The traumatized horror of adolescence is coming soon to a Broadway theater near you!

Over at Vox, Constance Grady reposts her review of the musical Be More Chill, a teen sensation that came (literally) out of nowhere; has now migrated to off-Broadway; and will finally make it to the big time early next year. The show is apparently about an unpopular teenager with an even more unpopular friend named Michael. The big showstopper is a song called “Michael in the Bathroom”:

Oh, Jesus, you think when you hear it, Been there, kid. Who hasn’t hidden out in the bathroom at a crappy house party, feeling alone and ignored? Who hasn’t felt abandoned and isolated and rejected? That’s basically the default state of being a teenager.

“Michael in the Bathroom” is so true to life, so vivid and evocative, that if you’re an adult, listening to it sends you hurtling painfully back to high school. And if you hear it as a teenager — well, then, judging by the audience for Be More Chill, the only possible reaction is to scream wildly for a solid minute and then post some fan art to Tumblr.

That feeling is the secret sauce. “Michael in the Bathroom” taps so clearly into the traumatized horror of adolescence that it metabolizes the angst into pure energy, the kind of energy that can lift the cast album from a tiny regional musical out of obscurity and to the top of billboard, that can propel a show from New Jersey to an off-Broadway theater.

So. Constance Grady appears to be in her late 20s. I’m in my late 50s. I’m a dinosaur. But I’m genuinely curious. Is “abandoned and isolated and rejected” the “default state” of being a teenager these days? Is modern adolescence really marked by “traumatized horror”?

You will be unsurprised to know that I was a nerdy teenager. My friends were all nerdy teenagers. And yes, sometimes we felt rejected and uncool and depressed. Some might have felt it more than I did. But “traumatized horror”? Nope. Abandoned and rejected? Not really. Occasionally bullied and made fun of? Sure, but not much more than that.

So what the hell is going on? Did I happen to attend one of the nicest, kindest, most welcoming high schools in California? You would be right to doubt that. Has high school become exponentially worse since 1976? Would Holden Caulfield be considered one of the bright, cheerful kids if he attended high school in 2018? I doubt that I have a ton of angsty millennials reading my blog, but maybe I have some high school teachers or counselors who have been in the business for a few decades. Have things changed dramatically for the worse since the 70s and 80s? Or do today’s teenagers just have more theatrical vocabularies than my friends ever did? Or what?

I’m going to quote Jonah Goldberg on the great foofaraw over inviting and then disinviting Steve Bannon to the New Yorker Festival:

First, I agree with those who think that he should never have been invited. Steve Bannon keeps failing in his various projects to overthrow the establishment or create a political mass-movement. Were it not for the lavish media attention he still gets, he’d be a classic coffee-house revolutionary, regaling strangers about how he came “this close” to ruling and how, with a little help from you, he can get the revolution restarted.

…..But by disinviting him, Bannon comes out even more of a winner, with more publicity and a hero-martyr narrative, and The New Yorker looks feckless for having appeased a Twitter mob. Giving into threats from other invited speakers looks pretty wimpy too….Letting panelists dictate the agenda of an “ideas festival” kind of explodes the fiction that this thing is anything more than an entertainment event.

This is a view that bugs me. It’s not really a conservative view or a liberal view, it’s a view that says once you’ve made a mistake, then that’s that. Backing down is the worst possible sin, so just suck it up and bull your way through something that you know is wrong.

This is crazy. Sometimes, yes, you are caving in to a mob when you reverse yourself on something like this. That’s not a good look. But sometimes the mob is right and you should back down. Does anyone seriously think it’s better to continue mindlessly with something we know is wrong than it is to change our minds and do the right thing, just because it might expose the fact that we’ve conceded a point?

I know that conceding a point is perhaps the worst thing anyone can do in modern politics, so I’m just shouting into the wind. But it’s worth an occasional thought. Sometimes the mob has a point. Sometimes they don’t. It’s up to you to decide whether (a) their point is a worthwhile one that should prompt a change of course, or (b) after some genuine consideration, it still doesn’t move you, in which case you should stand your ground no matter how sharp the pitchforks get. Neither response should be automatic.

Regardless of what you think of President Obama’s red line on Syria, for example, I was always appalled by the idea that, by God, once the red line was drawn it had to be enforced. Obviously I understand that the credibility of threats is something to take seriously. But I also understand that sometimes threats are dumb in retrospect, and you’re better off taking the credibility hit than you are getting involved in a land war in Asia. The fact that Obama was willing to consider both sides of this argument was, I thought, worth some applause no matter what decision he ended up making.

In the current case, David Remnick made a bad decision. Inviting Bannon had nothing to do with Bannon’s ideas and everything to do with getting some publicity for his festival. A lot of people made that clear, so he changed his mind. If you insist on referring to this as “backing down” or “surrendering to the mob,” feel free. I prefer to think of it as doing the right thing, just a little late.

