Monthly Archives: July 2016

07.07.16
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A Brief Semi-Defense of Tony Blair’s Chilcot Defense

Eh, about that, old boy…

(I suppose the title should actually read “Defence”, but not this close to the 4th, right?)

After yesterday’s Chilcot Report, the world has more or less been united in scorn of Tony Blair, the once-dashing head of New Labor, who decided to yoke his genuine concern for human rights to a Bush administration that alternated between messianic and cynical. Blair’s reputation had already been mostly destroyed; now there is little chance of him being remembered for anything but a bloody (with meanings relevant to both sides of the Atlantic) disaster.

But there was one part of his defense that struck me as being relevant, and that was “you think things would have been any better had Saddam stayed?”

He added: “I can regret the mistakes and I can regret many things about it – but I genuinely believe not just that we acted out of good motives and I did what I did out of good faith, but I sincerely believe that we would be in a worse position if we hadn’t acted that way. I may be completely wrong about that.”

He argued that had Saddam Hussein been left in power, “he would have gone back to his [weapons of mass destruction] programmes again”.

And if he had been in power during the Arab Spring in 2011, “I believe he would have tried to keep power” in the way that Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, had done.

We’re all pretty much agreed that Trump’s semi-praise of Saddam is ludicrous, and we all agree because Saddam was one of the worst human rights violators of the 20th-century, which is pretty damned impressive. So to reckon with that is to ask if another 13 years of Saddam would have been a net benefit, in terms of human suffering.

It is obviously unanswerable, mostly because we liberated Iraq from the soul-crushing horror of controlled tyranny into the soul-crushing horror of anarchy, ethnic cleansing, and religious totalitarianism. Both options are pretty bad, and I can’t say which is worse. I can’t remember where now, but I remember an Iraqi writer saying that under Saddam, there was one giant dark circle you had to avoid. If you fell in you were dead. But now, there are millions of deadly circles and you don’t know where they are.

Still, if the Arab Spring had happened without the invasion, which seems likely in some form, would Saddam have just stepped aside? Or if he wasn’t alive, would one of his maniac sons be Asad but even more violent? Of course, if he had died, would the internal contradictions of Iraq have burbled up anyways, leading to a civil war like the one we have been seeing since 2003? It’s not hard to imagine the party breaking apart even without Bremer’s unimaginable idiocy, just under the weight of palace and fratricidal rivalries.

Counterfactual history is a mug’s game, of course. But I think Blair had a point in his defense of the war, even when it became a clear calamity: this might have happened anyway, and indeed, it probably would have. Iraq couldn’t have maintained itself after the tyranny of Saddam, and then you might have seen the hardening of ethnic lines, the splintering of Syria, regional chaos, the rise of an ISIS-like group anyway, etc. Indeed, you could argue that having troops there made the war more contained.

That’s an argument, anyway. We’ll never know of course, but the one thing that is clear is that it is hard to imagine how anything can be worse than what we have now, which undercuts any rationale for the invasion. The only thing we can say for sure is that American and British (and other) troops wouldn’t have been killed or maimed or had their brains broken, and that the hatred we engendered by doing the killing wouldn’t be so strong. Iraqis may have been killed horribly otherwise, but maybe not. The invasion was so destabilizing that maybe the nearly-inevitable impact of the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire may have been relatively peaceful.

That’s the final argument for any of the war’s last defenders. It isn’t that Obama lost the war or anything like that. It’s that it takes an willful act of disturbingly macabre imagination to imagine a worse possible world.

07.07.16
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Response to Conor Friedersdorf on Stopping Trump

In The Atlantic yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf asked the question on everyone’s mind: is it legitimate to stop Donald Trump from getting the nomination. You can even take it a step further and ask if it is, indeed, incumbent upon GOP delegates to not let a wildly unqualified, know-nothing, hateful, tyrant-praising white-nationalist-courting giant dummy one step away from being the most powerful person in the world?

When you put it that way, the question kind of answers itself. But Conor is more fair than I am, and sketches out four possibilities.

Are you a democrat who believes that, regardless of Donald Trump’s fitness for office, the nomination is rightfully his, because he won the most primary votes and delegates?

Are you a republican who believes that delegates aren’t mere vestiges of an antiquated system, that they’re around for a reason, and that they have a moral obligation to vote their conscience, at least when it is in radical conflict with voter preferences?

Are you a formalist who believes in strict adherence to rules, whether their character is democratic or republican, and that any outcome consistent with the rules is legitimate?

Are you a consequentialist whose position is determined by comparing, say, the likely cost of a Trump presidency with the likely cost of the anti-democratic actions that would be required to deny him the nomination and any chance at victory?

