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    Home / College Guide / Trav Trivia: Volume 15, Number 19
     Posted on Monday, September 16 @ 00:00:14 PDT
    College

    September 15, 2019 -- This week’s doggerel and tweets ( @Trav_McKinney ) – Hundreds of psychiatrists have become aware That in their professional judgement Trump needs mental health care There is no rule that says a crackpot can’t serve as head of state Special circumstances he may have to wait To be released as stable enough around the globe he will no longer scare. When you see an enormous golden comb over or a fierce mustache on prominent men you’ll say they’re just hairy But when they’re Donald Trump and John Bolton the other word I use for hairy is scary. Donald Trump is turning out to be Alabama bound Move the weather bureau there based on an old weather report he found To call a fierce storm a hurricane Or give it any other name It must move over and touch the Alabama ground. Here the cash registers go ring ring ring at the Trump family hotels and resorts If you intend to call on the USA bring bring bring monetary currency of all sorts For here the thing thing thing Trump insists is that you stay at his resorts Trump will sting sting sting like a besotted wasp if you don’t follow his norm You’ll have to spring spring spring to stay out of his harm So you better fling fling fling into Trumps arms.

    Democratic candidates debate: Resiliency https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhl6Rxaj9Ak Frank Bruni, NYT: Elizabeth Warren’s Formidable Stride Elizabeth Warren didn’t have her best debate on Thursday night, nor was she the most poetic or passionate candidate on that overcrowded stage. Beto O’Rourke, describing the toll of gun violence, forged a moment more moving than any of hers. Cory Booker had better one-liners. Pete Buttigieg’s beautifully shaped final answer put hers, delivered minutes earlier, almost immediately out of mind. But she demonstrated precisely why she has been on an upward trajectory in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and why that arc won’t be interrupted anytime soon. She showed how canny she can be. How cunning. Criticism came her way, and she brushed it off like so much lint. And she was evasive — not a noble quality but an essential one when you’re running for office. Idealism puts you in play. Slipperiness gets you the prize. I’ll come back to that last observation, but first: Afghanistan. Warren’s reputation isn’t staked on foreign-policy expertise. She focuses more on domestic issues than on international ones.

    But when she was asked whether she would pull remaining American troops out of Afghanistan no matter the state of the conflict there, she emphatically said yes, then gave an explanation that was its own miniature master class in political communication. She established authority by noting that she had traveled there — in the company of Senator John McCain, no less — and that she had grilled and listened hard to generals from her perch on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee. She framed her misgivings about this particular military engagement in accessible, even folksy terms, saying that she would repeatedly ask military leaders “what winning looks like” and “no one can describe it.” Then came the finishing touch, which made clear that hers wasn’t merely the perspective of some disconnected politician and that plenty in her background overlaps with the experiences of less powerful Americans. “I have three older brothers who all served in the military,” she said. “I understand firsthand the kind of commitment they have made. They will do anything we ask them to do. But we cannot ask them to solve problems that they alone cannot solve.

    ” Now that’s an answer. And that’s why Warren will move on from this debate in strong form. Will Joe Biden? I think so, at least for now. He may even benefit from having been the object of a nasty attack by Julián Castro, who all but accused him of suffering from dementia. The two of them were quarreling over Biden’s contradictory turns of phrase about his health care plan, a hazy quasi-discrepancy that Castro decided to treat as a referendum on Biden’s very cognition. “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Castro asked, as if wielding some hybrid of stethoscope and saber. Then, again: “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I mean, I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that.” It was gratuitous: Democratic voters can make their own judgments about Biden’s manner of speaking, which has long been sloppy and meandering, if not quite to this extent. Castro’s pointing it out wasn’t illuminating. It was just plain crude. Buttigieg indicated as much, smartly but a tad too theatrically.

    “This is why presidential debates are becoming unwatchable,” he said. “This reminds everybody of what they cannot stand about Washington, scoring points against each other, poking at each other.” “Yeah, that’s called the Democratic primary election, Pete,” Castro responded as he quickly developed a knack for condescension and sank deeper into his hole. “That’s called an election.” True enough, but I doubt that Castro’s campaign will be making and selling T-shirts with the phrase. I also doubt that anyone’s fortunes will change much as a result of the debate, though some of the candidates were more appealing and compelling than others. O’Rourke found a fight and fire that had been missing since his star-making Senate campaign. Buttigieg proved again that he knows what distinguishes him in this field of contenders and how to allude to those qualities in any and every riff. If you finished watching the debate and didn’t realize that he was the youngest candidate on the stage and the only military veteran and gay, then you probably also didn’t register how funny Kamala Harris finds herself, which is to say that Castro would have legitimate issues with your level of awareness.

