The Weekly Sift

Who expected that when the Republicans anointed a new front-runner, it would be somebody worse?

Ever since he announced his candidacy last summer, political insiders have been telling us that Donald Trump was a fluke of the season: It was early in the process, and people weren’t serious yet. As the primaries got closer, Trump would fade and a more acceptable mainstream candidate like Bush or Rubio or Walker would emerge. Pundits recalled the 2012 cycle, where boomlets for far-out candidates like Michele Bachmann or Hermann Cain came and went every few weeks, but the establishment eventually nominated its man, Mitt Romney. As John Podhoretz put it:

Most of those who are telling pollsters they support the outsiders are basically dating Trump and Carson. They’ll likely settle down with someone else.

And Ross Douthat predicts GOP primary voters will soon start saying this to themselves:

The Donald is fun and I admire Carson, but let’s get real: I’m going to vote Rubio.

Well, according to the Real Clear Politics poll average, Trump replaced Jeb Bush as the front-runner on July 20, and stayed on top not for just a few weeks, but until November 4. And then, it wasn’t Bush or Rubio who passed him (Walker being long gone, along with fellow mainstream GOP candidate Rick Perry). No, in the November 4 average, Ben Carson took the lead with 24.8% to Trump’s 24.6%. [1]

To me, that’s a sign not that things are settling down, but that they’ve wobbled even further off course.

The Music Man. When I think of Donald Trump, the word that comes to mind is huckster. He’s a darker version of Harold Hill from The Music Man, spinning a vision of how fantastic things will be if people do what he wants. Right now we’re looking at trouble in River City, but after we elect him America will be great again. There will be lots of good jobs for real Americans, because he’ll throw out all the Mexicans who are stealing them now, and build a big, beautiful wall to stop any more from coming in. Don’t worry about what that wall will cost, because Mexico will pay for it (from its vast storehouse of wealth). China will stop dumping cheap stuff into our economy, Putin will behave, and we’ll finally crush ISIS. Taxes will be low, and we won’t have to do without any important government service, but there won’t be a deficit.

What’s not to like? [2]  After I hear Trump speak, I can’t get “76 Trombones” out of my head.

It’s hard to be a good huckster, though, if you don’t also know a lot about how the real world works. So if you look inside Trump’s business empire, I’ll bet somewhere you’ll find a legal department that hires lawyers and an accounting department full of accountants. Middle management probably includes a lot of MBAs. I haven’t noticed any of his flashy buildings falling down, so I suspect they are designed by architects and built by engineers.

That’s why, although I would expect a Trump administration to do a lot of things I wouldn’t like, I picture it doing them in a fairly sensible way. Whatever crazy things he had to say to get elected, once he was in office he’d get his economic advice from economists, his military advice from generals, and so on. His priorities would be misguided and some people would get hurt, but we’ve survived bad presidents before.

Carson is different. When you watch Ben Carson, it’s tempting to view him through the lens of Trump, as this Nick Anderson cartoon does: They say similarly crazy things, but in different styles.

But this week Carson had two major bursts of bad publicity, and in one of them [3] we see a personality type very different and far more dangerous than the huckster: Ben Carson is a crackpot.

Now, we’ve had reason to suspect Carson of crackpottery for some time, because his whole campaign has been a fountain of strange notions: The Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if Germany’s Jews had been armed; anarchy might force the 2016 elections to be cancelled; Russian president Putin, Palestinian leader Abbas, and Iranian leader Khamenei were all students together in 1968; Medicare and Medicaid fraud amounts to half a trillion dollars; Satan motivated Darwin to create the theory of evolution; and the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience. He found fault with the victims of a mass shooting. He told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” He wants to use the Department of Education to police liberal (but not conservative) bias at colleges and universities (and justified the need for such policing by citing an event that didn’t quite happen the way he claimed).

But even the odd sound bites don’t capture the weird vibe you’ll pick up if you listen to longer chunks of Carson’s speeches. He has the crackpot’s way of saying certain common phrases as if they had an occult meaning. Political correctness, for example, is far more sinister than just an exaggerated fear of giving offense, and secular progressives are much more dangerous than just liberals who don’t go to church. Why? I haven’t been initiated into that priesthood, so I can’t guess.