I don’t know if I fall into any of those camps, though if I did it would be more of the “republican” side (as hard as it was to type that). I don’t even know about voting their conscience, even though that plays a role. It’s more about wanting to win, which I think is the right thing for the party to do. The lack of a party establishment, having been reformed away, was one of Conor’s colleague John Rauch’s arguments about why we’re in the mess we’re in. Or, as I argued back in April when talking about superdelegates and “Stop Trump”:

Because that’s the thing with superdelegates, or the Daley/Meany branch. They are very, very concerned with winning elections, which means putting their support behind the candidate they think gives them the best shot. Of course there is corruption and incest and greed in the selection, and they aren’t going to be right all of the time, either. But that’s part of having a party system. The party wants to pick a candidate it thinks can win, and the primary process is designed to give them an idea of how to do that. It isn’t designed to bind them to the passion of a minority. It makes it incumbent upon the lesser-known candidate prove they can appeal to the most people, which is what Obama did in 2008, and Howard Dean failed to do in 2004.

So I think I am a structuralist. There is a moral reason to not want Trump to be President, but the delegates should also think of the best interest of the Party (which to them is the best interest of the nation, even though I wildly disagree and wouldn’t mind seeing them broke into a thousand pieces on the shores of Lake Erie, like the wreck of the PS Atlantic). Thinking of the best interest of the party isn’t cynical; parties exist,or they should, because they represent the interests of the most people. They are unwieldy, cobbled-together nightmares, and they should be. That can cause problems — like the hideous moral compromises inherent in the Democratic Coalition before the Civil Rights Bill — but at its heart it is about trying to do what’s best for the most people.

Even though I do believe that a lot of GOP office-holders are true believers, they balk at a ravening white nationalist taking over the party by empowering a minority of voters, even if they have benefited from the passionate intensity of the worst. That’s why I think “Stop Trump” is ok. Convention laws aren’t written from on high; they are chosen by the party in a way that benefits them. That’s good. They have a right to alter them to stop Trump.

Trump says the system is rigged. It might be. But it is rigged by the parties to try to win elections, which you can’t do if you are rightfully hated by women, Latinos, gays, youth, blacks, the educated, etc, and which you shouldn’t do if you are only loved by tyrants and by terrorists for recruiting purposes. The system is rigged to try to pick a winner, and you pick a winner by choosing someone who can appeal to the most voters. That person isn’t always the best choice, and is frequently a rotten one. But delegates blocking a sure loser isn’t anti-democratic. In a system where votes are the final currency, it is the bulwark of democracy.

07.07.16
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Let’s Play A Game: It’s Called “How Is Trump Ridiculous?”

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“I think it went really well.”

So, what do you think are the most ridiculous and terrifying parts of his meeting with the House and Senate Republicans today?  What do you think speaks most clearly to his immense disqualifications? Let’s see! (All quotes are from WaPo or TPM)

Bonus points if you remember that in literally two weeks from tonight he’s going to be accepting the nomination.

A Complete Inability To Recognize That He’s Hated, And Therefore The Unwillingness To Change?

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) said that members asked about his effect on the House and Senate races. One member asked pointedly about Trump’s comments about Hispanic voters.

“He said Hispanics love him,” Dent said, noting that the polls showed no such thing. “All I can say is that I haven’t endorsed him. I believe he has a lot of persuading to do.”

A Lack Of Ability To Take Any Criticism Or Opposition, And A Childlike Need To Bully?

Trump’s most tense exchange was with Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has been vocal in his concerns about the business mogul’s candidacy, especially his rhetoric and policies on immigration that the senator argues alienate many Latino voters and others in Arizona.

When Flake stood up and introduced himself, Trump told him, “You’ve been very critical of me.”

“Yes, I’m the other senator from Arizona — the one who didn’t get captured — and I want to talk to you about statements like that,” Flake responded, according to two Republican officials.

Trump said at the meeting that he has yet to attack Flake hard but threatened to begin doing so. Flake stood up to Trump by urging him to stop attacking Mexicans. Trump predicted that Flake would lose his reelection, at which point Flake informed Trump that he was not on the ballot this year, the sources said.

(Note: a corollary to this is His Ability To Make Otherwise Terrible People Seem Noble)

A Total Lack Of Concern For Any Details?

“I wasn’t particularly impressed,” Sanford said. “It was the normal stream of consciousness that’s long on hyperbole and short on facts. At one point, somebody asked about Article I powers: What will you do to protect them? I think his response was, ‘I want to protect Article I, Article II, Article XII,’ going down the list. There is no Article XII.”

(Now, you can say that’s a flub, and that, as some people said, he was probably thinking of Amendments, but still: someone who has ever actually thought about the Constitution knows that Articles and Amendments are different things, and so wouldn’t confuse them, really. But also, do you really think Trump knows which is which, or which Amendment is what, other than maybe the 1st and 2nd? Does anyone believe that?)

How Anyone Who Defends Him Sounds Like A Fucking Moron?

“He was just listing out numbers,” Farenthold said. “I think he was confusing Articles and Amendments. Remember, this guy doesn’t speak from a TelePrompter. He speaks from the heart.”

