IDIOTS ONLY NEED APPLY (profanity alert)

Boehner worries about the deepening fissures in American society. But he sees Trump as more of a symptom than the cause of what is a longer arc of social and ideological alienation, fueled by talk radio and Fox News on the right and MSNBC and social media on the left. "People thought in '09, '10, '11, that the country couldn't be divided more. And you go back to Obama's campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion." Why is that? "Because it wasn't him!" Boehner replies. "It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out ... they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide."

He continues: "I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we'd go play golf. But you know, who was that right-wing guy, [Mark] Levin? He went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys--I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they're beating the living [***]t out of me." Boehner, seated in his favorite recliner, lights another cigarette. "I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, 'Listen, you're nuts.' We had this really blunt conversation. Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn't going to be a right-wing idiot."

Boehner believes Americans are ill-informed because of their retreat into media echo chambers, one of two incurable causes of the country's polarization. Another is inextricably related: the unwillingness of lawmakers to collaborate across the aisle, for fear of recriminations from the base. Boehner says the fact he and Obama golfed together only once--and agreed that it was usually better for him to sneak into the White House--speaks to how the two parties punish compromise. He doesn't foresee this toxic political climate improving, ticking off potential fixes--term limits, redistricting reform--that he says won't make a bit of difference. "It's going to take an intervening event for Americans to realize that first, we are Americans," he says. An intervening event? "Something cataclysmic," he responds, gazing upward.

Boehner often felt more welcome among Democrats than he did within his own party. When he made his retirement announcement, he told me, Obama called him and said, "Boehner, you can't do this, man. I'm gonna miss you." Biden feels the same way. "The only way we're going to get this back together again," he says, "is with some more John Boehners."

The starkest divide in recent Washington has been between longtime pols like Boehner and Biden who yearn for a more amicable time, and newcomers who view the bitter acrimony of the Bush and Obama years as normal. The fever might have broken in 2016, Boehner says. But the parties chose the two most polarizing nominees in modern history. "The only Republican who Hillary Clinton possibly could have beaten was Donald Trump, and the only Democrat that Trump possibly could have beaten was Clinton," Boehner smirks. "Three hundred and thirty million Americans, and we got those two." [...]

As a young House member, Boehner was instrumental in cleaning up Congress. As a committee chairman, he wrote and ushered through one of the premier policies of the Bush administration--even if the results were not what he envisioned. And as speaker, Boehner accomplished more than conservatives will ever give him credit for: winning significant spending cuts under a Democratic president; protecting the overwhelming majority of Americans from a tax hike; keeping earmarks banned despite having every reason to bring them back; and his proudest accomplishment, finding a permanent "Doc Fix," which solved a nagging problem with the Medicare payment formula and could produce nearly $3 trillion in savings over the next three decades.

"He came to Congress wanting to burn it to the ground," says Sommers, his former chief of staff. "And by the time he left, he was the ultimate institutionalist."

WHAT THE rIGHT SEEKS TO MEMORIALIZE:

The undersigned UNC School of Law faculty respectfully request that the UNC administration take immediate action to remove the monument of an armed Confederate soldier, known as Silent Sam, looming at the heart of UNC's main campus. While we do not favor shutting down the ability of individuals to voice disagreeable opinions, we believe that the statue sends a message of white supremacy that the university should refuse to endorse.

On June 2, 1913, at the monument's public dedication, Confederate war veteran Julian S. Carr said, "The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race. . . . if every State of the South had done what North Carolina did . . . the political geography of America would have been re-written." He then told this story: "less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings."

From the moment of its dedication, Carr's racist words cemented the monument as a symbol of white supremacy, violence and indignity. Even today, UNC's website acknowledges that many see Silent Sam as "a glorification of the Confederacy and thus a tacit defense of slavery."

FOLLOW THE RUBLES:

It's hard to remember sometimes given the insanity that has occurred since, but eyebrows were raised across the spectrum when Manafort was initially hired as Trump's campaign manager back in 2016. Manafort was an ancillary player in Republican politics and already clearly compromised. My colleague Martin Longman noted earlier this year that Manafort was closely connected to Roger Stone, himself a disgraced crackpot with his own insalubrious ties and connection to likely Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0.

