Thursday roundup

What was she doing on that board in the first place?

Four prominent pastors came under harsh criticism last week for promoting the new book of President Trump’s spiritual advisor Paula White, who is also on Trump’s evangelical advisory board. The ire directed at Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham), former Southern Baptist Convention President Jack Graham (no relation), Greg Laurie, and Robert Jeffress for their promotion of White was well deserved.

An article at The Gospel Coalition highlights some of the disqualifying aspects of White’s ministry, the most egregious of which include unrepentant adultery and a fundraising video made by White in 2016 in which she suggests that giving her $1,144 could result in salvation.

“There’s someone that God is speaking to, to click on that donation button by minimizing the screen. And when you do to sow $1,144. It’s not often I ask very specifically but God has instructed me and I want you to hear. This isn’t for everyone but this is for someone. When you sow that $1,144 based on John 11:44 I believe for resurrection life.”

The video has been removed from YouTube, but The Christian Post reports that White went on to offer those who couldn’t afford the $1,144 “resurrection seed” prayer cloths that could heal them and bring about other miracles.

“You say, ‘Paula, I just don’t have [$1,144]’, then sow $144. ‘I don’t have that.’ Sow $44. But stand on John chapter 11:44. And when you do, there are prayer cloths that we have anointed that we have prayed over, that are going to be a point of contact.

“In Acts 19, the Bible says, Paul prayed over these prayer cloths and they brought forth special miracles, signs and wonders. There have been times that I have taken prayer cloths that have been anointed as a point of contact. I put them in my loved one’s sneakers, I put them under their bed. I put them on parts of my body that I believe God for healing.”

Sadly, such heresy is not out of character for White, who calls fellow prosperity gospel preacher T.D. Jakes her “spiritual father.”

Another particularly egregious example of the overtly non-Christian nature of White’s ministry is when her co-pastor and ex-husband Jonathan Cain promoted pornography to the women in the congregation that they would discover what their husbands like sexually. White laughed along with the crowd before stating that while she and Cain aren’t advocating for anyone to get addicted to porn, people do need to educate themselves. This is supposedly a church service to give glory to the creator of the universe and redeemer of sinners.

Laurie and Franklin Graham have rescinded their endorsements, but JackGraham and Jeffress have not.

Maybe, as he said later in a tweet attempting to explain it, that it was kind of a shout-out to Colorado and Kansas people that were in his Pennsylvania audience, but that comes across as pretty flimsy, given the way he put together this word salad:

President Donald Trump said, “We’re building a wall in Colorado” when talking about border wall progress on Wednesday afternoon. Trump was speaking in Pittsburgh at the Shale Insight Conference when he made the comments.

“And we’re building a wall on the border of New Mexico and we’re building a wall in Colorado, we’re building a beautiful wall, a big one that really works that you can’t get over, you can’t get under and we’re building a wall in Texas. We’re not building a wall in Kansas but they get the benefit of the walls we just mentioned,” said Trump.

No unicorns, rainbow, tofu and sprouts in 2019 post-America: 

Partisan political division and the resulting incivility has reached a low in America, with 67% believing that the nation is nearing civil war, according to a new national survey.

“The majority of Americans believe that we are two-thirds of the way to being on the edge of civil war. That to me is a very pessimistic place,” said Mo Elleithee, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.

And worse, he said in announcing the results of the institute’s Battleground Poll, the political division is likely to make the upcoming 2020 presidential race the nastiest in modern history.

Thanks, Squirrel-Hair: Major shift in Mideast power dynamics:

Once again, Syrian President Bashar Assad has snapped up a prize from world powers that have been maneuvering in his country’s multi-front wars. Without firing a shot, his forces are returning to towns and villages in northeastern Syria where they haven’t set foot for years.
Assad was handed one victory first by U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria, analysts said. Then he got another from a deal struck between Turkey and Russia, Damascus’ ally.
Abandoned by U.S. forces and staring down the barrel of a Turkish invasion, Kurdish fighters had no option but to turn to Assad’s government and to Russia for protection from their No. 1 enemy.

Freshman House member from California Katie Hill needs our prayers.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is calling for his state's attorney general and Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate this suituation with 7-year-old James Younger.   So glad to see that the jury decision will not be the final chapter on this grotesque situation.

A real-life result of our willful plunge into spiritual monstrosity

Have you had any Facebook posts about eleven-year-olds raped by their fathers show up in your newsfeed yet? Chances are that unless you've jettisoned all your leftist FB friends, you have.

There's a saying in the legal field: "hard cases make bad law." Obviously, you want law to be as airtight as possible. When state-sanctioned punitive curbing of citizens' natural rights is what's at stake, you want to leave no stone unturned if at all possible.

But what if a given scenario is so rare as to make it for all intents and purposes hypothetical?

You want to know why most women who get abortions do so? Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire, bolstered by the findings of a decidedly non-pro-life source, tells us:

The vast majority of abortions have nothing at all to do with rape. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute surveyed post-abortion women and found that the top six reasons for getting an abortion, accounting for over 85% of all cases, were: "Not ready for a child," "can't afford a baby," "have completed my childbearing," "don't want to be a single mother," "don't feel mature enough," and "would interfere with education or career plans." In other words, most women get abortions for lifestyle reasons. They are getting rid of the baby because the baby would interfere with the kind of lives they want to live. Less than one percent of respondents said they were rape victims.

There are lots of societal resources for those who find themselves pregnant but don't feel ready to become mothers. There should be more (and I don't mean of the governmental variety). But, as Alabama Governor Kay Ivey responded to CBS reporter Jericka Duncan when Duncan snot-noesedly shouted "Where is the money coming from to support people who aren't ready to become mothers?", "You simply cannot defer protecting the lives of unborn children because of costs?"

By the way - and, as I shall demonstrate momentarily, this is not a digression - did you hear about this story, which occurs at the nexus of society's cavalier attitude toward the unborn and another kind of middle finger we've been giving to almighty God?