I should add that the Economist has rather pretentiously defended its decision to invite Bannon to its Festival of Ideas on the grounds that Bannon has “vibrant” and “robust” ideas that will be ruthlessly exposed as the bigotry and prejudice they are. They should rethink this too. Bannon has no ideas that are fresh, no ideas that we haven’t heard before, and no ideas that are “worth a rethink in the era of Trump.” They’re just dumb, odious, racist ideas that have been around forever and have been exposed repeatedly as the bigotry and prejudice they are. They should disinvite him too.

Oh, hey, look. An editor and columnist for the Daily Caller—which is totally just a mainstream conservative news outlet that believes in a colorblind society that treats blacks and whites equally—turns out to be a white supremacist who also works for Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal under a pseudonym. Let’s listen in on Scott Greer:

Greer expressed racist antiblack views and anti-Semitism in the Radix articles he wrote under the Michael McGregor byline, and disparaged other groups including feminists, immigrants, Christian Zionists, and the pro-life movement. In an interview with the website Social Matter in 2014, the same year Greer started working at The Daily Caller, Michael McGregor was identified as the managing editor of Radix.

In a statement acknowledging writing for Radix, Greer said that his views have changed since he stopped writing for the journal in 2015. “In my early twenties when it appeared our only mainstream options were Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, I was attracted to more radical ideas and expressed them under the name Michael McGregor at Radix Journal,” Greer wrote. “As the political situation has evolved in recent years, so have my views.”

Uh huh. Quite a few of us managed to somehow deal with the grim reality of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush without turning into white nationalists, but I guess it was too much for Greer back in his younger days—which were [checks calendar] four years ago. In any case, as he writes, “the political situation has evolved in recent years.” I wonder what that could possibly mean? I’m just a big ol’ cynical meanie, so I’m going to guess that what “evolved” was Donald Trump, who made it socially acceptable to express racist, sexist, and anti-Muslim views in public without much in the way pushback. I’m sure Greer has a fine career ahead of him in the fever swamps of Trumpesque conservatism.

As for the Daily Caller, I’m sure they had absolutely no idea what was going on. They were just totally taken by surprise, amirite?

I dunno, folks. As John Kelly says, we’re in Crazytown. Here’s the latest Kaiser tracking poll asking people about the importance of protecting health coverage for people with pre-existing conditions:

A full 90 percent want to keep the Obamacare provision that protects those with pre-existing conditions. 90 percent! You can barely get a number that high for approval of a congressional Mother’s Day resolution. And yet, the approval rate of Obamacare itself remains….meh:

Among Republicans, 58 percent think it’s important to retain Obamacare protections for pre-existing conditions. However, only 15 percent have a favorable view of the law that provides those protections in the first place. This makes no sense. One way or another, it means that at least 43 percent of Republicans want to get rid of Obamacare but keep Obamacare’s protections for pre-existing conditions.

Just the other day I had cause to wonder why so many conservatives seem to be perfectly happy with being wildly misinformed. This isn’t to say that plenty of liberals aren’t misinformed about various topics too. We don’t live in Plato’s Republic, after all. But conservatives practically seem to revel in it. They are lied to in the most obvious and egregious ways, and not only is that fine, they actually seem to like it. And it’s not because they don’t know. Sure, some of them are just ignorant, but I will swear on a stack of Bibles that an awful lot of the ones I talk to actually have a pretty good idea that they’re being deliberately misled and they’re OK with it. In fact, they prefer it that way. It keeps life simple, and they value a simple life above almost anything.

New Yorker editor David Remnick.Edu Bayer/EFE via ZUMA

The New Yorker Festival, which will take place next month, will take place without Steve Bannon. After he was invited, other folks started dropping out in droves, and before long it looked as if it would be more like a New Yorker coffee klatch than anything else. Editor David Remnick carefully considered his options, and then called Bannon to tell him to get lost.

This is something of a mini-scandal on the right, which is shocked that we lefties are so thin-skinned that we can’t bear the thought of even being at the same event as Steve Bannon, let alone listening to his words. But before anyone gets too outraged by all this, I’d like to draw your attention to a New York Times article explaining the timeline:

Correspondence from The New Yorker to Mr. Bannon, which was obtained by The Times, shows that the talk had been planned for two months.

Mr. Bannon said Monday that he and Mr. Remnick had been trying to work out a time to sit down for one of the magazine’s podcasts. On July 2, a producer working with the magazine emailed Mr. Bannon to say that because they had not yet made something work, they would like instead to host him at The New Yorker Festival in October. “I get the sense you’re still interested in a conversation with David. So, how about we make an event of it?” the email to Mr. Bannon said.

