Politics

After losing a US Senate race, Congressman George H. W. Bush was prepared to head back to the Texas oilfields and a life of relative obscurity when the new Republican president summoned him to Washington. The president thought highly of the young man and wanted to ensure his political future. He offered Bush the Ambassadorship to the United Nations, a position that would give him a chance to remain politically relevant as he burnished his foreign policy credentials. Bush accepted. And with that, Richard Nixon launched George H.W. Bush as a national figure.

The world knew him as ‘Bush 41.’ I knew him by a different name during the time I worked for him as his speechwriter when he was Vice President. In those days, the staff called him ‘The Vishnu.’ It was his own devising. He’d been to India on a state visit, where they’d presented him, amid much pomp and ceremony and clanging of brass, with a statue of the four-armed Vedic deity Vishnu. Its plaque described Vishnu’s numerous godly qualities, among them: omniscience, omnipotence, and his title ‘Preserver of the Universe.’ Mr Bush immediately recognized a kindred godhead. He began referring to himself, in staff memos and aboard Air Force Two’s loudspeakers as ‘The Vishnu.’ In more intimate settings, simply, ‘The Vish.

The chapters of the life of President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday night aged 94, are the history of an era. If he was not one of Emerson’s ‘representative men’, it was to the good. The ‘representative man’ of Emerson’s imagination was Carlyle’s ‘great man’, a conqueror who stamped his mark on his age by forcing his environment to reflect his inborn character. G.H.W. Bush’s character reflected its environment, and represented the virtues of a vanishing class and suddenly distant age. Born in 1924 a senator’s son, Bush was educated at Phillips Academy and Yale, decades before the acronym WASP was coined. In 1942, he enlisted in the US Navy on his 18th birthday. As a naval aviator, he returned to duty after being shot down and rescued from the Pacific.

By most conventional pundit metrics, Bernie Sanders should be the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. To state the obvious, he was last cycle’s runner-up, having won 46 percent of elected delegates, 23 states, and smashed small-dollar fundraising records. His policy platform has taken hold across the party, with most every nationally ambitious figure now calling for universal Medicare, free public college tuition, and a host of other measures that were closely associated with his 2016 run. He has consistently polled as the most popular politician in America, he just won re-election in his home-state by a massive margin, and his social media engagement is off-the-charts. So what’s the problem? Simply put, large sections of the party still view him as a threat.

As the teeming mass of mostly male, partly criminal, humanity stews about on Mexican side of our Southern border, entertaining itself by throwing rocks at US border officials, emoting for CNN cameras, and periodically rushing the fence in an effort to break through to America, it is worth stepping back to ask a few large questions. But first, let’s step out of the rancid pool of sentimentality with which the media, in its anti-Trump frenzy, has surrounded this episode.

There is a point where one can go from being a conspiracy theorist to becoming an actual conspirator. It seems that Jerome Corsi, who is reportedly negotiating a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, may have reached that point during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is zeroing in on the ties between Corsi, Roger Stone, WikiLeaks, and, of course, Mother Russia. Corsi has been at the center of right-wing conspiracy thinking for some years. He has been part of numerous campaigns to vilify leading Democrats, a veteran, so to speak, of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s mission to take down John Kerry in 2004 and the birther contretemps about Barack Obama, which Donald Trump, among others, helped to push.

’Twas the night after Thanksgiving 2028, and all the White House was dark, except for the kitchen. President Trump leant against the range, sipping from a can of Poland Spring cranberry seltzer as she watched the First Husband scraping the last of the stuffing from the cavity of the giant turkey. ‘Harder,’ she ordered. ‘Ivanka, I’m trying,’ Jared said. He was glad MBS and Kanye had already left. Thanksgiving 2028 had been just like Thanksgiving 2018, except for the moment at the table when they had been taking turns to say what they were grateful for, and Jared’s electronic ankle bracelet had gone off.

According to a document obtained by the transparency initiative Property of the People, the FBI now regards the Proud Boys (the self-styled ‘pro-West fraternal organization’ founded by right-wing provocateur Gavin McInnes) as an extremist group linked to white nationalism. As someone who’s met similar groups (I’ve stayed with anti-government militias in Kansas and California), I’m not convinced. In my experience, Proud Boy-style groups aren’t racist – if I had to define them, I’d say they’re obnoxious pro-Trumpers whose politics seem less about making America great again and more about antagonizing the other side. Sure, they tend to be strongly anti-immigration and un-PC more generally – but white nationalist?

