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Saturday, March 23, 2019

Mueller Time; Or, It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Fitzmas

Obviously, the report has finally dropped, and obviously, anyone who thinks they know anything specific is full of shit.

My completely uneducated guess is that supporters and opponents of this human centipede of an administration will each be disappointed in different ways:
  • There will not be a clear path of evidence to directly convict Trump on an impeachable offense.
  • There are other investigations in motion, and Mueller of course wisely farmed out as much as possible to multiple federal districts, meaning that there is certainly more to come from those investigations, and Trump and his family and associates are going to be extremely lucky if they all manage to get through it with assets and freedom intact.
Some important takeaways, based on what we do know:
  • Dozens of indictments, six guilty pleas, and several convictions.
  • Paul Manafort (campaign manager #2, and the person who tapped Pence for VP) didn't get the thirty years he deserved, but seven years is a lot for someone who turns seventy in a week.
  • Flynn (National Security Advisor) still has to allocute, and has given plenty of testimony and (one presumes) evidence as part of his plea deal.
  • Rick Gates (deputy to Manafort) is still working with investigators.
  • Felix Sater is scheduled to testify on March 27th. He knows everything Michael Cohen does, and probably more.
  • Roger Stone's trial is later in the year. Stone is apparently deep in debt, and not wanting to take a nickel in Club Fed for Agent Orange.
  • Steve Bannon and Tom Barrack turned over a combined five thousand pages of documents to House investigators last week.
  • These are all key players, as is Michael Cohen, and now Elliott Broidy (who, along with Cohen, was one of the RNC finance chairs for the 2016 campaign), whose offices were raided last week, and who has already done time for this sort of thing.
Bottom line:  whether or not there's a "smoking gun" in the report, anyone who still says there was nothing is clearly on someone's payroll, and would have said there was nothing even with a smoking gun.

And the House committee, regardless of what we're permitted to hear and see of the report, will continue their collective spelunking of Fatboy's voluminous crooked ass. Tax returns, financial records, the "charitable foundation," the bank and insurance fraud committed in his loan applications, all the real estate he's been using to launder bratva money for the past decade or so, that's all still in play.

That's the other thing about the report -- it's not the end, it's the beginning. It will be a road map to the corruption and criminality baked into the entire apparatus, every player and every move they made. If even half of it's true, it's way too much to sweep under.

The real question, and the real challenge here, is whether it will move any cultists. Of course this is purely anecdotal, so feel free to disregard, but I've made it a point to ask my Trump-supporting friends -- none of whom are so far in as to, say, attend a rally, and at least a couple of them voted for Obama at least once -- what it would take for them to change their mind about their support for him. War, recession, proof of collusion and subversion?

It's a vague, open-ended question with some subjectivity, and therefore not easy to answer regardless, but still, it's troubling to note that none of them seemed worried about any of the Russia stuff, and all were happy with the economy. The thing to be most worried about here is that every one of the aforementioned players mentioned above could be convicted on concrete evidence, and a lot of them just won't give a shit. They'll flip on Fixed Noise and soak in whatever nonsense they push about the Dummycrat of the week, and that'll be that.

It's something to keep in mind as the perpetual campaign starts kicking into higher gears as 2020 inches closer. By definition, the cultists are completely impervious to evidence, to clear patterns of erratic behavior and sheer incompetence. When nothing matters to forty percent of the electorate but being assholes, you have a deep systemic problem that just might never be undone, and in fact might get worse.

I'm not worried about King Joffrey's idle jabber about the military, cops, or bikers -- the first two groups swear oaths that most of them actually do take seriously, and the latter group consists mostly of rapidly aging puds who won't ever get into a one-on-one fight.

What's more worrisome is the clear threat of more instances of politically motivated stochastic terrorism. The two most recent instances in the US -- the van-driving nutjobs who sent pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, and the Coast Guard lieutenant who was stockpiling weapons and drawing up plans -- were fortunately too inept to pull anything off. Sooner or later you'll get one who figures out how to pull it off.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Boycott CNN

Your periodic reminder that CNN, in its own way, is as bad as Fixed Noise, and the sooner they're out of business, the better off the planet will be. Fuck. Them.

I Want to Believe the Fairy Tale

Longtime readers of this here eternal rant may recall that back in a more innocent time, I put out a few e-books under the "auspices" of the blog name. Two were annual compendia of blog posts from the years 2012 and 2013 (with some fresh commentary included; I would feel bad screwing you out of two bucks for something you had already read), and two were 100% new analyses of people in the news for those years, along the lines of the old Buffalo Beast's annual Assholes of [the past year] series.

(Not to shake anyone out of their hard-earned couch-cushion change, but if you have a few shekels you can part with, the books are still available, and I think you might be pleasantly -- or not -- surprised by how relevant they still are, more than half a decade later.)

