Category Archives: Politics

06.21.16
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Clinton’s Money Advantage and Citizens United

 

Pictured: Clinton campaign headquarters. Actually, you could probably write an essay on internet bros, Hillary Clinton, and Skyler White.

 

So, as everyone knows by now, Hillary Clinton is laying an absolute mollywhomping on Donald Trump in terms of fundraising, having over $42 million on hand to his $1.3 million. There are candidates for Water Reclamation boards that have more than $1.3 million.

The reasons are both obvious and not so obvious. Clinton, of course, is a very experienced fundraiser and knows how to play the game. Indeed, that’s the main thing that people don’t like about her: her comfort with big money. Trump’s pathetic fundraising is because he doesn’t want to do the work of being President, much in the same way he didn’t want to be an actual businessman, just a guy who could con suckers and take advantage of bankruptcy laws to make money. Or maybe that is an actual businessman. Regardless. It’s a weird combination of laziness, arrogance, and unsleeping avarice. It’s the spirit of his campaign.

Needless to say, there is a bit of an uncomfortable glee among Democrats, and obvious charges of hypocrisy. Democrats, in the main, don’t like the role of money, and loathe the Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to jowly barbarians looking to destroy the social safety net, tear up any environmental legislation, and basically make the government little more than a tool for regulating sexual behavior. So it is weird to be dancing under a rain of money.

Hillary, in particular, has come under the most fire for this. It was in April that Glenn Greenwald argued that Clinton was undermining the anti-Citizens United front by saying that while she was accepting money, she was not being corrupted by it. On the surface, that makes a certain amount of sense. The argument is that money is inherently corrupting, which is a valid argument, but the option is to a) not take any money for an expensive campaign and lose or b) say “yup, I’m corrupt.”

It’s a weird and extremely leftier-than-thou argument, because it demands a kind of impossible purity that would rather lose elections, and have no chance at making better laws. Would I rather that there wasn’t this kind of money in politics? Of course- and that’s exactly why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton in the fall. I voted for Bernie in the primary, but millions of more people chose another candidate. An imperfect one (as was Bernie!) but someone who is far better on the issues I care about, including money in politics, than her opponent.

There is a thread of argument that says Hillary is insincere in her opposition to Citizen’s United, or at least sincere for the wrong reasons. This stemmed from a debate line about campaign finance.

And let’s remember, Citizens United, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in our country’s history, was actually a case about a right-wing attack on me and my campaign. A right-wing organization took aim at me and ended up damaging our entire democracy. So, yes, you’re not going to find anybody more committed to aggressive campaign finance reform than me.

 As Slate’s excellent Mark Joseph Stern argued, after laying out three reasons to be opposed to Citizens United, “Clinton concocted a fourth: Citizens Unitedwas bad because it let a corporation attack my candidacy.” In a post on Washington’s Blog, Eric Zeusse furthered that argument, saying that it showed no actual commitment to overturning Citizen’s United, and was just a way to trick the “suckers” into voting for a fake Democrat. He added to that argument by saying that while her website pledges to overturn Citizens United, it doesn’t say how, making it “Yet more sucker bait.” (It actually does say how- appoint better justices, a constitutional amendment, etc. You just have to scroll down. However, these details might not have been there when Zuesse wrote his piece.)
This is, I think, an unfair charge, and sort of the price of being Hillary Clinton. With nearly any other politician, her answer would be seen as imperfect, but as a vehicle of passion. “Yes, I care about this. I understand what these people are capable of. I know how we got here.” It wasn’t a great answer, legalistically, but any good-faith reading of both the answer and other things she has said on the topic make it clear that she isn’t just rejecting Citizens United because of it attacking her. This was just a (inelegant) way of demonstrating that it is personal for her.
But she isn’t any other politician- indeed, there wouldn’t be this kind of movie made about anyone else, save for Obama. Republicans think she is a shrill liberal Balrog, summoned from the cruel depths of the 60s to fight back their reactionary victories. The left thinks she is a far-right fake Dem, tainted by her connection to Wall Street, and unbearably corrupt.
What she is is a professional politician, with all the attendant compromises, who is center-left, hawkish in many ways (though not all, as Fred Kaplan demonstrates), and someone who wants to win. And to win, you have to raise money. To overturn Citizens United, you have to get the votes. You have to win the Presidency. You have to take back the Senate. You have to have the money to make your case. It sucks, and it is uncomfortable, and yes, it demonstrates the awful power of money in politics. It isn’t a cause for joy that Hillary has all his money, and Trump has none. It’s just a cause for some relief.

