This post is mostly about Republicans, but if you see parallels with the Democrats, I won’t argue. I will get to that in the end.

David Weigel, Michael Scherer and Robert Costa report in WaPo that Mitch McConnell has declared war on Steve Bannon.

More than a year ahead of the 2018 congressional contests, a ­super PAC aligned with McConnell (R-Ky.) revealed plans to attack Bannon personally as it works to protect GOP incumbents facing uphill primary fights. The effort reflects the growing concern of Republican lawmakers over the rise of anti-establishment forces and comes amid escalating frustration over President Trump’s conduct, which has prompted a handful of lawmakers to publicly criticize the president.

Yet the retaliatory crusade does not aim to target Trump, whose popularity remains high among Republican voters. Instead, the McConnell-allied Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) will highlight Bannon’s hard-line populism and attempt to link him to white nationalism to discredit him and the candidates he will support. It will also boost candidates with traditional GOP profiles and excoriate those tied to Bannon, with plans to spend millions and launch a heavy social media presence in some states.

Bannon, of course, has been at war with McConnell for some time. But this points to the impasse the Republican Party has reached. The core of their voting base is made up of hard-line populists and white nationalists. How can Republicans campaign against hard-line populism and white nationalism and keep the base happy?

The fascinating thing going on here is that the Republicans for years have been telling themselves they are a party of Principles and Ideas and Whatnot, while attracting voters with red meat and dog whistles, but the base really doesn’t give a hoo-haw about the principles and ideas and just want the dog whistle stuff. But if the Republicans become nothing but the party of red meat and dog whistles, with no pretense otherwise, it’s unlikely they can survive long as a party. They’ve already demonstrated they don’t know how to govern any more. And this is a reality that’s yet to dawn on some of them.

Ron Dreher — no fan of Trump’s — writes at the American Conservative about Jeff Flake:

 Jeff Flake’s conservatism deserves to lose. He’s right about Trump’s character, but as I wrote in response to his book a short while back, all he offers is warmed-over Reaganism. If establishment Republicans like Flake had been paying attention, they would have changed with the times, and headed off somebody like Trump. I don’t mean that they should have surrendered their principles, necessarily, but adjusted them to fit the circumstances. Burke himself said that a state without the means of change is without the means of its own conservation. It’s true of a political party, certainly. Political parties are not churches, after all. The problem with the Republican Party and movement conservatism is that it regarded Reaganism as a kind of religion.

Jeff Flake strikes me as an honorable man. But good riddance to his kind of Republican.

Via Dreher, I learn that Ross Douthat has written something halfway intelligent:

To the extent that there’s a plausible theory behind all of these halfhearted efforts, it’s that resisting Trump too vigorously only strengthens his hold on the party’s base, by vindicating his claim to have all the establishment arrayed against him.

But the problem with this logic is that it offers a permanent excuse for doing nothing, no matter how bad Trump’s reign becomes. (“I’d criticize him for accidentally nuking Manila, but you know, then Fox News would just make it all about me …”) In the end, if you want Republican voters to reject Trumpism, you need to give them clear electoral opportunities to do so — even if you expect defeat, even if it’s all but certain. And an anti-Trump movement that gives high-minded speeches but never mounts candidates confirms Trump’s claim to face establishment opposition while also confirming his judgment of the establishment’s guts and stamina — proving that they’re all low-energy, all “liddle” men, all unwilling to fight him man to man.

If Corker really means what he keeps saying about the danger posed by Trump’s effective incapacity, he should call openly for impeachment or for 25th Amendment proceedings — and other anti-Trump Republicans should join him. If Flake really means what he said in his impassioned speech, and he doesn’t want to waste time and energy on a foredoomed Senate primary campaign, then he should choose a different hopeless-seeming cause and primary Trump in 2020.

I said yesterday that it wouldn’t surprise me if Flake is positioning himself to primary Trump. We’ll see. Meanwhile, after his gutsy speech, Flake went back to Republicanism as usual:

In the dead of Tuesday night, with the applause still ringing in his ears, Flake voted to strip the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau of a rule that allowed Americans to file class-action suits against banks rather than being forced into an arbitration process that generally is as rigged as a North Korean election.

Another interesting read is by Damon Linker, “The Center-Right’s Empty Idealism.”  He is discussing the recent anti-Trump speeches by McCain and G.W. Bush.

At an event in New York three days later, Bush defended the same idealized construal of the country, its history, and its role in the world, while adding more specifics. For Bush, the United States stands for freedom and democracy, which are the “inborn hope of our humanity,” and is called upon to defend them against their enemies abroad. Doing so involves supporting the liberal international order against tyrannical and totalitarian threats, as well as favoring free trade, the dynamism that results from relatively open immigration, and policies that empower the job-creating juggernaut of the private sector.