    Something weird has happened to Harris: She has gone from smoothly generating electric moments — on the Senate Judiciary Committee, at the first Democratic presidential debate — to contriving them, so that they have no glow or sizzle at all. I want to root for her but she just won’t let me. Perhaps the most important figure on the stage was Amy Klobuchar, by which I mean that she most readily accepted and aggressively played the necessary role of suggesting that the most progressive proposals — namely, Medicare for All, backed by both Warren and Bernie Sanders — existed in the realm not of the doable but of the dream-able, and that they weren’t going to fix needy Americans’ lives anytime soon. “When it comes to our health care and when it comes to our premiums, I go with the doctor’s creed, which is, do no harm,” she said. Then, referring to Sanders’s Medicare for All legislation, she added: “While Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill. And on page eight — on page eight of the bill — it says that we will no longer have private insurance as we know it. And that means that 149 million Americans will no longer be able to have their current insurance.

    ” “ I don’t think that’s a bold idea, she concluded. “I think it’s a bad idea.” Don’t expect her to get any traction, though. She’s campaigning — admirably — in the realm of the doable. The dream-able is always going to be more vivid and romantic, and that’s where Warren dwells. I worry lots about how Warren’s grandly liberal plans would play in a general election, but I’m impressed by her increasingly skillful navigation of the Democratic primary. Performance-wise, she’s pulling away from Sanders. He shouts and then shouts louder. She’s hardly quiet, but she has grown better and better at layering in personal anecdotes and dabs of humor, which he has never been any good at. He still favors the word “oligarchic,” as if saying it for the zillionth time will finally make it roll off the tongue. She instead talks of “multinational corporations” and their corrupt chief executives, using more concrete images and language and doing, from a different end of the political spectrum, what Trump did with such effectiveness: identifying a class of villains on whom all of the country’s problems can be blamed.

    She has learned to sail over and around potentially choppy waters. On Thursday night she spoke of her lifelong passion for education without giving the slightest hint of how much her positions on some education-related issues had changed over time. (She once supported vouchers, for example, but not one of her opponents onstage bothered to bring this up.) She also refused to say whether Medicare for All would require a middle-class tax increase. One of the debate’s moderators, George Stephanopoulos, asked her, and then Biden pressed her, but she never grew flustered and never succumbed, instead stressing repeatedly that in terms of people’s reduced health care costs, they’d be ahead of the game. You could call that deceptive. You could also call it disciplined. I shook my head but tipped my hat. She’ll be in this thing until the end. Frank Bruni, NYT: We Will Never, Ever Be Rid of Donald Trump House Democrats are inching closer to a formal impeachment inquiry, as if that’s how best to exorcise Donald Trump from the body politic. Mark Sanford just became the third Republican to announce a 2020 primary challenge and to dream of a successful insurrection against an emperor whom most of the party meekly obeys.

    And 10 Democrats will take the stage on Thursday night for the party’ next presidential debate, each determined to present himself or herself as the surest route to the far side of Trump. So now is as good a time as any to state what should be obvious to anyone who has considered Trump’s psychology, registered his megalomania and taken full account of his behavior to date. We will never, ever be rid of him. Oh, sure, we may remove him from the presidency , which is no small thing. But that won’t get him out of the nation’s bloodstream. It sure as hell won’t shut him up. If you think he has demolished all the norms of what it means to be the president of the United States, just wait until you see the sledgehammer he takes to the traditional role and restraint of former presidents. He won’t be at an easel in remote Texas, like George W. Bush. He won’t be biting his tongue and taking big, deep, centering breaths, like Barack Obama. A foundation devoted to good works? Been there, done that, and it was a perfect mirror of the man, which is to stay a complete sham. It’s under investigation by the State of New York. No, he’ll be tweeting, bleating, ranting and raging in precisely the manner that he is now, just without the nuclear codes.