 

06.20.16
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In Which I Disagree With Paul Krugman

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Pictured: the face that millions of people want to be President.

Paul Krugman’s column today is about why the Republican Party was unable to stop Trump, but it seems like Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have been able to. There are a lot of structural and logical reasons: namely, he’s not running against 16 people who are scared of him, now. He’s the focus, and he’s massively, comically, underprepared. (A nationwide field staff of 30 people. 30!)  It’s the natural result of running a con- once it starts to get exposed, once the gilded walls turn out to be painted plaster, it all crumbles quickly.

The real question is why this particular bill of goods could be so easily sold during the primary, and I think that’s where Krugman’s analysis is revealed to a little off. The main point is that the Republican Party practices a top-down ideological form of control. I’d argue that the Republican Party is virtually leaderless, yes, but I still think he’s correct if you extend that to the blogs, to Fox, to talk radio, and all the snake-oil outlets. And he argues that because they are about one ideology, and that ideology is hollow and broken, it couldn’t offer any resistance. The Democratic Party is more “robust”, because it has a large number of interest groups that compete with each other.

But a big factor, I’d argue, is that the Democratic establishment in general is fairly robust. I’m not saying that its members are angels, which they aren’t. Some, no doubt, are personally corrupt. But the various groups making up the party’s coalition really care about and believe in their positions — they’re not just saying what the Koch brothers pay them to say.

This, I think is incorrect. To be sure, there are a lot of Republicans who only ask how high when told to jump, and not a single one of them hangs up when a Koch (or another rich winger) calls. But I don’t think it is as easy as that.  If David Koch decided tomorrow that he wanted to raise taxes and protect the environment, I don’t think you’d see Republicans start behaving better. Some, sure. But for the most part, these are true believers.

Guys like Cruz, and many more like them in the Senate and (especially) the House, and younger comers in the various ALEC-and-Koch-bought statehouses are absolutely products of the right-wing era, who grew up with Reagan and came of age with talk radio, Newt, and the Clintons. They do what the Kochs want, yes, but that’s because their interests and beliefs are aligned. If anything, these are people who are far more committed (and far meaner) then the Kochs. They are people who believe fiercely that the government should exist only to punish poor people and minorities, to impose a form of Christian sexual morality, and to bomb terrorists, and to bomb foreigners.

And more to the point, that’s not just the leaders. It’s the base. That’s why Trump won. It isn’t because right-wing ideology is in decline (though I think we see that it is), it’s because some people believe it, every word, and Trump played it perfectly. It’s an ideology built on mendacious machismo and hippie-punching ignorance. It’ll be here until it is driven away with loss after loss after loss, and the professional politicians finally see the writing on the wall. That’s part of why this election is important. If the True Believers, including Trump, who has no principles but is their avatar, get the nutstomping they deserve, it can make the less-committed professionals think twice.

06.17.16
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A Data Point for the Con

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Mr. Perfect!

A key part of a long con, which is what Trump is running, is convincing the marks that the good stuff is just around the corner, that the payment is coming. You get them in too deep to pull out. It works well in business a lot, if you can rely on bankruptcy laws and rules that favor the already rich. Trump is hoping it works in elections.

“I’m four down in one poll, three and a half in another that just came out, and I haven’t started yet,” Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in a phone interview on Thursday night, a thought he volunteered as he dismissed concerns from Senate Republicans that he may be a drag on their candidacies in the fall.