This week, The New England Journal of Medicine published a bizarre story. A "transgender man" entered a hospital with severe abdominal pains. Because she was identified as a man, the doctors naturally did not think to treat her for labor and delivery, so she tragically lost the baby. Rather than emphasizing the danger of placing gender identity over biological sex, both the journal and The Washington Post made the absurd claim that the hospital should not have ruled out pregnancy for a man.

"He was rightly classified as a man" in the medical records and appears masculine, Dr. Daphna Stroumsa at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, wrote in the journal article. "But that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs."

"The point is not what's happened to this particular individual but this is an example of what happened to transgender people interacting with the health care system," she added.

The Washington Post's Marilynn Marchione argued that this case should make doctors aware of the "blurred lines" in medicine. Citing the journal article, she claimed that the case "points to larger issues about assigning labels or making assumptions in a society increasingly confronting gender variations in sports, entertainment and government. In medicine, there's a similar danger of missing diseases such as sickle cell and cystic fibrosis that largely affect specific racial groups, the authors wrote."

Yet this conclusion is forced at best, and merely serves to blind people to the truth of the story.

The 32-year-old woman was not identified, but the journal noted that she told the nurse she was transgender at the emergency room. The record listed her as male. She hadn't had a period in several years and had been taking testosterone, which decreases ovulation and menstruation. She quit taking the hormone after she lost health insurance. 

The mother had taken a home pregnancy test and it came out positive. She also had wet herself, a possible sign of ruptured membranes and labor. A nurse ordered a pregnancy test but considered her stable and her problems non-urgent.
Hours later, a doctor evaluated her and confirmed pregnancy. They took an ultrasound and found clear signs of fetal heart activity, but part of the umbilical cord had slipped into the birth canal. Doctors prepared to do an emergency c-section, but the baby's heartbeat stopped in the operating room.

The Washington Post reported these words, "Moments later, the man delivered a stillborn baby."

Tellingly, the authors wrote that if a clearly identified woman had shown up with similar systems, the woman "would almost surely have been triaged and evaluated more urgently for pregnancy-related problems." In other words, the confusion of transgender identity prevented the doctors from giving this mother the care she needed. 

"The man delivered a stillborn baby."

We have officially gone certifiably nuts as a society. That sentence appeared in one of the most journalistically prestigious and relied-upon organs in the world, the premier news outlet in the capital of the most powerful and influential nation in history.

Allow me to dispense with a matter of parenthetical concern before returning to my main point: Just who impregnated this . . . person? What kind of human being is aroused by a woman well along in the self-mutilation process, having pumped herself full of unnatural levels of testosterone? Seriously. This is more than a matter of idle curiosity. Are we now warping human nature to the point at which there really are some significant number of men wanting to have sex with women operating under the delusion that they are men?

Now, back to the point to which I was leading up. Consider how recent the traction gained by the notion that two people of the same gender can get "married" is. No society or culture anywhere in the world prior to 20 years ago at the outset entertained such a bizarre idea. You didn't find in the world's most sophisticated cultures, its most primitive, or in any culture in between. And within what seems like minutes after it gained its initial foothold, a Supreme Court decision codifying this aberration was handed down. Now, consider how fast the proliferation of transgenderism followed in its wake.

And then we get this denial of the way the universe is constructed, resulting in the death of an innocent person.

What this case tells us, in the form of an illustration of the opposite, is that the obviousness of the natural architecture of the universe confirms the Judeo-Christian understanding that said architecture was decreed by almighty God. In short, you can tell something has been decreed by Almighty God by observing how this world works.

And we're denying how the world works in our desperation to invent ourselves, to be our own deities.

Man and woman He created them. He knits us together in our mothers' wombs. Those darkened in their understanding due to the hardness of their hearts have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity. Nothing is new under the sun.

We are most definitely not deities, but we are called upon to defend what is so. And gradualism and taking into account "political realities" will not cut it. We must unflinchingly insist on a society that operates in accordance with absolute truth. 

Three unmistakable signals right out of the box

That is, in addition to the one that's the subject of the post immediately below.

There's AOC telling Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes that she wants to see the highest income bracket taxed at 70 percent - and the money used to fund her Green New Deal.

There's this stunt by openly bisexual Senator Krysten Sinema. And, by the way, don't you have to be promiscuous to know if you'er bisexual?

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) took her ceremonial oath of office holding her hand on a copy of the Constitution rather than a religious text such as the Bible.

Vice President Pence can be seen in video of the moment ending Sinema's oath by saying the standard words, "so help you God?," to which Sinema responded, "I do." He then says that he looks forward to working with her in Congress. 

And then there's this from one of the Jew-haters in the freshman class:

 A liberal congresswoman who boasted in a foul-mouthed itrade that the new Democratic House leadership will impeach 'motherf***er' Donald Trump doubled down Friday morning on Twitter, refusing to apologize .

'I will always speak truth to power. #unapologeticallyMe,' Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted a day after taking her seat in Congress.

'This is not just about Donald Trump,' she claimed. 'This is about all of us. In the face of this constitutional crisis, we must rise.' She didn't specify what constitutional crisis she was reacting to. 

Republican House Minority Leader Kevin Mccathy blasted her on Friday, and slapped at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not publicly disavowing the slur.

There was a time when there was room in the Democrat party for the likes of Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Yes, it was the repository for left-of-center America's political intentions, but still set store in its less inflamed quarters by rigor of thought and basic decency. That was all over by the 1980s, with the rise of - well, for instance, Nancy Pelosi.

The leftward lurch over the past 40 years has begged the question of how far it could go. Well, folks, at least this far. And they bring a fierce - indeed, vicious - determination the likes of Ron Dellums could only have dreamed about.