(To be Perfectly Fair, Blake Farenthold always sounds like a fucking moron)

How He Makes People Repeat The Same Sweatily Desperate Claims They Have Time And Time Again?

Other members expressed confidence that Trump understands he needs to tone down his rhetoric.

“If you look at the trajectory of his unforced errors, he’s getting better,” said Rep. Bill Flores (R-Tex.). “I mean, he’s not where we want him to be, but he’s getting better.”

How Everything That Goes Wrong Is Because Someone Is Unfair To Him, Because Mr. Trump Can Never Be Wrong, Just Ask Anyone On My Payroll?

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said Trump brought up his recent comments about Saddam Hussein “in the context of how unfair the media has been to him.” Trump has praised the former Iraqi dictator for being “so good” at killing terrorists, while adding that is all he thinks was good about a “bad guy, really bad guy.”

(He didn’t address the white nationalist retweets, but I’m sure that’ll come up again.)

How He Makes Paul Ryan Look Like The World’s Biggest Jackass?

“What I thought was especially helpful today was our members just got access and got to ask their questions and talk about their issues,” said House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). “I thought he did a great job engaging with our members, and I think our members appreciated it.”

(OK, well, that’s a point in his favor, I guess.)

So which of these wildly-disqualifying things scares you the most? If you answered “all of them!” you still aren’t close to terrified enough.

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Bonus Section In Which I Praise Trump

So, Eric Trump, the Patrick Bateman-esque son of Donald, was asked today about his sister Ivanka being Trump’s pick for Vice President (which was Bob Corker’s idea). He answered in typically-creepy Trump fashion:

“I agree, right? She’s got the beautiful looks. She’s got — she’s smart. She’s smart smart smart smart,” Trump said.

He obviously starts with the looks, and then right after the second “got” realized he shouldn’t say “legs” or “breasts” or anything, and compensated with a ton of “smarts”. Which, I mean, this is normal for Trump-world, where even your own sister is judged primarily on being boneworthy. So whatever.

But really, can’t you see it? Trump picking Ivanka? I’d be behind this, because I bet Newt still thinks the VP is his to lose. Joni dropped out; so I bet he thinks it’s between him and Christie. Trump, the consummate bully, might just be stringing him along, telling him, sure Newt, it’ll be you, for sure. You’ll get to run the country as you see fit, I’ll just play golf and judge Miss America, and now it’ll be legally binding. It’s gonna be you, and you’re gonna be great, and then- bam! Dropping him like a first wife. I’d love to see ol’ Newt’s face if that happened. It would be fantastic. Hell, I might even vote for Trump just out of gratitude.

07.07.16
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Wade to Bulls, Simmons on Durant, The Unbearable Dimness of Trump, and Thursday Quick Hits

The most interesting thing about this is that Trump actually thought that “most corrupt candidate ever!” was like an official designation. She made history! 73 corruptions!

  • I don’t know a ton about basketball, but I feel like combining the rarely-coachable Rajon Rondo, a surly, past-his-prime-with-something-to-prove superstar like Dwayne Wade with a budding superstar like Jimmy Butler who desperately wants to prove that he can be a true leader might be pretty combustible under any coach. With Fred Hoiberg, this could be a disaster. Or they could win 40 games! Which would be even more of a disaster. I’d be willing to have a terrible season and have more room for when the cap expands, and do a rebuild around Butler, Tony Snell, and Dougie McDermott. “Buckets, McBuckets, and Snell” is pretty catchy, right?
  • That said, while I don’t know a ton about basketball, it’s nice to know that I won’t ever be as wrong as The Country’s #1 Hoophead, Bill Simmons. Thanks to Awful Announcing for digging up a Simmons podcast where he “discusses” a Wojo scoop in February about Durant being interested in Golden State. “In his podcast, Simmons called the report ‘one of the most ludicrous stories I’ve ever read,’ stating that the Warriors were ‘not thinking about Durant,’ adding that ‘it’s absurd,’ and ‘I just don’t believe it.’ He went on to say it was ‘the most idiotic logic I’ve ever heard,’ and the story got Yahoo’s The Vertical site ‘some traffic, some attention.’ It’s not just being wrong, and it isn’t even just being unbearably and arrogantly and reflexively wrong: it’s that he dismisses Wojo as hungry for attention. Even a casual NBA fan like me knows that Wojo scoops are worthy. Simmons is the most petty and vainglorious writer in the land. Even Norman Mailer would tell him to stop finding slights everywhere. Gore Vidal would advise him to show some humility. Virginia Woolf would tell him to fuck off. (No real reason; I just don’t think she’d care for him.)
  • Hey, Democrats! Worried about the email scandal never dying? Well, of course it won’t (and more on that anon), but are you worried about Trump skillfully taking advantage of it? Well, maybe you don’t need to be. There’s no question that he can use it to rally people who hate Hillary, but he is unable to talk too much about it, because, at the end of the day, when he talks about Hillary he isn’t talking about himself. As the Times reports, at a rally last night, he spent a few minutes talking about Comey’s scolding report, and then went into a long rant about the Star of David tweet he got from a white nationalist collection. He defended himself for a long time on it, in a rabbling incoherent stream-of-conscious rant. The thing is, there is a strategy here: doubling down did good in the primary, where any sign of capitulation to the Hideous Liberal PC Establishment was a fatal weakness. He knew how to play it perfectly, and it fit his “I am the cosmos” mentality (apologies to Molly Ivins). He is incapable of not talking about himself, and showing that he is always right, even if- especially if- it means outright lying, obvious lying. A man who has always seen himself as powerful wants to make the truth his possession. Hopefully, that’s a fatal electoral weakness.
  • This is as-of-now unconfirmed, but apparently on the local radio this morning Mark Kirk said that his double-amputee opponent Tammy Duckworth doesn’t want to do a Spanish-language debate with him because she isn’t as “quick on her feet.” That isn’t offensive; Kirk wasn’t being deliberate, I’m sure. It’s just a saying, divorced from any actual meaning. But still: it’s literally the one thing you shouldn’t say. It’s the only phrase you can’t use, except maybe like “she’s so incompetent she’d need two partners in a three-legged race”, which isn’t even an actual saying, but that’s the point: you’d need to make something up to say something dumber.
  • That said, the idea of a Spanish-language debate is interesting. It’s a skill Kirk has, a good one, and I wish more politicians spoke other languages. (Remember when John Kerry was belittled for speaking French? 2004 was a horrible and stupid year, wasn’t it?) It’s smart politics, and a sign of basic humanity to recognize that maybe other languages aren’t inherently bad. I feel this is something though that only a Republican could get away with. Were it Duckworth who spoke Spanish, and challenged the monoglot Kirk, you’d hear a lot about un-American pandering.
  • Now that I think about it, “she’s so incompetent she’d need two partners in a three-legged race” is a great phrase. Remind me to use it when I run for the Water Reclamation District, unless, you know…
07.06.16
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Is Trump Gozer or The Marshmallow Man? A Response on Trump’s Racism