“Haven’t started yet” is key to the con. So is fluffing numbers- he’s not down a lot (he’s down a historic amount), there are just a couple of itsy-bitsy polls that have him down a tiny amount, and anyway, we haven’t gotten going yet, ok? Things look bad now but only because I haven’t tried, and when I do, so much winning you’ll beg me to stop, you’ll scream and cry and gnash your teeth to make the hurricane-like winning cease, you’ll literally drown your best friend in tar and mud, watching them beg for breath as the person who they trusted the most in the world betrayed them, because you just can’t handle all the winning. That’s how much winning we’ll do. Just you wait.

You can see him doing the same thing in one of his bullshit businesses. Oh yeah, the casino is a little under now, but it’s got so much gold and glitz it will do great soon, and then I’ll pay you for your work. Trust me, once we get this going, it’s going to be amazing, and all bondholders will get twice- no, 864 times their investment. Trust me.

It’s questionable if this can work in an election. I mean, electorally it almost certainly won’t, but the question is if he can keep this up without it blowing up in his face, without everyone catching on that his campaign is being run the same way as a con. It’s a sham campaign, a flat shampaign, but it isn’t (just) about money. It’s about getting people to go along with what he wants without having to make any actual investment. It’s how he’s run every business in his entire life. And it’s gotten him close, though still very far, from the Presidency.

06.17.16
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Trump Campaign Isn’t A Grift, It’s A Con

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If we want to make America great again, we have to go back to a time when our conmen were handsome and charming!

There’s been a lot of talk since Trumps started his run if this was just a ploy to boost his business. This was most ably stated by President Obama in the White House Correspondents Dinner in May, scolding the press for overhyping him. “The guy wanted to give his hotel business a boost and now we are praying that Cleveland makes it through July.”  The thrust of this is that he just wanted publicity, started winning, and it overtook him.

The correlation to this theory is that he doesn’t actually want to be President, which is why he is sabotaging himself with bizarre rants and a refusal to actually do anything it takes to be President. He’s worried about his business interests and wants to get out. This is exemplified in the Politico report where he had 20 top donors to call, called three, got bored, and stopped. He’s unserious, the thinking goes, because he doesn’t want to be President. He’s sabotaging himself.

The idea that it is a grift was furthered this week by unsubstantiated reports that he was looking to set up a TV station. He had riled up the rubes, using his undeniable skills as a demagogue, and then is going to drop out and get more money doing things his way. The whole thing was a grift that got taken too seriously, and now we’re faced with an openly white nationalist campaign.

Overlooking how scary that aspect is- and even overlooking, for the moment, what it says about our country and the Republican Party that such an obvious grift (if that is what it was) could have won, I think he need to come up with a more unified theory of Trump. His campaign isn’t a grift. It’s a con, and always has been.

There’s a slight difference there. A grift is to engage in petty theft, to take money pretty much outright, with no other goal. Sarah Palin’s whole career in the national spotlight has been a grift. If Trump were just doing this for his business, or to get a TV show, it would have been the merest (and biggest) grift.

I don’t think that’s what it was. I think he thinks he can be President, and thinks it is the best outlet for his petty grievances, his desire to punish enemies, to control people, and to propitiate his massive ego. It’s also a way to pursue the racism and anti-foreigner bias he’s harbored his whole life. He’s not interested in acting as the President, just being him. And, it is good for business as well.

So that’s the con they’ve been running: pretending to want to be a good President just so he can be President, if that makes sense. The goal was the further the Trump brand and let the boss have all the power in the world. So they ran it like a con: promising to be so Presidential later on, promising to raise money, saying they had the money, claiming they gave money to troops, and treating his campaign like any of his other businesses: an opportunity to tell people lies that they’ll believe, not deliver, and then tell them more lies. They’ll be so deep in the hole in their (financial, emotional, partisan) investment that they can’t back out. The long con, getting power, is based on a series of small cons that ensnare the gullible. Trump’s excellent at it.