If it weren’t for the Trump administration’s promotion of a far more culturally populist and nationalist ideology, there would be nothing at all noteworthy about McCain and Bush’s statements. On the contrary, they would be seen as expressions of the purest political boilerplate — a recitation of chapters and verses from the hymnal of American civil religion that one might have expected to hear from any president or presidential candidate from either party at any point since Ronald Reagan was elected (and maybe earlier). They stand out today, and move many of us a bit more than they once did, only because President Trump and many of his senior advisers don’t speak this language and don’t entirely share the moral and political vision it expresses.

It’s precisely the familiarity of the language and political vision that should strike us as strange. McCain and Bush recited the same civic poetry we’ve heard for decades, the same poetry that lost out to Donald Trump in the 2016 GOP primaries. Yet here we are, nearly a year into the Trump administration, and two of the most prominent figures in the Republican establishment have decided to respond by saying … precisely the same thing yet again.

James Hohmann writes at WaPo that most Republicans are rallying around Trump by saying critiques such as Flake’s are about Trump’s personality and not policy. Hohmann tries to argue that there are real policy differences. “Flake’s decision to not seek another term was as much about his refusal to abandon his core principles as his concern over Trump’s fitness for office,” Hohmann writes. But what core principles would those be? Flake’s votes in the Senate show that he agrees with Trump 90 percent of the time.  Maybe going forward he will clarify his position vis à vis Trumpism, but it’s not clear to me now, other than maybe thinking that Trump is vulgar and doesn’t know how to play the We Are the Party of Principles and Ideas game.

Back to Ron Dreher:

Donald Trump is not the answer. But you know what else isn’t the answer? The same old GOP script. I find myself tonight thinking about the reader who posted a comment last night saying that he’s having to work 12-hour days, and on weekends too, just to make ends meet. I happen to know the guy. He’s a middle-aged political and religious conservative, a churchgoing family man. And he’s being ground down by what he rightly calls “the destruction of the middle class.” I don’t know if he voted for Trump or not, but the Republican Party offers him nothing, and he knows that. Doesn’t mean he’s voting Democratic — that party is also a hot mess — but I can well imagine that the respectable rhetoric of a Sen. Flake falls on deaf ears in his house.

The parallels with Democrats — the Old Guard of both parties is clinging to the past, although in different ways. And they are both clinging to a mythical center that may not exist any more. And the Old Guard of both parties offers nothing to beaten down working class people, and the Old Guard of both parties is in denial about that.

The Republican Old Guard still thinks it is the party of Reagan, Main Street, tough foreign policy and world leadership. Listening to Jeff Flake, I am reminded of the great line from Nixon’s “Checkers” speech — “I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything.” Respectable Republican cloth coat — that was a line that resonated with people in 1952. Republicans were not ostentatious people. They were people who wore sensible shoes and cloth coats and loved their little daughters and their dogs. How would the cloth coat line go over today? It seems a quaint and alien thing now.

Of course, in 1952 Joe McCarthy was out there, too, whipping up hysteria. Behind the curtains of civility and rows of genteel men in grey flannel suits, Richard Hofstader’s pseudo conservatives were fighting against the center of their day. (I still say that if you want to understand the roots of today’s political insanity, read Hofstader.)

Both parties are in a perilous place. The political center, whether center-right or center-left, is empty. The center-left is compromised by clientelism and overpaid technocrats producing bullet-point plans of well-intentioned tweaks. The center-right, though, is just a sad ghost that wants to believe it has principles but can’t quite remember where it put them.

Today’s big nooz:

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) will retire from the Senate at the end of his term, saying he was out of step with his party in the era of President Trump.  …

… In an unannounced Senate floor speech Tuesday announcing his retirement, Flake excoriated Trump without using his name.

“We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that is just the way things are now. If we simply become used to this condition . . . then heaven help us,” Flake said, his voice shaking. “Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe, we must stop pretending that the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused as telling it like it is when it is actually reckless, outrageous and undignified.”

Flake was first elected to the Senate in 2012 and was up for re-election next year. Before that he served in the House, beginning 2001.

“It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we doing to do about that?,” Flake said. “When the next generation asks us, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? What are we going to say? I rise to say, enough.”

Flake said senators “must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal. With respect, we fooled ourselves long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. by now, we all know better than that.”  …

… “It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path” in the Republican Party, he said.

The speech got a standing ovation from those senators present. Responding with her usual graciousness, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Flake was being petty and was such a loser he wouldn’t have won re-election anyway.