So in the Assholes of 2012 collection, which had the catchy title 12 in '12, I ranked the current thing in the Oval Office as the #3 asshole in these here Yewnighted States, due to his toxic blend of birther conspiracies and shameless ignorance. In retrospect, that ranking seems at once to be prescient, while also giving outsized importance to what was then realistically a noisy reality-teevee gadfly looking to fill his bottomless psychic hole, his pathetic need for publicity every fucking hour of every goddamned day.

What I was ignoring, even as it seems apparent in a back-handed way with the second factor stated above, was just how pernicious and effective reality teevee has become on people. Sure, it's been a staple here since the very beginning, how it's made 'murkins stoopid and whatnot, but the fact is that, since I really have never actually watched any of it, I only know of its effects secondhand at best.

Now, another more recent common theme of mine since the bewigged gastropod has oozed its way in and ensconced itself there, is that while it presents a significant problem, the real problem is the prion disease eating the brains of the idiots who voted for it, and still inexplicably believe in it, despite failure after failure after pathetic, toxic failure.

How do you deprogram a cult? We've been trying to figure that out with North Korea, among others for decades. But at least North Korea's cult is obviously held in place with a very real, palpable fear. These slapdick rubes sincerely love Trump without reservation. Until they decide that they love their country more than they hate whatever caricature of "liberals" Fixed Noise is pushing on them today, they'll follow him right over the edge. Don't kid yourself otherwise.

The joke about "when we're all living under freeway overpasses, grilling sparrows on curtain rods, the Trump voter will look over at his neighbor, who has no sparrow, and consider it a victory" cuts closer to the cold truth than any of us would like to admit. Think about it for a second -- whatever choice you've cast for imperial custodian or congressional prelate or what-have-you over the years, did you ever factor as long as it fucks over the other guy into your choice? Yeah, that's not a normal thing. But it's sadly become all too normal and obvious.



Here's a little story, completely true, about the effects of reality teevee on otherwise sentient, normal, even nice people:  an older person of my acquaintance for about ten years (let's call her Mary), very sweet, devout church-goer, even more devout reality-teevee fanatic, and currently deep in the thrall of He Who Shall Not Be Named. But Mary is also the kind of person who always asks about everyone's families, remembers the names of your kids, even gets them a little something for their birthdays and Christmas. A sincerely kind person, but one who has been immersed and baptized in the poisoned well of Rupert Murdoch.

So some years ago, back around the time of the e-books (it really was a simpler time, wasn't it), she was rattling on about some Bachelorette-type show, and I was alternating between ignoring her, politely nodding my head, and occasionally providing some gentle ribbing. But at some point, having written so many caustic observations in here over the years about what I perceived (again, mostly secondhand) to be a negative, perfidious cultural epiphenomenon, I wanted to get the point-of-view from someone who watched all -- and I do mean all, she did and does have an encyclopedic knowledge of this crap -- of these shows.

"What's the appeal?," I asked. "You know it's seedy and gross -- these people who could all easily hook up in any meat market on a weekday night, pretending to have to go on a show to look for love, but really just wanting to burnish their social-media cred. You spend weeks watching them winnow through dozens of members of the opposite sex, frequently in hot tubs and other unseemly situations. And in the end, they're not going to get married, and if they do, they'll be divorced within a year, because this is not how anyone meets people. It's weird that someone like yourself, who takes pride in having been married nearly fifty years, would see value in that sort of thing."

Mary replied simply, I want to believe the fairy tale.

I think that cuts to the heart of both the appeal and the treachery of reality teevee. Whatever else you want to say about how and why it su-su-su-suuuucks, the fact is that the people who assemble this schlock are very good at distilling it down to elemental narratives that we all had drummed into us by junior-high school, and carry with us in our daily adult lives, whether we know and use them or not. They're there:  identifying cliques, choosing sides, likes, loves, hates, fears, what you can share with your "friends" and what you can't because they can use it against you with the rest of the clique, etc.

These are extremely effective tropes, and they've obviously been very successful at packaging them into interchangeable "entertainment" products to piece out in between endless scads of advertisements for fast food and insurance and feminine hygiene products and big ol' trucks.

But what we're seeing now with Trump is someone who really had been on the verge of being rightly consigned to history's dustbin as a ridiculous punchline, a perennial blowhard who tried to go all Ross Perot in the 2000 campaign and got reminded that the court had to put him on an allowance because, you know, he bankrupted a fucking casino, because he's about as good a businessman as he is a husband or father or human being. Until that fucking turd Mark Burnett pulled him out of that dust heap, brushed him off, cleaned up his ricockulous microweave hairpiece and spent the next decade presenting him to 'murka as a gin-you-whine boner-fried bidnessman.

And they bought it. And now they're buying it with him as an "outsider" politician, even though he's neither of those things. He's an "outsider" to the extent that actual billionaires want nothing to do with him, don't invite him to their elitist soirees, etc. But he's a trust-fund asshole through and through, never worked an honest day or made an honest dollar in his goddamned life.