He’s also excellent at getting out and letting other suckers hold the bag, which is why I think the self-sabotage theories have some validity. I think most of the damage is the fact that his is a lily-fingered narcissist who can pull things over on a lot of people, but not everyone at once, and whose ugliness and ill-tempered paranoia is exposed in the summer sun. But I do think he kind of wants to get out. His whole scheme his whole life has been to build a house of cards and then get out before the collapse, leveraging himself deeply, using one project to finance another one, stiffing creditors, and making money.

So now that he has historically terrible numbers, he can see the writing on the wall, and I think he might be looking for a reason to be treated “very unfairly” so he can leave, and pretend he’s a winner, and make more money off of the rubes. The TV thing is plausible, because the mark of a good con is to have a lot of outs.

But I don’t think this will happen. This is the biggest con of his life, and it has been amazing, in a terrible and godless sort of way. The heat of a Presidential campaign can give the feeling of power and destiny to even a dedicated public servant like Bernie Sanders. Imagine what it has done to Trump. I bet he thinks he can still pull off this huge con, because for god’s sake, he’s Trump. It’s what he does.

The one nice thing about this is that, possibly, it will all come down, be exposed, and he’ll be humiliated and revealed to all but the diehards for what he is. A cheap swindler whose only core beliefs are enriching himself and hating non-whites. It’s usually when you reach too high that the con gets brought down. Just ask Doyle Lonnegan.

06.17.16
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McCain: Obama “Directly Responsible” For Orlando: Dispatches From The Land of Cognitive Dissonance

As we briefly discussed in the Quick Hits, John McCain knew who was to blame for a violent, sexually-confused psychopath buying an assault weapon and pledging vague and meaningless allegiance to a terrorist group.

(via @benjysarlin)

Now, McCain went on to say that he hold’s the President’s policies responsible, not Obama himself. Ben Mathis-Lilley of Slate says that “In summary, John McCain is not going to be the Republican Party’s voice of reason on this one,” but in a way he sort of is. After all, unlike a lot of his colleagues, he isn’t whispering that Obama wanted this to happen (or, like the presumptive nominee, he isn’t shouting it). Unlike Ted Cruz, he isn’t saying that the FBI would have kept up their investigations on Mateen due to a series of incomprehensible and contradictory boasts and the fact that he went to Mecca, indefinitely, if only Obama said “radical Islamic terrorism” every once in a while.

The Cruz line is interesting, because, as Simon Maloy points out, the FBI is doing exactly what Ted Cruz says they should do: investigate anyone who might have any connection whatsoever to terrorism, even if it is specious at best. (Even though he, in theory, is against “Big Government”, and the tyranny of insurance regulations, these sorts of prolonged and rights-denying investigations are ok.) But for Cruz, the FBI would have somehow found something, found a non-existent connection, and arrested and stopped Mateen for a crime he hadn’t committed, for allegiances, even tenuous ones, he had yet to pledge, if only the magic words were uttered. It’s less the obvious anti-democratic and terrifying nonsense here, although that’s important, as it is the level of mental contortions that make even John McCain’s fabulisms look logical.

Obviously, Obama demolished this line of thinking, as he has before, but that doesn’t matter. The words “Radical Islam” have achieved totemic power on the right. Their incantation of it isn’t so much to stop ISIS, but to create a witch’s brew of allegations against Obama. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make any sense. In a political climate where certain phrases, like Keystone XL and (of course) Benghzai, take on a meaning far beyond their actual physical weight or strategic merit, the President’s refusal to say a phrase becomes all-encompassing. It becomes an article of faith.

This sort of faith-based fippery of the professional amnesiac is what is driving nearly all of  Republican thinking, especially on foreign policy. They don’t even engage with Obama’s arguments for why he doesn’t say the phrase. There is even a case. Not on their terms, but it is possible to say “Oh, come on- explaining why you won’t say it is basically saying it. At this point, it doesn’t matter if you do or don’t. It’s not like ISIS is waiting for you to say ‘Radical Islam’ before they get really cocky.” But nope. There is no actual debate. They just get angrier and angrier at it, because it is a worldview, not a thought.

