Both candidates in Montana now running ads where they shoot TVs

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment

Real Montanans Rob Quist and Greg Gianforte, with guns

In only three weeks, the voters of Montana will select a new congressman to replace former Rep. Ryan Zinke, who vacated his seat as our sole representative in the US House to become Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Interior. It’s an exciting race. Democrat Rob Quist, at left above, is a locally famous folk singer who has never held public office. Republican Greg Gianforte, at right, is a millionaire tech entrepreneur who ran for governor in 2016 but has also never held public office. Both men were chosen by their parties, rather than by the usual primary process, to run in the special election. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real Montanans like me and, to a lesser extent, you. Why, just look at how they shoot guns!

That’s Greg Gianforte, wearing very clean work clothes and shooting a twelve-gauge at some office equipment in a field. Whoever did the voiceover for this one belongs in the Scary Ad Voice hall of fame. He says “national gun registry” in the scandalized tone most of us would reserve for “lobster in her vagina.” As you can see from this spot, candidate Gianforte loves guns and hates computers. That’s a sharp contrast with candidate Quist, who loves guns and hates Gianforte.

In the future, all political discourse will be conducted by shooting things that represent ideas. All candidates will be celebrities and tycoons with no record of public service, who are operated by their parties via remote control. What’s striking about these two ads is their near-total similarity. Creeping similarity has been a real problem in this contest between two supposedly different candidates for the House, which has amounted to a dance-off of affected pandering to a political consultant’s idea of Montana.

What if Montanans picked their leaders based on something other than who shoots a gun and lives on a ranch? What if the parties gave us to understand that our decisions could mean something besides “support Trump” or “stop Trump?” What if Montana politics were not, at this moment, captured entirely by cynics? These questions are academic. You can read all about them in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find an object that represents exemptions for pre-existing conditions on the individual health insurance market and prop it up on a fencepost. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Lawyers defending DNC argue impartiality was just a guideline

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 0 Comment

Former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (artist’s conception)

Did you guys know that someone filed a class-action suit against the Democratic National Committee on behalf of Bernie Sanders supporters? It’s like Twitter in lawsuit form. You may remember last summer, when leaked emails appeared to show pro-Clinton bias among high-ranking members of the DNC—including Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned as a result. That’s about as contrite as the party was willing to get. When it comes to shelling out actual compensatory damages to Sanders donors—who, Miami law firm Beck & Lee argues, were defrauded by a national committee that gave them to believe the nominating process would be fair—the DNC draws a line. That line runs right through Article V, Section 4 of the DNC charter, which instructs the chair and staff to, as the Observer puts it, “ensure neutrality in the Democratic presidential primaries.” But that’s more of a guideline than a rule, DNC attorneys argued. The neutrality provision is “a discretionary rule that [the committee] didn’t need to adopt to begin with.”

What’s fun about this argument is that no one is contesting that the primaries were unfair. You’d think there might be some legal case to be made that, despite the emails, Wasserman Schultz and the rest of the committee acted impartially. But apparently they thought that wouldn’t work, and they’d have a better chance arguing that no one expected them to act according to the charter.

This is not the argument the committee has presented to Democratic primary voters. Wasserman Schultz did not send out an email suggesting that the party should agree ahead of time whether to follow the charter in the next election, to avoid this kind of misunderstanding. She resigned, because she and the committee appeared to have been unfair when everyone expected fairness. It’s weird that the money version of this argument takes issue with the expectation, when what went wrong was clearly the unfairness.

But that’s probably just a legal calculation. The weird expectations argument stood a better chance of working, and would therefore lead to a smaller settlement down the line. Still, this reads as an admission from the DNC that it’d be easier to argue no one expected the party to follow its charter than to say the nominating process was fair.

Who cares, right? Bernie is going to die peacefully in his sleep before the next election, and Hillary is going to rise up into the air on silvery wings she’ll use to decapitate the former President Trump as soon as he admits treason, resigns and becomes a private citizen. Or he’ll win again in 2020, because Biden croaked, Elizabeth Warren is Hillary without the banks, and Corey Booker is the banks. Trump will still be in office at age 77, likeRonald Reagan without a middle-class childhood to soften his dementia.

All this would have been okay if she had won. If the DNC had set up a coronation for Clinton while hapless sophomores wasted bong money on Sanders and then she kept Trump from becoming president, that would have been cool. But to hand-pick your candidate and lose! It contravenes our sole request of the modern political party. Cheat to our advantage. Cheat in a way that makes our lives better.

Does watching Donald Trump lie make me dumber?

By Dan Brooks in Lived Experience 2 Comments

Donald Trump is like if the evil country club president in Caddyshack and Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack were the same character. “Hey everybody,” he yells in his underground bunker as hot Korean nuclei blast through our widening eyes. “We’re all gonna get laid!” He’s not as funny as Dangerfield or Ted Knight, much less both of them together. But he owns a lot more golf courses. Today your New York Times reports that one of his golf courses contains a plaque commemorating Civil War battle along a nearby stretch of the Potomac it calls “The River of Blood”:

“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” the inscription reads. “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’” The inscription, beneath his family crest and above Mr. Trump’s full name, concludes: “It is my great honor to have preserved this important section of the Potomac River!”