Josh Marshall reminds us that Flake was a “very conservative Republican” who has been a reliable vote for Trump’s nonsense. Even so,

 I’m still pretty stunned by this turn of events. We know Trump is a bull in a china shop. We know that he’s creating cross-cutting tensions within the GOP that are hard to navigate. We know that everyone around President Trump gets damaged. But Flake giving up his seat just makes the impact of Trump, the electoral carnage palpable and visible in an entirely new way.

Jeff Flake is 54 years old. He served a dozen years in the House before running for the Senate in 2012, the first opening that came up while he was in Congress. Politicians don’t put in that time building a base and a political track to bail out of the Senate after one term. Basically not ever. Certainly not for someone like Jeff Flake.

No, sentimentality. But wow. The carnage and the stress and the destruction. There will be much more. Trump is poison. He arranges around himself, the worst and least principled sort of people. We’ll all be damaged more.

What’s up with Trump and Flake?  David Nakamura and Ed O’Keefe wrote this in the Washington Post last August:

President Trump went on the offensive Thursday against two Republican senators, attacking them for their recent criticisms of his divisive governing style and response to the violence in Charlottesville.

In a morning tweetstorm, Trump lambasted Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.), calling Graham “publicity-seeking” and Flake “toxic” and endorsing a primary challenger to Flake in his reelection bid next year. Flake recently published a book that was highly critical of Trump. …

…Flake wrote in his book that Republicans abandoned their principles in the face of Trump’s unorthodox campaign and surrendered to the “politics of anger.” The party gave in to “the belief that riling up the base can make up for failed attempts to broaden the electorate,” Flake wrote in “Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle.”“These are the spasms of a dying party.”

Even earlier, last May, Flake got into trouble with Trump by publicly doubting that the Republicans would have a viable replacement health care law to vote on before the August break, which certainly turned out to be true. Former Arizona state senator Kelli Ward criticized Flake for not being enough of an obsequious toady toward Trump, and she issued a primary challenge. Trump noisily endorsed Ward over Flake a few weeks ago.

Just to illustrate what sort of class act Ward is, after Sen. John McCain announced he had brain cancer, Ward publicly stated that McCain should resign at once, and by the way, she was available to fill his seat.

Ward is not winning hearts and minds.

A Republican super PAC with ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday took a shot at former Arizona state Sen. Kelli Ward (R), arguing that she will not be the Republican nominee in the wake of Sen. Jeff Flake‘s (R-Ariz.) decision to not run for reelection.

Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) has been critical of Ward, who had launched a primary challenge to the right of Flake and has the backing of pro-Trump outside group Great America Alliance. Flake sent shockwaves throughout the political world when he announced on Tuesday that he wouldn’t run for a second term in 2018.

“Sen. Jeff Flake will be remembered for a distinguished and impactful career in Congress, as well as his independent streak and genial manner,” Senate Leadership Fund president Steven Law said in a statement.

“The one political upshot of Sen. Flake’s decision today is that Steve Bannon’s hand-picked candidate, conspiracy-theorist Kelli Ward, will not be the Republican nominee for this Senate seat in 2018.”

Flake’s departure will likely open up the Republican field and now leaves a spot open for a candidate as an alternative to Ward.

Just yesterday, we learned that Ward may not be Trumpian enough, either.

This past April, two Breitbart alumni joined the campaign of Kelli Ward, an insurgent conservative preparing to challenge Republican Sen. Jeff Flake on a familiar Trump-style platform to “drain the swamp” and “Make America Great Again.”

Ward officially kicked off her campaign last week at an event attended by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham and Breitbart executive chair and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Later that same day, the two Breitbart writers, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, quit. After working on her campaign for more than six months, they had come to believe that Ward was not the true believer she claimed to be.

So, the Right isn’t just breaking up into pro- and anti-Trump factions; it is breaking up into varying degrees of Trumpism factions. And the senate race in Arizona next year is going to be right out of the Wild West.

Anyway, Flake will still be in the Senate until January 2019, which would be a good time to focus on his presidential nomination exploratory committee. (He wrote a book. That’s why senators write books; to run for POTUS.) His announcement today makes it possible for him to become a leader of the anti-Trump faction within the GOP. It also means he has no reason to kiss Trump’s ass, ever.

The Russian Uranium Clinton Thing is an old story being given new life in right-wing media to deflect attention from Trump’s Russian connection scandals. Right-wing media never bother to address the question of why one story is supposed to cancel out the other, but never mind. I’m bringing it up now because (1) it’s stupid; and (2) it’s new to a lot of people. The Russian Uranium Clinton Thing was a thing last year during the primaries, also, but I don’t believe I mentioned it then. I have been filing it under the heading of Shit That Looks Bad But There’s Worse Stuff to Talk About.