This brings us to McCain. He’s running for office, as we said, so he has no interest in being even a semi-decent person, but it’s more interesting that he blames Obama, directly, for ISIS. On one level, that’s politics, of course- he’s not going to blame himself! But it’s also a matter of deeply internalized cognitive dissonance. The right has wholly swallowed up the idea that we were about to win in Iraq, because it was relatively peaceful, until we pulled out, and then ISIS formed. On a very surface level, that makes some sense. It did happen like that, chronologically.

But think about it more. That basically means that our “victory” was such that as soon as we left it all fell apart. Our great triumph was a “peace” held together only by limitless troops staying there from now until infinity. But that doesn’t matter. The myth has, contra Lord of the Rings, faded into history, and become reality. The present started in January of 2009.

The whole right-wing foreign policy mentality consists of this kind of magical thinking. When McCain says that Obama is responsible for Orlando, or when moderate New Jersey governor Chris Christie says that we have to hit them where they live, when they live here, they aren’t fringing out. They are in the dead-center of their mainstream, and, given the reality they have constructed, are acting perfectly reasonable.

 

06.17.16
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Bernie Staying In; Hillary’s Savvy, Billionaire Fight, and More Political Quick Hits

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  • There is a trace amount of frustration, and even panic, in Bernie Sanders not taking the time yesterday to drop out and endorse Hillary. But that’s fine. He did the right thing. In not dropping out, he can continue to grow his left coalition, and keep pressure on for the Fight for $15, other labor issues, and everything else related to inequality. He pledged to make sure Trump doesn’t win, which precludes a lengthy run. And by telling his supporters that he knows “we must continue our grassroots efforts to create the America that we know we can become.” This is smart- building on the local and state levels, continuing with that energy, working to make a more progressive platform, and eventually reconciling differences with Clinton that turn into an endorsement. You can see the “We had serious differences, but over the last few months we have made our voice heard, and I can state that I unequivocally vote for Hillary Clinton, etc”.  This makes it seem- correctly!- like Bernie and his supporters will have a big influence. There will be a very small “sellout!” crowd, but those will mostly be people who were attracted to politics as a form of self-expression, a way to show that they were the real rebels, and whom identity as leftier-than-thou was more important than then actual election.
  • Speaking of that, unless something comes out that Bernie backstabbed Hillary, kudos to her for recognizing the passion of the Sanders campaign, and making sure that they can be eased off the hook. If Bernie’s speech was the result of an agreement at their meeting, she played this very well. It’s hard for a politician who has won to not spike the football a bit, but not only is she being gracious, she’s letting Bernie go out on roughly his own terms. This is really smart politics, and speaks very highly of her character.
  • Billionaire fight! Billionaire fight! Writing in The Financial Times, (behind paywall, Re/Code recap here) big-time VC Michael Moritz tears Trump apart for his phony business schemes, his fake narrative, and how he “seems little more than a hustler who takes from the rich (lenders he has short-changed, partners he has sued) and also takes from the poor (hapless students of Trump University, tenants whom he has allegedly bullied).” He praises the same immigrants who Trump has denigrated for being the real winners, people who came with nothing and made something of themselves, like Andy Grove or Jerry Yang. He also picks a side in the Trump/Bezos spat, in which Trump has revoked the WaPo’s access and threatened to use the power of the IRS and other government agencies to go after Bezos. It’s a tribute to Trump’s utter loathsomeness that you instinctively side with Bezos, instead of the normal reaction, which is “fuck Jeff Bezos”.
  • Speaking of jerks, hey guys, John McCain is running for office this year! It means that any reasonableness he might have is completely launched out the window and he once again reveals himself to be the grasping, desperate, unprincipled and self-righteous huckster he is. He can’t side tooooo close to Trump on most issues, because Hispanics do exist in Arizona, but he certainly doesn’t want to get tooooo far away either, because white racists make up his base, so what to do? Oh yeah- ISIS is Obama’s fault for not keeping and indefinite amount of American troops in Iraq indefinitely. This makes him directly responsible for Orlando, which was a devious ISIS plot. That’s the way to show steady leadership, John!  You can deconstruct a lot of right-wing lunacy, and the weird moonscape of their mentality, just from this. Maybe it deserves its own post.
06.15.16
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Well, We Have to Bomb Somebody!