    And if that transition happens after November 2020, he’ll declare the election suspect, fraudulent, the result of a media crusade against him, the fruit of illegal votes. He pressed that narrative in 2016 even though he was declared the victor. A winner that sore is poised to be an epically nasty loser, and I have an easier time imagining a “Thelma and Louise” remake starring Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin than I do the Trumps graciously beckoning the Warrens across the threshold of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The post-Trump landscape — or, rather, the impossibility of one — is on my mind in part because of a prediction by Brad Parscale, the manager of the Trump 2020 campaign, at a California Republican convention last weekend. “The Trumps will be a dynasty that will last for decades, propelling the Republican Party into a new party,” he said in a speech to delegates. Then The Atlantic published a riveting cover story by McKay Coppins that in some ways raised the same prospect, reporting that Ivanka and Don Jr. are jockeying to be their dad’s rightful political heir and noting that the Trump progeny are genetically wired to wring every last droplet from their father’s celebrity that they can.

    Flashing back to the night in November 2016 when the family watched the election returns, Coppins wrote that they were in shock, because Trump “was supposed to go down in a spectacular blaze of made-for-TV martyrdom that all of them could capitalize on. Ivanka had a book coming out. Don and Eric were working on a line of patriotically themed budget hotels. And preliminary talks were underway to launch a Trump-branded TV network that would turn disgruntled voters into viewers. Now they needed a new plan.” Apparently it’s one modeled after the Kennedys and the Bushes, only with a much bigger budget for hair and makeup. Best of luck, Trumpkins. I just don’t see it. Ivanka — or, as I like to think of her, Our Lady of the DMZ — has shown a shocking tone-deafness during her White House romp. And Don Jr. was the nitwit emailing ecstatically and then lying badly about that June 2016 meeting with the Russian, um, adoption evangelists. These two have all of Dad’s gall but only a scintilla of his guile. Trump won’t hang around by proxy, in a next generation of opportunists with his surname or agenda. That would negate the whole point of his pivot into politics.

    It wasn’t to promote ideas; it was to promote himself . Health permitting, he’ll move heaven and earth to maintain his omnipresence in American life, by which I mean he’ll be as outrageous as he must to stay in the news. And we in the media will confront a decision: Give him what he wants, or let go of him and all the eyeballs he draws? Even if we let go, there’s the strong possibility, as Coppins noted, that he’ll establish his own media enterprise, with a network where the news really is fake, adulation doesn’t hinge on nuisances like the ballot box and Sean Hannity isn’t the model for Trump veneration. He’s the baseline. From that coddled perch Trump can take out his big black Sharpie and write higher vote counts over his actual, official ones. He can draw horns on John Bolton and a halo over William Barr. He can sketch a second White House adjacent to the first one but taller, with gold trim. That’s where he’ll be living, his power fictive but his presence ineluctable, snappily ever after. Eugene Robinson, WaPo: Congress is shirking its constitutional duty by not impeaching Trump House Democrats can’t have it both ways.

    Either they’re impeaching President Trump or they’re not — and it looks like they’re not. Why Congress is not fulfilling what would seem to be its constitutional duty has nothing to do with the merits of the case against Trump, who adds to the list of his impeachable offenses almost daily. It has everything to do with a political calculation that I hope Democrats do not come to regret. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said this week his panel is “examining the various malfeasances of the president with the view toward possibly . . . recommending articles of impeachment to the House.” But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this is just a “path of investigation” that might lead to a formal impeachment inquiry or, presumably, might not. Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said Wednesday the House has not launched an impeachment inquiry, but later clarified that he fully supports the “investigation” whose subject, according to Nadler, is impeachment. On Thursday, Nadler’s committee approved procedural guidelines for its investigation or inquiry or whatever anyone wants to call it.

    “I salute them for that work,” Pelosi said later. But she added that “people are saying it’s good to be careful about how we proceed.” Enough with the oh-so-subtle semantic distinctions. Do something or don’t — and be prepared to explain why. With respect, how much more investigation do we need? Former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III spent two years compiling what amounts to an impeachment road map. Part Two of his voluminous report clearly establishes, to the satisfaction of more than 1,000 former prosecutors, that Trump’s actions would have justified multiple charges of obstruction of justice. If you take the view that impeachment requires the president to have committed a statutory crime, Mueller handed it to Congress on a platter. But impeachment doesn’t even necessitate a finding that the president, beyond a reasonable doubt, violated the law. The framers left it vague, declining to define what the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” means. But from their writings we know they deeply feared that a president might use his expansive powers to act as a tyrant rather than as a servant of the people. “Abuse of power” is not a federal crime, but it was one of the impeachment articles being prepared against President Richard M.

