Pelosi's Consummate Skill at Goading Trump

Donald Trump's relationship with women is not pretty.  The man is a sexist pig even when not boasting about being a sexual predator.  He's the embodiment of the type of man that decent parents would never want their daughters - or sons for that matter - ever involved with.  His narcissism and mistreatment of women is stunning. Yet there is one woman who seemingly can not only stand up to him but can leave him totally unsettled and somehow emasculated - something that tears his fragile ego apart.  That woman?  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who seems to be able to play on Trump's insecurities and fragile ego.  Perhaps her skill is enhanced by the fact that Trump likes to surround himself with women willing to grovel to his ego and who justify their relationship with a serial adulterer by closing their eyes and counting the money (let's get real, it cannot be because Trump is physically attractive - the thought of him naked is beyond revolting). Whatever the basis, as a column in the Washington Post notes, Pelosi gets under Trump's skin like few others and can get him to rashly act against even his own long term interest. With luck, her skill at the game will continue to Trump's disadvantage and political damage.   Here are column highlights:

There is something about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that allows her to unnerve President Trump as seemingly no one else can.

“I pray for the president of the United States,” she said on Thursday. “I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country. Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence.”

The proof that she had hit the giant bull’s eye of Trump’s insecurities was his response: “I am an extremely stable genius.”

Exchanging insults with Trump is not an endeavor that is normally productive, as many others who tried it have found. But Pelosi is a dangerous foil for a president who operates on impulse and outburst. While Trump succeeds in making everyone else around him dizzy, Pelosi’s unique talent is an ability to keep her focus on the endgame.

Her current goal is to assure that the president vacates the Oval Office, as swiftly and as surely as possible.  That means Pelosi must do two things at once: Keep Trump off balance, and restrain those within her Democratic caucus who are urging a precipitous drive toward impeachment.

Pelosi knows that unless and until there is overwhelming, bipartisan support for such an effort, it will end with Trump’s acquittal in the Senate. And that would only help him win another four years in office. “He wants to be impeached so he can be exonerated by the Senate,” she told top Democrats in a private meeting. “His actions are villainous to the Constitution of the United States.”

The speaker argues for another course: Continuing congressional oversight and relying on the courts to provide air cover as six different House committees seek documents and testimony from a stonewalling administration. While not as gratifying to those who are eager to begin impeachment proceedings, and who argue that anything less is a dereliction of Congress’s duty to hold Trump accountable, it is the more likely path to defeating him in 2020.

The Democratic caucus would be wise to trust her instincts and experience. Pelosi is patient, disciplined and resilient because she has had to be. No woman in U.S. history has ever risen to a more powerful office in government than the one in which Pelosi now sits for a second time.

All of this has not come without a price. Pelosi’s adversaries have caricatured and demonized her, and even some of her allies have dismissed her.
 Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel by doing what it took to win in congressional districts where she — and her liberal party — are not particularly popular. Those are the seats she knows she must protect in 2020.

So far, her strategy of keeping one foot on the congressional oversight accelerator while tapping the brakes on impeachment is winning. The prospect of unending scrutiny is getting to Trump. . . . [Trump] bristled at Pelosi’s characterization of that aborted infrastructure meeting as a “temper tantrum,” and pressed five different White House aides to attest he had been “calm” in his three-minute session with the lawmakers.

By Thursday night, Trump and his allies were reduced to the shameless gambit of circulating doctored and heavily edited videos suggesting it was the speaker’s mental stability that should be questioned. . . . Pelosi is exactly who she has always been. What’s changed is that Trump is beginning to understand what that means.

Trump's real problem with Pelosi?  He cannot handle strong women who see through his lies and bullshit and see him for the mentally disturbed and needy narcissist that he is in fact.

Meet Brett Kavanaugh’s Alleged Accomplice, Mark Judge

Georgetown Prep - Kavanaugh and Judge's "rich boy" school

At this point, it is unclear when and how the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh will move forward.  Kavanaugh's seemingly credible accuser of past sexual assault wants an FBI investigation of the incident/Kavanaugh before she will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Meanwhile, Senate Republicans want the matter to simply go away, yet are fearful that ramming through Kavanaugh's approval could alienate millions of women voters.  What makes this different than the usual "she said, he said" situation is that Kavanaugh allegedly had an accomplice in the assault on Ford.  His good buddy, Mark Judge, who is anything but the kind of character witness one would want and who is refusing to testify under oath before the Committee.  Likely, with good reason since he has documented his bad boy behavior in writings and may not relish having to lie under oath if he is to protect his buddy.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Judge,  Here are highlights (read the entire piece):

The most obvious threat to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh from the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford is that he may have committed a very serious crime when he allegedly assaulted her with an apparent rape in mind. That and the fact that he may be lying about it are both disqualifiers for the job he wants, and quite possibly for the job he has.