I believe the Russian Uranium Clinton Thing story was broken by the New York Times in 2015, in a story headlined Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

At the time, both Rosatom [the Russian atomic energy agency] and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.

So there’s a big, fat appearance of naughty here. On top of that, it has been reported more recently that back in 2010, when the Thing was going on, Russians and uranium were being investigated by the FBI. The Hill reported this week:

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

That looks corrupt as hell, as maybe it is. You might remember I’m not a Hillary Clinton fan. However, as Callum Borchers reported at WaPo this week, there are mitigating circumstances. The “government body” that approved the sale was made up of representatives from the State Department and eight other U.S. government agencies. Clinton did not have the authority to approve the sale by herself. Further, Borchers writes, it appears the committee members did not know anything about the FBI investigation when the sale was approved. See also Snopes.

And what about the donations?

It is virtually impossible to view these donations as anything other than an attempt to curry favor with Clinton. Donations alone do not, however, prove that Clinton was actually influenced by money to vote in favor of the Uranium One sale — or to overlook the FBI investigation. Again, there is no evidence that she even knew about the investigation.

Further, as Vox reports, there’s no indication that Clinton went out of her way to advocate for the sale of the uranium.

I am reminded of something written last year by my friend Jeffrey Feldman, that Clinton is less guilty of corruption than of clientelism.

“Corruption” is essentially a quid-pro-quo system. In the most basic example, a person walks into a politicians office and gives them an envelope full of money–throws it on the desk. As the delivery man walks out of the office, he turns to the Congressperson and says, “Vote no on the housing bill.”  That’s the stereotype of corruption in government. I give you money, you do what I tell you to do.

“Clientelism” is a bit different because it is a system whereby patrons and clients act in ways that are mutually beneficial to both–without the explicit quid pro quo, without the smudged brown envelope of sweaty cash.  The big difference between corruption and clientelism is the explicit demand for a political act from the person or entity who wants to influence government. In “corruption” you are paid and then you do what you are asked. In clientism, the politician acts in favor of a powerful interest or entity and then, subsequently, is rewarded.

Put another way — without agreeing to a specific quid pro quo, which would be illegal, the Clintons and a lot of other big players in the world operate in a system in which they are perpetually doing each other mutually beneficially favors without ever being so crass as to admit out loud that’s what they are doing, and without ever specifically agreeing to terms of the favors. Very likely the Russians never directly approached Clinton for her favorable vote, and Clinton never asked for donations. It’s just How Things Are Done.  That doesn’t mean it’s not a corruption of the system, but it’s probably not indictable. Jeffrey continued,

Secretary Clinton, for all the good work that she has done, has built a career on the belief that she can control these patron-client relationships to benefit the powerless. Yet, she has done so by entering into reciprocal relationships with the powerful–who gain no advantage by legislation that helps the powerless.

This is a big reason I don’t want her in office, and I don’t want her associates running the Democratic Party. It it turns out she did do something indictable, I’m not going to shed tears over it. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Trump-Russian Collusion Thing, which is a different thing.

Rather hilariously, Trump and Fox News are screaming that “fake media” have refused to cover the Russian Uranium Clinton Thing, even though the New York Times broke the story more than two years ago, and other major news outlets have been reporting on it this week. To see the spin right-wing media are giving the story, see the New York Post.

Politico reports that the DNC is facing a massive money deficit.

The Democratic National Committee is reeling, facing a turnaround that’s proving a much bigger lift than anyone expected as it struggles to raise enough money to cover its basic promises.

Many donors are refusing to write checks. And on-the-ground operatives worry they won’t have the resources to build the infrastructure they need to compete effectively in next year’s midterms and in the run-up to 2020.

The Politico article frames this as a fundraising problem and appears to blame Tom Perez and his lack of experience. But one might ask, given that the Trump Republican Party is destroying America, why Democrats would have such a hard time raising money. One would think the DNC wouldn’t even have to ask for money.

One has to read between the lines a bit, but by doing so we learn that people are giving generously to “new resistance-minded groups” and to individual candidates, the DNC is in big trouble.

See in particular this part:

Party officials involved in fundraising say donors repeatedly turn them away with a “try again next year,” especially since it became clear there won’t be an official party autopsy from 2016. Democrat Jon Ossoff’s loss in his much-hyped special congressional election in Atlanta’s suburbs in June has also depressed donor enthusiasm.

“I’ve made it pretty clear I don’t want to donate to the DNC, DCCC, or the Senate counterpart, so they have not called me,” said Northern California attorney Guy Saperstein, a part-owner of the Oakland Athletics and a prominent funder of progressive causes and candidates.

Even donors who are more willing to play ball have a stern message: The party needs a clearer plan to win before we fork over more money.