 

Coming soon…

 

I think just being around Donald Trump makes everyone dumber. Not that I thought Chris Christie was ever an astute foreign policy thinker, but yeesh…

“It’s unacceptable to allow this kind of stuff in our country and for us not to fight back, and we need to fight back, and that’s all these people understand,” Christie told the radio show. When the hosts smartly pressed the New Jersey governor on exactly where that fight should take place, he responded: ““You gotta get over there and start making them pay where they live. It’s an ugly and difficult thing but if we don’t get over there, they’re coming here, and they showed it again this weekend.”

Count the cliches!

  1. “that’s all these people understand.” This is always a good one, because it makes you sound really tough and realistic. Look, I don’t like violence, but it’s the only language we have in common. No translation needed. You should generally crack your neck after you say this.
  2. “start over there”. This is fantastic. It deals with the “if we stop them there, they won’t come here” reasoning which was one of the big reasons for why we are  supposed to fight ISIS in Iraq, even though the invasion created the conditions for regional collapse. But it’s even better because Christie has no idea what “over there” he’s referring to. As Will Bunch said, he “wants the U.S. military to drop bombs on Port St. Lucie, Florida,” since that’s where Mateen lived.
  3. “making them pay where they live”. He got this directly from a movie. I’m not sure which one. Maybe a cheap knockoff of The Sopranos, one in which the hero is a tough-talking, and tougher-acting, governor, played by Steve Schirripa. I’m not saying Christie wrote this movie (working title: The Boss of Jungleland), but I’m certainly not saying he didn’t.
  4. “ugly and difficult thing”. Translation: this’ll be great, but I have to use the somber face.
  5. “if we don’t get over there, they’re coming here, and they showed it again this weekend.” Mostly a repeat of number 3, because Christie literally has less than three sentences worth of foreign policy knowledge, but with a neat little bow that highlights the cruel absurdity of everything he is saying. They showed again that they’re coming here, like 30 years ago, and creating sexually-confused psychopaths who wrap their hatred up with the thinnest veneer of religion.

The thing is, this incoherent nonsense is essentially no different than what you hear from Lindsay Graham, who, anti-Trump charm tour notwithstanding, still believes we have to invade literally everywhere or we’re all gonna die. There isn’t a major GOP foreign policy “thinker” who doesn’t advocate this in some form or the other. We have to go there so they can’t come here. Action simply for the sake of action. The Max Power way. Christie isn’t saying just because he’s a dumb guy on foreign policy. He’s saying this because it is perfectly in line with his party’s mainstream ideas.

I don’t know guys. Newt “Bring back HUAC!” Gingrich has some strong credentials, but if Christie keeps sounding like such a dumbass he might get that Veep nod.

06.15.16
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Trump and “Crooked”, Thieving Soldiers: I Mean, He’s Sort of Right

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“Oh, good, the news is on!” -Donald Trump

So Donald Trump in a rally yesterday took the politically…unusual step of accusing American service men and women of theft in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Iraq, crooked as hell,” Trump told a crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina. “How about bringing baskets of money – millions and millions of dollars – and handing it out? I wanna know, who are the soldiers that had that job? Because I think they’re living very well right now, whoever they may be.”

This isn’t the first time he’s gone down this road, either.

“They were going through Afghanistan paying off, I want to know who were the soldiers that are carrying cash of 50 million dollars? Cash! How stupid are we?” he said at a September rally. “I wouldn’t be surprised those soldiers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cash didn’t get there, I have to be honest.”

