Climate Assholes

The psychotic GOP death cult is making sure we are headed to catastrophic climate change.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America’s efforts to tackle global warming.

At an event in eastern Kentucky, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that his predecessors had departed from regulatory norms in crafting the Clean Power Plan, which was finalized in 2015 and would have pushed states to move away from coal in favor of sources of electricity that produce fewer carbon emissions.

“The war on coal is over,” Mr. Pruitt said. “Tomorrow in Washington, D.C., I will be signing a proposed rule to roll back the Clean Power Plan. No better place to make that announcement than Hazard, Kentucky.”

The repeal proposal, which will be filed in the Federal Register on Tuesday, fulfills a promise President Trump made to eradicate his predecessor’s environmental legacy. Eliminating the Clean Power Plan makes it less likely the United States can fulfill its promise as part of the Paris climate agreement to ratchet down emissions that are warming the planet and contributing to heat waves and sea-level rise. Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon that international accord.

Trump, the Eternal GOP Asshole and Nuclear Psychopath

Shit is getting real:

There is nothing more to be said about the depth of Donald Trump’s ignorance or his more consequential lack of character—his selfishness, his cruelty, his caprice, his vanity, his vindictiveness, his malignant narcissism. We know all that. What is more interesting is what it will yield. 

Last Friday, he kicked off his weekend by firing off a set of abusive tweets at Carmen Yulin Cruz, the beleaguered mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The explanation was not hard to glean: the U.S. territory is a disaster zone in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria; he had not paid much attention to the sufferings of several million Americans for reasons easily guessed, and took a bludgeoning in the media for his negligence. And so after Cruz insisted that the plight of her city wasn’t “a good news story,” Trump decided to heap abuse on the strained leader of a suffering city. A decent president who thought Mayor Cruz’s reproaches unjustified would have gently ignored them, and perhaps pointed out what the federal government has done and can do for Puerto Rico. But then again, a decent man would not have repeatedly sneered at and damned an 81-year-old war hero with a lethal cancer.

The consequences of Trump’s preference for picking fights with some black football players rather than seeing what could be done about Spanish-speaking victims of a hurricane will be felt in predictable ways. One may expect angry voters of Hispanic extraction to exact a price at the ballot box. But his weekend tweets about his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, will have consequences that may be longer term and considerably darker. 

In a series of tweets on Sunday, Trump sneered at Tillerson’s diplomatic efforts to engage with North Korea, which other members of the foreign policy apparatus (to include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) have dutifully and appropriately supported. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man...Save your energy, Rex, we’ll do what has to be done! Being nice to Rocket Man hasn't worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won't fail.” 

There are two things at work here. Trump has emasculated his secretary of state, who clearly does not speak for the administration. Some of Tillerson’s predecessors have fallen out of favor with their presidents, but none has been so undercut in such a public, dismissive way. And if Trump is serious, this means war, and a war to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons could lead not only to the devastation of much of the Korean peninsula, but the first use of such weapons—by the United States as likely as by the North Koreans—since 1945. 

There is no middle path between some combination of deterrence, containment, sanctions, covert action, and threats of preemption directed at North Korea, on the one hand, and a preventive war on the other. The forces impelling Pyongyang to acquire nuclear weapons are strong, and go well beyond the vanity of the grandson of the country’s founder. For a dictatorship whose slogan of self-reliance is national dogma, nuclear weapons are the ultimate source of autonomy in a world of wealthier and presumably hostile states. Nor will China squeeze Kim Jong Un hard enough to make him yield. It does not want chaos on its southern border. It does not want a unified Korea aligned with the United States. And above all, it does not intend to act, or be seen to act, as America’s sheriff. 

Trump has chosen to say, and compel those who speak for him to say, that North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons and threats leveled against the United States are themselves a casus belli. Yet Pyongyang has nuclear weapons and has threatened the United States. He has now repeatedly insisted that he will resolve the problem that has bedeviled three of his predecessors, and has made it clear that diplomacy is not the way. That leaves either North Korea’s surrender, which will not happen, or war, or another broken promise. 

The incalculable costs of war could include the loss of hundreds of thousands of Korean lives, and the loss of many thousands of U.S. soldiers and civilians, including military dependents in Korea. It could well bring about a Chinese intervention and direct confrontation with Beijing. It would shatter what remaining confidence America’s allies have in Washington’s good judgment.

 

Trump Is an Asshole: Victim Blaming Puerto Rico

A True Moment of National Disgrace:

On Twitter this morning, stung by criticism, President Trump attacked the people of Puerto Rico, all American citizens, as lazy and disorganized people who “want everything to be done for them.” I am cutting the verbatim text out of the tweets here.

“The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump. Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

There’s more. But I don’t think we need to hear more after these words.

Thanks to reporting from the big papers, we now have a general understanding of how this all unfolded. For a critical three or four days after Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, President Trump was away at his New Jersey golf resort, ranting about the NFL and generally not paying attention. It now seems that wasn’t merely a matter of optics and presidential statements. Critical time was lost and things didn’t happen. Once the scope of catastrophe began to become clear, Trump’s inaction began to generate criticism. Once that happened Trump proceeded to fold Puerto Rico into his comfort zone politics of grievance and narcissism. The focus shifted to Puerto Rico’s debt, ingratitude and – finally this morning – laziness and disorganization.

It does not discount or diminish Trump’s penchant for racist awfulness to note that a lot of this doesn’t seem to be by design or, perhaps better to say, forethought. It is more like reflex, in response to his own bumbling. Trump provoked his battle with the NFL out of a mix of personal, racist rage and desire to stoke up his supporters with a new white rights grievance controversy. This seems a little different. His own incompetence and indifference to his job responsibilities generated criticism and led him to make critical mistakes he could not undo. Once that happened, his own personality kicked in. The greased path to narcissistic injury, grievance and racist grievance political attacks was the inevitable reflex. It’s his comfort zone, his natural inclination.