    Nixon before he resigned. Trump abuses his power in ways that must have the framers whirring like turbines in their graves. To cite just a few examples, look at his border policy. He ignored a court ruling and continued to separate migrant families and jail children in cages and deny them soap or toothbrushes. When Congress, which has the power of the purse, declined to fund his ridiculous border wall, he snatched billions of dollars that had been duly appropriated for other programs. According to credible reports, he told underlings to break the law to keep migrants out of the country, if necessary, and promised to pardon them if they got in trouble. Beyond abuse of power, there is the principle that no president should use the office to corruptly enrich himself. In some cases, there appear to be clear violations of the emoluments clause. In others, there’s just plain old-fashioned graft. Of all the hotels in Scotland, U.S. military crews can find nowhere to stay except at Trump’s overpriced golf resort? Seriously? And Congress thinks this is acceptable? I believe the framers would also consider impeachable the way Trump lies constantly to the American people. I don’t need to give examples; just look at his Twitter feed or listen to the comments he makes on the White House lawn.

    I know Trump may believe concepts such as trust and honor are for suckers, but his incessant lying defiles the presidency — and members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, know it does. But they do nothing about it. The damage Trump is doing is limited only by his lack of focus. We can only hope that after he is gone things return to normal, though that is not guaranteed. And heaven help us if there is a genuine crisis while he’s still in office. The political calculation that Democrats are making is that impeachment, especially if followed by acquittal in the GOP-controlled Senate, might make Trump’s reelection more likely. There’s no way of knowing, but I doubt it would make much of a difference one way or the other. Trump’s going to inflame his base anyway. Democrats had better motivate theirs. But everyone should realize that history’s calculation must be considered as well. Future generations will judge all who decided, for whatever reason, to put politics above duty. Paul Krugman, NYT: Trump Hits the Panic Button Donald Trump marked the anniversary of 9/11 by repeating several lies about his own actions on that day. But that wasn’t his only concern.

    He also spent part of the day writing a series of tweets excoriating Federal Reserve officials as “Boneheads” and demanding that they immediately put into effect emergency measures to stimulate the economy — emergency measures that are normally only implemented in the face of a severe crisis. Trump’s diatribe was revealing in two ways. First, it’s now clear that he’s in full-blown panic over the failure of his economic policies to deliver the promised results. Second, he’s clueless about why his policies aren’t working, or about anything else involving economic policy.Before I get to the economics, let’s talk about one indicator of Trump’s cluelessness: his remarks about federal debt. In addition to demanding that the Fed cut interest rates below zero, Trump declared that “we should then start to refinance our debt,” because “the USA should always be paying the lowest rate.” Observers were left scratching their heads, wondering what he was talking about. Actually, however, it’s fairly obvious. Trump thinks that federal debt is like a business loan, which you can pay down early to take advantage of lower interest rates.

    He’s clearly unaware that federal debt actually consists of bonds, which can’t be prepaid (which is one reason interest rates on federal debt are always lower than, say, rates on home mortgages). That is, he imagines that the government’s finances can be managed as if the U.S. were a casino or a golf course, and it never occurred to him to ask anyone at Treasury whether that’s how it works. But back to the economy. Why is Trump panicking? After all, while the economy is slowing, we’re not in a recession, and it’s by no means clear that a recession is even on the horizon. There’s nothing in the data that would justify radical monetary stimulus — stimulus, by the way, that Republicans, including Trump, denounced during the Obama years, when the economy really needed it. Furthermore, despite Trump’s claims that the Fed has somehow done something crazy, monetary policy has actually been looser than Trump’s own economic team expected when making their rosy forecasts. In the summer of 2018 the White House’s economic projections envisioned that this year three-month interest rates would average 2.7 percent, while 10-year rates would be 3.

    2 percent. The actual rates as I write this are 1.9 and 1.7 percent, respectively. But while there’s no economic emergency, Trump apparently feels that he’s facing a political emergency. He expected a booming economy to be his big winning issue next year. If, as now seems likely, economic performance is mediocre at best, he’s in deep trouble. Remember, Trump’s two signature economic policies were his 2017 tax cut and his rapidly escalating trade war with China. The first was supposed to lead to a decade or more of rapid economic growth, while the second was supposed to revive U.S. manufacturing. In reality, however, the tax cut delivered at most a couple of quarters of higher growth. More specifically, huge tax breaks for corporations haven’t delivered the promised surge in wages and business investment; instead, corporations used the windfall to buy back stocks and pay higher dividends. At the same time, the trade war has turned out to be a major drag on the economy — bigger than many people, myself included, expected. Until last fall the general expectation was that Trump would deal with China the way he dealt with Mexico: make a few mainly cosmetic changes to existing arrangements, claim victory, and move on.

