Republicans and The Big Lie are not rational: Former Guy's blackjack table

There’s a mental phenomenon known among gamblers as tilt*. 

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times, by Virginia Heffernan

Political tilt is brain-hijacking

It’s a brain-hijacking that happens after an ego blow. Rather than taking a break, a gambler on tilt becomes absolutely convinced he should have won the hand or the slot-machine tug. He starts to risk greater and greater sums of money to offset shame, regain honor and prove he was right.

Don’t try to reason with a tilting brain. As a wild-eyed gambler’s losses compound, he won’t be stopped. Hit me, hit me, hit me.

This is the Republican Party right now.

On Wednesday, House Republicans voted to strip Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) of her role as chair of the House Republican Conference, the third-highest position in party leadership in the House.

Much hay has been made of the Republicans’ reasons for doing this. And indeed Congresswoman Cheney, who keeps denouncing the big lie about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, is not in lockstep with the party, which tends to adore the stolen-election trope.

But, really, like gamblers on tilt, they’re just not being rational.

A marquee ideological neoconservative, daughter of a former vice president, and thus a household name, Cheney had held the position of conference chair since 2019. Her caucus had long admired her for her fiscal and social conservatism and her foreign-policy experience, as she served in several key State Department positions under Bush.

So why in the world would Republicans — eager for a comeback after the former buy Trump’s November defeat — cancel her?

This is a question without a sensible answer. Sure some were given. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told CBS, “You can’t have [Cheney] attacking the leader of the Republican Party [Trump].”

But House Republicans are not being rational. They’re acting out of the card-table compulsions that have come to define their despairing caucus.

By every metric, they’re on a vicious losing streak.

They’re stuck in the minority in Congress, and they lost the White House and the Senate six months ago. They’re struggling with the disgrace brought on them by the twice-impeached, one-term former president whom many still inexplicably consider the party leader.

They’re stigmatized with the catastrophe of the bloody attempted coup in Trump’s name at the U.S. Capitol. And they’re bitter about the popularity and successes of the Democratic President Joe Biden.

Their attempts at reviving their tired culture war — over Dr. Seuss or “cancel culture” or “woke capitalism” — seem to be leading nowhere.

On top of all this, prominent Republicans keep falling hard from grace.

Trump favorite Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is under investigation by the Justice Department for potential violations of sex trafficking laws. He denies wrongdoing.

Another Trump favorite, Jerry Falwell Jr., has been kicked out of Liberty University, where he was president, amid allegations that he and his wife engaged in a sexual relationship with a one-time pool attendant.

Then there’s Trump ultra-favorite Rudolph W. Giuliani. Last month, the FBI conducted a high-profile raid of Giuliani’s apartment and office, escalating the Justice Department’s investigation into the president’s former personal attorney and what exactly he was doing in Ukraine a few years back.

And then, according to the Wall Street Journal, prosecutors in New York subpoenaed documents related to Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s close confidant and his company’s longtime chief financial officer, in a move among others widely believed to be putting pressure on Weisselberg to cooperate in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of the Trump Organization.

In the words of Norm Eisen, former ethics chief under President Obama, such developments “signal turbulent waters ahead” for the Trump crowd. For Republicans, it must feel like nothing but “bad beats” — the unfair losses that gamblers complain about in bars until they’re blue in the face.

But good grief, politics is defined by loss. Think of the Democrats in 2016. Though crushed, they began working to cut their losses, lick their wounds, reflect and correct course.

But Republicans seem to have lost that kind of resiliency. They will not step away from the Trump blackjack table, breathe some fresh air and devise a new strategy.

Instead, they are throwing good resources after bad, manically gunning for Trump’s enemies as if he were something more than a has-been living in Florida who is the target of one investigation after another.

In short, the hivemind of House Republicans has been seized by the delusion that if it keeps placing more and even bigger bets on one-term, twice-impeached Donald Trump — the most disgraced and disliked president in American history — this time the party will get its power back.

And more! Their dignity will come back. The private planes, the poll numbers outside their most rabid base, the righteousness, the adulation of the American people. Gaetz can go back to flaunting videos of semi-naked ladies on his phone (sources say), and Falwell can post more pix of his unzipped pants. Giuliani will be restored as America’s Mayor. And of course Trump will be back in office, the forever president.

Deal me in, the House Republicans are saying with the hit job on Cheney. Just one more hand. That’ll show everyone.

Mmmm, OK, Republicans. While you keep blowing it on delusions, the rest of us will be getting our vaccinations and rebuilding the economy. We don’t mess with gamblers on tilt.

*Tilt in sports betting is when you start losing control while making wagers. Tilt typically starts when you take a bad beat or lose a bet on a game you were “sure” would win.