But more subtly, Ford’s story of prepsters gone violently wild in 1983 suggests that for all of Kavanaugh’s maturity, urbanity, education, and carefully cultivated respectability, he remains a man whose respect for women is lacking. That in turn could perhaps lead him to deny them, to choose an example, control over their reproductive systems.

Ford’s account of the fateful night introduces a new element into what might have been a nearly insoluble he-said she-said deadlock: the presence of a third party, Mark Judge. It is not a particularly good sign for Kavanaugh that Judge (after denying any recollection of the party where Ford said she was assaulted) is at this point refusing to testify before the Judiciary Committee. But even if he was offering a more robust defense of his old friend, there’s another problem. Yes, Judge has matured since his days at Georgetown Prep: from an admitted alcoholic to a sort-of-conservative Catholic man-boy who still has some sexual and gender issues he is working out. Unfortunately for himself and for Kavanaugh, he’s working them out in public as a writer. And he is thus not the most convincing witness to Kavanaugh’s moral purity then or now. He actually comes across more as the wingman from hell who, all these many years later, is still struggling to keep it in his pants.

Even as Republican senators flounder around in an effort to avoid dragging Judge into the world’s biggest spotlight as an eyewitness to the alleged assault or as a character witness for his high-school buddy, Judge’s relentlessly self-revelatory jottings about both drunken and sober encounters with women are spreading quickly to a fascinated and appalled new readership. Here’s a tight but comprehensive description of the Judge oeuvre from the Washington Post:

In two memoirs, Judge depicted his high school as a nest of debauchery where students attended “masturbation class,” “lusted after girls” from nearby Catholic schools and drank themselves into stupors at parties. He has since renounced that lifestyle and refashioned himself as a conservative moralist — albeit one who has written about “the wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion….”

Now that Kavanaugh is on the brink of stiffening the conservative Catholic rigor of the Supreme Court, it’s inconvenient that the only person available to support his it-didn’t-happen version of the story Ford is telling is a man like Mark Judge. If that drunken party boy got sober and grew up into this very conventional defender of the patriarchy, maybe he’s not the best, er, judge of what happened in 1983 or of his old friend’s fitness for the highest court in the land, either. No wonder Republican senators are reluctant to put Judge before a camera and a microphone with the future of constitutional law at stake.

If the allegations are true, they confirm that Kavanaugh holds women in contempt and should not be on the U.S. Supreme Court - or any court.  They also show a frightening attitude that the lives of others do not matter, a pillar of today's GOP.

Roy Moore: A Symptom of a Larger Problem in Evangelical Circles

Moore last month at the Ultra-right "Christian" so-called Value Voters Summit 

Beginning several decades ago, the leadership of the Republican Party made the cynical decision to welcome Christofascists and evangelical Christians into the party grass roots.  Initially, the thought was that these unwashed, ignorance embracing voters and activists could be controlled bu the so-called GOP establishment.  The leadership could not have been more wrong and now the GOP has morphed into a party dominated by (i) Christian extremists who reject science, knowledge and anything else that challenges their unhinged version of Christianity and (ii) white supremacists, many of whom also fall under the evangelical Christian label.  I exited the GOP long before the second element of the new party base became overt.  With the growing equating of the GOP with evangelical Christians, the GOP finds itself tied to morality issues tied to the evangelicals, including a preference for "young marriage" wherein older men marry girls still in their teens.  The practice ties in with the evangelical belief that women are meant to be subservient to men and also allows such men to train young, unworldly and inexperience girls to their will.   A piece in the Los Angeles Times by a woman who escaped evangelical Christianity looks at this disturbing practice which the growing accusations against Roy Moore illustrate.  Here are column excerpts:

We need to talk about the segment of American culture that probably doesn’t think the allegations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore are particularly damning, the segment that will blanch at only two accusations in the Washington Post expose: He pursued a 14-year-old-girl without first getting her parents’ permission, and he initiated sexual contact outside of marriage. That segment is evangelicalism. In that world, which Moore travels in and I grew up in, 14-year-old girls courting adult men isn’t uncommon. I use the phrase “14-year-old girls courting adult men,” rather than “adult men courting 14-year-old girls,” for a reason: Evangelicals routinely frame these relationships in those terms. One popular courtship story that was told and retold in home-school circles during the 1990s was that of Matthew and Maranatha Chapman, who turned their history into a successful career promoting young marriage. Most audiences, however, didn’t realize just how young the Chapmans had in mind until the site Homeschoolers Anonymous and the blogger Libby Anne revealed that Matthew was 27 and Maranatha was 15 when they married. Libby Anne also drew mainstream attention to Matthew Chapman’s writings, in which he argued that parents should consider marriage for their daughters in their “middle-teens.” At that point the Chapmans stopped receiving quite so many speaking invitations. “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson advocated for adult men to marry 15- and 16-year-old girls and deemed age 20 too old because “you wait until they get to be 20 years old, the only picking that’s going to take place is your pocket.” Home-school leader Kevin Swanson, whose 2015 convention was attended by several Republican presidential candidates, defended Robertson on his radio show after the story broke. Advocating for child marriage hasn’t slowed down Robertson’s career. As a teenager, I attended a lecture on courtship by a home-school speaker who was popular at the time. He praised the idea of “early courtship” so the girl could be molded into the best possible helpmeet for her future husband. The girl’s father was expected to direct her education after the courtship began so she could help her future husband in his work.

In retrospect, I understand what the speaker was really describing: Adult men selecting and grooming girls who were too young to have life experience. Another word for that is “predation.”

Much of the sexual abuse that takes place in Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, or IFB, churches involves adult men targeting 14- to 16-year-old girls. If caught, the teenage victim may be forced to repent the “sin” of having seduced an adult man. . . . . In the wake of the Schaap case, numerous other stories emerged of sexual abuse cover-ups involving teenage girls at IFB churches. In another high-profile case, pregnant 15-year-old Tina Anderson, who was raped by a church deacon twice her age, was forced to confess her “sin” to the congregation. Growing up, I witnessed an influential religious right leader flirting with some of my teenage friends and receiving neck and shoulder massages from one of them. I’ve been expecting a scandal to break with him for years, but in the meantime, this man has put significant time into campaigning for anti-trans bathroom bills while deeming trans people “predators.”

The allegations against Roy Moore are merely a symptom of a larger problem. It’s not a Southern problem or an Alabama problem. It’s a Christian fundamentalist problem.

The evangelical world is overdue for a reckoning. Women raised in evangelicalism and fundamentalism have for years discussed the normalization of child sexual abuse. We’ve told our stories on social media and on our blogs and various online platforms, but until the Roy Moore story broke, mainstream American society barely paid attention. Everyone assumed this was an isolated, fringe issue. It isn’t.

The hate, lunacy and sexual hypocrisy of evangelical Christians needs to be exposed.  But do not expect the Republican Party to do the right thing and reject individuals like Roy Moore and his evangelical supporters. As a piece in CBC News notes, the GOP has put itself in an impossible situation which, long term, bodes ill for the future of the GOP.  Here are a few highlights:

"Forget losing this seat, which is the short-term problem," says Real Clear Politics Senior Elections Analyst Sean Trende. "Given the long-term problems the GOP face, this is exactly the story they don't need." The "long-term problem" Trende has in mind was evident Tuesday, when Republican Ed Gillespie lost among voters under age 45 by more than 20 points.

Older, white voters — particularly white men — are supporting the GOP in record numbers. But their percentage of the voting-age population is shrinking.  Republicans can't win without them, but they can't win with just those voters, either. Candidates like Roy Moore who literally wave guns at their campaign rallies and rail against same-sex marriage are sending a message to these voters that he's on their side. But it's not a message resonating with the next generation.

To win today, the GOP needs the populist/Trump wing of the party energized. But the outcome in the Virginia elections showed those voters alone aren't enough. Virginia's Ed Gillespie actually outperformed Trump among white, blue-collar voters, but still lost badly. The GOP needs to attract a more diverse pool of voters.