There is some solace in the reality check these freedom-, dignity-, decency- and God-haters will be encountering soon enough:

. . . for all the talk of Alison Spanberger and the "Badass Caucus," of how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib "aren't going to take no for an answer," of grand plans for a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, there remains the inescapable reality of power. Democrats don't really have it. Indeed, they have even less than the last time Pelosi became speaker.

Yes, they can fire their subpoena cannon at the White House. They can interrogate cabinet officials, subpoena Jared and Ivanka, leak scoops to reporters, maybe force a cabinet official or two to resign, if any are left. When Mueller delivers his findings, they could begin impeachment proceedings. But impeachment, like progressive legislation, won't get far. A decade ago the House could pass bills and hope that Harry Reid would persuade his Democratic Senate majority to support them. All Pelosi had to worry about was President Bush's veto. Now, Pelosi has to deal with Mitch McConnell's Republican Senate even before her policies reach Donald Trump.

But the bar has now been lowered. You can be a foul-mouthed, spiritually grotesque radical and get elected to Congress. These people have a legitimacy conferred upon their pronouncements significantly beyond what they had six months ago. When they speak to gatherings of the nation's youth, they do so not just as representatives of activist groups but as elected officials.

And to top it all off, the Very Stable Genius is going to run his mouth and take to Twitter and suck much-needed oxygen away from actual conservative arguments against this debacle.

It's now even later in the day.

Further confirmation that The Very Stable Genius is devoid of character, not that it's going to matter to most post-Americans, particularly the MAGA crowd

There's no credible answer to the question Susan Wright poses twice in her latest Resurgent post other than that Donald Trump had extramarital sex with Stormy Daniels in 2006 - mere months after his third wife had given birth to their son - and almost assuredly concurrently with his ongoing affair with Karen McDougal (started at the same gold tournament at which he had the sex with Daniels).

And why did Rudy Giuliani want to put himself in the position he's now in by joining the VSG's legal team? Did he not see that he'd wind up acknowledging what he did on Hannity's show last night?

While appearing on Fox News’ Sean Hannity show on Wednesday night, Giuliani offered up that Trump had reimbursed the $130,000 paid by his longtime attorney/fixer, Michael Cohen to porn star, Stormy Daniels, through a series of payments.

This contradicts Trump’s claim from a month ago that he had no idea about the payoff.

“The president repaid it,’’ Giuliani told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity.

Trump “didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know. But he did know the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this, like I take care of things like this with my clients,” Giuliani said. “I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.’’

But if there was no affair, why was she being paid, at all?

Giuliani later told the Washington Post that Trump’s repayments may have ended in 2017, or possibly even 2018.

“The president was always going to make sure he got it back, and enough money to pay the taxes,” Giuliani said. “There probably were other things of a personal nature that Michael took care of for which the president would have always trusted him as his lawyer . . . and that was paid back out of the rest of the money, and Michael earned a fee out of it.”

This is where you have to really suspend your disbelief for a moment, to just revel in the wonder of it all.

“It all” being how Giuliani will manage to not be fired by day’s end.

According to Giuliani, Trump only learned details of the Daniels payoff over the last couple of weeks, after the raid on Michael Cohen’s office and home by federal agents. Meanwhile, he’s been reimbursing Cohen for – something – for months.

Wouldn’t he have at least an elementary knowledge of what he’s paying that kind of money for? And again, why was Stormy Daniels getting paid, to begin with?

“I don’t know if he distinguished it from other things Cohen might have done for him during the campaign,” Giuliani said, adding, “He trusted Michael, and Michael trusted him.”

That’s a lousy, disjointed, irresponsible way to do business. And I don't trust anybody enough to just give them $130,000 and not ask why.

No wonder the guy has so many bankruptcies under his belt. 

The irony of it all is that post-Americans generally, and certainly the VSG's slavish devotees,  are so inured to moral turpitude that it wouldn't have mattered politically if this stuff had come out circa 2015 - 16:

The funny thing is, had Cohen not paid her, and had Daniels told her story, nothing would have come of it. We’ve seen that. Nearly 20 women stepped forward and voters blew it all off.

Look, none of this diminishes my being pleased with the following:

How many Republican presidential candidates over the years complained about the ban on drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR? Trump signed legislation to begin the process of repealing the ban. Trump successfully appointed more federal appellate judges than any first-year president in history. Trump lowered the corporate tax rate, once the highest statutory rate in the industrialized world. Trump, as promised, eliminated or delayed numerous job-killing regulations. He approved the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

The stock market has repeatedly reached all-time highs, and for the first time in years, polls show that Americans believe young peoples' lives will be better than their parents'. An April 2018 Gallup poll found 61 percent believe today's youth "will have a better life than their parents did," the highest mark since 2010. 

Excellent stuff, of course.

But two things about it:

1. Those achievements happened because actual conservatives pushed for them and convinced the VSG that he'd look like a "winner" if he supported them, and 
2. We'd therefore have achieved most if not all of them had we elected an actual conservative.

I realize that everything is a tradeoff in this fallen world. And I realize that the lowering of the bar got started with Bill Clinton (actually, John Kennedy, but, to his credit, he had a regard for presenting a dignified bearing in public, and understood that public awareness of what a cad he was would have undermined his policy-level ambitions). 

But Republicans, whose party was ostensibly the repository of the upholding of traditional values, went with this guy. 

Politically speaking, there is no high ground from which to mount a campaign to reverse this.

On the broader ideological level, Ben Shapiro's take is spot-on:

Culturally, this marks yet another odd moment for the conservative right that cannot stand cognitive dissonance. It’s one thing to say you like Trump’s policy and say that he is a rotten scoundrel with regard to women – that’s honest. It’s another thing to deny that he’s a rotten scoundrel with women by imitating the worst arguments of the Left circa 1998: “Everyone lies about sex! It’s just his personal life!” In that realm, the soul-suck of the conservative movement continues apace.

Yup.