But try telling them that. You can't change their minds with "facts" because they want to believe the fairy tale. So you have to come up with a better fairy tale, a more compelling narrative that clearly positions who the "good guys" and "bad guys" really are. Put it in Game of Thrones terms:  you may enjoy the moral fluidity of, say, Varys and Littlefinger, but there's no doubt where Ned and Joffrey were on their respective points of the moral compass.

Farmers in the midwestern states are going through huge increases in bankruptcy filings, thanks in large part to Purznit Shit-fer-Brains' brilliant trade wars, which are good and easy to win. This in spite of the fact that over eight billion dollars has already been expended in bailouts and price supports, because these people literally have entire harvest rotting in warehouses, because it cost them more to harvest it than they can currently get on the market.

Now, on the one hand, I am a huge -- and sincere! -- fan of people getting what they vote for, and in this case, these people are getting exactly that, good and hard. So fuck them. On the other hand, if I were running for president, and wanting to win the people in these states back over, I'd work on crafting a narrative that cleanly and simply outlines exactly what went down, and who's responsible. I'd find a handful of these suckers in every state and trot them up onstage, get them to recite their litany of woes to the audience of neighbors 'n' friends, and then make goddamned sure no one left the building without understanding that Fuckface Von Clownstick is entirely responsible for every miserable, sleepless night they've endured going through their financial hardship, and that we're going to fix it. And make sure that the corporate media shows up and broadcasts that shit, again and again.

That all of this has the added benefit of being 100% true is orthogonal to the real challenge. Truth just makes it a bit simpler to craft the narrative, but you'll still have to add a bit of fairy tale, a little something that they want to believe, even when they know in their hearts it isn't true.

Maybe point out to these farmers that while they're trying like hell to figure out how to hang onto what their parents and grandparents busted their humps to pass along to them, Jared Kushner is selling our nuclear tech to the Saudis, because he's neck-deep in hock to them. Maybe point out that things aren't going too well with North Korea after all, despite all the stunt summits and hand-waving and time-share salesmanship.

Maybe point out that poor and working-class people, whether they're in Alabama or California, have a hell of a lot more in common with each other, than with a thin-skinned fake tycoon who lies about everything, even things that don't matter. Maybe point out that, just as in real life, treating your friends and allies like shit does matter, because sooner or later you want or need something from them, and they have no reason to help you.

Maybe point out that this could all have gone completely differently, if he had just been 30% less of an asshole, that he could have won over moderates and even some liberals by simply making good on promises such as infrastructure and the opioid crisis, and not siding with nazis and calling everyone who disagrees with him an enemy of the state. Maybe ask why wages are still stagnant in Duh Best Economy Evuh, or why Genius Q. Dealmaker, Real Billionaire Tycoon, feels so comfortable cutting their health care.

I mean, if you didn't know any better, you might start to think that, you know, he's always been a fucking bullshitter.



I hate to say it, but future Real Housewives of Scottsdale star Meghan McCain has the right idea:  you don't have to take any shit from this doddering cartoon character. You really don't. I look forward to George Conway finally screwing up the courage to tell that mercenary cunt wife of his to make a choice -- your boss or your family. (Although I also hope that, whether or not this Magnificent Bickersons act the Conways have going is real or some weird cover-our-asses-for-future-employment gambit, they both spend the rest of their lives broke and despised, just like the scumbag they helped put into office.) I look forward to enough senators finally remembering that they took an oath to serve the Constitution, and not a particular man, especially one so deeply unqualified and unfit for office.

More than that, I look forward to Trump's continuing decompensation. He's unraveling fast now -- fifty tweets over the past weekend, whining about Saturday Night Live reruns and Fixed Noise anchors, and equally meaningless nonsense. But what it really reveals is how fucking miserable he is.

I said this about Trump long before he threw his ricockulous microweave into the ring, and transitioned from being a distributor of thick envelopes to becoming a recipient of thick envelopes:  if you, Tonstant Weader, had a kajillionty bucks and could do whatever you want, would you spend your time picking Twitter fights with Bill Cosby and Rosie O'Donnell, giving dating advice to Twilight actors? Which is literally what he was doing at the time, when he wasn't LYING about Obama's birthplace.

But now he's the chief executive, with all the cultural "soft power" perks that come with it. It's the closest thing to a literal version of the old "if you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be" question -- he can reach out to virtually anyone from any walk of life, musicians, actors, writers, economists, people of skill and talent and expertise, and ask them to dinner. Obama made great and frequent use of this perk, not for cynical fundraising reasons (as the Clintons did, renting out the Lincoln Bedroom), but because he's a fan of art and science and people who do things most people can't. That's what a normal person would do.

Trump does none of that. He had (pfft) Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, and former veep flop (and current reality-teevee flop) Sarah Palin shortly after the election, as a suck it libturds! moment. Since then, nothing, not even z-listers like Tim Allen and James Woods, people who would suck his tiny dick in Times Square if he asked them to. No, he bails to the Maga-Lardo every other weekend to hang out with thrice-divorced urologists and has-beens and never-weres like Robert Davi.

I mean, I think I know who Robert Davi is. Or was. He's still alive, right?