    Once it became clear that he was really serious about confrontation, however, business confidence began falling, dragging investment down with it. And voters have noticed: Trump’s approval rating on the economy, while still higher than his overall approval, has started to decline. Hence the panicky demands that the Fed pull out all the stops. But while Trump realizes that he’s in trouble, there’s no indication that he understands why. He’s not the kind of person who ever admits, even to himself, that he made mistakes; his instinct is always to blame someone else while doubling down on his failed policies. Even actions that look like a slight policy softening, like his announcement of a two-week delay in implementing some China tariffs, betray a deep incomprehension of the problem — which has as much to do with his capriciousness as with the tariffs per se. Policy zigzags, even if they involve delaying tariffs, just add to the will-he-or-won’t-he uncertainty that’s causing companies to put investment on hold. So what happens next? Trump could reverse course, and do what most people expected a year ago, reaching a deal with China that more or less restores the status quo.

    But that would be a de facto admission of defeat — and at this point it’s not clear why the Chinese would trust him to honor any such deal past Election Day. The fact is that when it comes to economic policy, Trump has trapped himself in a bad place. David Axelrod: Let Trump Destroy Trump Mr. Axelrod was the senior strategist for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. The person most capable of defeating Donald Trump is Donald Trump. If Democrats are smart, they will let him do the job. President Trump thrives on outrage and resentment. He seethes with it, stirs it in others and mines it for his own political profit. His political project relies on driving Americans to their cultural and ideological corners. He is Pavlov. We are the dogs. Mr. Trump’s serial assaults on the decency and the decorum upon which civil society depends are enraging — and meant to be. It is only natural to respond to his every provocation with righteous indignation. My advice to the Democratic nominee next year is: Donʼt play. Wrestling is Mr. Trump’s preferred form of combat. But beating him will require jiu-jitsu, a different style of battle typically defined as the art of manipulating an opponent’s force against himself rather than confronting it with one’s own force.

    Mr. Trump was elected to shake things up and challenge the political establishment. And to many of his core supporters, his incendiary dog whistles, bullhorn attacks and nonstop flouting of “political correctness” remain energizing symbols of authenticity. But polling and focus groups reflect a growing unease among a small but potentially decisive group of voters who sided with Mr. Trump in 2016 but are increasingly turned off by the unremitting nastiness, the gratuitous squabbles and the endless chaos he sows. Plenty of attention has been paid to the historic shift in suburban areas Mr. Trump narrowly carried in 2016 but that broke decisively with his party last fall. That revolt was led by college-educated white women, who overwhelmingly turned against Republican candidates. But what should be of even greater concern to Mr. Trump is the potential erosion among the non-college-educated white women he is counting on as a core constituency. Those women gave Mr. Trump a 27-point margin over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Yet in a recent Fox News poll, Mr. Trump was beating former Vice President Joe Biden by just four points in that group. If I were sitting in the Trump war room, this number, more than any other, would alarm me.

    He won the presidency by the slimmest of margins in three battleground states. With little place to grow, even a small erosion of support among these women could prove fatal to Mr. Trump’s chances. While they are inclined to many of his positions, the thing that is driving these voters away is Mr. Trump himself. And one thing we can be sure of as the election approaches: Donald Trump is not going to change. Given that Mr. Trump’s approval rating has been hovering around 40 percent throughout his presidency, his obvious and only strategy is to turn his dial further into the red. He will try to raise the stakes by painting the election as a choice between himself and a radical, left-wing apocalypse. He will bay about socialism, open borders and “deep state” corruption and relentlessly work to inflame and exploit racial and cultural divides. But as Mr. Trump seeks to rev up his base, he also runs a significant risk of driving away a small but decisive cohort of voters he needs. His frenetic efforts to create a panic over the immigrant caravan in the days leading up to the 2018 midterms may have stoked his base, but it also generated a backlash that contributed to major losses for his party.