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This was always weirdly hot, right?

Last night over at Slate, Jamelle Bouie had an excellent piece on how Trump is defying every political norm. Not the ones where he is winning despite not having a campaign, or any idea of anything going on anywhere in the world, and being completely unlikeable, but rather that where any indecency is not only excused, but expected, and largely ignored. His argument is that the political class, including the media, really has no idea how to deal with it.

For now, it suffices to say that it’s happening—that the Trump campaign is a superhighway for an organized horde of hate that defines much of the pro-Trump grass-roots presence online. Rooted in online communities like Reddit and 4Chan, these supporters—who often identify as “alt-right,” a current of conservative politics on the internet where racism thrives and anti-Semitism flourishes—are virtual shock troops against journalists who criticize Trump or scrutinize his campaign and its personalities. Jewish journalists, in particular, face the worst abuse.

…If political media exists to do anything, it’s to reveal this flow from the fringe. To educate audiences on what these ideas mean, to give context for symbols like the one we saw on Saturday. Thus far, the media seems ill-equipped for the job. For every display of “pro-truth” bias, there are a dozen examples of mindless coverage, as reporters present racist rhetoric as simple “controversy” or frame anti-Semitic propaganda as a “he said/she said” dispute.

…In short order, the boundaries of political speech expand to include outright bigotry. Right now, Trump is showing his dedicated following of white supremacists that you can deny the humanity of other people and still thrive in mainstream politics. If this all feels dangerous—like the beginning of a new, more frightening kind of politics—that’s because it is.

He’s absolutely right. This has happened stunningly fast, the mainstreaming of his hate, and that of his followers. Trump knows, somewhere in his jackal heart, that everything he does will quickly be placed in the framework of normal political discussion. “Well, he did take a meme from a noted racist/anti-semite site, and tweeted it out, and lied about it, but on the other hand, he says he didn’t, so discuss the controversy.” It’s remarkable, and terrifying. We should be marching in outrage against it, but most of us, at best, just sort of blog about it. The more elite talk about how he is “breaking the rules.” The worst and most gutless still back him.

The question I have is if Trump is the destroyer, or just the outcome of how we’ve destroyed ourselves. He seems to me to be the logical (and completely irrational) culmination of a million trends: our idiot media with its constitutional inability to recognize that one party has gone completely insane, its addition to “both-sides-do-itsm”; the way that social media has amped up all our tendencies toward hatred and loudness; our addiction to pseudo-reality spectacle and personality over character and intelligence; our national inability to reflect on mistakes; and more. The system is broken, and we’re huge and unwieldy and angry and bitter and dispossessed. It seems almost impossible that a barking mad know-nothing wouldn’t appear, especially one who already embodied a lot of those trends.So is Trump Gozer, who is creating the destruction, or is he merely the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, who is the avatar of our destruction. Choose and perish, right? The

So is Trump Gozer, who is creating the destruction, or is he merely the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, who is the avatar of our destruction. Choose and perish, right? I personally lean more toward Gozer, because this galumphing ball of hate and artifice is who he has always been: a racist, misogynist strongman with a pea-brained sense of the world and a galactic idea of a deserved destiny. He’s helped to create the media and cultural environment in which he thrived.