Post-America chokes on its own toxicity

This is one of those days on which it seems like the only two sensible reactions to the state of post-American culture are weeping and hurling.

Well, and of course praying.

A lot of what this post is going to cite and discuss has to do with the accelerated pace of the rot since the Trump phenomenon got underway, but that's not the whole picture. Ultimately, Trump, and the hate that emanates from his support base, and also from the Left that wants to see him destroyed by any means necessary, are the fruits of trends that have been poisoning this country for decades.

And now it's at the point where some people whose position, on the surface, is the good and right one are sabotaging even that, caught up as they are in the coarseness with which most people now communicate, as I shall discuss shortly.

I'd like to start with Erick Erickson's Resurgent post from yesterday in which he discusses what he and his family have been through since he publicly declared that he couldn't support Trump:

Over the course of the campaign in 2016, we had people show up at our home to threaten us. We had armed guards at the house for a while. My kids were harassed in the store. More than once they came home in tears because other kids were telling them I was going to get killed or that their parents hated me. I got yelled at in the Atlanta airport while peeing by some angry Trump supporter.

We got harassed in church and stopped going for a while. A woman in a Bible study told my wife she wanted to slap me across the face My seminary got calls from people demanding I be expelled. And on and on it went. When I nearly died in 2016, I got notes from people upset I was still alive. When I announced my wife had an incurable form of lung cancer, some cheered. All were directed from supposedly evangelical Trump supporters convinced God was punishing me for not siding with his chosen one. For a while, given the nature of what we were getting in the mail, my kids had to stop checking it.

It's really like that.

And I guess you know about Michelle Wolf's appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

I suppose the place to start with regard to this is to point out that there was a time when that level of basic crudeness would not have been found at a Washington social event at which people were dressed elegantly and eating from fine china, glass and silver. But that's so obvious it's kind of a banal observation now, isn't it. Almost elicits a reaction of "Oh, please, to what year do you want to turn back the clock?"

In particular, the nastiness of Wolf's "jokes" about Sarah Huckabee Sanders encapsulated Wolf's overall tone and generated an exchange that in itself was full of poison.

Take the Daily Beast's Marlow Stern's reaction, for example:

The White House purposely sent Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway to the #WHCD to then feign outrage at the jokes made at their expense, so... don't fall for it

Does "cynical" even begin to scratch the surface? His assumption is that they were sent there to be lightning rods, to draw out snark that might then garner outrage among Trump supporters.

Except consider this tweet from Brad Thor, know to be vigorously opposed to Trump, to the point where he's considering a primary run against him in 2020.

Dear @PressSec - it took a lot of dignity, guts, and class to sit through what you did tonight. You personified professionalism. Thank you.

For which he came in for this kind of response:

She lies everyday at the podium and says horrible things about various people like our former FBI Director. She deserves no courtesy.

And the thread then takes a turn of digression that makes Comey the point.

The treasonous Comey? Lol! He is a disgrace to the FBI. You must be a supporter of honest Hillary? Don’t even get me started.  

The atmosphere demands that one take a black-or-white position on James Comey, an enigmatic, complex and flawed man, a man who has a longtime friend in Andrew McCarthy, who will vouch for his admirable qualities, even as he expresses dismay at his recent poor judgement (The book and the book tour were bad ideas, and the continuing mystery surrounding the way he handled the Hillary Clinton email case is discomforting):

I am fond of Jim Comey and have been for 30 years. I vigorously disagree with both his handling of the Clinton emails investigation and the manner in which the FBI has conducted what is supposed to be a classified, counterintelligence probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — not a public, government-orchestrated campaign of insinuation that Trump was complicit in Russian perfidy.

No doubt because of my personal regard for him and respect for his high-end ability, I am inclined to cut the former director slack. He was thrust into a no-win situation: It is not his fault that Democrats nominated a criminal suspect, or that Republicans nominated an irregular politician heedless of the norms of discretion and distance that a president should maintain when dealing with his law-enforcement subordinates. Comey aside, I had no better friends in nearly 20 years as a federal prosecutor in New York than Dan Richman, the Columbia Law School prof through whom Comey transmitted information to the New York Times, and Pat Fitzgerald and Dave Kelley, Comey’s lawyers. These aren’t just former colleagues of mine; they are old friends. I haven’t tried to speak to any of them about this matter, but my esteem for them weighs on me — as does my duty to be an honest analyst. How well I resolve that tension is not for me to say; I can just tell you it is real.

See how far afield we've gotten? All because in 2018 post-America, everyone has to be either a total villain or a white knight. And, yes, due to her job, Sarah Huckabee Sanders has to cast aspersions on Comey in her press briefings. Sanders works for a loathsome being who directs her to speak thusly. And her father, who has always been disappointing and has, since the Trump phenomenon got underway, had his respect-worthiness diminish markedly, is no doubt a factor in her loyalty to Trump, which is bewildering, given her Christian moorings. I really hope she reaches a point at which she can no longer hold that job. But, as with the case of Comey, in this rancid atmosphere, she must either be a scurrilous scumbag or an uncommonly noble paragon of virtue. She is not allowed to be a complex human being.

And then we come to the biggest vulnerability that someone like Sanders sets herself up for, because, as noted above, she does indeed work for a president who is indeed a loathsome being.

Republicans calling Michelle Wolf disgusting and vulgar must not remember the dude they elected bragging about grabbing women by their vaginas whilst cheating on his wife with porn stars.

There's not much room for squirming past that one.

I'm pretty sure the above tweet comes from a left-leaner, but I'm also pretty sure the one below comes from a right-leaner - i.e., the one kind of person in all this who ought to know better than to take this occasion to point out Sanders' precarious position.

Sarah Huckabee has zero shame and goes out there and lies to the nation daily on behalf of a despicable conman.