Manafort was a terrible choice for campaign manager, both in terms of competence and optics. It was neither a pick designed to buoy his populist credentials, nor was it a sop to the GOP establishment that Trump desperately needed at the time. The only thing Manafort had in his favor was his close ties to Putin, and there is no conceivable reason to have hired him except to leverage those ties.

If Manafort is indeed the primary target of Mueller's probe, it's a guarantee that the Trump campaign absolutely intended to collude closely with Russia as a longshot path to a difficult election.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION IS ABOUT SELF-DETERMINATION, NOT LINES ON A MAP:

In 1991-92, two things happened. First came the fall of the Soviet Union; then came the signing of the Maastricht Treaty and the creation of the European Union. Border issues began to drive events again. The border of the Soviet Union collapsed, and a multitude of countries popped up to reclaim their past. There were many questions about borders that were mumbled about. The border of Ukraine and Belarus had moved far to the west in 1945. The borders in the Caucasus were poorly defined. The borders in Central Asia were theoretical. And the borders between Eastern European countries had been the subject of suspended dispute.

For Eastern European countries, other problems took precedence: establishing national sovereignty, finding their place in a Europe that they longed to join, and building a new life for their people. They let the border issue drop - for the most part.

Yugoslavia and the Caucasus were exceptions that drove home the lesson of European borders. There, outside the framework of the EU and of little consequence to others, more than 100,000 people died. Compare this to the Velvet Divorce of the Czechs and Slovaks, which took place within the context of future European states and left no one dead. After this, and with Yugoslavia and the Caucasus in mind, the European Union tried to reinstate the principle that borders were sacrosanct. It provided what it had promised - peace and prosperity - and treated borders as anachronistic. No one was supposed to care where the lines were drawn.

But there was a problem. The European Union had affirmed the principle of national self-determination while avoiding the question of what a nation actually was. A nation was, under the bloc's definition, any political entity that was in place when the EU was formed. There was little consideration after that.

This is why Catalonia is so important, along with Scotland. The Scots rejected a divorce by a startlingly narrow vote. One would have expected 90 percent of Scots to want to remain in the United Kingdom. Slightly more than 55 percent wanted to, which means secessionists are within striking distance of secession - which would not only divide Scotland from England, but would also maintain the divide among the Scots.

Add to this another critical element. Catalonia has been part of Spain for a long time, but it has considered itself a unique nation apart for an even longer time. Spain will not legalize an independence vote. The underlying questions are the ones the Europeans tried to bury, particularly after Yugoslavia: What is a nation, and what rights does it have? Both Scotland and Catalonia are nations. Do they therefore have a right to national determination or have they lost that right? And what are the consequences if the Catalans disagree?

This is not the only such issue festering in Europe. Hungary was partitioned between Romania and Slovakia. Does it have a right to reclaim these lands? Belgium was a British invention binding the Dutch and French in an unhappy marriage. Can they divorce? Lviv used to be a very Polish city, and now it is part of Ukraine. Can western Ukraine secede and its people rejoin the countries they were citizens of before 1945?

THE LAST BATCH OF WOGS ALWAYS OPPOSES THE NEXT:

At some point since 2000, I noticed that the right-wing chorus pontificating from screens in bars and shops was filled by men with names like Hannity, O'Reilly, and Buchanan. Nobody else seemed to care, so I let it go as one of those oddities that interested only me.

Then came Bannon's ascension as Trump's eminence grise , and it seemed impossible to ignore. This can't be accidental. Why have these white men come to the fore, rather than a more multicultural Catholic cohort --a Pole, an Italian, a German, and so on?

The origins of the sneering, baiting, biting style of O'Reilly et al are obvious. All of them can be traced to Joe McCarthy's rise to stardom, propelled by his gift for lurid innuendo and theatrical outrage. He set the precedent for a paranoiac ethno-populism that equates conventional power elites with treasonous conspiracy, much as Robert Welch, Jr., founder of the John Birch Society, labeled President Eisenhower a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy" and the "Birther" movement insisted President Obama was a Kenyan Muslim infiltrator.