But then, it wouldn’t have worked if we didn’t let him come in, if we didn’t, on some level, choose to accept this. To keep accepting things until they became inevitable, and suddenly we’re saying it is “too PC” when we condemn him for retweeting outrageous and inflammatory racist stats from a white nationalist website.

The Ghostbusters thing is not an accident. This summer, we’re having a new Ghostbusters movie, with an all-female cast. This is: fine. They are all funny actors, and it could be good, or it could be bad. It probably won’t be as good as the first, but it might be better than the second. But the fact that they are females sent a certain sector of dickless morons into a frothing frenzy. Men’s Right’s Activists, who are literally the worst, conspired to make the trailer the most “disliked” of all time.  Because, as we know, it is emasculating and a symbol of PC run amok for females to bust ghosts. That’s a man’s job, and has, throughout American history, been the traditional prerogative of men. Busting ghosts. This is all Shillary’s fault. People actually believe this. 

That’s the culture which Trump has come to dominate. People who see aggrievement in everything, and who believe that everything the have is being taken away, and who can, with the strength of like-minded people online, convince themselves that they care even more than they actually do, until it becomes a reinforcing circle of amplified anger. That circle is where Trump lives. He’s not just Gozer, and not just Stay-Puft: be built the circle. He’s our own Ivo Shandor, and his buildings keep going up.

07.06.16
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The Chilcot Report: The Complicity of a Wasted Decade

 

I will be with you, whatever. Christ. 

 

What’s a bigger shock to a national system: an actual surprise, or the tug on the chin, forcing you to look at something unpleasant and buried? For Great Britain, was the Brexit vote (and the loss to Iceland!) the biggest blow to national image, or is it today’s Chilcot Report on Tony Blair, the Ministry of Defense, the political/media class, and the Iraq War? At over two million words- the summary alone is 145 pages- it looks to be an exhaustive look at the complicity of Tony Blair in the rush to an era-defining disaster. (Here are the high points.)

(The low point for Tony BLair is probably this: “In his forensic account of the way Blair and his ministers built the case for military action, Chilcot finds the then Labour prime minister – who had promised US president George W Bush, ‘I will be with you, whatever’ – disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services.” No matter in which tone you read that singular “whatever” it is reputation-definingly pathetic. The Guardian has a great look at how a smart man yoked himself to a swaggering bouffon he thought was both moral and controllable)

But then, the obvious answer to the above question is: of course Brexit (and Iceland!). I mean, everyone knew that the intelligence was phony, the options to avoid war unexhausted, the righteousness of its defenders equal parts unbearable and completely blinkered, and the execution of the war and its aftermath criminally cruel and indictably incompetent. Through its wreckage we have the unspiraling of Syria, the rise of ISIS, the generational refugee crisis, and more. But we know all this.”

That said, there is something vastly important in getting everything down on the record, in complete and unflinching detail. I think this is always important, but especially for the Iraq War. We have to remember what happened last decade. The run-up to the war was filled with chest-thumping fury and smoldering conviction. Those who spoke out against it were banished (remember the Dixie Chicks?). As the war went sideways, it was increasingly buried, ignored, and treated as some distant colonial enterprise on a more malarial time. We collectively (though not entirely, thanks to some brave journalists and activists) shrugged it off, and watched TV.

There was a brief bout of patriotic bellowing during the surge, but even that was perfunctory. It was getting the band back together for one last rusty gig, as the various national security ghouls invaded TVs again to talk about Republican leadership in the face of Democratic cowardice.

But something funny happened during all of that; or rather, not funny, but historically tragic. We somehow shifted from everyone thinking the invasion was great to everyone thinking that it was a bad idea without ever really thinking about it. The conclusion became a done deal, and one we officially don’t talk about. As a nation, we refused to learn its lesson, which is why we focus insanely on Benghazi rather than the intervention in Libya, and more insanely, why Obama can be pilloried for “doing nothing” in the labyrinthine abattoir of Syria. ISIS is painted as Obama’s fault for “losing” in Iraq, and the actual war isn’t talked about.

As a nation, we’ve pretty much forgotten about 2002-2009. That’s partly because its been Republican strategy, with media complicity, to ignore everything pre-Obama (remember how they mocked him for sometimes talking about George Bush, as if there could be any way that the recent past affected the present?). But it is also a national longing to ignore a stupid and bloody and disastrous decade, one that was filled with the dead and wounded, with economic collapse, and a sense of guilt that we spent it watching reality TV. We haven’t had a national reckoning with what went wrong. We jumped into the Obama era as a way to assuage national guilt, and then have been focused on the fury that followed.