But that should give you an indication of how truly miserable Trump is. He can do literally anything he wants, and this is what he chooses to do. And he knows that the walls are closing in, that even if Mueller's report turns out to be a nothingburger with extra cheese, there are already enough wheels in motion just at the SDNY to keep him in court for the rest of his life, and that he stands a very real chance of going to jail and/or losing substantial assets. It's driving him nuts, and he was never all that tethered to reality in the first place.

And that brings me immense joy, because I can scarcely think of a more deserving scumbag. And that's not an exaggeration. He is scum. His adult kids are scum. His current wife and his ex-wives are scum. They're all fucking awful people, lamely pretending to not be fucking awful, but by definition not really knowing how to pretend convincingly.

They are all part of the same vile problem -- and it is the same problem that we saw last week with the celebritard college admissions scandal. It is the tacit admission by wealthy people, that the whole point of being truly wealthy is not simply having more money, or just having enough money to not have to worry about money, the way the little people do.

The real point of being truly wealthy is having your own set of rules to play by, because you are insulated from the consequences that the little people take for granted. So you have a kid you want to get into college, but they not only aren't qualified to go, they don't even want to go? No problem, just bribe the right people in the right places in what is undoubtedly just another American racket, like health care and finance, just a grift designed to siphon money out of suckers.

And it worked until it didn't. Don't worry, America doesn't want to see the chick from Full House go to prison for a "victimless" crime, so she and Filliam H. Muffman will pay their token fines, and then go on PR rehab tours on the talk-show circuit, and go right back to what they were doing, which is whatever the hell they wanted.

But that's the same dynamic that Trump and his disgusting coterie of fellow grifters and enablers count on:  that the little people really lurve their pelf-grubbing insect overlords; that they're too fucking dumb to understand the difference between knowing something about real business and just being a garden-variety chiseler; that they hate their fellow citizens more than they love their country.

And it just might work, not because Trump might steal the election next year, or refuse to leave if he loses, or any of that. It's because Democrats and liberals want to believe the fairy tale too, only their fairy tale consists of the disproven notion that most people are inherently good and idealistic and care more about facts than emotional catharsis. They need to recognize that their base is fucking hostile now too, and adjust their approach accordingly.

I don't give two fucks about how competent Amy Klobuchar (for example) may be. What concerns me is that her tepid, sensible approach reminds me of the beige suit known as Al Gore, who couldn't even get his home state to vote for him against a proven dipshit like George W. Bush. We want a fight, so either be prepared to get in the ring, or go the fuck home and weed your garden and draft policy papers touting the intrinsic benefits of gutless incrementalism.

What would be very nearly as bad as Trump legitimately winning next year, is the Democrats winning everything back in an indisputable landslide, and still not understanding that unless and until the current incarnation of the Republicon party is burned to the ground and the ashes pissed and shat upon, nothing will ever really change except the players. They have to deliver a convincing message of real economic justice for everyone, and couple that with a sincere conviction to end these cocksuckers, once and for all.

Saturday, March 02, 2019

And All Your Money Won't Another Minute Buy

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same. .... What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. -- George Orwell, 1984, Part II, Chapter 9

In the midst of the constant info-tsunami, you may have heard that noted hairpiece enthusiast Sheldon Adelson is in grave health. Considering Adelson is eighty-five years old, has looked much older for many years, and is in fact pure scum, it would be understandable if you shrugged your shoulders at such news, and went off to go read your horoscope or fix a nice cocktail.

Nonetheless, let's all spare a thought and/or prayer for ol' Shelly, something in the neighborhood of I hope it fuckin' hurts, reeeeeal bad.

If Howard Zinn proved anything, it's that most of history really just consists of wealth and power subjugating everyone else by whatever means available at the given time. Torture, murder, rape, slavery back in the day, compelled by violence and force; usury, debt peonage, and wage slavery nowadays wrought by sophisticated systems of disinformation and culture-war stoking.

Where these modes of subjugation once were in the service of religious and territorial expansionism, now it's just for the money. Imagine:  people who already have more wealth than they could spend in ten or twenty lifetimes, pitting the country against itself for another fucking tax break. A few more million dollars, which for them is a fraction of a percent, but for everyone else is more money than they'll see in their entire lives.

At least the religious fanatics believed in something, even if it was all bullshit. People like Sheldon Adelson believe only in what they already have way more than enough of.

Let's do the quick back-of-the-envelope calcs here:  if you had a billion dollars, you could spend $100,000 every single day for over twenty-seven years. And that's if you're giving it all away and buying toys and shit with no further value -- no real estate, no businesses, no stocks or investments or anything with a yield or resale value whatsoever.

The average American family takes close to two years to earn $100,000 gross, before all the expenses of daily life are deducted. I have a pretty good imagination, and I like toys, and I have no clue how I would go about wasting $100k every day for nearly three decades. You can indulge in hookers and blow for only so long -- believe me, I tried back in the Eighties and Nineties.