One thing you can say for McCarthy, however, is that he avoided attacking specific races and religions. His epigones have changed all that, beginning with Pat Buchanan, McCarthy's self-designated successor, as he makes clear in Right From the Beginning , his 1988 memoir.

At the Republican convention in 1992, Buchanan called for a "culture war" and it was pretty evident who was in his sights. Ever since, he has trafficked in barely veiled racism and anti-Semitism.

The next stage came when the O'Reilly Factor premiered on Fox News in 1996, followed in the 2000s by Sean Hannity's various shows. Until his defrocking last spring, O'Reilly had a fabulous career as a beady-eyed Grand Inquisitor. Beefy Hannity, in contrast, is the runner-up in viewership, but Trump's closest ally among the reactionary pundits.

Collectively, these men couldn't be more different from the proverbial grace of the old Irish American liberals like Tip O'Neill, full of poetic allusions and noble ideals. What motivates them is a passionate antipathy to the "liberals" who destroyed the America of the 1940s and 50s.

That vanished world created space for their fathers and uncles to achieve a modest prosperity, and it's worth remembering how hard-won material success and social respectability was for the Irish.

Although they built enclaves of ethnic political power back in the nineteenth century, well into the post-World War II era they remained outsiders in the Ivy League, the State Department, or the White House.

By the 1960s, however, Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, had finally made it and become fully "white," a long process indeed. Having fought their way to full inclusion, many were intent on pulling up the drawbridge.

ECONOMICS VS bIOLOGY:

BOILING DOWN TO A BEER HALL BASE:

The decline in support is particularly notable among several groups that have long been seen as a key part of Trump's base. Support from whites declined from 51 percent to 47 percent, and it was even more steep among whites without a college degree--from 58 percent to 51 percent.

WHAT'S BAD FOR AMERICA IS BAD FOR GENERAL MOTORS:

Frequent GOP donor Seth Klarman, CEO of $30 billion Baupost Group hedge fund, had already warned his investors about Trump's protectionist policies and the deficits his tax plan would produce. But at Robin Hood, Klarman -- who is widely revered in investing circles -- offered a much harsher assessment of Trump to his peers.

"The president is a threat to democracy. He has attacked journalists and he's threatening to take away NBC's license," Klarman said, according to an audio recording of his remarks. "He's attacking judges. He's violating all sorts of democratic norms, from the emoluments clause to questioning the election and threatening to lock up his opponent. People don't focus on this but Nazi Germany had a constitution before Hitler came to power and at the end of the war they had the exact same constitution. It lasted all the way through, but democracy didn't."

Klarman continued: "The country is getting divided, whether it's immigrants, whether it's transgender people, whether it's blacks, whether it's Mexicans. It's awful."

Seven months ago, Sternlicht was on CNBC talking about how Trump's moves were inspiring the business community -- but that wasn't his message last week. Sternlicht wryly noted that he was waiting for Trump's promises to materialize, noting that "deregulation has not really taken place yet" and "we haven't seen much in the way of infrastructure spending." Sternlicht, whose Miami-based Starwood Capital Group is opening a new chain of high-end hotels (including One New York and One Brooklyn) with the message to visitors to "live green," also said Trump's "stance on the environment is just inconceivable to me."

As a real-estate investor, Sternlicht thinks about future demographic trends, and that's another area where Trump worries him. The president's immigration views will hurt growth, he said, noting that the one million refugees Angela Merkel let into Germany are revitalizing the economy there. "It's amazing; there's no angst," he said. "They reworking. They own soccer teams. They are in stores. That's why Angela Merkel let them in. She needed the labor."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

This is never not funny. Btw, it's not on tonight. "The Lost Weekend" airs at 8pm ET. Slightly different story. pic.twitter.com/fNld5Y2iUZ

— Ben Mankiewicz (@BenMank77) October 28, 2017

THE LONGEST YARD:

Houston Texans players are planning to protest as a unit before Sunday's game against the Seattle Seahawks in the wake of team owner Bob McNair's controversial "inmates running the prison" comment, a league source told ESPN's Adam Schefter.