    With everything on the line and nothing, to his mind, out of bounds, the same dynamic will be in play in 2020, and this creates an opportunity for Democrats — if their party’s message allows Trump defectors to comfortably cross that bridge. There is a legion of arguments on moral, ethical and policy grounds for Mr. Trump’s defeat, and that’s leaving out the sheer incompetence. But the most effective question for Democrats to get voters to ask is simply whether the country can survive another four years like this. Can we continue to wake each day to the tweets and tantrums, the nasty, often gratuitous fights and the ensuing turmoil that surrounds this president? Can we make progress on issues of concern to the way millions of people live their lives with a leader who looks for every opportunity to divide us for his own political purposes? And is a Trump freed of the burden of re-election really going to be less combative and more constructive in a second term? Um, no. Each time Mr. Trump lashes out, as he will with increasing ferocity and frequency as the election approaches, these questions will gain more resonance. Every erratic escalation — every needless quarrel, firing or convulsive policy lurch — will provide additional evidence in the case for change.

    Mr. Trump’s impulse is always to create a binary choice, forcing Americans to retreat to tribe. He wants to define the battle around divisive cultural issues that will hem in his supporters, and it would be seductive for Democrats to chase every tweeted rabbit down the hole. The president would welcome a pitched battle over lines of race, ideology and culture. But while Mr. Trump’s thermonuclear politics may rally both his base and Democrats who slumbered in 2016, it is the paralyzing disorder and anxiety his bilious behavior creates that is a distressing turnoff to voters at the margins who will make the difference. To win, the Democrats will have turn Mr. Trump’s negative energy against him without embodying it themselves. Gail Collins, NYT: 10 Candidates, No Weather Maps O.K., concerned citizens, it’s debate time. Come back here and sit down! This is important. Let’s see if you’re prepared. First, name the 10 Democratic presidential candidates who will be sharing the stage Thursday night. Give yourself a big pat on the back if you got them all. Light tap on the shoulder if you got six or seven. If you failed to remember Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, just leave the room.

    Admit it. You’re not going to watch this thing at all, are you? Those of you who have demonstrated your commitment should now recall the debate goes on for three hours. But there’s lots to look forward to! Will Beto O’Rourke obey the Democratic National Committee ban on “foul language”? He’s been using it a lot, particularly since the mass shooting in El Paso, when he laced into Donald Trump: “He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. I don’t know, like, members of the press, what the [expletive]?” Now this was totally understandable, given the terrible tragedy and Trump’s appalling history of racism. However, it’s one thing to blurt out a four-letter word at a moment of great stress. It’s another to have your campaign sell T-shirts that say repeatedly “THIS IS F*CKED UP.” And what about Joe Biden? Everybody’s waiting to see if Biden will do something … strange. Maybe refer to one of the questioners as “Mom.” Or start telling stories about his adventures in a M*A*S*H unit in the Korean War, forgetting that was a TV series. So, we’ll be watching to see if Biden bloops or Beto bleeps.

    Two deeply different matters, since so far in this campaign, swearing is pretty much the only area where O’Rourke is leading the pack. And nobody really cares that Biden accidentally called the president “Donald Hump.” Admit it — you chortled. At the debate, our former vice president will be squished in between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. That in itself should make it worth tuning in. If things go well, Biden could market T-shirts bragging “It’s Cool To Be In The Middle.” There’s a popular presumption that Biden needs to perform at least decently in these events if he wants to win the nomination. But having trouble handling Senator Warren in verbal combat is way different from being able to hold your own against Donald Trump. Particularly when the subject gets to whether a president should make up his own weather maps. How much of the audience will be thinking about age? Biden, as the whole world knows, will soon turn 77. And Sanders is 78. Warren is 70, but she campaigns like a maniac — her record for posing for selfies with her fans has probably passed 45,000 by now. Biden is taking things fairly easy, in a world where hitting 13 events in three weeks is sort of like goofing off.

    Still, if he can stand up on the stage for three hours trying to look both genial and hard-charging, that’s a pretty good sign that his age doesn’t matter. Or at least doesn’t matter above all else. There are a few troubling precedents. One of the presidents who was oldest at the time of his inauguration, William Henry Harrison, died after a month in office. And the very oldest, Donald Trump, has been known to forget which country his father was born in. Meanwhile, I’m betting Kamala Harris, 54, will try to vie with Pete Buttigieg, 37, in an appeal to the youth vote. Only saying that because she just sent out an anti-Trump fund-raising email with the subject line “This dude’s gotta go.” It’s sometimes a little hard to keep track of the actual issues when everybody’s vying to be youthful/likable/powerful/memorable/not-disaster-prone. Warren and Biden’s history of fighting over financial law will surely surface. They tangled in 2005 when credit companies wanted to make it harder for average Americans to declare bankruptcy. She sided with average Americans and he sided with, um, the banks. Which of them do you think will try to bring that up? Happy to report there will no longer be any questions in which everybody has to raise a hand.

