A Question Of Character Is Very Different From A Stand On Policies

I live in a solidly blue district-- CA-28. The PVI is D+23. Hillary whipped Trump here 72.1% to 22.3%. Some of the country's most Democratic bastions are in the district: Hollywood (plus East and West Hollywood), Silverlake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, Glendale, Sunland-Tujunga... I have no idea where that 22.3% could possibly be. La Crescenta Montrose? La Cañada Flintridge? Our congressman is a conservative Democrat, New Dem (former Blue Dog) Adam Schiff. People see him on TV railing against Trump and their brain tells them he's a progressive because they automatically assume that anyone who hates Trump loudly enough must be a progressive. Don't be fooled. Schiff has a ProgressivePunch "D" rating. He's a military-industrial complex stalwart who voted with the Republicans to invade Iraq in 2003. Unlike California colleagues Ted Lieu and Ro Khanna, who are working furiously to get the U.S. out of the Yemen genocide, Schiff has been a supporter of the U.S. role. Early in 2015 he said that "The military action by Saudi Arabia and its partners was necessitated by the illegal action of the Houthi rebels and their Iranian backers," basically the Republican Party talking point. This is what Schiff's voting record always looks like: mainstream Democrats on one side and Republicans and conservative Democrats on the other side. Schiff stands with the Republicans and the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, despite representing a progressive district. In this vote for an anti-family healthcare bill last summer, notice that among California members all the Republicans voted yea while the Democrats were split. Schiff voted with the Republicans, as did Pete Aguilar (New Dem), Ami Bera (New Dem and criminal), Julia Brownley (New Dem), Salud Carbajal (New Dem), Lou Correa (Blue Dog), Jimmy Panetta, Raul Ruiz (New Dem), Norma Torres (New Dem). The rest of the Californians-- from Pelosi, Lieu, Khanna, Barbara Lee, Judy Chu, Nanette Barragán, Maxine Waters, Linda Sánchez, Jimmy Gomez to Doris Matsui, John Garamendi, Mike Thompson, Mark DeSaulnier, Jared Huffman... even arch-conservatives like Jim Costa and Scott Peters-- voted NO.

You can hear a bunch of ex-Bush administration conservatives railing against Trump on MSNBC everyday. They are entertaining and it is satisfying to hear them rip into Trump. But they are conservatives, not progressives. On Christmas Day, the L.A. Times ran a column by very right-wing Republican Jonah Goldberg. Believe me, he's not our friend, despite his column, Why the Trump presidency will end poorly. He began with a collegial translation of Heraclitus' enduring ethos anthropoi daimon: "character is destiny," often appearing as "man’s character is his fate."

James Q. Wilson had a simple definition of character: "decency, politeness, self-restraint, commitment, honesty, cooperativeness and the ability to think of others’ well-being." You see where this is, inevitably, going. We all know exactly who is none of the above. "Weirdly," wrote Goldberg, "it’s gotten to the point that when I say President Trump is not a man of good character, I feel like I should preface it with a trigger warning for many of my fellow conservatives. Most of the angry responses are rooted in the fact they do not wish to be reminded of this obvious truth. But others seem to have convinced themselves that Trump is a man of good character, and they take personal offense at the insult, even though I usually offer it as little more than an observation." He worries that conservatives are actually "redefining good character in Trump’s image, and they end up modeling it." Some, he wrote, "overlook that his insults are not merely an act, but rather the product of astonishing levels of narcissism, insecurity and intellectual incuriosity. His Twitter feed is simply a window into his id."

The president who became a celebrity by telling reality-show contestants “you’re fired” has not fired any of his Cabinet officials face-to-face, or even on the phone. He relies on others, or on Twitter, to deliver the news. He loves controversy because it keeps him in the center ring, but he hates confrontation.

The driving force behind nearly all of the controversies that have bedeviled his administration is his personality, not his ideology.

To be sure, ideology plays a role. It amplifies the anger from both his left-wing critics and his transactional defenders. Many of the liberal critics shrieking about the betrayal of the Kurds implicit in his decision to withdraw from Syria would be applauding if a President Clinton had made the same decision. And many of the conservatives celebrating the move would be condemning it.

But his refusal to listen to advisors; his inability to bite his tongue; his demonization and belittling of senators who vote for his agenda; his rants against the 1st Amendment; his praise for dictators and insults for allies; his need to create new controversies to eclipse old ones; and his inexhaustible capacity to lie and fabricate history: All this springs from his nature.

Over the weekend, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered an odd defense of the president. He’s like a “72-year-old relative,” Christie said on ABC’s This Week. “When people get older, they become more and more convinced of the fact that what they’re doing is the right thing.”

Christie has a point. But the reason Trump won’t change has little to do with age and everything to do with character.

Jonah Goldberg is right about Trump's character... but wrong on virtually everything else. When his book, Liberal Fascism was released, most people realized he has a serious screw loose. Son of another crackpot, Lucianne Goldberg, he built his career making up stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton. In another one of his crazy books, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, he started the lies right on the jacket, claiming to have been nominated for two Pulizers. He wasn't ever nominated for a Pulitzer; he's widely considered a liar, a buffoon and a very mediocre writer who has been on the losing side of every important issue in his lifetime-- except one: Trump. Eventually, his publisher acknowledged the "mistake," and rewrote the jacket blurb. In any case, Eugene Robinson put it better in his Christmas eve Post column, "Trump is incompetent, impulsive and amoral": "The chaos all around us is what happens when the nation elects an incompetent, narcissistic, impulsive and amoral man as president. This Christmas, heaven help us all."

No Pulitzer nominations for the crackpot neo-fascist-- but an excellent example of how conservatives cheat in the war of ideas

UPDATE: On Character... And Bone Spurs

Trump hates the military, always has. This week the fake, illegitimate "president" became the first occupant of the Oval Office in nearly 3 decades not to visit active duty military personnel around Christmas. Instead he was home alone in the White House freaking out and tweeting about... what else? Himself. Today, the NY Times poked at him by looking into how he dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. "For 50 years, the details of how the exemption came about, and who made the diagnosis, have remained a mystery, with Mr. Trump himself saying during the presidential campaign that he could not recall who had signed off on the medical documentation. Now a possible explanation has emerged about the documentation. It involves a foot doctor in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and a suggestion that the diagnosis was granted as a courtesy to the elder Mr. Trump."