Barking Lunatic opinion - Donald Trump in a tell tale frenzy

"And scared people are scary...." Virginia Heffernan

(1809-1849)
Edgar Allen Poe published The Tell Tale Heart in January, 1843Poe's tales of horror and the macabre are unrivaled in American fiction.

True! — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them.

This opinion echo was published in the Los Angeles Times, by Virginia Heffernan

So begins Edgar Allan Poe’s marvelously twisted 1843, short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which a madman recounts murdering a neighbor, burying the dismembered body and blurting out a confession to the police.

The narrator, all the while, insists he is utterly sane. Or more than sane. Shrewd. A stable genius. Perfect. To prove his point, he liberally uses exclamation points. Hark! Ha!

Sound familiar? I don’t mean to imply that Donald Trump is some kind of goth killer. My point is that Trump’s prose — which appeared in a long, marvelously deranged and twisted letter Tuesday — resembles Poe’s.

Poe had more range and skill, but both writers are singularly able to render the interior life of a barking lunatic who thinks he’s a genius and keeps confessing more than he ought to.

Like Poe’s narrator, Trump kicks off his story by designating a mortal enemy. In Trump’s case, this is, of course, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), to whom the screed was addressed.

Where the “Tell-Tale Heart” speaker imagines that the old man next door has the “eye of a vulture,” Trump has observed, with equal creepiness, that Pelosi’s “teeth were falling out.” 

Moreover, Trump complains bitterly in the letter, blaming Pelosi for his impeachment and going full Poe: “It is a terrible thing you are doing,” he writes. “But you will have to live with it, not I!” 

Indeed, the Trump (ghost written) letter really does suggest he could benefit from inpatient care (yes!).

The concept of terror and the terrible is central to Poe’s work. When the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” creeps into his neighbor’s room, he perceives “mortal terror” in the old man, which he recognizes as something he has experienced himself. That recognition in turn provokes “uncontrollable terror” in the narrator.

The narrator kills the old man out of terror, but also to end their mutual terror. Instead, the murder amplifies the ambient terror to a deafening roar.

This is a very Trumpian cycle. Ever since he snapped, “No puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet” at Hillary Clinton, then his presidential opponent, Trump has made it clear he lives and dies by projection. Whatever he fears in himself, he imputes to another person.

Read the Tuesday weird to Speaker Pelosi, and it’s clear: Trump is scared as hell. And scared people are scary.

Pelosi has signaled since September that the House is committed to a methodical impeachment process. But in spite of her prudence during the impeachment inquiry, Trump sees in her every kind of bellicosity. In the letter, the president charges her with “a full-fledged case” of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Likewise the Poe narrator imagines his placid, sleeping victim is deranged. He perceives an “overcharged” soul in the sleeping man’s snores. He believes he can hear the man’s heart beating and decides it’s a symptom of the man’s fear — and not his own.

Oh, projectors.

Trump solicited foreign intervention in the upcoming 2020 election, and multiple former federal prosecutors agree that he should be indicted on multiple counts of obstruction of justice. So Trump, as usual, offloads these facts onto Pelosi and the Democrats: “You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice.”

Finally, like Poe’s narrator, Trump credits himself for stable ingenuity, even as every sentence he writes speaks to his madness. “There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time,” he writes, “and yet done so much for the success of America and its citizens.”

It’s a quiet sentence, a brief clearing in the forest of erratic capitalization and exclamation points. But it’s Trump talking to himself, telling himself, as Poe’s narrator does, that while everyone else is crazy, “I was singularly at ease.”

Alas, ease is in short supply. Trump, like the character who is Poe’s murderer, both come across as trapped in their own heads, and surrounded by grating, menacing and deranged voices they try to tell themselves come from the outside.

But the pretense can’t last. Trump’s fate is of course still uncertain. But in Poe’s narrator, the voices grow too loud to repress. He begins to believe the police are laughing at him. (Being laughed at by investigators: also a Trump fear.)

The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” cracks.

“I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now — again! — hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!”

Until: “I admit the deed! — tear up the planks! here, here! — It is the beating of his hideous heart.”

Will Trump to give himself up? Not so far, though he does tend to blurt out self-incriminating stuff on the White House lawn and in his tweets. And he did freely turn over the notes from his July call to the Ukrainian president, which essentially led to his impeachment.

And then there’s the time he boasted he could get away with murder.

That was the bet the narrator made in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe would have us believe that no matter how many floorboards are hammered down to cover up someone’s crimes, the truth will out and justice will prevail.

We can only hope.

Donald Trump failed tank day #tanksbutnotanks a weird display

Echo critique published in the New York newspaper Newsday by Virginia Heffernan*

Tanks might strike you as fierce and cool, or as nothing more than fetish objects for right-wing tweens and goggle-eyed “Armored Warfare” addicts. 

Either way, all Americans should agree: Tanks are singularly weird machinery for a Fourth of July pageant.