NOT FAKE-, JUST NON-:

In 2010 the stockholders of a Canadian mining company, Uranium One, accepted a bid from the Russian nuclear-energy agency, Rosatom, for a majority of their shares. They cashed out.

There is a very good reason no politician or organization tried to halt the uranium deal. It wasn't controversial.

The decision was taken by pension-fund managers, other institutional investors and private investors from Canada, the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

The deal had previously been approved by company management and independent directors on the board.

This is what's known as "private property," "commerce" and "capitalism." Trump should read up on it.

The burden of proof for a U.S. government official to intervene in a Canadian stock-market transaction would have to be pretty high.

• No, Hillary didn't "approve" the sale, either. She was just one of 14 -- count 'em, 14 -- people who sat on a U.S. government committee that might, in theory, have intervened but didn't.

The others on the committee included the secretaries of the Treasury, homeland security, energy and defense; the White House budget director; the attorney general; and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

So, as far as we know, none of them said peep.

The committee could have intervened if it thought the deal threatened U.S. national security.

Others who could also have intervened in the deal, but saw no reason to, included the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and regulators in Canada and elsewhere.

• There is a very good reason none of those people or organizations tried to halt the deal. It wasn't controversial. And if it weren't for Trump's cynical demagoguery, it wouldn't be now.

America is a bit player in worldwide uranium production, and the amount involved was about half a percent -- yes, really -- of global supply.

Furthermore, uranium has been a drag on the international markets for years. There's too much of it around. Miners are giving it away for less than it costs to dig up. There was no reason to think of it as an especially precious resource.

In 2010, when Russia agreed to this deal, the price of uranium had already fallen by 75% in three years. And since then it's halved again.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Someone's having a Sunday morning meltdown over Mueller indictment. Very very worried. As he should be. Untouchables closing in. pic.twitter.com/CoF5W00CTY

— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) October 29, 2017

OUR CALVINISM SPARED US FROM MODERNITY:

It is impossible for us to fully grasp the cataclysmic cultural shift that was created by World War I. Each of us has lived and moved and had our being shaped by the world that emerged from that rubble. The War to End All Wars did not succeed in ending war, but it did herald the final blow to the unparalleled optimism of the 18th and 19th centuries, destroyed the remaining vestiges of the Medieval world, and ushered in worldwide despair, angst, and nihilism.In other words, Modernity was born.

In the century leading up to that Great War, the world--especially in the West--was dominated by an intense optimism that is difficult for us to comprehend. The world was changing extraordinarily rapidly. There were advancements in medicine and food production. The Industrial Revolution had raised the standard of living for most people, and technology was booming. Prince Albert launched the Crystal Palace exhibition to showcase the world of the future via British advancements. And, emboldened by a new "rational" approach to the world, promoted by Enlightenment philosophers, political leaders redrew the map. Ignoring millennial-old ethnic, religious, and cultural ties, they created new nations and dissolved empires with the stroke of a pen--utterly confident that they were solving the problem of war.

Poverty, illness, disease, war: it truly appeared that mankind was on the cusp of conquering every foe. Even death could be defeated. With the right combination of technology, scientific advancement, and rational common sense, the world was set to usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity.

But, instead of achieving Heaven on Earth, the world imploded on itself and became a living hell. And twenty years later, it did it again.

A death toll surpassing the Black Plague, worldwide famine, crushing economic depression: these were the fruits of man's optimism. That technology which appeared to be the savior of mankind was harnessed to unleash unprecedented destruction. The whole world was devastated, birthing a tremendous global cultural angst. Hope and optimism were replaced by alienation, isolation, and despair. And the whole of creation groaned.