But, as we can see, it takes no time at all for a simple expression of admiration for a moment of composure to turn into a cesspool of tribalist gotcha, absolutist takes on figures in precarious professional positions, and, of course, nasty juvenile ways of expressing it all.

The sum total of it all is a demonic cacophony that leaves scant room for maturity, self-respect, and humility.

It gets later in the day by the microsecond.

God help us.

The Cohen office raid once again clarifies where a number of players are coming from

Look, this isn't Mueller's doing.

Yes, his team came across the information that spurred it, but that information was referred to the District Attorney for Southern New York, who issued the search warrant after it had been signed off on by a federal magistrate judge.

And the information has to do with the payoffs resulting from the concurrent 2006 affairs the Very Stable Genius was having with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playmate Karen McDougal. Cohen himself had paid the hush money to Daniels, and American Media, Inc, which owns the National Enquirer, paid the hush money to McDougal.

The VSG shills who took the position that these affairs were insignificant on a moral level, now that they are faced with their legal ramifications, are howling about the "deep state" and engaging in whataboutism, bringing up Madame Bleachbit and Uranium One and Michael Flynn.

I repeat, this is not part of the Mueller investigation. Such arguments and the bringing in of Comey and the mention of all the Democrats on Mueller's team are a smokescreen.

No, the sybaritic behavior and low character of the current US president are at the core of the Cohen arrest and raid.

And then there is the eight minutes of ranting in which the VSG indulged during the photo-op portion of his national-security team's discussion of the Syrian situation. Once again bad-mouthing Jeff Sessions. (How long is he going to endure this kind of humiliation before he says, "I don't need this; I'm out of here"?) Claiming that Cohen's office was "broken into." Trying to fold this matter into an overall "witch hunt."

Why was one of the most heavy-handed approach to getting the relevant materials taken?

Prosecutors are admonished that, because raiding a lawyer’s office has serious constitutional implications, it should be avoided unless truly essential to a significant criminal investigation. If the only matter under investigation were a potential campaign-finance violation that would normally not be grist for criminal prosecution, it would be outrageous to raid a lawyer’s office — especially, the president’s lawyer. Not only must high-level Justice Department approval be obtained before seeking a search warrant for an attorney’s premises; the prosecutors and their superiors must explore whether less intrusive investigative alternatives — such as seeking the desired materials by grand-jury subpoena — would be viable.

That the government must have decided they were not viable is remarkable. A prosecutor gets a search warrant when the subject cannot be trusted to cooperate and hand over materials voluntarily. But Cohen has been cooperating with investigators, at least ostensibly. His counsel, Stephen Ryan, maintains that Cohen has been giving information to “all government entities,” intimating that he has cooperated with Mueller in addition to providing extensive documentary evidence and testimony to congressional committees. The fact that Cohen’s law practice was searched anyway cannot help but remind us of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s case. Manafort’s Virginia home was raided by Mueller’s team even as he was in the midst of cooperating with and surrendering documents to congressional investigators. Manafort, of course, was ultimately indicted on a wide array of felony charges.

So, no, let's keep basics front and center. This is occurring because the Very Stable Genius habitually behaved abominably. These particular incidents of it may have happened twelve years ago, but karma sometimes takes a while to manifest itself.

Donald Trump was up to his eyeballs in infidelity in 2006

Susan Wright at Red State takes a fairly exhaustive look at revelations that Stormy Daniels wasn't the only extramarital dalliance the Very Stable Genius was having as his third wife was giving birth to his fifth child. In the course of it, she relies heavily on a just-published New Yorker expose on the subject by Ronan Farrow.

Not only did Squirrel-Hair have both of these relationships going on at the same time, he had both women at the same social events:

Behold, it is the hay-haired idol of American “Christians.”

With a new book coming out that (laughably) makes excuses for Trump’s abuses and infidelities, called The Faith of Donald J. Trump, you’d think somebody is probably not thrilled with another story of Trump’s absolute unfaithfulness seeing the light of day.

On the contrary, according to the authors, sexual infidelity is the equivalent of searching for God.

So, rejoice, fellow, lukewarmers. There’s a new tale of Trump’s quest for God, today.

Ronan Farrow, who broke Hollywood wide open with his New Yorker report of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s crimes and abuses, has set his sites on Trump, and another 2006 affair with Playboy model, Karen McDougal.

It’s not just the affair, but the planning that went into juggling multiple affairs and covering them up, including payoffs and nondisclosure agreements, all while his new wife and baby were home.

In this instance, the model, McDougal, kept handwritten notes of the affair, which Farrow obtained from her friend, John Crawford, for his piece. When shown the notes, she didn’t deny, and confirmed it was her handwriting.

The affair began after Trump met McDougal at a Playboy Mansion pool party, thrown by Hugh Hefner for contestants of “The Apprentice.”

McDougal was Playmate of the Year in 1998, and was voted runner-up (behind Pamela Anderson) for Playmate of the 90s in 2001.

Trump apparently took a liking to her at this party, took her number, and the affair began shortly after.

Trump and McDougal began talking frequently on the phone, and soon had what McDougal described as their first date: dinner in a private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. McDougal wrote that Trump impressed her. “I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man,” she wrote. “We talked for a couple hours – then, it was “ON”! We got naked + had sex.” As McDougal was getting dressed to leave, Trump did something that surprised her. “He offered me money,” she wrote. “I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks – I’m not ‘that girl.’ I slept w/you because I like you – NOT for money’ – He told me ‘you are special.’ ”

Afterward, McDougal wrote, she “went to see him every time he was in LA (which was a lot).” Trump, she said, always stayed in the same bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and ordered the same meal—steak and mashed potatoes—and never drank. McDougal’s account is consistent with other descriptions of Trump’s behavior. Last month, In Touch Weekly published an interview conducted in 2011 with Stephanie Clifford in which she revealed that during a relationship with Trump she met him for dinner at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Trump insisted they watch “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel. Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” alleged that Trump assaulted her at a private dinner meeting, in December of 2007, at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Trump, Zervos has claimed, kissed her, groped her breast, and suggested that they lie down to “watch some telly-telly.” After Zervos rebuffed Trump’s advances, she said that he “began thrusting his genitals” against her. (Zervos recently sued Trump for defamation after he denied her account.) All three women say that they were escorted to a bungalow at the hotel by a Trump bodyguard, whom two of the women have identified as Keith Schiller. After Trump was elected, Schiller was appointed director of Oval Office Operations and deputy assistant to the President. Last September, John Kelly, acting as the new chief of staff, removed Schiller from the White House posts. (Schiller did not respond to a request for comment.)

