who criticized President Obama for taking too much time off, which makes sense because Trump projects and lies the way you and I breathe. Obama, in fact, had spent 21 days away from the White House at this point in his presidency, including 8 visits to Camp David (which, while relaxing, is hardly a vacation).

As CNN's Chris Cillizza points out,

Generally speaking, I think "the president is taking a too-long vacation" is a dumb storyline. Presidents -- of both parties -- deserve some down time. Whether they play golf or clear brush in their free time, it's fine with me! We all need a little break. And let's be honest: If I am always not so far from my phone (and work) on vacation, then you can sure as hell bet the president of the United States is staying dialed in too. It's not as though these presidents go to a remote island where there's no phone or Internet service.

That said, Trump asked for this criticism. He was relentless not only in his attacks on Obama's vacation habits but insistent that he wouldn't take any vacation if he was elected president.

"Pres. Obama is about to embark on a 17 day vacation in his 'native' Hawaii, putting Secret Service away from families on Christmas. Aloha!," Trump tweeted in December 2013. "President Obama has a major meeting on the N.Y.C. Ebola outbreak, with people flying in from all over the country, but decided to play golf!," he tweeted in October 2014.

I'm on vacation as well, flying out tomorrow to the Ancestral Homeland. First, though, I'm spending a day enjoying our perfect late-summer weather at the Bristol Renaissance Faire. Photos forthcoming.

The Washington Post today published transcripts of President Trump's late-January calls with Mexican president Enrique Peña-Nieto and Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull.

Most press reports today focus on his statements to Peña-Nieto that make it clear the border wall is complete bullshit. But I think we already knew that; this just puts it in Trump's own words.

On the other hand, I found the Turnbull call fascinating because it's clear Trump doesn't understand the important nuance of Australia's policy against accepting refugees who arrive by boat. Turnbull tries repeatedly to get Trump to see the point, but all Trump cares about is that the Obama Administration agreed to take 1,250 refugees from Australia in exchange for an equal number of Central American refugees—a "bad deal," according to Trump.

It's hard to pull out a short bit of the exchange that shows the problem simply. The issue is, Australia does not, under any circumstance, admit refugees who arrive by boat:

TURNBULL: The only people that we do not take are people who come by boat. So we would rather take a not very attractive guy that help you out then to take a [Nobel] Peace Prize winner that comes by boat. That is the point.

TRUMP: What is the thing with boats? Why do you discriminate against boats? No, I know, they come from certain regions. I get it.

TURNBULL: No, let me explain why. The problem with the boats it that you are basically outsourcing your immigration program to people smugglers and also you get thousands of people drowning at sea.

This is not hard to understand. Not hard at all.

But Trump "knows" that the only reason to prevent some people and not others from entering the country is because they're "bad hombres." ("Bad wallabies?") Because that's how he thinks. And he's incapable, even in a semi-private call with another world leader, of seeing another point of view.

Shortly after the part I quoted above, Trump completely loses his patience and essentially hangs up on Turnbull. From Trump's perspective, if he honors the deal, he'll "be seen as a weak and ineffective leader in my first week by these people." Never mind that, as Turnbull points out, there's really no downside: Trump can refuse to admit anyone, he can blame Obama, whatever.

After reading this, I wonder if Trump hung up on Turnbull because the Australian PM made an irrefutable point that undermined Trump's basic premises. Since Trump can never be wrong, Turnbull must be the problem.

We weren't wrong about Trump two years ago. He just doesn't have the stuff for this job. No surprise there. But it's interesting to see how he behaves one-on-one with his peers, and what his priorities are up close. It's sad, really.