But seriously, we're not just talking about a lot of money, we're talking about a staggering amount of money, at the cusp of what most people can conceive. The vast majority of Americans still think conceptually of a "millionaire" as someone who is doing quite well -- little or no debt; chooses houses and vehicles instead of just getting what you can afford; two or more vacations per year, domestically or abroad; will be able to retire well before you hit the age of sixty. So now picture all that a thousand times over.

Sheldon Adelson is reckoned to be worth about thirty-six billion dollars.

And of course you have your other greedy elders who take an active role in undermining this country with their shenanigans in its electoral process:  Rupert Murdoch (turns eighty-eight next week), and Charles (eighty-three) and David (seventy-eight) Koch. Like Adelson, they count their billions in the teens. They could each live another ten, twenty -- another hundred -- years and still not be anywhere close to running out of precious, precious money. They could send hundreds of kids to college every year and not even feel it.

But it's not enough. It's never enough. I seriously think that the thing with people like them is that once you reach a point where you don't really need money anymore, because you have so much of it, you just use it to keep score, to compete with others in your social strata. It's all just a game for them.

Yes, they've done some philanthropy -- the Kochs have donated to rich-guy activities like symphonies and ballets, and Adelson donated $25 million to build a children's hospital. He also spent $100 million trying to get Newt Fucking Gingrich elected president, and another $100 million in the 2018 midterm electoral cycle. I'm sure he's got another $100M cocked and loaded for next year, to keep that jabbering scumbag in place. Probably already good to go, in case he kicks off.

Isn't that nice to know? When you flip on your teevee now, and are subjected to the daily ravings of a slobbering grifter, day after day after fucking day, it's all because a handful of elderly billionaires decided that the best way to lower their tax bills even further was to use their propaganda organs to pit working-class Americans against each other. Be sure to thank them.

Somewhere in hell, Jay Gould is smiling knowingly.

Friday, March 01, 2019

The Art of the Meal

The latest dog-and-jackass show in Asia turned out the failure any sensible person might have expected, and for all the obvious reasons. People can parse empty phrases like "sometimes you have to walk" all they want, but that's a waste of time. Sometimes you do have to walk, and we all have been there, whether it's buying a car or on a blind date or working out a business negotiation. But at this level, the only reason "you have to walk" is because you didn't prepare in the first place.

The thing about statecraft that one gets accustomed to just taking for granted is the principle that by the time the "summit" is held, the work has already been done. That is, the various diplomatic minions from both sides, armed with policy direction and strategic goals and interests, have hammered out the details, extracted and made concessions, feinted and weaseled and wheedled and cajoled, and finally arrived at some flawed agreement that both sides can live with.

The summit is really just supposed to be a public ceremony to affirm that which has already been agreed upon. Maybe some final details need to be smoothed out, but again, the pros have already stepped in and done the actual work.

Clearly, these basic concepts have never occurred to anyone of any standing in this inept goat rodeo of an administration. One imagines a human centipede consisting of Trump, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, maybe Lindsey Graham, and whoever else is unlucky enough to be in the room with them. And in this instance, the segments of the centipede continually trade positions and rearrange, the front becoming the middle, the middle rotating to the end of the line, and so on, an endless parade of mutual shit-sucking.

I mean seriously -- what the fuck did anyone in this group do to prepare for this nonsense? Anything at all, besides the usual dopey marketing boilerplate?

People talk a lot of shit about MBAs, business consultants, that sort of breed, as purveyors of empty jargon and Ponzi-style catchphrases, endlessly rolled down to the next level of hustlers on the pyramid. And they're not entirely wrong; from books to courses to TED talkers, there's obviously no shortage of tent-revival hucksters hustling rubes with the secular religion of productivity hacks and customer engagement strategies and renaming the Deming cycle and such like.

But I can tell you something firsthand:  one of the most basic principles they teach you in grad school is the value proposition. That is, a customer will want to employ your business because you provide value. Either you do something they cannot do themselves, or they can do it but you can do it more efficiently, better and/or less costly.

Just as fundamental to the legit b-school acolyte is the sacred nine-word dictum handed down from Mt. Sinai by the Moses of the MBA religion, Peter Drucker:  If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

So this "Hanoi Hail Mary" nonsense serves as a perfect crystallization of what's being going on with these morons the entire time, seen through the prism of the above two business principles. What has been accomplished with these two pseudo-summits, aside from an increasingly embarrassing series of sorry genuflections to a brutal dictator, with nothing at all to show for it? He stopped testing? Big fucking deal -- he's already got several dozen functioning weapons. He hasn't needed to test for a long time. The only reason North Korea "tests" missiles anymore is to get attention. It's saber-rattling. Once Genius Q. Dealmaker let him into the country club, the need for showboat launches into the Sea of Japan was done. Anyone who doesn't at least know that much doesn't belong anywhere near this game.

He's going to run the gubmint like a business, they said. Yeah, like one of his businesses, was our retort.

