Politics as the Crow Flies

[EasyAce]

(On Rob Porter and the budget . . .)
By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/456286/ideology-trump-white-house-rob-porter-wife-abuse

. . . WIFE BEATING: THEORY & PRACTICE

. . . if we’re going to talk about leaving the realm of Platonic ideals and talk about the need for concrete practicalities, I think we should at least take a moment and acknowledge that, for the first time in living memory, the phrase “When did you stop beating your wife?” has been plucked from the ether of rhetorical abstraction and rendered an utterly pragmatic query. For that is just one of the many questions John Kelly or Don McGahn should have asked Robert Porter.

And they probably did! They just took Porter’s denials at face value and didn’t bother to credit the accusers, the FBI background checks, or common sense. I mean, the thing about the “When did you stop beating your wife (or wives)?” question is that the person being asked will deny it — even if he actually beats his wives.

I have no doubt that Porter was good at his job. One hears reports about how he was a stabilizing presence in the White House and a reliable ally of the Gang of Grown-Ups in the West Wing. But it tells you something about the bunker mentality inside the White House that these allegations were simply too bad to check . . .

. . . DEBT SOAPBOX, R.I.P.

. . . For the last decade, at least, conservatives have insisted that they were ideologically opposed to precisely the sort of turd burger we saw getting sizzled on the congressional grill this week. Regardless of Paul’s political calculations, his arguments were entirely right. If you passionately insisted that runaway deficit spending was an abomination under Barack Obama, there really is no way you can defend the same thing under Donald Trump. I argued for years that the tea parties were in no small way a delayed backlash against the profligate spending of George W. Bush as much as they were a backlash against Barack Obama. The psychological reasoning boiled down to: “We felt we had to put up with the crap under Bush because of the war or because he was our guy, but we’ll be damned if we’re gonna put up with it from this guy too" . . .

. . . the Tea Party is done. MAGA nationalism has siphoned off most of it, and what remains is a scattered and spent force. I understand that Paul Ryan and others insist that we’ll move on to entitlement reform. And Ryan may give it the old college try. But it won’t work. For reasons laid out in our National Review editorial and by Yuval Levin, no serious entitlement reform can get through the Senate now, because Republicans gave away reconciliation until after the midterms. More broadly, the president doesn’t like entitlement reform, as he has made clear many times. His State of the Union address didn’t contain a word about it — but it did float a new paid-family-leave entitlement. The only mention of the word “deficit” was in the phrase “infrastructure deficit” — a term the GOP would have mocked relentlessly if it passed the lips of Barack Obama . . .

[Concerned]

Kelly and McGahn did seem to have plenty of warning, but only when the story became public was action taken.  Employers do investigations all the time and take action as a result of those investigations without judicial “due process” (as Trump tweeted about today).  In the case of Porter, I’d argue “due process” actually did take place in the form of the FBI background investigation which (no doubt) confirmed the police reports, the protector order, the photo, and the blog.  The fact that a former girlfriend also called Don McGahn, when she heard Porter was dating Hope Hicks, to warn him of Porter’s behavior is further “evidence”.  This all was certainly enough “due process” IMO for an employer to take action (or in this case, to encourage the employee to resign).  Why the President insists upon defending this type of behavior is beyond me (actually it’s not). 

Relative to the debt, would even Hillary have supported $1T in borrowing this year?  Doubtful to me, but this is what Trump conservatism looks like, I guess.