“You can’t just go to [donors] and say … ‘Support me, I’m the DNC.’ You have to rebuild the credibility,” said a longtime Democratic donor and DNC member.

DNC members themselves have now been asked to give or raise $1,000 each, some said — a request people who’ve been around the committee for decades say they can’t remember being made before.

Part of the problem has been the lack of major draws for the contributors. For the past eight years, much of the party’s donor strategy has been built around large events featuring Obama. …

…“I’ve had enough dinners,” said Orlando attorney John Morgan, a longtime top party donor who is now considering a Florida gubernatorial run. “I’m not really interested. I’m going to let them get new blood. I can’t get motivated.”

So there is no autopsy of what went wrong last year, and we’ve seen this week that they have no intention of engaging in the reforms they need to restore people’s confidence. I personally think that what went wrong last year was years in the making. The Dem Party skated far too long on the personal popularity of Barack Obama while the rest of the party went to hell. Having President Obama in the White House helped them deny that they were losing more seats in Congress, and state legislatures, and governor’s mansions, with every election. But now even that band-aid is ripped off, and what’s left? Failure, that’s what.

Eventually they’re going to blame Perez (and also Keith Ellison, who is helpless to do much as long as his auxiliary position is seen as just a sop to the Left), and they’ll put some other centrist toady in the DNC chair position who also will fail. You can see it from miles away.

The only bright spot is that while the DNC remains mired in denial and incompetence, House Democratic congressional candidates are outraising Republican ones.

House Republicans are growing increasingly alarmed that some of their most vulnerable members aren’t doing the necessary legwork to protect themselves from an emerging Democratic tidal wave. In some of the biggest media markets, where blockbuster fundraising is a prerequisite for political survival—most notably in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston—Republican lawmakers aren’t raising enough money to run aggressive campaigns against up-and-coming Democrats.

Of the 53 House Republicans facing competitive races, according to Cook Political Report ratings, a whopping 21 have been outraised by at least one Democratic opponent in the just-completed fundraising quarter. That’s a stunningly high number this early in the cycle, one that illustrates just how favorable the political environment is for House Democrats.

Republicans are frustrated with the House GOP’s inability to walk and chew gum at the same time; Democrats are throwing money at candidates they like. The DNC is frozen out, but in the still unlikely event that Dems take back the House next year, watch the DNC claim this as vindication.

Of the several untrue things John Kelly said yesterday, I want to comment on this one:

“When I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country,” he said. “Women were sacred and looked upon with great honor. That’s obviously not the case anymore, as we see from recent cases.”

If he’s referring to the Harvey Weinstein case, there’s something he apparently didn’t know. And it’s this: Back when Kelly was a kid growing up, sexual harassment was worse. It was more open. It was more accepted. It was completely legal. Women had absolutely no recourse but to put up with it.

I know what the world was like when John Kelly grew up, because he’s only a year older than I am. So I can speak with at least as much authority. Although assault was as taboo then as now, sexual harassment was the norm back in the day. A woman working with men had to put up with being perpetually objectified and belittled. It didn’t just go on behind closed doors. Men who didn’t participate would sit passively by while other men did, in full view.

Sexual harassment wasn’t even recognized as a “thing” until second wave feminism took it up as a cause, and even second wave feminism was a bit late about it.

Women did not even have a term with which to describe the experience of sexual harassment until 1976. This lack of a term made it difficult to discuss the subject, which prevented the development of a generalized, shared and social definition of the phenomenon. However the lack of a term should not be equated with the nonexistence of the event. In fact, silence is often a reflection of terrible pain and degradation. Like rape and domestic violence, it was a problem which male society swept under the rug, treating it as something simultaneously rare and shameful to the victim. Writing in an article originally published in 1979, Gloria Steinem noted that what now was called “sexual harassment” had just been called “life” only a few years earlier.

Labeling sexual harassment as being “just a part of life” effectively told women that this sort of thing was normal, even a compliment, and that it was their responsibility to cope with it and not complain. Therefore many women of the 1960’s and early 70’s believed that their feelings of shame and injury were evidence of something wrong with them rather than the behavior they endured. This effect only increased when people responded to women’s complaints by telling them, “you asked for it.” This told women that they must really want and enjoy those unwanted attentions, which increased their feelings of guilt and alienation.

But it was going on before the 1960s. The post World War II years saw widespread denigration of women, as Betty Friedan documented in The Feminine Mystique (1964). For example, in the 1950s and 1960s we were the primary butts of stand up comedy (women drivers! mothers in law! stupid housewives!). This was a form of cultural aggression aimed at an entire gender. Yeah, that’s how sacred we were.