Holy Schitt! Just when you think there isn’t anything for Donald Trump to add to the lexicon of insults, he finds a new way, this time with the jejune epithet aimed at California lawmaker Adam Schiff, who is poised to become chairman of the House Intelligence committee. Trump’s tweet about him may be taken as an index of his inner apprehension about Schiff, not to mention Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who continues silently to stalk Trump, immune, at least so far, to his brickbats. The main reason for Trump’s turmoil is that he lost the midterm elections even if, as he explained to an alternately bemused and incredulous Chris Wallace of Fox News on Sunday, ‘I wasn’t on the ballot.’ So he was on the ballot until he wasn’t?

For all the good news 2018’s midterms have given Democrats — a House majority, a Senate seat from Arizona, seven more governorships, and an all-blue congressional delegation from Orange County — they have also shown that President Trump has a clear path to re-election in 2020. Midterms historically maximize the relative turnout for the opposition party. More voters overall will go to the polls in 2020 than did so this year, just as more people voted in 2016 than did so this November. But the ratio of Democrats to Republicans will be narrower, if the past anything to go by.

The exact scale of Democratic victory in the US midterms remains unclear, but a shortage of numbers has not prevented many media outlets proclaiming a historic shift, a stern rebuke to Donald Trump, and above all, a key augury for the 2020 presidential contest. Some polls imagine Trump in 2020 losing to any number of a wide range of hypothetical Democrats. I will differ. I have now lived long enough to see so many elections that were portrayed at the time as historic, decisive and/or transformative, but most of these supposed watershed contests were nothing of the kind. In several electoral cycles over the past half-century, we have supposedly seen the imminent extinction of Party X, or at least a near-death experience.

So much for small favors. Judge Timothy J. Kelly just came down hard on the administration that appointed him to the federal bench in September 2017. He granted CNN a temporary restraining order, ruling that the White House did not follow due process in depriving CNN reporter Jim Acosta of his right to a ‘hard pass,’ which permits him to enter White House grounds when pleases. He also noted that the doctored video that press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders disseminated about Acosta performing a karate chop on a hapless intern who was trying to retrieve a microphone was ‘likely untrue.’ The judge’s verdict further demonstrates that Trump is the best thing to happen to Acosta and, by extension, much of the media.

Ivanka Trump holds rather more sway in the White House than a First Daughter should — that much is well-established. Yet this week we see that it is her step-mother, Melania, who calls the shots in her husband’s administration. Mrs T is the real force behind the throne, as Mira Ricardel has discovered to her cost. Palace intrigue doesn’t get more intriguing. Ms Ricardel, a close ally of National Security Adviser John Bolton, made the mistake of clashing with Melania over her ‘Be Best’ trip to Africa. Ricardel allegedly insisted a member of the security council should accompany Mrs Trump as she posed her way around Ghana, Malawi and Kenya in a pith helmet, cream jacket and trousers, and black-neck tie. Melania disagreed. https://audioboom.

Socialist know-nothing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the future of the Democrat Party. Nancy Pelosi is its past, but she’s probably its present too despite threats to deny her another Speakership. The Ocasio-Cortez contingent in the party has determined that Nancy Pelosi simply isn’t radical enough. That will be news to many on the American Right for whom she has served as a longtime bête noir and whose strident advocacy of San Francisco values provided fodder for countless Republican campaign ads and fundraising letters. For Republicans she’s a radical who favors amnesty, citizenship, and voting rights for illegal aliens, government funded abortion on demand, and impeaching the president. But in the current Democrat Party she’s a mushy moderate.

We’re all Trumpologists now. Like the Kremlinologists of the Cold War, monitoring the line-ups at missile parades to see who was in or out of the Politburo, we track the president’s Twitter twitches and off-the-cuff quips, then guess which way he’s going to go next. The Soviets were rational actors, and so was Donald Trump when he responded to the midterms. He called the split Congress a ‘beautiful, bipartisan-type situation’ — beautiful because the situation places Trump at the fulcrum of power, bi-partisan because no legislature will pass without both sides on board. Trump is the president who spent his first few days in the White House annulling Barack Obama’s executive orders.