Great Britain seems now to have had that reckoning, and we’ll see what the fallout is. Even if people “know” this, there is a difference between knowing something and being forced to face it. It’s the drunk who wakes up in the morning with the lingering guilt he wants to ignore, before finding out that, yup, he knocked up his wife’s sister. You have to face your crimes. I’d like to think we can learn from the Chilcot Report, but think it might be too late. We went from the Obama Era to the Era of Obama Racial Backlash, personified by a symbol of that horrible decade, the reality-show racist. We’ve learned nothing.

I just read Karen Greenberg’s excellent Rogue Justice, which I’ll be reviewing for publication. When that comes out, we’ll have a lot more discussion on how we drifted into the security state we have now. It’s all tied together. In the meanwhile, you should read her book. It’s a great look at the decisions that were made which helped us, as citizens, fall into the indecisions that cemented them.

07.05.16
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Joni Ernst for VP Is Actually A Pretty Good Pick

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So Donald Trump is fawning over Joni Ernst, which is getting the right people excited about his picking her to be his Vice President. And honestly, compared to a lot of other choices (Newt!) she might be the best pick.

Politically, I mean. Certainly not in terms of being good for the country, or being anywhere near the Oval Office. But given that, if she is Vice-President, her one boss is the single most dangerously-unqualified person to ever “serve” (a term that would lose all meaning in the Age of Trump), she might seem ready to go just by dint of comparison.

The Junior Senator from Iowa made her rise to right-wing prominence by releasing a pro-castration ad where she threatened to make big pork-barrel spenders “squeal”, the way she used to do with hogs. This mix of anti-PC bingo and juvenile sexuality made hearts stir, nethers tingle, and launched her into talk-radio superstardom (she remains, as far as I can tell, the only sitting senator for whom “castration” is a google autofill, though I could recommend some others).

She’s pretty, with a nice smile. She is a 20-yr veteran. She’s a hog farmer. If we want to compare her to her most obvious antecedents, she’s smarter and more polished than Sarah Palin and less of a loon than Michelle Bachman. That may seem like small beer, but it matters. She’s a pretty good talker, and most importantly, she’s amazing at lying about just how incredibly conservative she is. Let’s go over some hits.

  1.  She’s anti-Agenda 21, which means she believes that the UN is going to come in and take our vital fluids. That’s garden-level wackadoodleness, but it is pretty damning for a grownup to believe.
  2. It’s not really needed to say, but she’s fairly pro-gun.
  3. She believes strongly that the states should decide minimum wage. That isn’t a “state vs feds” issue, solely. Or rather it is, but it is one that gets right to the heart of the issue. She thinks that states should be able to do whatever they want to people, with no Constitutional oversight, and no protection. It’s a mentality that encourages a race to the bottom, allowing states like Mississippi to become “business friendly” by removing all workers’ rights.
  4. More to the point, she believes strongly in nullification. It’s not incidental; it’s the core of her beliefs. She wants to essentially make the federal government subservient to the states. That’s the whole damn project. If you do so, you can strip any environmental protection, any workers’ rights, sell off all the public land, and impose whatever racial theocracy you want. That’s key to Ernst. You might think it a strange position for a senior member of the Executive Branch to have (that is, that the executive branch shouldn’t do anything), but here we are.
  5. I guess it isn’t that she doesn’t believe the Executive should do anything. She very strongly supports a Personhood amendment. And this is why I think she’s a good pick. During her Senate campaign, she was very clear about being very muddled on the issue, saying time and time again that such an Amendment was merely definitional, and wouldn’t change anything, so what’s the big deal. It was merely a “statement of support for Life.” It raised the question: if it didn’t do anything, why did she care? It’s a strange idea for an Amendment. Most Amendments aren’t just statements. But she was excellent about obfuscating what for the far right are important totems, but for low-information voters are confusing.

But it worked! And what’s more, though I can’t find any links now, the media was happy to let her get away with it, praising her for tacking to the middle without alienating the base (in other words, totally lying). She’s smart like that, and better at it than most Republicans.

She’s someone the media likes because they know they shouldn’t but it makes them feel very catholic to do so. Yes, if Trump picks her, her record will be taken apart, but not as much as with Newt or Sessions, for god’s sake. We’ll hear how Trump is softening his image with women, and how it’s a smart strategy to fire up the conservative base (as if they needed it). I don’t know if it’ll get him more votes. But I don’t think she’ll be a Palin-level disaster, and it might help with some extremely-low-information voters. He’ll still lose, but what the hell. It’s not like he’s going to get some steady hand on the till of the state. He’s not going to drag, say, Dick Lugar into this mess. Shit, the next best choice is Mike Pence, and he managed to make NASCAR and Wal-Mart slap down Indiana. Ernst might be the best possible pick, and that says everything you need to know.

07.05.16
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Paul Ryan and Gun Control: Profile in Courage

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“I’m in line for the Presidency!” 