He put an exclamation point on the plaque. That’s a rookie mistake in the area of inscription. Also, that river of blood thing is made up. According to at least three regional historians, no battles were fought at the future site of Trump’s golf course. While soldiers sometimes crossed the river there, none of them died.

“How would they know that?” Trump asked when confronted with this information. He went on to say that several historians had told him of a battle there, declining to give their names, before saying that the historians had actually spoken to several of his employees, whose anonymity he also preserved.

This raises an interesting question: Can learning about thee president’s various insipid lies eventually cause my brain to shoot out of my nose like when you squeeze a Capri Sun? Like must I spend each day in astonishment at the next dumb elaboration of the last poorly constructed lie, or will the astonishment hormones build up until they finally explode and spray my face in an even layer across my windshield? In this scenario I’m just driving around, thinking about how Trump said no one can prove he didn’t bang Selena or whatever. One minute I’m alive, outraged for the 852nd consecutive day of the administration, and the next minute I’m dead—or not dead but driving without a face, bearing down on the accelerator and wildly twisting the wheel in the hopes that these movements coincide with correct driving, because I have no sense left but taste.

I was going to say that Trump put forward a classic cracked-plate defense with his multilevel evasion here, but fuck, man—when will we get something from the day’s experience besides an expanded taxonomy of lies? Is it just going to be Ecclesiastes from now on, marveling at how unfair everything is until we are dead? It’s times like these, when presidents are TV personalities who lied about Civil War battles in commemorative plaques on their golf courses, that you realize how useless outrage is. I deserve better than this, you think, looking at the daily news. Someone should treat me with respect. Then you feel the lash of your Korean overseer, and you drop your phone and get back to work. The whole country has gone to seed, and you know whose fault it is? Bernie Sanders.

What doesn’t Donald Trump know?

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 1 Comment

Very little

Combat! blog has been crushed under an avalanche of work today and whimpers from the rubble but faintly. The world doesn’t stop for us to make money, though. Among other people whose work experience consists of pretending to have big, dynamic ideas on whatever subject is presently at hand, history continues apace. Yesterday, on Twitter, President Trump sang the praises of Republicans’ new bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which may come to the House for a vote this week. “New healthcare plan is on its way,” he tweeted. “Will have much lower premiums & deductibles while at the same time taking care of pre-existing conditions!” As Robert Pear of the New York Times drily put it, “Which bill Mr. Trump was referring to is not clear.”

He probably means the new version of Trumpcare, which “takes care” of people in the mafia sense of the phrase. One of the concessions that makes this bill more appealing to conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus is a waiver that will allow states to let insurers charge higher premiums to customers with pre-existing conditions. The bill would also remove minimum coverage requirements that are currently part of Obamacare. That takes care of pre-existing conditions only in that it will let insurers charge prohibitively high premiums to cover them. For example, before the Affordable Care Act, I had a $38,000 deductible on my left shoulder because of previous injuries. That was basically the same as not having insurance, except I still paid premiums every month.

As for Trump’s promise of “much lower premiums and deductibles,” that might be true, if anyone cared to find out. Although the last bill Republicans proposed was expected to raise premiums 15% to 20% next year, no such information is known about the current bill. Rep. Chris Collins (R-New York) told the Times that House Republicans are “not planning to seek a new cost-and-impact estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.”

Whatever—the president is just going to say a bunch of stuff anyway. Also this weekend, Trump gave an interview to Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner, in which he compared himself to Andrew Jackson. If you’re thinking that’s kind of an odd choice of role model—given that he was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Indians and wrecked the economy by eliminating the Bank of the United States—you have made a classic error. President Trump is not familiar with American history. I quote the leader of the free world:

People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

When Trump says “people don’t realize this,” he means “I just learned this.” Given that he attended high school 50 years ago, you can almost forgive him for saying “people don’t ask” the question that literally every American history class asks. But Jesus Christ, man, he went to the United States Military Academy and then Wharton. He is the president of the United States. Is it too much to expect him to muster a B-level understanding of the most significant event in American history?

Anyway, Trump’s assertion that Jackson “was really angry what he saw with regard to the Civil War; he said, ‘There’s no reason for this'” is not true. Jackson did not say that, and he died 15 years before the war broke out. But who cares, right? The president says some stupid shit that literal schoolchildren know is not true, and it doesn’t matter. None of this matters. Nuke Korea, bankrupt me because I dislocated my shoulder again—the important thing is that a bunch of Jimmy Buffett fans got revenge on college students for not being able to say the n-word anymore. America is great, again.

Friday links! Hardships of the rich edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

From Fyre Festival, a $12,000 concert in the Bahamas that is not going as planned

Experts from Dave Barry to Naven R. Johnson’s grandmother agree that it is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick. But is being rich really such a sweet deal? Wages have stagnated for the last four decades as corporate profits climbed to all-time highs, so it seems like now is a great time to own things. But that’s a narrow perspective. If you weren’t so wrapped up in working all day, you’d see that the rich are suffering terribly. They never get any sympathy for it, either, what with frothy-mouthed socialism being so popular lately. All this talk about fairness and equality serves only to divide us. Today is Friday, and we all bleed the same shade of Nantucket red. Won’t you pity the masters with me?

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