    (“Do you think a mass murderer who once assaulted a beloved guard who was the sole support of 14 grandchildren should be allowed to vote? Yes or no?”) This is, of course, only one step in the long road toward … next year. Another debate is coming in October, which will probably have even more people. Remember the other candidates? How many can you name? Five? Fantastic. Eight? You’re beginning to get me a little worried. One of them, Tom Steyer, has already qualified for the next round. He’s the billionaire who keeps running ads saying that he’s a better businessman than Donald Trump. What do you think about that? A) My cousin Fred who runs a pickle stand is a better businessman than Donald Trump. B) Is Steyer’s slogan going to be “What this country needs is a hedge fund manager in the White House”? C) Just promise me I won’t ever have to listen to Bill de Blasio. Have a great debate night. Probably a good idea to skip the drinking games. There have been some suggestions you should take a shot every time somebody says “existential threat,” but remember, we’re talking about three hours here. Eugene Robinson, WaPo: Help hurricane victims.

    Fight to stop climate change, too. “It is impossible to prepare for an apocalypse,” Dr. Duane Sands, the health minister of the Bahamas, told reporters Sunday. Somehow, though, we all had better try. Those who have witnessed the devastation wrought by Hurricane Dorian on Grand Bahama, Great Abaco and Little Abaco islands struggle to describe it. “Some places it’s like nothing happened,” Mark Green, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told The Post after an aerial tour. “Other places, it’s like they were hit by a nuclear bomb.” Dorian, then a Category 5 storm bearing sustained winds of 185 miles per hour and gusts even stronger, stalled over the northern Bahamas and barely moved for nearly three full days. The result was the kind of damage more commonly seen from tornados, except that a tornado touchdown typically lasts just minutes. In the town of Marsh Harbour on Great Abaco, entire neighborhoods were smashed into rubble and then the broken pieces were blown around like confetti. Journalists who have reached those places say the smell of death is everywhere. The official toll stood at just 45 on Monday, but authorities have understandably prioritized the care and feeding of thousands of bereft survivors over the counting of the dead.

    It is assumed that the final number, or estimate, will be orders of magnitude higher. Sands, who oversees the grim tally, has used the word “staggering” to describe the loss of life. An exact number of casualties will likely never be known because Dorian’s tsunami-like storm surge carried many victims away. Survivors have told wrenching stories of how they watched helplessly as loved ones were swept out to sea. Tens of thousands of people who remain in the devastated areas, and who have lost everything, desperately need food, shelter, clothing and medical attention. This slow-motion catastrophe is unfolding barely 100 miles off the coast of Florida. One thing the United States government can do is avoid a repeat of what happened Sunday night, when scores of refugees were forced to disembark from a ferry about to head from Grand Bahama to Fort Lauderdale because they did not have visas to enter the country. U.S. Customs and Border Protection blamed the ferry company; the ferry’s crew reportedly blamed CBP. Whoever was responsible, such cruelty must not happen again. Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott of Florida have asked President Trump to waive all visa requirements for Bahamians with relatives in the United States.

    In other respects, U.S. officials seem to be doing everything they can to help the Bahamas cope with the immediate tragedy. Sadly, however, our government is willfully blind to the bigger picture. Climate scientists have predicted that human-induced global warming will make hurricanes stronger, more laden with rainfall and, possibly, more likely to stall — just like Dorian. Rising sea levels, due to climate change, make low-lying coastal communities more vulnerable than in the past. Trump may believe climate change is a hoax, but the next hurricane could potentially do to his Palm Beach estate what Dorian did to Marsh Harbour. Our government should be moving on two fronts. First, it should join the rest of the world in acknowledging the need to try to limit climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels. It is insane that while the Trump administration sends resources to help the Bahamas, it is simultaneously throwing a legal fit over the decision by California and major car manufacturers to make their vehicles emit less heat-trapping carbon than Trump would prefer. The president refuses to see the contradiction. Perhaps someone could draw it for him with a Sharpie. For a start, we should immediately resume participation in the landmark Paris accords.