Nearly two weeks after House Democrats staged a historic sit-in to demand action on gun control legislation, the Republican speaker of the House has agreed to hold a vote on a single gun-related bill: a measure to allow the attorney general to delay the sale of a gun to a suspected terrorist for three days, similar to a Senate measure backed by the National Rifle Association. (The Guardian)

At the blog, we have a saying: if the NRA supports it, there’s a decent chance it might not be the super best idea. I understand that’s not much of a saying, but the bluenoses at the bumper-sticker shop won’t let me go with “Fuck The NRA.” Also, that seems like a dangerous sticker with which to drive around. In life, I’ve found that it isn’t a good idea to piss off the irrational and heavily-armed.

Paul Ryan has learned the same lesson, and quickly, reacting to the hideous level of gun violence in America by backing the most toothless possible bill, and one that should make civil libertarians squirm, beside. Not only will this do extremely little to stop mass shootings- I’m guessing that neither Jared Laughner nor Adam Lanza not his mom were on that list- but will do nothing to stop the daily thrum of handgun-based murder, accidents, and suicide that threaten to revoke our status in the civilized world.

Ryan’s response to violence is to pretend that he was outraged by the sit-in in Congress, led by John Lewis, a man with more courage in his shoes than Ryan has accumulated in a life of cheese-filled toadying. Our previous VP nominee, who couldn’t even carry his hometown, called the action a “publicity stunt” and a “low moment” for Congress, which surprised a lot of us who are old enough to remember shutdowns over budgets, dozens of attempts to repeal the ACA, and the continuing career of Louis Gohmert.

He was right though, that it was a publicity stunt. A lot that John Lewis has done in his life has been for “publicity”, which is a cynical way of saying “getting people to pay attention to something I’d rather sweep under the rug.” It turns out that’s the way to get things done. Raise awareness, march in the streets, get people fired up, and then go out and vote. It worked in the 60s (the repudiation of Goldwaterism and Johnson’s supermajority), and it worked for the Tea Party, who turned their atavistic outrage into electoral success, at least at district levels.

That’s the only way to make a change. Democrats have to win big, and sweep out the bastards. It isn’t enough to put pressure on them. As we’ve argued here a few times, a lot of the mooks in Congress aren’t dancing to the NRA’s tune because of money; they are true believers. They buy the whole spiel about freedom. They won’t change because of politics. Yes, the NRA’s money, along with gerrymandering, keeps them safe from having to make a choice, but the bulk of them would choose guns. Guns over everything else.

That’s why they have to lose. The anger has to translate to votes. Polls showing American outrage don’t matter to them. Sweeping out enough to give the gun control side the power is the only thing that will work.

Above, I kind of joked that “In life, I’ve found that it isn’t a good idea to piss off the irrational and heavily-armed,” but that’s really the nut of it, isn’t it? The “freedom” to carry guns everywhere takes away everyone else’s freedom to feel safe. I don’t know if the person walking into the store is a mass-shooter or just a gun-nut, who could turn into a shooter if I told him that he’s making everyone else feel nervous. You just don’t know. And so, like with ISIS, we’re all on the front lines of the NRA’s war on human decency, and their generational battle against human life. Unlike with ISIS, we can do something about it.

 

07.05.16
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Better the Infidel Than The Apostate: Medina Bombings and the ISIS Endgame

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Saudi Press Agency/EPA

It’s been a particularly bloody week in ISIS’s history of violence. Since Tuesday, we’ve seen an attack on Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, a slaughter in Bangladesh that was carried out by radicalized elites, an apocalyptic bombing in Baghdad that was mostly overlooked, and the suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia, including near the Prophet’s Tomb in Medina, Islam’s second-holiest city. As of this writing, ISIS has yet to claim responsibility for the Medina bombings, which means it may not have been an attack planned by ISIS, but rather one “just” inspired by it. However, the wave of bombings throughout Saudi Arabia is indicative of some coordination.

This has led, understandably, to a lot of talk about the next phase of ISIS. Speaking to the CFR last week, John Brennan  “warned that the trajectories for the ISIS religious state, or caliphate, and global violence point in opposite directions. ‘As the pressure mounts on ISIL,” he said, “we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.'” The headline to the Times piece linked above captures most of the analysis: “As ISIS Loses Land, It Gains Ground In Overseas Terror.”

I think this is largely true. There’s no doubt that they are doubling down on large-scale overseas attacks, and are mutating to the point where it is hard to say what ISIS even is: is it caliphate-based and centrally-coordinated like pre-9/11 al-Qaeda, or is it franchised out, like Qaeda starting in the middle of last decade? Or, perhaps more frightening, is it just a particularly carnage-based idea?

I think it is the latter, which is why I think we’re seeing the endgame of what ISIS has been. Note that endgame doesn’t mean the world is particularly close to defeating ISIS, mostly because I don’t think “defeating” is even possible. It’s a generational battle to have the ideology be discredited and to have them stop serving as an inspiration for those who feel that life should be offering more.