Many of his stranger ideas come from a Cold War era kook, W. Cleon Skousen, a man that even the conservative National Review has characterized as an “all-around nutjob“. In an interview with Alan Colmes, Carson recommended reading Skousen’s 1958 conspiracy-theory screed The Naked Communist as a way to see the connections between Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the writings of Lenin, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and the Obama administration. [4]

Pyramids. This week all doubt about Carson’s crackpottery was removed when Buzzfeed unearthed a 15-minute clip from the commencement speech Carson gave at Andrews University in 1998.

At around the 3-minute mark, he starts talking about the career of the Biblical patriarch Joseph as prime minister of Egypt, building up a grain surplus from the seven fat years to eat during the seven lean years. Andrews is a religious institution (associated with Carson’s own Seventh Day Adventist denomination), so recounting a famous Bible story is a perfectly reasonable thing for a commencement speaker to do. But then Carson goes off the rails and starts talking about the pyramids. As you listen, bear three things in mind:

• The pyramids aren’t any part of the Joseph story as recounted in the Bible. Nor do they figure in any other Bible story; the Bible is pyramid-free.
• Nobody asked Carson about the pyramids.
• The pyramids don’t seem to have anything to do with the overall themes of his speech.

In other words, he just saw a microphone in front of him and decided to lay this bit of wisdom on his audience:

My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids in order to store grain. Now, all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big — when you stop and think about it, and I don’t think it would just disappear over the course of time — to store that much grain. And when you look at the way the pyramids are made, with many chambers that are hermetically sealed, they would have to be that way for a reason.

And, you know, various scientists have said, “Well, you know, there were alien beings that came down, and they had special knowledge and that’s how [garbled, maybe ‘they arose’].” And, you know, it doesn’t require an alien being when God is with you. And that’s really the key. People may not even be able to explain what it is that you’re accomplishing. But they don’t have to be able to explain it when God is there. All you have to do is accept His presence, and His total understanding of everything and link yourself with that.

All the archaeologists think one thing, but I’m a smart guy, so why shouldn’t I have a different opinion and include it in my commencement speech, even though I have no idea what I’m talking about? (He’s not joking; nobody laughs.)

And the competing theory Carson rejects — and attributes to “scientists” — is that aliens built the pyramids. (Though, I suppose, if you imagine the pyramids being built during a seven-year period, you’d need more-than-human tech.) I mean, run the experiment yourself: Google “aliens built the pyramids”. You don’t get references from Nature or Scientific American. You get a rival camp of crackpots.

This is not some unfair reference to Carson’s misspent youth. (Every interesting person has believed something weird if you go back far enough. Heck, I used to be a libertarian.) When asked, Carson verified that, yes, he still believes Joseph built the pyramids. Present-day Ben Carson attributes criticism of his pyramid theory to those ubiquitous “secular progressives”, and so tries to turn it into an argument about religion and exploit the persecution complex many conservative Christians share: Are we saying a Biblical literalist can’t be president? How is that different from a statement Carson took heat for, that a Muslim shouldn’t be president?

But the point is far simpler than that, and doesn’t depend on bias against any particular religion or even religion in general: A crackpot shouldn’t be president. I don’t care if he or she is Christian, Muslim, atheist, or whatever. If (as Paul Waldman puts it) your beliefs are “impervious to evidence” and you hold them with an “an alarming lack of what we might call epistemological modesty”, then you shouldn’t be president. [5]

Contempt for expertise. Carson’s I-thought-about-this-for-five-minutes opposition to “all the archaeologists” is a symptom of a larger problem: his contempt for people who study things and know them more deeply than Carson does. Consider this recent Carson tweet:

It is important to remember that amateurs built the Ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.

In the context of the pyramid quote, you realize that this isn’t just a quip. Carson really means it: Noah’s Flood is a historical event, and the Ark is one of the great achievements of ancient engineering — more evidence of what you can accomplish when God is with you.