    Trump won’t; perhaps his successor will. Federal officials also should begin taking seriously the increased risks created by warming that has already taken place and further warming that is inevitable. That means, basically, preparing for the next apocalypse. Think of the immense loss of life and property that would have been suffered had Dorian parked itself over Miami instead. Then work backward: What preparations and precautions could have mitigated that hypothetical damage? Do we need to change building codes and development patterns? Do we need to create more natural or manmade storm-surge barriers? In 2050, when sea levels are projected to have risen an additional foot and a half, will some coastal areas no longer be safe for habitation? Let’s open our hearts to the suffering people of the Bahamas. But let’s also try to make sure that the Bahamas — and our own coastlines — have a viable future. Karen Tumulty, WaPo: With the Taliban invite to Camp David, Trump continues his desecration of norms Eighteen years ago, just days after nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives in deadly terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and his national security team cloistered themselves for the weekend at a secure presidential retreat on the Catoctin Mountain ridge in northern Maryland.

    The country was turning to them for the two things it needed most at that moment. Bush and his advisers formed a council of war, figuring out the options to strike back against the al-Qaeda terrorists who had planned the slaughter and the Taliban forces who were harboring them. But just as deep as America’s anger was its need for comfort, and no one but a president could lead the way on those first, tentative steps toward healing. So at one point that Saturday evening at Camp David, they all took a break from the first challenge to ponder the second. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft sat down at the piano and they joined in on gospel hymns. That night at dinner, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice offered a prayer: “We have seen the face of evil, but we are not afraid.” Now, we learn that the current occupant of the White House actually proposed inviting that murderous face of evil — the Taliban — to Camp David itself. What’s more, he planned to do it just days before the anniversary of 9/11. That nothing is sacred to President Trump is something we should have figured out long ago. But that does not mean we should lose our ability to be shocked by his continuous desecration of collective norms, institutions and symbols.

    Al-Qaeda carried out the actual attacks on 9/11, but its operation would not have been possible without the support and assistance of the Islamic militants of the Taliban. “The immediate problem we faced after 9/11 was to find a strategy to defeat the Taliban,” Rice wrote in her 2011 memoir. Nearly two decades later, however, the Taliban is still there, and it has never renounced the supporting role it played on 9/11. Trump’s half-baked idea to invite its leaders to Camp David was another one of those reality-television-style stunts that he seems to find irresistible. Camp David exists to provide our leaders a spot for contemplation and reflection — two things for which Trump has little regard. Shortly before he became president, Trump told European journalists: “Camp David is very rustic, it’s nice, you’d like it. You know how long you’d like it? For about 30 minutes.” Trump no doubt regards the place as he does everything else — as a branding opportunity. He perhaps even thought there might be a Nobel Peace Prize waiting for him as a reward. He assumed Americans would hear an echo of the retreat’s most famous moment, which came in 1978.

    That year, then-President Jimmy Carter hosted weeks of summit negotiations there that produced the Camp David Accords, a framework for Middle East peace signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Built in the 1930s by the Works Project Administration, the site was converted to a retreat for Franklin D. Roosevelt soon after the United States joined World War II, giving him a place to escape the pressure and heat of Washington. So enamored was FDR with the setting and the view that he christened it Shangri-La, after the fictional Himalayan paradise in the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon.” Back then, the existence of the retreat was still a state secret. Roosevelt traveled back and forth in the only armored car in the United States, which had been seized from gangster Al Capone in 1932 after he was nailed for tax evasion. For Roosevelt, it also became a secluded venue for sensitive business. He and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did some of the planning for D-Day there. To Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had grown up in a Kansas farm town, the name Shangri-La sounded a tad too fancy for a place he went to relax. He changed it in 1953 to Camp David, after his young grandson.

    Eisenhower also set a precedent for inviting adversaries to Camp David, as well as allies. In 1959, he hosted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev there for two days, in talks that began on a high note of optimism but failed to bring them any closer. “There have been plenty of so-called bad people brought up to Camp David for meetings,” Trump said on Monday. “And the alternative was the White House, and you wouldn’t have been happy with that, either.” It is admirable that Trump wants to end a war that has gone on for far too long. But an invitation to Camp David conveys legitimacy, something the Taliban has yet to earn.

     
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