Both of the above principles (value and measurement) should be obvious to all, that a real business earns its keep, and that success and failure can be measured and predicted, in order to set controls and projections. But how do they square with what we know -- what we've all observed for decades, again and again -- about Trump and his approach to business?

Inheriting a real estate portfolio from your tax-dodging dad does not make you a businessman, it makes you a rentier, and there's a very stark difference. To heavily paraphrase Gordon Gekko, the rentier does not create or innovate or produce or deliver, he owns, he collects, he hustles. And then he finds ways to avoid paying taxes on money he didn't really work to earn in the first place.

Every other "business" Trump has been involved in, or tried to start, has failed miserably. There is a clear reason for this, one that goes beyond the usual "Trump is a gravy-brained dipshit" smackdown.

In the Tolstoyan sense of happy families being alike, successful businesses tend to share many traits, one of the most critical being that they know who their customer is. Who is my customer? A business that doesn't ask themselves that question regularly (because your customers and their needs change, and your perception of them changes, and your ability to deliver to them can change, and so on) is destined to fail. When that business is run by an idiot with a load of ill-gotten pelf, those deficiencies can be masked for some time, until the bankroll runs out, and then they fail all the same.

(That's how he ended up as a bratva launderer. That's why he won't show his tax returns. Again, anyone who denies it or can't see it needs to be excluded from any serious conversation.)

So look at Trump's businesses (or "businesses") over the years through that prism, and you see the key to what he now regards as statecraft. All of the jokey failures, from the USFL team to the airline to the steaks to the casinos, the common thread is that Trump is his own customer. He sees himself as a glamorous man-about-town, women want to fuck him and men want to be like him.

As ludicrous as that sounds, that is obviously how he's always seen himself, and continues to see himself. The fact that most people see him as an insufferable blowhard with a comical wig and spray-tan does not pierce his megalomania. This poorly informed self-image, and his innate sense of corruption and incompetent self-dealing, has poisoned all of his value propositions over the years.

And there are certainly successful businesses where the founder asked themselves, what if I made this product for me, and it turns out to be a popular innovation. But "innovating" means taking an existing product and making it better, whether with a superior design or product delivery or whatever. Something about the product is improved, in comparison with other products of the same type and market segment.

But there was nothing better about his steaks, nothing different about his casinos. The USFL could have been successful -- the NFL still had Up With People doing its Super Bowl halftime shows during the 1980s, and had endured two lengthy player strikes. But even there, Trump found a way to fuck up what could have been a good thing. This is because he obviously doesn't believe in that second principle, the Drucker maxim about measuring everything.

If I had to boil down business grad school to a single essential thing, a consistent ideal to which all of the components point directly toward, it would be this:  Measure twice, cut once. That's it, that's pretty much everything put as concisely as possible. You can take a leap of faith from time to time, if it's something you believe in strongly, but you damn sure don't ever do it without knowing the ramifications and potential consequences beforehand. Anyone who really holds an MBA degree and actually paid attention in class understands this. You don't take any major action without charting out the possibilities, and then you keep measuring as you go along, so that you can take corrective actions as needed, since they're always needed sooner or later.

You never "go with your gut". Ever. Even when you "know" that your product or your innovation is "better" you still do analyses to figure out the market positioning and segmentation.

Let's take the Trump Steaks as an example. Let's pretend that it's a serious, viable opportunity, that the meat really is top-grade, that there's a reliable supply at a relatively fixed cost. Let's assume that the proposition should fit into Trump's vision of himself as a luxury-item promoter, that the steaks are part of a portfolio of "status items" that are sold. People pay thousands of dollars for fashion items like handbags, that are made for a few bucks in some Asian sweatshop by child slaves, so forty-dollar mail-order steaks are not necessarily a ludicrous idea.

So all of these things are given in our hypothetical:  I have a better product. Who is my customer, and how do I find them and sell my superior product to them?

I could put you through a boring mini-seminar of how to research this sort of thing, much of which revolves around the simple (but time-consuming and vital) process of closely examining competitors from varying market (price) segments, identifying and exploiting gaps and differentiations, repositioning, branding, etc. But for a quick thumbnail example that essentially illustrates the same point, I would say to look at Omaha Steaks for a successful example of how to do that. You may or may not like their product or how they do it, but the fact is that they understand their customer and the product, and why barbecue enthusiasts will pay more for a better cut of meat.

Trump, on the other hand, chose to market his steaks like he "marketed" everything else he slapped his name on:  I'm an awesome guy, and I like this product, therefore you'll like this product too! This is an Underpants Gnome equation at its very heart, something that never adds up. Especially if you're asking someone to pay a premium price for a highly subjective product like steaks.

Using a person or personality to sell a product is always a dicey proposition, even when it's a universally liked celebrity. But Trump has always been an abrasive figure, deeply crass and vulgar, a loudmouth blowhard who fucks around on his wives and talks shit out of his neck. So the steak commercials went over much like an "Easy Eddie" used-car commercial might, and no one fell for it.