In interview after interview, Carson proves that he hasn’t bothered to study for the presidency; he seems to believe that a president doesn’t need to understand things any better than he already does. Marketplace‘s Kai Ryssdal interviewed him on economic issues, and the transcript makes scary reading. When asked about raising the debt ceiling, Carson seems not to grasp what it is, talking instead about refusing to increase the budget. And when asked what he would cut to balance the budget, he offers nothing, and doesn’t even seem to think it would be his job to do so.

Take every departmental head, or sub-department head and tell them, “I want a 3 to 4 percent reduction.” Now anybody who tells me there’s not 3 to 4 percent fat in virtually everything that we do is fibbing to themselves. … They would have to find a place to cut. … I would provide the kind of leadership that says, “Get on the stick guys, and stop messing around, and cut where you need to cut, because we’re not raising any spending limits, period.”

Because, apparently, no previous president has thought to tell Congress or the bureaucracy to “get on the stick”.

He has proposed a flat tax (based on the Biblical notion of tithing), but doesn’t know what the rate will be. When challenged during the CNBC debate by moderator Becky Quick, who thought his plan would blow a hole in the budget even at the highest rate he has considered (15%), he told her that her math was wrong. It wasn’t.

The Carson cabinet. Think about what all this portends for a Carson presidency. Unlike Trump, he wouldn’t be looking for advice from economists or generals or constitutional lawyers, or from people who speak foreign languages and study foreign cultures and know the history of the conflicts we’re getting involved in. Those “experts” are like the builders of the Titanic. Instead, President Carson would be looking at potential cabinet members and asking “Is God with them?”. If so, then he’d count on them to build whatever arks or pyramids America needs.

That doesn’t sound like The Music Man, it sounds like the Children’s Crusade of the 13th century.

A boy began preaching in either France or Germany claiming that he had been visited by Jesus and told to lead a Crusade to peacefully convert Muslims to Christianity. Through a series of supposed portents and miracles he gained a considerable following, including possibly as many as 30,000 children. He led his followers south towards the Mediterranean Sea, in the belief that the sea would part on their arrival, allowing him and his followers to march to Jerusalem, but this did not happen. They were sold to two merchants (Hugh the Iron and William of Posqueres) who gave free passage on boats to as many of the children as were willing, but they were actually either taken to Tunisia and sold into slavery by the cruel merchants, or died in a shipwreck on San Pietro Island off Sardinia during a gale.

A crackpot president poses a far greater danger than a huckster president. The huckster knows that he’s spinning a yarn, and understands that he’s going to have to finagle something when his story starts meeting the real world. But the crackpot doesn’t grasp this. He’ll walk right onto his invisible bridge and plunge into the abyss. And anybody who follows will plunge in after him.

[1] By Saturday, Trump had regained a similarly tiny lead. It’ll probably take a week or so for this to settle out.

[2] Unless, of course, you’re one of those Mexicans he’ll throw out, or care about any of them. So Trump’s vision looks good — to steal a phrase from a recent novel — “not counting the people who don’t count”.

[3] The kerfuffle I’m not going to say much about centers on a variety of anecdotes contained in Carson’s autobiography Gifted Hands. CNN went looking for other people who might have remembered these incidents, and couldn’t find any.  Politico claimed Carson had admitted one of them was false, but then had to tone down its headline, though it claims it stands by the story.

Let me explain why these reports don’t bother me: When Carson wrote Gifted Hands in 1992, the point was to tell an inspiring up-from-poverty story, not to build a case for becoming president. He wanted black kids in dodgy situations to realize that it wasn’t too late to turn their lives around and do something fantastic. So if he exaggerated how bad his life got before he turned it around to become a famous surgeon, that’s like a perfectly trim fitness instructor fibbing about how fat a slob she used to be.

I’m not inclined to hang him for it, because the overall story of Gifted Hands is still true: He was born into a bad situation and succeeded anyway. (But the NYT’s Charles Blow takes a harsher view.)