Because that is what they do: they offer a sense of greatness in a world that seems to have lost its moorings. This doesn’t mean that they only appeal to the poor and dispossessed; if the last 100 years have taught us anything, it is that the truly scary people are the ones who are comfortable and feel guilty about it, or feel that they shouldn’t be comfortable, but be truly great. Think of the middling student who reads Ayn Rand and begins to believe that his relative failure is due to a conspiracy of the weak. That’s the mindset.

That’s why these attacks, during Ramadan, are so important to ISIS, but also represent their eventual breaking apart. Going after Medina, and attacking largely Muslims (the Bangladesh attack partially notwithstanding) is key to their success. That’s how they attract the truly dispossessed, because they further cut up the world, slicing belief into an ever-narrower portion. It’s exciting to say that, yes, the Turks are Muslims, but bad ones. I mean, Ataturk should pay, symbolically, for being secular. It’s thrilling to say that bombing Baghdad is the blood price that has to be paid for a more just world. It’s radical and dangerous to attack the holy cities. That’s the kind of sick passion that inspires people into being radicalized: the idea that they are the most committed. It makes up for a lifetime of drifting, even if (especially if) that lifetime is only 19 or 20 years. A wasted year or two seems longer to the young, and a certain kind of mindset wants to rectify that through absolute purity.

(It’s important to remember that in many ways the modern radical Islamic movement wasn’t kicked off by the Iranian revolution, which was more concurrent, or even by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but by the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, also in 1979. It’s weirdly a footnote now, but this audacious attack on the corrupt monarchy was inspirational to the future leaders of al-Qaeda.)

Why this represents their eventual breaking apart, though, is the same reason any revolutionary group ends up either coalescing into an actual political entity (Hezbollah) or burning itself out (Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda). The need to up the ante constantly, to keep swimming, means that you’ll alienate more people than you attract. The entire Muslim world seems to be speaking out against the Medina attacks.  The well from which they draw their legitimacy- the well of violence- is the one that will eventually poison them, and they’ll discredit themselves.

It’s a long and uphill battle, and whether through direct coordination or through inspiration, it’s one in which we’re all on the undrafted frontline. As they break apart, and as the slowly lose militarily (and don’t expect progress here to be a straight line), they’ll increase these attacks in an attempt to maintain primacy. It’s no comfort to the dead that this will also be their downfall.

07.01.16
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VP Wanted: Must Have Experience in Government, Jowls

 

Trump/Gingrich 2016: Vitality!

 

WaPo: Donald Trump’s campaign has begun formally vetting possible running mates, with former House speaker Newt Gingrich emerging as the leading candidate, followed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. But there are more than a half dozen others being discussed as possibilities, according to several people with knowledge of the process.

Let’s see: a disgraced former Speaker who, when running against the avatar of pure charisma that is Mitt Romney managed to win all of South Carolina, and who if anything is even more of a fabulist than Donald Trump, or a blustering East Coast Soprano-wannabe who is hated in his state, with looming scandals and a complete lack of knowledge about anything happening outside Bayonne?

Gingrich has been a top Trump toady throughout most of the campaign, and to be fair, he deserves some credit for recognizing quickly that Trump is the apotheosis of the white anger that Gingrich weaponized in 1994. In his lizard heart, he realized that Trump had what it took to exploit that wave, made even angrier in the last 20 years (and especially the last eight). Newt, while amoral, is smart enough to know that Trump isn’t actually a leader or a good pick to be President. I assume his thinking is that if he is Veep, Trump will mostly delegate to him, and he can have one last shot at remaking America.

That’s quite a calculation, and it is dependent upon Trump being ok with someone so ambitious and outspoken being on the ticket. Chances are Trump will pick Newt just to put him in his place, because he like humiliating people. I’m sure Gingrich thinks he can be invaluable, and will be respected by Trump, but the clash of their world-historic egos will be fascinating, as well as nauseating.

Christie’s calculation is easier: he has nowhere to go. He’s termed out, and it isn’t like he could (or would) run for Senator. It’s VP, AG, or a radio show. All his money is on Trump.

Just imagine Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Mike Ditka, Bobby Knight, and Chris Christie standing on a Cleveland stage, laughing wildly while patting each other on the back. That’s your vision of the next four years: fat, angry, old white guys, simultaneously shouting “not politically correct” at each other, sizing up each other’s wealth and pretending that they’ll never die, while a ragtag group of Myrtle Beach refugees in Confederate Flag Looney Tunes shirts howls “we’re the Silent Majority” behind them, casting murder-eyes at the janitor.

If that’s too grim for a holiday weekend, I hope this part will cheer you up. It made me laugh to beat the bank, that’s for sure.

Culvahouse, a former White House counsel who is managing the vetting for Trump, was the lawyer who vetted then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for the GOP vice-presidential nomination during the 2008 campaign.

Trump only hires the best.