So Republicans talk about how the charges -- "if proven" -- are so awful that Moore should withdraw from the race, while knowing that proving charges like these from 40 years ago is nearly impossible. 

It may well just be politics, but it's getting the GOP no closer to solving the problem embodied by Moore -- that dumping him alienates the base they need today. Keeping him alienates the voters they need tomorrow.

Donald Trump and the Normalization of Sexual Assault

Over the last few years we have heard numerous stories about sexual assault on college campuses and efforts to change the mentality of males who would possible disregard the meaning of the word "No." Enter Donald Trump as revealed in the 2005 tape released last Friday and his excuse - and that of far too many of his surrogates - that all he was doing is engaging in "locker room talk." I may be gay, but over the years growing up, I was in many locker rooms and secured a varsity letter in high school.  Yes, there is racy talk at times, but in my experience it is about how much women supposedly want a guy (at least in the guy's imagination), not the fact that the guy can assault them at will  because he's a "star."  Trump is a sick and disgusting individual and a case study in the reality that money cannot by class and decorum.   A column in the New York Times looks at how Trump would normalize the sexual assault of women.  It also looks at how a Trump/Pence administration would likely be anti-women.  Here are highlights:

 After recently being caught on a 2005 tape gloating about sexual assaults, Trump issued an unapologetic apology in which he focused on the “big difference” between words and actions. And he has a point.

But there’s abundant evidence that Trump has indulged in not just scurrilous rhetoric, but also in heinous actions. Several more women have stepped forward to offer on-the-record accounts of having been aggressively groped or kissed by Trump against their will, right after he met them.

Some Republicans have demanded laws to ban transgender women from entering women’s restrooms or locker rooms, but instead they might focus on the risk of Trump doing this. He has boasted that he marched unannounced into changing rooms to ogle beauty pageant contestants naked, and a former contestant, Miss Arizona, Tasha Dixon, said he did just that as they were changing into bikinis. “Some girls were topless,” she said. “Other girls were naked.”

The pageant theme that year? Empowering women.

There’s more. In Trump’s 2005 tape, he referred in vulgar ways to a married woman, Nancy O’Dell, he had unsuccessfully pursued, but what’s less known is that in 2007 he reportedly tried to have her fired from hosting the Miss USA Pageant. Why? Because she was pregnant.

What is dehumanizing is not necessarily dirty words as such, but rather the casual braggadocio by men that normalizes assault. One study of 16,000 comments on a website for fraternity men found that the most common body part mentioned was “ass,” followed by “tits.”

There’s some evidence that hearing sexist language may be linked to greater tolerance of rape. And we already have a national problem with sexual harassment: One large survey found that almost one-quarter of American women said they had been groped in public spaces.

So I’m delighted that at least one person, Billy Bush, is paying in a concrete way for the words in the Trump tape. Maybe this can be a wake-up call for us men to appreciate that sexist epithets are no more acceptable than racist epithets.

If we’re outraged by vulgar words, shouldn’t we be even more appalled by predatory actions? And policies? Here the truth is that a Trump administration’s policies might be less titillating than his words, but they would be far more dangerous.

Every year, 550,000 women in America require medical attention after an assault by a boyfriend or husband. That’s an issue that is belatedly being addressed through screenings under Obamacare, which Trump wants to repeal, and by the Violence Against Women Act, which a large bloc of Republicans opposed in Congress. Trump’s concern about such assaults seems dubious, and in fact both he and his campaign C.E.O., Steve Bannon, have been accused of domestic violence themselves.

Since he never held public office, Trump lacks a voting record. But his running mate has tended to look at what might help women and do the opposite, including voting against equal-pay legislation.

At a time when 11 women a day die of cervical cancer, Trump and Pence have also been stalwart opponents of women’s health programs that provide cancer screenings. They are motivated partly by hostility toward Planned Parenthood over abortions, but Pence, while a congressman, also sponsored legislation to defund Title X, the main federal family planning program. It does not pay for abortions but does help screen more than 750,000 women for cervical cancer a year.

New York magazine once quoted Trump as telling a friend about women, “you have to treat ‘em like——” well, manure. But to me, his language pales beside his behavior and likely policies. So let’s try to pivot from outrage at gross words to condemnation of unconscionable behavior and policies.