Now, his response to these criticisms — attributing them to “the liberal media” or “secular progressives”, and shooting back by referring to weird theories about Obama’s past that the press supposedly let slide — does bear on the crackpot question.

[4] Having finally read Rules for Radicals, I suspect Carson gets all his information about it from somebody else, probably fellow Skousen fan Glenn Beck. The book itself bears no resemblance to what Carson says about it.

You have to recognize that one of the rules in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is you make the majority believe that what they believe is no longer relevant and no intelligent person thinks that way and the way you believe is the only way intelligent people believe. And that way they’ll keep silent. Because I’ll tell you something. They don’t care if you don’t believe what they believe, as long as you keep your mouth shut.

There is no way that Carson has actually read the book, if this is what he thinks it says. A more accurate summary of Alinsky’s views is in his Playboy interview, done shortly before his death.

My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they’ll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it’s a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment.

[5] As a further example of “lack of epistemological modesty”, Waldman references a later part of the commencement address, when Carson relates how he stumped a scientist with a simple question:

Would you just reconcile those two things for me, the Big Bang and entropy? Well of course he has no answer for that.

Carson repeated that anecdote almost word-for-word this September, which caused FactCheck.org to produce the answer Carson’s scientist couldn’t. It’s not that complicated, for people who want to understand it. I sincerely doubt that the conversation Carson describes really happened, because no scientist worthy of the name would be flustered by Carson’s question.

This stumping-the-scientist-with-an-obvious-question story is one of the mythic anecdotes you will hear often if you hang around in fundamentalist and evangelical circles. Others include the-famous-atheist-who-converted-on-his-deathbed and the-skeptic-who-set-out-to-list-all-the-Bible’s-contradictions-and-instead-found-God. The names and circumstances in the stories change, but the motifs have been around for centuries. They are basically religious urban legends. (So no: Christopher Hitchens did not convert on his deathbed; neither did David Hume or Thomas Paine.)

In the full sunlight of public attention, one very smart, very well prepared Democrat is more than a match for a roomful of Republicans who have been breathing the stale air inside the conservative news bubble.

Unlike so many of the stories that Republicans use to rally their base — Obama’s plot to persecute conservative political organizations through the IRS, Planned Parenthood’s attempt to make big money through the baby-body-parts market, or the conspiracy of the international scientific community to establish a world socialist government by trumping up a global warming crisis — the attack on the American outpost in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 really happened. Four Americans died, including our ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

It was a bad day for America. Not nearly as bad as, say, October 23, 1983, when a Marine barracks in Beirut was bombed, killing 299 American and French servicemen, but a bad day nonetheless.

In hindsight, a lot of people might have done something differently. For instance, Republicans in Congress might have funded the State Department’s security program at the level requested, rather than repeatedly cutting it. Or the State Department might have allocated more of that scarce funding to the Benghazi compound. Or, simplest of all, Ambassador Stevens might have chosen to spend the anniversary of 9-11 in a more secure location.

Hindsight is like that. You can always find something. What’s harder — but far more important — is to find actual lessons for keeping our diplomats safer in the future. That’s the legitimate point of having Congress investigate Benghazi.

As The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer observed a year-and-a-half ago, a good model for that investigation would have been the one the Democratically controlled House did in 1983: It respected the human tragedy of the Beirut bombing, didn’t use the lives of American servicemen as political poker chips, produced a genuinely bipartisan report, put rumors to rest rather than fanning them, and completed its job in a timely fashion rather than spawning second, third, and fourth House investigations that might have gone on for years. The bombing did not become a major issue to use against President Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign.

As we know, Republicans in Congress decided not to follow that model. Investigating Benghazi has turned into an industry and the investigation never ends. Depending on how you count, the House Select Committee chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy is maybe the ninth Benghazi investigation. Mayer’s article concluded:

If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial security lapses in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home.

What went wrong with the previous eight investigations — from the Republican point of view — is that they didn’t decisively nail either President Obama or then-Secretary of State Clinton. They didn’t result in grounds for impeachment, or justify fantasies of putting Hillary in jail. They didn’t substantiate rumors of a rescue mission that was ready to roll until either Obama or Clinton pulled the plug and let our people die. They didn’t justify crowd-pleasing lines like Lindsey Graham’s, “Hillary Clinton got away with murder.”