We’ve heard Schiller’s name, a lot. Hey, now we know why Trump was so upset when Schiller left the White House.

McDougal wrote that Trump would fly her out to public events to be at his side, but he never purchased the tickets, himself. She would purchase the tickets and make the arrangements, then he would reimburse her, so as not to leave a paper trail.

She was with him in July 2006 at the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship, at the Edgewood Resort, on Lake Tahoe.

Do you know who else was there?

Stormy Daniels. He reportedly began his affair with her there.

According to Daniels’ account, Trump didn’t mention that he was sleeping with someone else there, at the time. Another porn star, Alana Evans, claims Trump and Daniels invited her to join them at that weekend romp.

Trump also invited both McDougal and Daniels to the 55th Miss Universe pageant in Los Angeles.

During Trump’s relationship with McDougal, she wrote, he introduced her to members of his family and took her to his private residences. At a January, 2007, launch party in Los Angeles for Trump’s now-defunct liquor brand, Trump Vodka, McDougal, who was photographed entering the event, recalled sitting at a table with Kim Kardashian, Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Trump, Jr.’s wife, Vanessa, who was pregnant. At one point, Trump held a party for “The Apprentice” at the Playboy Mansion, and McDougal worked as a costumed Playboy bunny. “We took pics together, alone + with his family,” McDougal wrote. She recalled that Trump said he had asked his son Eric “who he thought was the most beautiful girl here + Eric pointed me. Mr. T said ‘He has great taste’ + we laughed!” Trump gave McDougal tours of Trump Tower and his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. In Trump Tower, McDougal wrote, Trump pointed out Melania’s separate bedroom. He “said she liked her space,” McDougal wrote, “to read or be alone.”

That is sort of confirmation of some of the rumored tales that are to be included in the upcoming Omarosa tell-all – that Melania and Trump do not share the same bedroom.

McDougal’s account, like those of Clifford and other women who have described Trump’s advances, conveys a man preoccupied with his image. McDougal recalled that Trump would often send her articles about him or his daughter, as well as signed books and sun visors from his golf courses. Clifford recalled Trump remarking that she and Ivanka were similar and proudly showing her a copy of a “money magazine” with his image on the cover.

Trump also promised to buy McDougal an apartment in New York as a Christmas present. Clifford, likewise, said that Trump promised to buy her a condo in Tampa. For Trump, showing off real estate and other branded products was sometimes a prelude to sexual advances.

Surprisingly, it was the nude model who got the bout of conscience and ended the affair, in April 2007.

According to Crawford, the breakup was prompted in part by McDougal’s feelings of guilt. “She couldn’t look at herself in the mirror anymore,” Crawford said. “And she was concerned about what her mother thought of her.” The decision was reinforced by a series of comments Trump made that McDougal found disrespectful, according to several of her friends. When she raised her concern about her mother’s disapproval to Trump, he replied, “What, that old hag?” (McDougal, hurt, pointed out that Trump and her mother were close in age.) On the night of the Miss Universe pageant McDougal attended, McDougal and a friend rode with Trump in his limousine and the friend mentioned a relationship she had had with an African-American man. According to multiple sources, Trump remarked that the friend liked “the big black d*ck” and began commenting on her attractiveness and breast size. The interactions angered the friend and deeply offended McDougal.

So then began the cover-up. 

That cover-up included a $150,000 payment to McDougal by the company that publishes the National Enquirer for exclusive rights to her story. The company's CEO, David Pecker (go ahead and snicker; I did.) is a personal friend of Trump's. The idea was to buy the story and then sit on it. This seems to have been fine with McDougal, as she was increasingly leaning Republican as the 2016 election cycle unfolded, and did not want to hurt Trump's chances. She has since become a Christian and had a change of mind and heart.

But consider the state of her morality at the time of the affair. After their first night together, Trump offered her money. She just kind of laughed it off, and continued to see him. She didn't appear to be insulted in the least. Also consider what it says about the state of Trump's morality as well.

She has changed as a person. Him, not so much.

As we know, no one, not even his evangelical sycophants, is claiming that he has become an actual Christian.

Which brings us to the book referenced above. There is a review of it by Erick Erickson at The Weekly Standard that, whether you read the book or not, stands as a searing indictment of the excuse-making on the part of these boot-lickers:

In The Faith of Donald J. Trump, authors David Brody and Scott Lamb provide an in-depth look at the relationship between the president and American evangelicals. Brody and Lamb—respectively a newscaster with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and a vice president at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University—have written what they dub a “spiritual biography,” even though they come right out and say they have no intention of answering the question of whether Trump is a Christian. Instead, they hope to convey his faith through his actions.

In the process, though, Brody and Lamb inadvertently expose the corruption and moral vacuity of the political evangelical movement in the United States.

Trump only started paying attention to evangelicals once he began to consider running for president—some five or more years before the 2016 campaign. He made a show of cozying up to evangelical pastors who write books that usually don’t sell well outside their own congregations. He reached out to the prosperity-gospel heretic Paula White and flattered her. He asked questions of other religious leaders.