His spokewoman, the impeccably-named Hope Hicks (turn out to vote), said that he was referring to Iraqi soldiers stealing the money, a rare case of cover-your-ass by the campaign, because this seems to be the one area in which he fears to tread. Accusing our boys and girls of being thieves? That’s suicide. But he clearly didn’t mean Iraqis. One, they weren’t given the bags full of money, and two, well:

“More than 100 enlisted military personnel have been convicted of stealing funds, bribery, and contract rigging while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity valued at $52 million in a 2015 report.”

So, yeah- Trump was right. Maybe exaggerating, certainly a wild conspiratorialist, imagining these veterans living large and laughing at us simps, but still, this did happen. And more so, it points to the insanity of these wars, the incredible waste of money (and of course lives, and honor, and any possibility of even weak regional stability, but let’s stick with money). We spent close to two trillion dollars in Iraq, a lot of it to crooked contractors who inflated prices building a simulacrum of safe areas in the Green Zone. We rented out war priorities to mercenaries. We relentlessly bribed leaders who could turn on us the next day without more bribes.

And that’s why this is the third rail. We can talk about the war in Iraq being a “mistake”, and most of the country is in agreement, but getting into why it was a mistake is dangerous ground. We never talk about the outsourcing of fighting, and we never talk about how the war was driven by money, but paid for in blood. (Here I don’t mean that Bush went to war to make money for his friends, but it was an inevitable outcome of bad intentions).  It was cheap and tacky and cruel, and there is no doubt that its cheap and tacky and cruel nature influenced people who were there, these little pieces flung around with bags of money. Why can’t they have a taste? Everyone else is.

To look at why there was so much corruption is to understand that everywhere our economic system touches becomes just as corrupt. So we gasp when someone insinuates such a thing about the military, whom we’ve mostly all agreed to never criticize. That’s partly understandable, of course, but also dangerous. Not just because it excuses when they do something wrong, but to admit that the military, our boys and girls in uniform, can be corrupted is to look at the whole system in a bare and unflattering hanging-bulb light.

So it is weird that Donald Trump, who never met a lie he didn’t like, and vigorously defend even when every fact in opposition is thrust in his face, accidentally stumbles on to a truth. It’s even more telling that this is the one in which he immediately backtracks.

 

06.14.16
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Just a Normal Day on The Campaign Trail

Donald Trump

Let’s look at what happened in the 24 hours following the Orlando shooting.

  • Donald Trump gave a speech proposing a ban for immigrants from any Muslim country, and any country that has ever committed terrorism against the US and its allies (Ireland?), because, if you follow the logic of it, their children, or their children’s children might do something bad.
  • He suggested, to multiple outlets, that President Obama might in fact be in league with ISIS, or at least sympathetic to it. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.” Now, in his lying way, he said that he believes Obama just doesn’t get it, but you know, people might think otherwise, and it’s really unbelievable, and it’s also hard to believe. To recap: a Presidential candidate is repeating, and heightening, the idea that the sitting President is actively helping, or at least hoping for, and ISIS victory.
  • When a major publication called him out on it, he revoked their credentials. Nixon didn’t revoke the credentials of the Post during Watergate. Nixon! And they aren’t the first. “Among the news organizations whose reporters have been blacklisted: Gawker, BuzzFeed, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Des Moines Register, the Daily Beast and Huffington Post.” That these bans are haphazardly enforced doesn’t make them any less scary.

To recap: this is not normal. The blood-and-soil race-hatred, the wild paranoia, the fiercely shouted conspiracy theories, the dismissing of noncompliant press. There is no way to normalize this. This is not a campaign strategy. It’s exactly how he’d govern, as the tinpot strongman of our nightmares.

I actually think the Post thing will backfire, as the mainstream media, who have been desperate to  treat this as a normal race, albeit one with an unusual candidate, will finally see it happening to one of their own. It was easy when it was local papers like the Union-Leader or the Register. And what’s this BuzzFed? And didn’t Gawker do the Hogan? Mother Jones? Fuck you.