For three years now, Republican politicians have been like the guy who tells his wife he’s working to launch a new business that will make them rich, when really he’s been spending his afternoons at the bar. (“Someday soon it’s all going to come together, honey, and then you’ll see.”) They’ve been telling their base that they have the goods on Secretary Clinton. They’ve been winking and nodding at every scurrilous rumor right-wing talk radio can manufacture, implying that when they finally get Hillary under oath, they’ll confront her with the hard evidence and expose her for the whole country to see.

Unfortunately, they missed the lesson that every tale-spinning husband should know: You never actually schedule that demonstration. The fantasy that your ship is coming in can’t survive if you circle a date on the calendar and invite all your friends and relatives down to the docks.

Well, Thursday the circled date on the calendar arrived. There was Hillary Clinton, under oath, on national TV, outnumbered, in a setting designed and controlled by the House Select Committee’s Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy. But for a one-hour lunch break, they kept her answering hostile questions from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

I’m sure the Republicans thought they had a chance. They had ten hours, and they only needed a ten-second lapse. If Clinton stumbled once, if she contradicted herself, if she looked guilty or flustered, if she lost her cool, if she had a Freudian slip … then Fox News would have its lead story and the eventual Republican nominee would have his attack ad. It would all be worth it.

What actually happened is pretty well summed up by the cartoon at the top of the page. (Hillary didn’t really say that line. In Watchmen, Rorschach says it to his fellow prison inmates.) The Republicans didn’t have Hillary where they wanted her, she had them. For 11 hours on national TV on multiple networks, she demonstrated her most presidential qualities: She’s smart, she knows her stuff, she’s unflappable, and she has amazing stamina. Not only did she defuse Benghazi and her email server as issues — if you’ve really got something on her, why couldn’t you produce it? — but she also shut down the argument that she’s too old to be president.

I mean, young Marco Rubio (currently the betting favorite to win the GOP nomination) couldn’t stay presidential for 15 minutes when he gave the Republicans’ State of the Union response in 2013. Josh Marshall had the same thought:

Seriously, can you imagine Marco Rubio in the same chair under the same sort of questioning? Not to mention Donald Trump or – God forbid – the increasingly Chauncey Gardner-esque Ben Carson?

Meanwhile, Chairman Gowdy came out shining with sweat and looking like he’d been through the mill. (I can sympathize. When I saw Clinton this summer inside an oven — I mean, a school gym — in Nashua, I came out soaked and she still looked fresh.)

In short, it was a put-up-or-shut-up moment for the Republicans, and they had nothing to put up.

I would compare Clinton’s testimony to the time in 2010 when President Obama submitted to a Q&A at the retreat of the House Republican Caucus. He ran rings around them that day, and so they never invited him back. Needing to conform to the bizarre fantasies popular among the conservative base is a severe disadvantage when Republicans venture into the view of the general public.

I’ll conclude with some short observations.

You need a comedian to cover the Benghazi hearing properly. Trevor Noah, say.

One way you can tell how an all-day spectacle like this is going is to check which news network cuts away first: that’s the side that thinks it’s losing. Liberal MSNBC stuck with Hillary’s testimony all the way to 9 p.m., while conservative Fox News abandoned ship in mid-afternoon. MSNBC’s Steve Benen sums up

that’s how awful yesterday’s hearing was for Republicans: even conservatives who desperately wanted it to go well for the right had to concede that the gambit was a failure.

As so often happens, right-wingers are annoyed that their people let them down (if you click that link, be sure to read the comments), but won’t consider the idea that there is no Benghazi scandal to ferret out. The clamor for yet another investigation is bound to start soon.

The Republican base views investigations like fortune cookies in a big box. They think that if they open enough of them, they’re bound to find one that says what they want.