As his ambitions grew, Trump cannily cultivated relationships with evangelicals, and they convinced themselves that those relationships must be sincere since they began before he openly started campaigning for the presidency. Once he did start openly campaigning, the outreach only became more intensive. As Brody and Lamb report, Trump would seek out the preachers to sit next to at events. He would bring his mother’s Bible to meetings to show it off. Evangelicals fell for it. So deluded and distracted are they by the trappings of power, they do not even see what Brody and Lamb see. “He’s the P. T. Barnum of the 21st century,” an anonymous banker in the book says of Donald Trump. These evangelical leaders have yet to realize that they are the suckers.

* * *

Brody and Lamb’s book highlights everything wrong with the morphing of American evangelicalism into a post-Jesus cult of personality looking for salvation delivered by politicians—including its hypocrisy and sophistry regarding Trump and morality. The authors quote one evangelical leader saying that evangelicals’ relationship with the president is authentic, not transactional. But a few chapters earlier, the same individual described a conference call he led with the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisers just after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about assaulting women. During that call, “all of us agreed to stand behind the candidate.” After all, Trump “had sacrificed his entire life, in my viewpoint, and supported us. How could we not support him?”

We can wink-wink at Trump’s misdeeds because he does good things for us. The authors actually write that “when assessing the faith of Donald Trump, the significance of the Neil Gorsuch nomination cannot be underestimated.” Really? That is essential to assessing Trump’s faith? More than his sexual proclivities and adulteries, which are barely touched upon in the book? In a few spots in the book, the authors blame American culture for Trump’s sexual ethics, and in one passage, they even find a way to implicate evangelicals in Trump’s sexual behavior. Follow the twisted logic: First, Brody and Lamb quote another biographer who says that “Clint Eastwood, James Bond, and Hugh Hefner” are the figures who dominate Trump’s self-image. Then we are told that Trump boasted about being a womanizer roughly around the same time that Pierce Brosnan’s first James Bond movie came out. And who do we have to thank for Bond’s having a place in Trump’s mind? “Americans—including evangelicals—fund these culture-shaping products with their book purchases and ticket sales.” So if you’ve ever seen a Bond movie, you’ve contributed to the culture that made Trump Trump.

More egregiously, in another passage the authors suggest that Trump’s rapacious libido is just his misguided quest for God. I wish I were kidding. The authors prominently quote a character from a 1944 Bruce Marshall novel: “I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.” Brody and Lamb’s book was printed before the appearance of press reports about Trump having had sex with a porn star around the time his wife was giving birth to their son, but one gets the sense that the authors of The Faith of Donald Trump and the evangelical casuists they quote would have no trouble spinning that infidelity as something unimportant or, in a roundabout way, even admirable.

When not justifying or shifting blame for Trump’s sexual escapades, the authors turn to anonymous sources to assure us that Donald Trump’s heart is not bent on greed. “These off-the-record friendly interviewees sense that Trump’s ambition stems from a deep-rooted need to command respect.” It is certainly true that he enjoys receiving praise and respect—including from the book’s authors. One five-page chapter recounts a lunch at the Polo Bar in New York City with one of the authors (Brody), his wife, and Trump. George Lucas, Ralph Lauren, and Michael J. Fox all come to Trump’s table to genuflect. Trump then brags to Oprah that he is meeting with the Christian Broadcasting Network. The chapter ends. Time and again the authors boast about their access to Trump, giving away the game of just how Mean Girlsevangelicalism has become.

While the authors praise Trump for his supposed authenticity in being willing to meet with them, Mitt Romney is criticized for talking to evangelical leaders through conference calls and national meetings: “Past Republican nominees like Mitt Romney and John McCain would come in front of a Christian audience but only minimally, knowing it was a political rite of passage to do so. . . . Trump, on the other hand, not only did substantially more interviews with us, his staff didn’t even bother to ask us what we planned to talk about.” See there, Trump gave them access, so he must be a believer. It clearly wasn’t a transactional relationship.

* * *

So if Brody and Lamb don’t grapple seriously with Trump’s moral character and choose not to answer the question of whether or not Trump is a Christian, how do they fill their hundreds of pages?

The book is stuffed with supposition. At one point we are assured that if Andy Warhol were alive today, he’d watch The Apprentice. This comes one page after announcing how much Warhol hated Trump. “If young Donald Trump” did something or other is a recurring theme. If he had picked up a book on church history he would have discovered all sorts of things. “If Trump recalled his Old Testament Bible stories,” he would have clearly understood what he was talking about by referencing the promised land in a speech. If frogs had wings they wouldn’t bust their asses every time they jump. That’s not actually in the book, but I kept thinking about it when whole sections of the book were premised on if Trump did or read or saw something.

Much of the book is padded with descriptions of every conceivable Christian influence on Donald Trump, no matter how attenuated. Brody and Lamb make him out to be the heir of Martin Luther, John Knox, John Winthrop, John Witherspoon, and Billy Graham.

At least Brody and Lamb try to come up with something a little less bone-headed than the "I-was-voting-for-a-president-not-a-Boy-Scout" tripe one sees in comment threads under any kind of news item or opinion piece related to Trump's character.

As I say, last May 3, in Indianapolis, one of the greatest tragedies in American history occurred. We could have had all the great policy-level achievements which Trumpists and actual conservatives alike rightly cheer without the moral taint.

The unwillingness of so many who used to deserve our respect to make look squarely at that moral taint is one of the most saddening measures of our spiritual sickness.

All this was simple when our society was, at least to some degree, moral

By now, you know about the piece at Babe.net by someone with the nom de plume Grace about a date with Aziz Ansari, I'm assuming.

Do I need to describe him to you? Maybe you're more literate in a pop-culture sense than me, but I'd never heard of the guy. Apparently his character in whatever show he's on is the "woke" guy, who doesn't have a sexually boorish bone in his body. Lovable and funny. Then there is his real-life self.