I’ve probably told this one before, but as recently as the 1970s I remember the publisher I worked for was bringing out a book of jokes for after dinner speakers. Some of the jokes were blatantly sexist, such as about wife beating. Yes, wife beating was considered funny. I cut out those jokes. The author was furious and went over my head to my supervisor. However, the department head was also a woman, and the jokes stayed out.

So, it wasn’t until John Kelly was very much an adult that sexual harassment was identified as a bad thing, and it was identified as something that shouldn’t be happening in the workplace. However, it still happened. All the time. Just less blatantly.

And, of course, back in the day we were so “sacred” we couldn’t get credit cards in our own name, and any job with a decent wage attached to it could be found in the classifieds in a column headed “Jobs for White Men.” I remember that, too. If that was “sacred,” John Kelly can have it.

Did you know the budget voted on by the Republican majority in the Senate cuts $470 billion from Medicare over the next ten years? This was done to help offset tax cuts for the wealthy, of course.

It also cuts more than a trillion dollars from Medicaid. Medicaid pays most of the bills for the 1.4 million people in nursing homes.

Here in Missouri, somebody is paying for television ads telling people to lean on Sen. Claire McCaskill to get behind the Republican tax cuts. Nobody is paying for ads telling people that if Republicans have their way, Medicare will be gutted and Grandma will be out on the street. Why is that? I guess the Democrats are too busy purging Sanders supporters from their party to pay attention.

Republicans have been shedding crocodile tears over Medicare for years, including pushing the false narrative that Obamacare was somehow being underwritten by cuts to Medicare.  Even this year Republican lawmakers recycled that, um, spin to argue to constituents that they had to repeal and replace the ACA to save Medicare. But at every turn, Republicans have voted to cut more money from Medicare, but (unlike Obama) not in ways that would make it more solvent.

Everybody’s been focused this week on Trump’s insensitive remarks to a Gold Star family and the ongoing feud with Rep. Frederica S. Wilson, whom the WaPo editorial board says is owed an apology from John Kelly.

But while that’s a significant thing, we do need to be screaming from the rafters about the cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

I wrote a few weeks ago that if the Dems haven’t gotten rid of the superdelegates by 2020, it’s going to hurt them. People will remember 2016. Well, it turns out they don’t plan to get rid of the superdelegates; they are going to make the superdelegate system even worse.  Bloomberg News:

The Democratic Party this week plans to name 75 people including lobbyists and political operatives to leadership posts that come with superdelegate votes at its next presidential convention, potentially aggravating old intraparty tensions as it struggles to confront President Donald Trump.

The new members-at-large of the Democratic National Committee will vote on party rules and in 2020 will be convention delegates free to vote for a primary candidate of their choice. They include lobbyists for Venezuela’s national petroleum company and for the parent company of Fox News, according to a list obtained by Bloomberg News.

Apologists for the Democratic Party tell me that progressives are purists who are going to destroy the Democratic Party with their narrow minded litmus tests and intolerance for other views. I keep saying I don’t care about purity; I just want the party leaders to get their heads out of their asses. This tells me they haven’t.

The appointment of active corporate lobbyists as at-large members of the 447-member Democratic National Committee has aroused controversy in the past.

“I will register my customary objections” to the selection of at-large members, said Christine Pelosi, a California-based vice-chair of the DNC who in February authored a proposal to bar the appointment of corporate lobbyists as superdelegates. The national committee voted down her proposal.

Party spokesman Michael Tyler stressed the demographic reach of the at-large nominees, saying they “reflect the unprecedented diversity of our party’s coalition.” The party is doubling the representation of millennials and Native Americans on the DNC and increasing the number of Puerto Ricans, he said.

The party is being hurt by claims it is too indebted to corporate money and influence, and this is the trick it pulls? What is wrong with these people? Diversity is great, but diversity should NOT include corporations and their lobbyists. What is wrong with these people?

A DNC aide who asked not to be identified defended including the lobbyists, saying they were all carry-overs from the last presidential election cycle and were renominated because of their service to the party.

The results of the last election cycle should have prompted the Democratic Party to clean house, not double down. What is wrong with these people?

One of the lobbyists is Joanne Dowdell, who’s registered as a federal lobbyist for News Corp, the parent company of Fox News, where she’s senior vice president for global government affairs. Dowdell ran for New Hampshire’s House seat as a Democrat in 2012 and is a party donor.

Two other lobbyists who disclosed corporate clients in their most recent public reports are Clinton White House veteran Harold Ickes and Manuel Ortiz. Ortiz’s clients this year include CITGO Petroleum Corp, owned by the Venezuelan government, and Citigroup Management Corp. Ortiz also lobbies for Puerto Rican interests.