Muskets, gazebos, little Shriner cars, sure. But when it comes to Yankee Doodling around, brute machines of war are a downer — long considered too ugly, utilitarian, authoritarian and lethal for even our most jingoistic national holidays.

Well, not anymore. President Donald Trump, ever the psycho, rolled tanks into Washington on Independence Day, surely the first head of state to occupy his own capital to demonstrate its independence.

The parade and the run-up to Trump’s late-afternoon speech were ominous. Along Constitution Avenue, people wore Trump-cult garb and slagged-off private citizen Hillary Clinton, who is not running for office. Elsewhere, vocal devotees of the QAnon nonsense were expecting no less than the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. At least one wore a T-shirt picturing that particular dead Kennedy in an ugly MAGA hat (euphemism for a KKK hood!).

You read that right. Hear that rumbling? It’s all 400,000 people interred at Arlington Cemetery rolling over in their graves.

As the public park close to the Lincoln Memorial filled with a vetted audience divided into castes by fences, the atmosphere recalled Trump’s sinister inauguration in 2017. Was menacing Stephen Miller “carnage” rhetoric on deck?

Or maybe Trump’s sniffing would start and, hoo boy, his geezer impairments would flare up again. Maybe we’d get a rollicking military history of the Bowling Green massacres (with a nod to Kellyanne Conway) or the Battle of Covfefe Creek.

Not this time. In the end, Trump gave one of his stilted norm core speeches, filled with plodding doggerel of American self-congratulation that sounded like Newt Gingrich blather — or maybe like an outtake from History Channel Kids. The speech managed to prove that, yes, Trump can read most words. It also suggested that the weak praise he routinely gets — “at least he’s not boring” — is unwarranted.

Most TV channels refused to carry Trump Tank Day (#tanksbutnotanks), wary of giving airtime to what many feared would be a campaign infomercial. But the speech was all bore, no bile. There also seemed to be a tight quota for red-hats (Khmer Rouge style) inside the fences. The whole affair was curiously muffled. The effect was heightened because the president spoke to the people from behind foggy rain-streaked bulletproof glass.

More armor, then. Only one hulking Bradley fighting vehicle, an eyesore in camo colors, could easily be seen during the televised speech, awkwardly grrr-ing in front of the stage. Reports had it that another Bradley and two olive-drab Abrams tanks had also been laboriously dragged in, but stealthy crustaceans that they are, they were either too low or too evasive for TV cameras to pick up. (Lesson: Tanks are bad in shows because … they don’t show.)

Trump was on defense. He was in hiding — behind the gates, chain-link, vast security detail, bulletproof glass and tanks. If you want to preen, you get soldiers in elegant formation or a corny military band. If you want to hide, you get tanks. The show of force seemed more like protection for the president than pageantry for the republic.

Even Trump’s encomiums to the regular-people heroes shipped in for the occasion were sterile. But when did Trump ever seek to inspire when he could strike an Il Duce pose or two, surround himself with sycophants, and hide his cowardice behind a cartoon display of flag-molesting and bellicosity?

This surreal Independence Day brought to mind the confession of Trump’s butler, Anthony Senecal, who said he once was required to hire a bugler to goose the then-not-president’s ego by playing “Hail to the Chief” when the boss came home in a sulk.

This time, it’s likely our taxes will pay the ego-goosing that came largely from GOP courtiers handpicked by the Republican National Committee to applaud Emperor Trump’s new clothes from first-class seats near the podium. The American Way, evidently. The crowd looked wet and listless a good deal of the time. Almost no one appeared to know the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Having for weeks called for Trump’s impeachment, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash dominated the morning political media by declaring independence from Trump’s party. (Out West, an earthquake stole the day’s thunder.) You’d think Trump on his big day would bask in the hokum and let Amash go without a word. But, naturally, he tweeted snippily: “Total loser.”

It was seemingly one of the president’s stock why-I-oughta efforts to warn others in his circle against betraying him. But it’s all tired now: Trump came off as petrified. He was, as usual, firing blindly, cornered, a little hysterical and surrounded by tanks, as if he were America’s enemy instead of its president.

*Virginia Heffernan wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

P.S. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone reported on the Russian news media analysis about the Sherman tanks in the #tanksbutnotanks exhibit. 

A Russian state TV news program laughed at Donald Trump’s Fourth of July parade this week. According to the Washington Post, the hosts of Rossiya 1’s 60 Minutes program ridiculed everything about Trump’s “A Salute to America” military extravaganza.

One of the hosts, Yevgeny Popov, chided the president, saying sarcastically, “The greatest parade of all time is going to be held today in Washington, that is what our Donald Trump has said.”

Popov roasted Trump, saying, “The American president announced he would show us the newest tanks.” But, “these are Abrams and Sherman tanks, used during World War II and withdrawn from service in 1957.”