According to Grace, he asked her on a date, which started with a glass of wine at his apartment. They then went to a restaurant, and at the end of the meal, he seemed in a hurry to get the check and pay and head back to his place. The kissing and groping began pretty much immediately, and was followed by requests, by him, for them to mouth each others' privates. She engages in the activity he is asking for, and then says, "Whoa, let's chill here. Let's go sit on the couch." While they're naked. She was hoping he'd "play with [her] hair and rub [her] back" to "calm her down." The situation deteriorated, and he mustered the decency to hail an Uber to get her home.

She texted him the next day to let him know she'd cried during the ride home and that she was disappointed to find out how he behaved on dates.

I swear, there's so much immaturity and jettisoning of standards on both sides that it looks like the way Democrats and Trump go after each other.

Why do any columns or blog posts, or which there are now many, discussing how this could have been prevented, need to be written?

How hard is it to muster the judgement needed to say, upon the conclusion of dinner, "Why don't we go for a stroll by the canal?" or "Let's check out that art show opening," or, if you have really been getting the sense that this guy's a horndog without an ounce of gentleman in him, "I didn't realize it was getting so late. I'd better get home."

He was a pig, and she was a ditz. And now, with the publication of her piece about it and all the subsequent discussion, society is that much more brittle, and the whole notion of romance has been further sidelined to make room for cold deliberations about "consent."

The way was paved for this when we as a society decided to mock God, but even after he'd been removed from the equation, there were a few years when the concepts of "lady" and "gentleman" still kept encounters this awkward and detrimental to the self-esteem of the parties involved to a minimum.

Now that everyone assumes everyone else to be a zoo animal, all bets are off. Everyone goes around hurt, scared, and bitter, and their souls visibly wither.

It is so very late in the day.

Adding to the list becomes an hourly exercise now

Charlie Rose. Gentle, reflective Charlie Rose, for cryin' out loud. Eight accusers. Allusions to maneuvers well-known among interns and staff, such as the "shower trick" and the "crusty paws."

Def Jam Recordings mogul Russell Simmons.

New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush 

A staffer at the SEIU.


The cultural rot of the last half-century-plus that is a prominent theme here at LITD seems to run deeper than I'd imagined.

1 Peter 5:8 absolutely nails our current state of affairs.

Adding to the list becomes a daily exercise now

I'm going to assume you're up to speed on Al Franken.

Subsequent "inappropriate behavior" (isn't that a nice, sanitary term?) revelations coming across the radar screen include

NPR Roger LaMay (who comes on the heels of that organization's news executive a few days ago):

On Wednesday, NPR Board Chairman Roger LaMay announced that he was stepping down at the end of his second one-year term. LaMay, who remains on the board, said he needed to devote more time to running the popular Philadelphia public radio music station WXPN, where he is general manager.

However, according to a knowledgeable source, LaMay is the subject of a complaint filed with NPR alleging past inappropriate behavior. Few additional details are currently known.

Stephen Bittel, Florida Democratic Party chair:

The resignation comes after Politico reported that six women had complained about Bittel leering at them and making comments of an explicit, sexual nature. He also, apparently, kept a lot of breast-related paraphernalia in his office that made the women feel uncomfortable:

“There was a lot of boob stuff in his office,” said a woman who was a fundraiser years ago and had to interact with him. “I was told by other women not to go into his bathroom. I was warned.”

In a written statement, a spokesman for Bittel didn’t dispute the women’s accounts and acknowledged he had the breast-shaped stress balls. But, he said, they were a gift “from a former female general counsel of his company years ago as a joke for his birthday. He keeps them in a drawer with other gag gifts.”

None of the women accused Bittel of touching them in any way, but it seems they didn't like the way he let his eyes do the walking:

“He’s just so f----ng creepy,” said a former female party staffer, anger palpable in her tone. “He just leers at you, and stares. I don’t know if you know what that feels like, but he just leers at you. I don’t know how to describe the feeling.”

It's probably a lot like being trapped on a plane with Al Franken.

And then there's Ohio state legislator Wes Gooden. This one is particularly scurrilous. The damage he has wrought to the cause of traditional morality is huge. At what point did this guy give his soul over to his kind of depravity - and I don't just mean the shenanigans in his office. The chasm between his public persona and his real self was nearly infinite. How does one hide the cognitive dissonance? What the hell motivated the guy to keep talking the talk about social conservatism? Did he ever come close to cracking? Was he relieved when he got caught? Will his wife stay with him?

An Ohio lawmaker who routinely touted his Christian faith and anti-LGBT views has resigned after being caught having sex with a man in his office.

Wes Goodman, who is the Republican state legislator for Ohio, is married to a woman who is assistant director of an annual anti-abortion rally known as March for Life.

The right-wing legislator, who pushed “family values”, was reportedly witnessed having sex with a man inside his office who was not employed by the legislator.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, the observer told Ohio House Chief of Staff Mike Dittoe what had happened on Tuesday afternoon. Mr Dittoe responded by telling House Speaker Republican Cliff Rosenberger who in turn met with Mr Goodman.

The 33-year-old, who has been branded the “conscience of the conservative movement”, resigned for “inappropriate conduct” shortly after the meeting took place.

Mr Goodman, whose Twitter biography describes him as “Christian. American. Conservative. Republican. Husband to @Beth1027”, has regularly claimed "natural marriage" occurs between a man and a woman.

"Healthy, vibrant, thriving, values-driven families are the source of Ohio's proud history and the key to Ohio's future greatness,” reads his campaign website which has now been taken offline.

“The ideals of a loving father and mother, a committed natural marriage, and a caring community are well worth pursuing and protecting."

The glaring question as this cascade's momentum increases, is, is this a recent phenomenon, or is the fact that society is finally seriously investigating it bringing a seaminess that has always been with us to light?

If it's the latter, the gossamer thread by which civilization hangs is thinner than we'd been presuming.

I leave you with Damon Linker's latest column for The Week, entitled "Al Franken Is Just the Beginning."