Attached was a scanned copy of a formal letter of invitation signed by Mr. Remnick saying that the magazine would accommodate any travel needs and pay an unspecified honorarium. (Mr. Bannon said Monday that he accepted without giving any thought to the fee.)

For weeks (months?), Bannon apparently couldn’t find the time to do a podcast, even though a podcast can literally be scheduled for any time and any place. But as soon as he was offered “an event,” suddenly he was available at the New Yorker’s bidding. It’s almost as if Bannon didn’t really care all that much about being allowed to speak, only being allowed to speak under specific circumstances that would glorify his mangy “philosophy.”

Plenty of people objected to that, and I don’t blame them. The New Yorker needs to rethink its place in the world if they believe it’s “edgy” or “contrarian” to invite someone with odious ideas that are universally known already. What’s the point? It’s not hard to outrage people, and it’s not hard to find racist conspiracy mongers who think we need to destroy Islam before they destroy us. Back when Bannon worked at the White House you could at least make the argument that his views were important because he had the ear of the president, but even that’s not true anymore. Bannon’s influence these days is close to zero and his ideology is about fresh and compelling as Mein Kampf. Why on earth would any kind of festival with even the slightest pretense toward serious thought want to give Bannon’s juvenalia a stage? It’s not edgy, it’s boring.

David Remnick may have been embarrassingly forced into making this decision, but he’s lucky that he was. This was a dumb and obnoxious idea from the start.

This is a fancy concept scooter from MINI, shot against the LA skyline from Dodger Stadium. The yellow thing on the left is a car, soon to be obsolete.MINI USA

The city of Los Angeles has decided to approve the use of scooters within city limits, accompanied by a rather astonishing set of regulations. But at least the poor will benefit, I guess:

The companies will be limited to 3,000 scooters or bikes anywhere in the city, but can deploy up to 2,500 more in low-income areas, and an additional 5,000 vehicles in low-income neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley.

It doesn’t appear that the scooters have to cost any less in low-income areas, they just have to exist. Is this the kind of help that our low-income workers really need? More scooters? I dunno, but several council members who represent poor districts seemed pretty taken with the idea. We’ll see.

BTW, the speed limit is 15 mph and there’s no riding on sidewalks. “We cannot regulate stupidity,” said councilmember Joe Buscaino.

What is this? No fair checking comments before you guess!

UPDATE: The winner is Nerd Rage, who guessed that it was a goat tail. Indeed it is. When I was at the Orange County Fair a few weeks ago, I was quite taken with the cropped tails in the goat pavilion. It appears to be the finishing touch on a prize goat, and there were several different varieties on view. However, this one was the most common.

Let’s finish up the morning by taking a look at a few of Donald Trump’s tweets. I usually try not to bother with this, but today’s crop is remarkable for reasons that go far beyond Trump’s standard lineup of mindless insults (though there are a few of those too). First, there’s this:

Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2018

The president of the United States—the country’s chief law-enforcement officer—is berating his own Attorney General for bringing criminal charges against two Republicans. There’s no question that the indictments against Reps. Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins were entirely proper: the evidence against both men was significant and the allegations against them were serious. And yet Trump seems to think they shouldn’t have been charged because it hurts Republican chances of keeping control of the House. Note that there is no attempt at subtlety here. He just flat-out thinks a Republican attorney general shouldn’t bring criminal cases against Republican members of Congress if it might hurt the Republican Party.

Next up are a couple of routine insults, and then this:

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria must not recklessly attack Idlib Province. The Russians and Iranians would be making a grave humanitarian mistake to take part in this potential human tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of people could be killed. Don’t let that happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2018

Apparently Donald “Bomb the hell out of them” Trump is suddenly a humanitarian. Naturally I applaud this change of heart, but what on earth makes Trump think that a tweet will have the slightest influence on Bashar al-Assad? I can’t imagine this will accomplish anything except making Trump look like a helpless supplicant. Assad is going to take control of Idlib the same way he takes control of everything—siege, bomb, starve, kill, destroy—and there’s nothing Trump can do about it. So now, after screwing up everything and allying himself with Russia in hopes of something or other, he’s begging Assad to go easy on former American allies. I don’t doubt for a second that it will give Assad considerable pleasure to show Trump just how little he cares about his wishes.

Finally, there’s this:

According to the Failing New York Times, the FBI started a major effort to flip Putin loyalists in 2014-2016. “It wasn’t about Trump, he wasn’t even close to a candidate yet.” Rigged Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2018

At first glance this looks like an ordinary Trump tweet: I’m innocent, witch hunt, blah blah blah. What makes it weird is that Trump doesn’t seem to understand what this New York Times story actually says. The whole story is here, and it explains that Bruce Ohr and Christopher Steele¹ began working together in 2014 in an operation to flip a Russian oligarch. This was long before the presidential campaign and long before Steele wrote his infamous dossier. This is why they were working together—they both had expertise in Russian organized crime—and this is why the FISA court issued surveillance warrants against Paul Manafort and others. Even at this early date, the FBI suspected that Russia planned to interfere with American elections.