I can’t find the link, but I recall TPM’s Josh Marshall complaining a month or two ago that Clinton-haters are so rabid and unfair in their attempts to bring Bill & Hillary down that he ends up rooting for the Clintons, even though he’d rather support more liberal candidates. That effect, combined with Hillary’s strong performance in the first debate, seems to be working.

Recently, Bernie Sanders held a lead in several New Hampshire polls and had even edged ahead in Iowa, but his advantage seems to have evaporated. Two new polls in Iowa show Clinton with a commanding lead. She has a smaller 38%-34% lead in a recent New Hampshire poll.

The articles on those polls attribute her bounce to the debate, but I imagine that the growing focus on the partisan nature of the Benghazi hearings has helped her too. I expect another bounce now that she has sailed through that grueling interrogation on national TV.

You might wonder why Clinton got the debate bounce when Sanders seemed to have all the good lines. I explain it like this: Clinton came into the campaign as the presumed nominee, much as an incumbent president would. In such cases, most voters make a two-part decision: First, a yes-or-no decision on the front-runner — am I satisfied with her or am I looking for an alternative? — and only if the first decision is negative do they proceed to a him-or-her decision between the presumptive nominee and a challenger.

To a lot of Democrats, Clinton looked good enough in the debate to win the first decision. After they said “I’m OK with her as the nominee”, Sanders’ performance really didn’t matter.

If the Benghazi hearings are working in her favor, I’d expect to see the effect most strongly among women, who would be quicker to identify with a woman being picked on unfairly, and especially with a woman who faces down her critics with poise and intelligence. The Quinnipiac poll in Iowa shows Clinton with a 59%-33% advantage with women, overcoming Sanders’ 51%-39% lead among men. We’ll see if that gap grows after the Benghazi hearings.

The Week‘s Paul Waldman sums up the most damning things we’ve discovered about Benghazi:

in May of last year, we learned of a memo that a White House communication official wrote at the time, encouraging staffers not to say Benghazi represented a failure of administration policy. In other words, a guy whose job it is to craft spin crafted some spin. … At another point in the hearing, a Republican congressman spent nearly 15 minutes aggressively interrogating Clinton over whether — brace yourself — her press secretary tried to make her look good to reporters.

The bait-and-switch pattern of Republican rhetoric has been the same from the beginning: They start out talking about four dead Americans and whether Obama/Clinton could have saved them. But when it comes time to detail what the administration might have done wrong, they focus on whether the post-attack talking points contained too much spin.

I want to hear a clear acknowledgment of this obvious fact: Nothing that could have been said on the next Sunday’s talk shows would have retroactively saved Ambassador Stevens. If we’re talking about talking points, we’re not talking about saving lives.

Maybe the most bizarre aspect of Thursday’s hearing was the repeated focus on Hillary’s communication with Sidney Blumenthal. It’s an example of one of those aspects of conservative discourse that has no liberal parallel: demonizing otherwise obscure people and then associating them with anybody else you want to bring down.

That’s what’s going on when conservatives talk about Saul Alinsky, for example, ignoring the fact that he died decades ago and his books go largely unread. (If your local library owns an Alinsky book — it may not — go look for it; I guarantee it won’t be checked out. Most of the Amazon reviews on Rules for Radicals are written by conservatives who think they’ve found the Rosetta Stone of the Obama presidency.) Bill Ayers is another one; if anybody can show me some major decision that turned on Bill Ayers’ opinion, I’d love to see it. Glenn Beck went so far as to put an octogenarian college professor most liberals have never heard of — Frances Fox Piven — at the center of the vast left-wing conspiracy. His web site did at least 24 stories about her in 2011-2012. If not for Beck, I still wouldn’t know who she is.

The dystopian fantasy of a hidden left-wing power structure (that will only be revealed after the Revolution) goes back to the McCarthy Red Scare, or maybe even further to ravings about the Illuminati or the Elders of Zion. Right-wing ideas like that never die.

Here’s the closest comparison I can find: Liberals demonize billionaires who contribute hundreds of millions to conservative causes — the Koch brothers, say — and we’ll connect you to them if you get lots of their money. That’s the best I can do.