But it’s different with the Post. As much as it has fallen, it is still the Post, the paper that brought down Nixon. I hope that this is when they realize that telling both sides and covering the debate is enabling an authoritarian the likes of which this country has never seen. I worry, and will worry until proven wrong, that the press will self-censor so they can stay in bed with the campaign. Access! That’s what most tyrants want. Self-censorship out of fear and preservation is so much more effective than having to line people up against the wall. Voices that are compliant in their own silence are usually too ashamed to ever speak up. That’s what Trump wants.

But maybe this will be different. Maybe this is so outrageous that they’ll push back. Maybe they’ll be fully awakened to the danger of this American monster.

06.14.16
by

A Confused and Angry Man With A Gun: An American Portrait

Orlando Sentinel:

At least four regular customers at the Orlando gay nightclub where a gunman killed 49 people said Monday that they had seen Omar Mateen there before.

“Sometimes he would go over in the corner and sit and drink by himself, and other times he would get so drunk he was loud and belligerent,” Ty Smith said.

Washington Post:

Further confusing matters, Comey also revealed that in “inflammatory and contradictory” comments to co-workers in 2013, Mateen had claimed to be a member of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia based in Lebanon.

 Now, it’s possible, I suppose, that Pulse just had great drink specials, good enough for a man with outward revulsion toward homosexuality to overcome his loathing and get some Bud. It’s also possible, I suppose, that a man whom no one described as particularly concerned with religion had a sophisticated conversion wherein he moved from Shi’ism to Sunnism, perhaps based on some actions taken by Hezbollah of which he disapproved, revoking his membership and transferring to Hezbollah’s rival, ISIS (and doing this, meanwhile, while frequently getting drunk at a gay nightclub).
In the absence of those not too terribly likely scenarios, though, we need to look at this as what it was: a deeply confused, possibly closeted man, twisted by a culture (both much of Islam and many strains of Christian American life) that has a fierce hatred of homosexuality. He’s someone who hated himself, and hated others, especially those who reminded him of what he possibly actually was, even as he was drawn to them.
An angry and boastful man, who wanted people to think he was something that he wasn’t, in many ways. A manly married man, a tough Muslim with a dangerous background.  With just a few puzzle pieces moved around, a few name substitutions, this could be any of our mass shooters (and many of our non-mass-shooters, and some people who somehow don’t shoot anyone at all).
That he pledged to ISIS is no more indicative of their global reach than was the Newtown Massacre. There is little doubt that he was “inspired” by them, but not in the way we commonly understand. They just gave him an outlet for his rage, and a justification for his actions. But he would have found one anyway. It doesn’t seem he was radicalized by ISIS: he was radicalized by his hate, by something in his personality, and possibly something lurking deep within him. He let ISIS be his final reason, but the reasons were always there. ISIS was, at best, the proximate justification.
That’s what we don’t seem to understand, and the cheap and dangerous political demagoguing coming from the Republican candidate is making matters worse. As Masha Gessen said in the NYRB, declaring “war” on people like Mateen only empowers them, empowers ISIS, and gives the next confused and small and angry man a reason to act. It makes them seem like a great and powerful force, exactly the kind of thing that someone like Mateen wants to be a part of. It isn’t Islam, although there is no doubt that Islam played a role. It’s the roaring anger that exists in so many men, a self that is curdled by tradition and loathing. In his case, it was heightened by the rank homophobia that exists in many parts of American culture, including Islam. (As Chotiner pointed out at Slate, in his speech, Trump clearly separated Muslims from Americans, even saying “them” and “us”, even when talking about citizens. This hideous bigotry is exactly what ISIS wants, and it feeds any angry teenager who identifes with Islam).
It’s this yell, this cancerous rage, that is rampant across the country, no matter the pledged allegiance. Mateen was a product of his won twisted pathologies, but they were heightened by the society in which he lived.
And he had easy and unfettered access to combat weaponry.