Believe Representative Adam Schiff #AdamSchiffStrong

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times - by Virginia Heffernan

Representative Adam Schiff 

Forget what William Barr #fakeBarrLetter wrote about collusion. Listen to Adam Schiff instead

C-Span link to "it's not ok" here.

"Representative Adam Schiff, now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is faced with a campaign of denial."

"Whatever the legal niceties, for most sane observers, the Barr letter is the latest entry in the administration’s effort to, shall we say, avoid a reckoning."

Twelve years ago, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) called on then-President George W. Bush to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide. He asked that the history of the Ottoman government’s extermination of 1.5 million Armenians be written into the record so future administrations making foreign policy would take that genocide into account.
Schiff’s resolution passed in committee. But after powerful American politicians of both parties enabled a lobbying blitz by the Turkish government, Schiff’s resolution never made it to the House floor.

"When you think about what we have against us — the president, a foreign policy establishment that has condoned this campaign of denial," Schiff said at the time, "against that you have the truth, which is a powerful thing but doesn't always win out."

Schiff, now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is faced with another campaign of denial.

This time, what’s being denied is not the past but the present. President Trump and his huffy apparatchiks in Congress and the media insist on trying to skirt what’s self-evident: the facts of Trumpworld’s commitments to the Kremlin.

These have emerged in public testimony (Michael Cohen), in emails in the public record (Don Jr.’s), and the many indictments and court documents produced by the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which delivered its Trump-Russia report to the attorney general on March 22.

Because persisting in denial means censoring anyone who tells the truth, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have been calling on Schiff to resign (HELLO? because he's telling the truth!)

All week they waved Atty. Gen. William Barr’s meager and fuzzy four-page letter, claiming it faithfully represents Mueller’s findings, which Barr says runs some 400 pages.

Of course, we need to see the actual Mueller findings to see how faithful Barr’s letter is. But legal analysts from Jed Shugerman (Fordham Law) to Ken White (former federal prosecutor) to Neal Katyal (Georgetown Law) have questioned Barr’s use of weasel words and his delay in turning over the whole report to Congress.

Against that you have the truth.

So on Thursday, Schiff, as he has done many times before, patiently spelled out the state of play between Trumpworld and the Russians to the members of the Intelligence committee and anyone watching on C-SPAN.

There was none of Barr’s fuzziness or torque in what Schiff said. He didn’t hypothesize. He didn’t speculate. He just laid it all out.

“The Russians offered dirt on a Democratic candidate for president as part of what was described as the Russian government’s effort to help the Trump campaign,” he said.

“When that was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, the president’s son did not call the FBI, he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help. Instead that son said that he would love the help of the Russians.

“Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, someone with great experience in running campaigns, also took that meeting…. The president’s son-in-law also took that meeting…. They concealed it from the public…. Their only disappointment after that meeting was that the dirt they received on Hillary Clinton wasn’t better.”

And Schiff kept going. Through Manafort’s offer of campaign information in exchange for debt forgiveness; through his offer of campaign polling data to someone linked to Russian intelligence; through Jared Kushner’s attempt to open a Russian back channel; through Trumpworld contacts with the GRU (“a hostile intelligence agency”); through denied-but-true Moscow Trump Tower negotiations and the promulgation of a “new and more favorable policy toward the Russians” as Trump sought “the Russians’ help — the Kremlin’s help” to make himself a fortune.

Call me crazy, Schiff said, but it all strikes me as immoral, unethical, corrupt — and, yes, as collusion, even if it isn’t part of a criminal conspiracy.

Throughout his incantation, Schiff repeated the phrase: “You might think it’s OK that…” as he walked through the facts. Since he delivered the litany, no one has called him on a single error. And yet, Republicans on the committee seemed to find all the evidence of Trump’s treachery OK.

So that’s it. We can all agree on what happened. The president encouraged computer crimes. Trumpworld has a pattern of back channeling with, digging dirt with, murky real-estate dealing with and swapping favors with Kremlin types. And Trumpworld lies about it.

Whatever the legal niceties, for most sane observers, the Barr letter is the latest entry in the administration’s effort to, shall we say, avoid a reckoning. Barr has suppressed Mueller’s findings, and he may have spun them hard, letting Trump spin that spin and claim, laughably, that he’d been, “Totally EXONERATED.” (Barr letter #fakeBarrLetter: The report “does not exonerate” Trump.)

The American people aren’t buying the president’s tweet, at least not yet. For any conclusion that big, we need the real report. And, according to a CNN poll this week, 87% of Americans want all of the Mueller findings released to the public, including 80% of Republicans.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in understanding the Trump-Russia findings, ignore what Barr #fakeBarrLetter wrote. Watch the Schiff speech instead.