Erich Fromm, in his afterword to Orwell's 1984, describes it this way:

"This hope for man's individual and social perfectibility, which in philosophical and anthropological terms was clearly expressed in the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century and of the socialist thinkers of the nineteenth, remained unchanged until after the First World War. This war, in which millions died for the territorial ambitions of the European powers, although under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy, was the beginning of that development which tended in a relatively short time to destroy a two-thousand-year old Western tradition of hope and to transform it into a mood of despair." 

It seemed as if the whole world had been turned upside down overnight. In a blink, thousands of years of culture and tradition were cast off and a brave new world emerged in its place. [...]

[I]n the midst of this darkness there were voices of hope. Voices which called us back to a transcendent reality, which tried to reintroduce mystery and wonder as an antidote to despair and angst. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both began to write stories that deliberately countered Modernity. Science fiction and fantasy became increasingly effective means to show readers a reality which reoriented hearts to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness and offered an answer to the hopelessness and chaos of the modern world.

Fantasy attempts to reintroduce transcendent meaning to the universe through the use of magic, fairies, supernatural creatures, mythological elements, and epic battles of good versus evil. There is something not just magical but also mysterious and unknowable in Lewis and Tolkien. The fantasy world is alive with meaning and things are rarely as they seem. And this strange and foreign world is beautiful and appealing, both answering and cultivating a longing within us for a greater reality.

But there is another genre that is just as effective at challenging the prevailing modern mindset, one which we perhaps overlook. Many mystery writers fought against the swell of Modernity just as fiercely as Lewis and Tolkien. And while fantasy achieves this aim in some other world--such as in Narnia or Middle Earth, the mystery novel does it in the here-and-now, in our own familiar place. 

HIRE THE BEST:

Simpson left the Journal at a time two forces were changing what he did as an investigative reporter: the distressed economics of journalism was shrinking the budgets available for the free-wheeling, spend-anything fly-anywhere style of investigative reporting for which he was known; and Rupert Murdoch, the paper's new owner, wanted spot scoops and not the deeply reported investigations that were his trademark. Fritsch, by now an editor in the Journal's Washington bureau after coming home from abroad, followed and joined up with Simpson for the same reasons.

I have no idea what Simpson and Fritsch charge, but I understand it's a lot, and that seems to be driven by the market: They are seriously savvy at finding extremely hard-to-locate -- and even more difficult to understand and contextualize -- documents and other intelligence on globally powerful people and organizations. People who know what they are talking about want to speak with them, in large part because they understand that -- either immediately or some time in the future -- they themselves can learn something from them.

Their expertise is rare. Most people in the investigative game, whether reporters or former government agents, are more skilled at name-dropping or sounding scary than at actually knowing something telling. [...]

In September 2015, the Washington Free Beacon, whose main funder is Republican hedge fund manager Peter Singer, at the time a Rubio backer and a fierce Trump critic, hired Simpson and Fritsch to look at Trump, according to a person familiar with the investigation. They began with a document dump -- collecting all the voluminous legal papers related to Trump's four bankruptcies. Using Pacer, the federal government's repository for legal cases, they began to track lawsuits naming Trump, and companies and people close to him. And they tracked cases and firms to Iceland, the Cayman Islands and Ukraine.

Among the key companies that surfaced was Bayrock, a Kazakh- and Russia-connected New York-based real estate firm with an intriguing Trump connection: its former chief operating officer, Felix Sater, was a mob-connected, Russian-born Trump adviser, and former manager of Trump Soho, a later foreclosed condominium project on Spring Street.

Help from a former British intelligence agent came in spring 2016, when Simpson and Fritsch sought some more specialized expertise on Russia, and hired an old acquaintance -- Christopher Steele, the former premier Russia expert for British intelligence, and now a private investigator. The documents were suggesting that Trump's businesses were heavily weighted to Russia and Russians; could Steele ask around for some details? [...]

What Steele emerged with makes up what is now known as the Trump dossier: a 35-page document of raw intelligence out of Moscow on Trump and his businesses. In September 2016, Fusion summoned reporters from top media organizations. Before them was Steele, visiting the U.S. from London. They introduced him by his credentials, and let him explain what he had found.