The three lobbyists didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At least 10 of the other superdelegates chosen by Perez have in the past been registered federal corporate lobbyists, with their most recent filings ranging from late last year to nearly a decade ago. …

…The new at-large members also includes operatives who worked on 2016 presidential campaigns who, if hired again in 2020, would each deliver one delegate vote to their bosses. At least three of the at-large members on Perez’s slate were both superdelegates in the last election and worked on primary campaigns: Jeff Berman, who planned delegate strategy for Clinton; Minyon Moore, a senior adviser who worked on Clinton’s White House transition; and Larry Cohen, a labor liaison for Sanders.

Two other former Clinton campaign workers, Emmy Ruiz and Craig Smith, are also among Perez’s slate of new at-large members, along with Sanders’s former press secretary, Symone Sanders.

The deadheads probably think they are covering their asses by including a couple of former Sanders people in with the lobbyists. But the whole superdelegate voting thing needs to end, first of all; second of all, the last thing the Democrats need is to be openly in bed with lobbyists of any sort. This confirms the worst fears of most leftist-progressive voters who distrust the Democratic Party.

See also Alex Seitz-Wald at NBC News:

A shake-up is underway at the Democratic National Committee as several key longtime officials have lost their posts, exposing a still-raw rift in the party and igniting anger among those in its progressive wing who see retaliation for their opposition to DNC Chairman Tom Perez.

The ousters come ahead of the DNC’s first meeting, in Las Vegas, Nevada, since Perez took over as chairman with a pledge this year to unite a party that had become badly divided during the brutal Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton 2016 primary race.

Complaints began immediately after party officials saw a list of Perez’s appointments to DNC committees and his roster of 75 “at-large” members, who are chosen by the chair.

The removal and demotion of a handful of veteran operatives stood out, as did what critics charge is the over-representation of Clinton-backed members on the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which helps set the terms for the party’s presidential primary, though other Sanders and Ellison backers remain represented.

The purged members were mostly people who backed Ellison for the DNC chair position, the article says.

The superdelegates were a source of hard feelings in 2008 and 2016, and until they are gotten rid of they will continue to be a source of division. And openly allowing lobbyists to determine party policy and rules, and possibly choose the nominee, pretty much tells me the party elites are more interested in holding on to their own influence than in winning elections or growing the party’s voter base. What a waste.

Lobbyists for Venezuela’s national petroleum company? Seriously?

For a brief, shiny moment it seemed the Senate would save the cost-sharing subsidies and the ACA. Yesterday  Sens. Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray submitted a bill that was supposed to do that, anyway.

Yesterday, Trump appeared to approve of this plan. Today, he does not. He still thinks it’s a “bailout” of the insurance industry. Sarah Kliff explains:

Trump has said he will discontinue the second [cost sharing] subsidy program. But insurance companies are still required by law to provide these subsidies to their low-income enrollees. They cannot jack up the deductibles on someone who earns 200 percent of the poverty line, even though the government has stopped providing the money.

Insurance companies don’t want to lose money. They need a way to offset the sudden loss of billions in government funds. So, they looked for other levers to pull. And many settled on raising premiums as a way to recoup those lost funds.

Paul Waldman wrote today:

President Trump is facing a dilemma: Does he want to destroy the American health-care system or not? At this point, all evidence suggests that he genuinely can’t decide what the answer to that question is. …

… When the Alexander-Murray agreement was announced yesterday, Trump at first seemed supportive. “It is a short-term solution, so that we don’t have this very dangerous little period — including dangerous periods for insurance companies,” he said at a press conference. “For a period of one year, two years, we will have a very good solution.” But then this morning, he tweeted, “I am supportive of Lamar as a person & also of the process, but I can never support bailing out ins co’s who have made a fortune w/ O’Care.”

What gives? When you try to interpret the president’s shifting positions — and figure out how this is all going to end — there are a few things you have to keep in mind. First, it’s wise to assume that he has no idea how any provision of this agreement or the ACA itself actually works, and that will not change. For instance, he seems to have convinced himself that cost-sharing reductions are like an extra bonus given to insurance companies that they’ll just use to pad their profits. “That money is going to insurance companies to lift up their stock price,” he has said, when in fact the money is basically passed through the insurers to provide lower co-payments and deductibles for people with low incomes. He hasn’t bothered to learn what the law does, and he certainly isn’t going to quickly get up to speed on new proposals to provide technical fixes.

Still, it might be that if he were presented with a bill to sign, he’d sign it. However, Paul Ryan probably has more enthusiasm for cold oatmeal than he has shown for this bill.

“The speaker does not see anything that changes his view that the Senate should keep its focus on repeal and replace of Obamacare,” a Ryan spokesperson told Axios.