But here’s the thing: as Cheryl Rofer points out, all this stuff was highly classified, as it should have been. Republicans on the various congressional intelligence committees knew it was classified and therefore no one would ever learn about it. That meant they could claim the FISA warrants were all based on the dossier and no one would ever know they were lying. Because of this, the intelligence community finally leaked the real story:

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an initiative that remains classified. Most expressed deep discomfort, saying they feared that in revealing the attempts to cultivate Mr. Deripaska and other oligarchs they were undermining American national security and strengthening the grip that Mr. Putin holds over those who surround him. But they also said they did not want Mr. Trump and his allies to use the program’s secrecy as a screen with which they could cherry-pick facts and present them, sheared of context, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation. That, too, they said they feared, would damage American security.

They weren’t happy about leaking. But they were even less happy about Republicans deliberately using the classification system as a way of lying about the Mueller investigation with no repercussions.

Bottom line: the dossier had little or nothing to do with the FISA court warrants that were issued against Manafort and others. Republicans have known that all along but figured they could lie about it with impunity. However, Donald Trump—because he’s too dumb to realize what he’s done—has now tweeted out a story that tells the truth for everyone to read. What an idiot.

¹For those of you with either short memories or interesting lives: Bruce Ohr is a longtime FBI agent specializing in organized crime, including Russian organized crime. Christopher Steele is the ex-British spy who wrote a “dossier” in 2016 that collected lots of raw intel about possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign. Needless to say, Trump hates them both and is convinved that they were working for the Democratic Party to bring him down on false charges of collusion with Russia.

I consider the generic congressional ballot something of a black art, but everyone else obsesses over it so I suppose I might as well too. Here’s the latest from the Washington Post/ABC poll:

In this poll, Democrats are ahead by 14 points. That’s not bad. I typically remove three or four points from the Democratic number just because I think people are more likely to claim they want a Democratic Congress even when they don’t. That gets me to around 49-41, an 8-point difference. Then I subtract a net five points from the difference because that’s the margin Democrats need these days just to break even on Election Day. So that gets us to 46-44, and by chance that happens to fit my gut feel at the moment. It’s a bit of a pessimistic read, and the funny thing is that I’m less pessimistic about Democrats screwing things up than I usually am. Still, if you asked me for my take on Democrats controlling the House in 2019, I’d say it’s pretty close to even right now.

But then again, there’s also this:

There’s no time series for this question, so I don’t know how it compares to past polls. What’s more, the generic ballot (“How are you going to vote?”) is generally more predictive than a fuzzy question like this one (“How do you want everybody else to vote?”). Still 30 points is a lot. This question is worded as a referendum on Donald Trump, and that may be the tailwind that pushes the generic ballot in a blue direction. Put these two poll questions together, and I’m less pessimistic: I’m now willing to believe that Dems might win 54 percent of the popular vote and something like 230 seats. As it happens, that’s almost precisely what 538 is projecting right now. So things are looking pretty good for Dems, and if Trump keeps getting loopier between now and November, Dems might even pull off an epic wave. Maybe.

Brian Cahn/ZUMA

Bob Woodward’s new book about Donald Trump has been leaked, and the Washington Post has excerpts. For today, let’s focus on the name-calling:

Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in [Korea] at all. “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him. After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

….White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly frequently lost his temper and told colleagues that he thought the president was “unhinged,” Woodward writes. In one small group meeting, Kelly said of Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

….Reince Priebus, Kelly’s predecessor, fretted that he could do little to constrain Trump from sparking chaos. Woodward writes that Priebus dubbed the presidential bedroom, where Trump obsessively watched cable news and tweeted, “the devil’s workshop,” and said early mornings and Sunday evenings, when the president often set off tweetstorms, were “the witching hour.”

….Cohn came to regard the president as “a professional liar” and threatened to resign in August 2017 over Trump’s handling of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

….On March 5, Dowd and Trump attorney Jay Sekulow met in Mueller’s office with the special counsel and his deputy, James Quarles, where Dowd and Sekulow reenacted Trump’s January practice session…..Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’ ”

So there you have it: fifth-grader, unhinged, professional liar, and goddamn dumbbell. But Trump gave as good as he got. Priebus was “a little rat.” H.R. McMaster dressed “like a beer salesman.” He told Wilbur Ross to his face that he was “past your prime.” Jeff Sessions was “mentally retarded.”

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?