But the commercials point out one other important trait that is also very consistent in everything Trump has ever done:  not only is Trump his own customer, he's also the product! From a true business perspective, this is nothing more than a perverse feedback loop -- selling yourself to yourself. Nothing good can come from it, certainly not any good product. It's basically jerking off in public, which is Trump's career in a nutshell (giggity).

You know who else sells themselves to themselves? Cult leaders and banana republic dictators. Televangelists. Con artists of every breed and stripe, including just about every knuckle-dragging bible-humping shithead politician from the South. But politics aside, you can see why this feedback loop can never work in the long run. The numbers simply cannot pencil out. There's only a "product" for as long as enough suckers are around to convince themselves of that.

And so, to make a long story just a little bit longer, this is why none of these stupid summits with North Korea can work out, as long as they're being done like this, like an inept product launch for a piece of shit sold on a late-night infomercial. Because Trump is both his own customer and his own product, and no one in his inner circle has ever told him no, he is incapable of approaching anything as a problem to be analyzed and solved with knowledge and expertise. Since he believes he knows more about every subject than the so-called experts, he's his own sole resource. Since he's a fucking idiot, it's a pretty sterile resource. And so the feedback loop continues.

Long before any sort of "summit" date was announced -- and this goes back to the Singapore thing last year, which was equally useless -- you send scientists and diplomats over to talk to their counterparts on the other side. This means nuclear scientists, people who understand how the uranium and plutonium is mined and refined and processed, what the steps and the equipment look like, and therefore how to verify that those things have been curtailed as part of the agreement. You have sub-agreements in place to ensure the physical security of these verification teams, that their findings jibe with your existing satellite data, that they aren't being impeded or menaced by internal security goons, etc. You have experts who understand the history and geopolitics of the country and its larger region, so that you can anticipate their interests and needs -- potential bargaining chips. You send diplomats over to find out what they need from us in order to make the concessions we want out of them. This is what we want from you -- what will it take to make that happen?

None of this seems to have happened, instead it's all been a loose thread of vaguely theatrical -- I don't even want to say "events" since they don't qualify as such -- punctuations with no consistent meaning or direction. The corporate media, of course, focus on Pompeo saying one thing and Trump saying another:  oh noez, they're contradicting each other, are they trying to fool the wily Norks?

A competent, serious media would start by asking what are America's interests in North Korea in particular, in East Asia in general, and how those interests square with ongoing policy in the Pacific theatre. Yes, we want them to denuclearize, but what are we willing to do, in terms of positive (bribery) or negative (threats) leverage, to achieve that goal? What is our strategy in North and East Asia overall -- that is, do we want to withdraw out troops from Korea and Japan, and if so, what are the geopolitical ramifications of that? Does a Japan that seems to be incrementally militarizing become more isolated, and begin pursuing their own nuclear program? How does that square with US interests in the region?

What happened in Singapore last year, and in Hanoi this week, is the natural result of people who don't even think about such questions. These fools run things as if they had simply binge-watched The Sopranos and The Office (American), and combined the worst features of both bosses, the cruel entitlement of Tony Soprano and the gibbering, mendacious incompetence of Michael Scott.

For the twentieth anniversary of the first season, HBO recently reran the entire Sopranos series in January, and I hadn't seen them for years, so caught probably half of them. What jumped out again and again, aside from the coal-black humor laced throughout, was how parasitic the wiseguys really were. They talked about garbage routes and union jobs and things like that, but none of them actually did anything, they merely extorted money earned by the peons that actually did those things. They ran boiler-room penny-stock scams on gullible seniors. But they talked about their livelihoods among themselves as if they were actual working people, instead of feudal lords overseeing extrajudicial fiefdoms. Their wives and grown children collectively participate in and enable that delusion of respectability.

The easy explanation is that since most people are innately "moral" to some degree, those who choose the apparent ease and convenience of the "amoral" lifestyle say these little things to themselves as rationalizations or justifications for their choices. But by the end, it becomes apparent that the reality of it is that they know better, they just don't care. If a landscaper gets beaten up in a turf war between rival crews and turns to one of them for help, he ends up working for free under implicit threat of further harm -- a literal slave. There is no introspection on anyone's part. This is simply the way "business" has always been done. Heads I win, tails you lose. Sucks to be you.

You could see some of that in Michael Cohen's open testimony in the House on Wednesday. Per usual, the media fixated on the rather pedestrian "revelations" that we already knew -- that he's a conniving hustler who fucked over small businesses and used his "charitable foundation" as a tax-dodge-slash-piggy-bank, paid off his mistresses from his campaign coffers, etc.

What was interesting to me was what Cohen revealed about how he saw himself, how he talked about his actions. He talks about how he had already achieved some measure of personal success before working for Trump, and then talks about his rather mundane goon tasks he performed for Trump -- sending out the various letters and documents by which Trump would threaten and cajole various interlocutors, to avoid paying his bills, to intimidate his former schools from releasing his grades and test scores.