So, not much chance anything is going to happen. Jonathan Swan and David Nather write at Axios that nobody has any idea what Trump actually thinks, “But it’s fair to say that everyone who is remotely conservative inside the administration is pushing not to keep funding the Affordable Care Act’s insurer subsidies without serious concessions.”

It’s clear that Trump has no clue how the Affordable Care Act works. But then, few Republicans in Congress do, either, including their alleged policy wonk, Paul Ryan. Trump’s understanding of the health care law probably came from them.

Today Trump explained his reasons for ending the cost-sharing subsidies, a move that will raise everybody’s premiums.

That was a subsidy to the insurance companies and a gift that was what they gave the insurance companies. Take a look at where their stock was when Obamacare was originally approved and what it is today. You will see numbers that if you invested in the stocks, you would be extremely happy. They have given them a total gift. They have given them — you can almost call it a pay off. It’s a disgrace. That money goes to the insurance companies. We want to take care of poof people and people that need help with health care.

I’m never going to get campaign contributions from the insurance companies, but take a look at how much money has been spent by the Democrats and by the health companies on politicians generally, but take a look at the coffers of the Democrats.

The CSR payments have actually brought Republicans and Democrats together. We got calls, emergency calls from the Democrats and I think probably the Republicans were also calling them saying let’s come up with at least a short-term fix of health care in this country. And the gravy train ended the day I knocked the insurance companies’ money. Which was last week. Hundred of millions of dollars handed to the insurance companies for very little reason. Believe me. I want the money to go to the people, to poor people that need it. Not to insurance companies which is where it’s going,  as of last week I ended that.

In other words, Trump seems to think that the payments were some kind of bribe to the insurance industry, not something that paid for an actual benefit.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the insurance industry altogether gives a lot more money to Republicans than to Democrats. The biggest health insurance donor, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, in 2016 gave $450,330 to Republicans and $229,840 to Democrats.  The single biggest recipient of insurance industry money in Congress is Paul Ryan.

Donations from insurance industry, 2016, Center for Responsive Politics

The insurance industry (all types) gave more money to Hillary Clinton than to Donald Trump last year, though, which may be one reason he’s angry at them.

The cost-sharing subsidies that Trump axed are different from the tax credits used to buy subsidized insurance, but losing those subsidies will hit everyone hard, especially poor people.

The cost-sharing subsidies were designed to reduce out-of-pocket costs such as deductibles and co-pays for people with incomes from 100 percent to 250 percent of the federal poverty level. About 7 million people are receiving these subsidies in 2017, more than half of the people who buy insurance on the ACA exchanges, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Insurers provide the subsidies to consumers, and the federal government reimburses insurers for the higher costs. Those reimbursements are estimated to total $7 billion this year and as much as $9 billion in 2018. At the same time, cost-sharing payments are expected reduce low-income consumers’ deductibles by as much as $3,354 each and out-of-pocket medical expenses by as much as $5,587, reported KFF.

Cost-sharing subsidies are different from the tax credits that qualified consumers receive to help offset the exchange-based premiums. Without the subsidies, medical expenses will become unaffordable for many low-income families, even if they purchase insurance.

Insurers are saying that as a result of the loss of this subsidy they will hike up everybody’s premiums by 20 percent and probably will push a lot of insurers out of the market altogether. The hike will likely be worse for those who buy insurance through ACA. This just in, from Pennsylvania —

Obamacare health insurance premiums in Pennsylvania will jump an average 30.6 percent in 2018, nearly four times the increase that had been anticipated before cost-sharing reductions for the coverage were scrapped last week.

The original projection had been for an average 7.6 percent rate increase for individual health insurance plans purchased through the Affordable Care Act’s government exchange.

See also What Affordable Care Act Rollback Means For The Health Care Insurance Industry at NPR.

Whatever happens to health care premiums now, Republicans will own it. Trump will own it. He doesn’t seem to grasp that; last July he actually said,

“I think we’re probably in that position where we’ll let Obamacare fail,” Trump said at the White House. “We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you, the Republicans are not going to own it.”

But that’s not something he gets to decide. Ezra Klein says,

Trump’s decision to choke off the federal payments stabilizing premiums and insurance markets is based on a similar theory — bad policy will lead to political pain, which will give Republicans negotiating leverage …

… The problem with this theory is that Democrats no longer hold the White House, or anything else. Republicans, led by Trump, hold total power. They are the governing party, and they stand to absorb the blame for the state of the country. According to an August poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, by a margin of 60 to 28 percent, Americans now say Republicans are now responsible for the Affordable Care Act.

I agree. People may not understand what Trump did, but they know he did something. And whatever happens to their costs and access to health care from now on, that’s on Trump.

My grandson is visiting. I will post something tomorrow.