It says something about Cohen that, as he recounts his vile activities on Trump's behalf, he seems absent from any contemporaneous bouts of introspection or conscience in performing those tasks. What sort of "successful" person goes to work on behalf of a shameless hustler whose primary activities consist of not paying contractors and hustling morons? At no point did Cohen -- who shamelessly and repeatedly reminds us that he is the son of a Holocaust survivor -- say to himself, what the fuck am I doing, and why am I doing it for this fucking asshole?

Even at the end of Cohen's opening statement, his mention of Melania Trump as a "kind" person who doesn't deserve any of this, felt tacked-on, like something Cohen thought would come off as a grace note of sorts. I don't think any reasonable person who has observed Melania Trump's actions and words, during her husband's campaign and during his tenure as an appalling excuse for a chief executive, could characterize her as "kind."

To be sure, she is quiet and polite, understands her place and role intrinsically. But she is on record as an Obama birther, she supports her husband's idiotic and destructive policies and statements implicitly and explicitly, and is at best a mercenary. If she has any lingering guilt for what she's abetted over the years, like Carmela Soprano, she has rationalized it away with the expensive trappings and trinkets of a spoiled courtesan. But she can't say that she hasn't been told.

It is helpful to look at Trump, both as a person and as a businessman, in that Sopranos light as well. His father and Roy Cohn taught him that greasing palms and cutting corners, schmoozing the media and lying through your teeth, was simply how "business" gets done. There's no need to measure or analyze anything if you know that the main obstacle to getting your permits and tax abatements is getting the campaign donations to the mayor and the councilman for your district.

And remember, he came to local and then national attention via the New York media, starting with the Times. He was a registered Democrat, donated to Hillary and Kirsten Gillibrand and others. They took his money, they took his calls. They printed his self-serving lies for years, they gave him a teevee show and a public platform, because they -- like Trump -- lie about who their customers are and what their product is.

And so he's not entirely wrong when he excoriates the corporate media for their self-serving bullshit. It was not until he threw his wig into the political ring that suddenly the media tried to grow a conscience about who and what he really was. But it was too late, and it rang false because they aren't very good at that sort of thing. The media's sudden "principled" stance re Trump hung off them like a pulsating tumor. That's why CNN is still trying to have it both ways by hiring a Jeff Sessions staffer to oversee their 2020 election analysis. They are "fake" in the sense that there is no moral core underpinning their editorial approach or even their objective delivery of their news-like product.

Their product is conflict, and their delivery device is panel shows and bullshit commentary. Really their product is their audience, and their true customers are the insurance and pharma and telecom companies that underwrite the panel shows -- and have various and sundry deals under consideration by various and sundry makers of the laws, approvers of the proposed mergers. Interests are vested, and intertwined.

CNN is (imho) the worst violator, but really just about all the corporate media monkeys are complicit in some form. As are we. Let me be more blunt, and put it the way Dr. Krakower might:  if you're still watching CNN for anything at this point, you're part of the problem, and like Carmela and Melania, you can't say you haven't been told. Fucking boycott them yesterday, and never look back.

It's more realistic -- if perhaps not healthy -- to look at the Hanoi "summit" as just another episode in this dopey reality show we're all forced to live in now, and as such, it will have relatively little consequence in and of itself. It's the overall dynamic that eroding what was already a shaky foundation. Turns out all it took to bring the whole edifice down was a handful of idiots who just didn't give a fuck.

The keys to getting rid of Trump are there, for the Dummycrat with the cojones to step up and use them. Again, Cohen's testimony yesterday was a reminder of part of it, that while he is indeed a convicted felon and liar and all-around weasel-for-hire, he brought corroborating documentation with him this time, as part of his allocution. One part of that documentation is three years' worth of financial statements for Deutsche Bank, back when Trump was trying to buy the Buffalo Bills. Guaranteed there will be something in there that will provide probable cause to go ass-spelunking for that fucker's tax returns -- and there will be the evidence of money laundering, or worse.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the need for Democrats to understand where this asshole's weaknesses really lie. Remember, everything is projection with this guy. The childish nicknames he uses on opponents are all characteristics that he dreads being called himself -- crooked, low-energy, little, lyin', etc.

It's helpful to dial down some of the hysteria a couple of notches and to keep in mind that he is not Hitler or Mussolini, he's Wile E. Coyote, and they need to start addressing him as such. Attack him on his incompetence, on what a ridiculous person he is. Use the things he says against him, which then forces him to lie further. I didn't say that. Well, we have the video, asshole.

His weakness is his narcissism; he cannot stand to think that people don't respect or admire him. These are deeply rooted daddy issues manifesting themselves, but they are very real all the same, and it is foolish not to exploit them. This latest public belly-flop is just another example to exploit, not just because of the more apparent non-results, but because of the obvious lack of preparation that led inevitably to failure.

Exploit those holes to their fullest potential, and you don't just bring down the cult leader, you take down the cult as well, because their self-esteem is tied inexorably to his. Once they understand that liberals are not crying but laughing at him, they can no longer support him.