Eternal Vigilance

“There’s a sucker born every minute” is an observation widely attributed to the flamboyant 19th-century showman P.T. Barnum, and it says this: The folks of a given generation may catch on to a con, making it more difficult to pull off. But there’s always a new generation coming along whose members are unaware of it and therefore susceptible to it. The perennial scam favorites appear and fade with regularity, but they never stop coming back.

That’s how the anti-Semitism con works. Destructive characterizations of Jews as a people, some outlandish and totally demented and some with a certain surface plausibility,(for the simple-minded, at least) come back again and again, and are given wide-eyed acceptance and dissemination by the incoming wave of the uninitiated.

The current political climate appears ripe for just that phenomenon. Thus, Flyoverland confidently predicts the resurrection, for example, of something called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a pseudo-scholarly and completely bogus early 20th-century document that purports to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders laying out their plan for world domination through control of the press and the world’s economies, and through subversion of the morals of non-Jews. It was long ago shown to be fraudulent but it’s still around and still widely available, and repeatedly comes back into favor with a certain segment of the population when the climate is right. It’s coming soon to an alt-right Web site near you. If it’s not there already.

An article in Wikipedia lists other tropes and canards about Jewish people that have come into fashion repeatedly over centuries, all designed to justify vilification (and blame) of the hated “other.” Some of these, including the Protocols, were favorites in Germany before and during WWII. Among the things Jews as a people have been accused of:

• Control of the global financial system;
• Control of the media, Hollywood, and the music industry;
• Hatred of non-Jews and the intention to destroy Christianity;
• Ritual murder and bestialiuty;
• Host desecration;
• Poisoning wells to spread disease;
• Causing wars, revolutions, and calamities;
• Lack of patriotism and allegiance to “world jewry” instead of to their country;
• Usury and profiteering (This one, or forms of it, enjoys fairly widespread casual acceptance even among people who do not see themselves as anti-Semitic);
• Playing an important role in the slave trade;

Lest we forget: Millions of people – young and old, tall and short, fat and thin, smart and dumb, handsome and ugly, blonde and brunette, factory and office workers, doctors and lawyers, artists and writers, street sweepers, teachers, small business owners, grocery store clerks, soccer moms, gawky teenagers, little kids, and babies – were murdered by Germany’s Third Reich with bullet and rope and fire and gas, because they were Jewish.

That kind of savagery is the culmination of a process that begins with the demonization of a population through stereotyping -- often, to the casual observer, innocent -- then blaming. It can happen to any population that is identifiable – skin color, ethnicity, religion -- and has happened to Jews time after time over centuries.

Something like the Holocaust can‘t happen again? Maybe not. We certainly want to think so. But…

Such a thing could never happen is exactly what the German people thought, before it happened and while it was happening. And, as we speak, we are seeing a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic activity in the United States and in the world, particularly Western Europe, according to the Anti-Defmation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, both of which keep careful track of these matters. Historically, such activity has ebbed and flowed – it’s always there but occasionally bubbles to the surface and becomes more noticeable, and more frightening, before dying back again. Will the current “flow” coalesce into something bigger, more sinister, more dangerous?

Does this uptick have anything to do with Donald Trump? Is Donald Trump anti-Semitic? Not overtly. But he has enthusiastic supporters who could not be more overt about it, and he has said this: “[Hillary Clinton] meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers…” Not an open reference to Jews but unquestionably part of the vocabulary of anti-Semitism over the years. And speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition a year ago, he said, "Look, I'm a negotiator like you folks; we're negotiators.” A perfect example of the casual acceptance of a stereotype. Trump didn’t know any of those people personally, so as far as he knew, not a single person in the room was a good negotiator. But they were all Jewish.

Flyoverland cannot recall a time when xenophobes, ultra-nationalists, racists, and haters of every stripe seemed to feel as empowered as they do now. Of all these hatreds, anti-Semitism, though it's intertwined with all the others, stands out as the most sinister, if only because we had a vivid demonstration just a few decades ago of the horror to which it can lead.

It's said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Just so.

True Believers

So numerous were the bizarre utterances, ranging from uninformed opinions to outright lies, coming out of the mouth of Donald Trump during the campaign that any one of them could be easily lost and forgotten. And most were, as each day’s nonsense eclipsed the previous day’s. But one which won’t soon be forgotten, because it has turned out to be so perfectly descriptive and prescient, is this:

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters,"

That was Trump’s way of paying homage to the gullibility, capacity for self-deception, and cult-of-personality devotion of his followers. He was making a joke at their expense – laughing up his sleeve at them and expressing supreme confidence that he could say or do anything and they would continue to worship at his altar. They didn’t get the joke. And, as we all now know, his confidence was fully warranted.

Take the Carrier business in Indiana, a remarkably transparent publicity stunt by which he would have his followers believe – in vivid testimony to his contempt for their intelligence – that he was making good on his tough-guy campaign promises to bring to heel those companies who wanted to move production facilities, and jobs, to Mexico. He would impose a 35-percent tax on goods those companies wished to bring back into the U.S. and sell here, and that would show them who’s boss. And it would do it without offering them tax incentives and other inducements, which he vigorously disdained.

But we now know, of course, that it was precisely through those kinds of inducements, engineered by his gofer Mike Pence, that persuaded Carrier to refrain from moving at least some of the jobs it had planned to move. Godfather Trump didn’t use his his highly-praised (by him) negotiating skills to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. No, he made them an offer they didn’t want to refuse: He paid them. Seven million dollars over ten years. And he used taxpayer money belonging to the citizens of Indiana to do it. And with that payment, he bought a photo op for himself.

And then there’s the Obamacare-Medicare-Medicaid-Social Security discussion. Again here, Trump and the GOP leadership in congress show their contempt for the intelligence of the folks who voted for them by immediately getting about the business of dismantling these programs, exactly as they promised to do. Trump himself has been all over the map on these matters but make no mistake: He’s the leader of a party whose most fervent wish has been to get the government out of these undertakings and turn them over to private enterprise. He said he would not disturb Medicare and they believed him. And he knew they would believe him. Even though disturbing Medicare was, and is, at the top of the GOP’s to-do list.

One shudders to think what it will be like for these voters as the reality of what Republicans are doing – what those voters have done to themselves -- sinks in, or, God forbid, actually comes to fruition. They will be as bugs hitting a windshield.

“Medicare’s history, folks. Here’s some dough, a tax credit maybe, for you to buy medical insurance on the open market. May or may not be enough – probably won’t be. You’ll now have to rely on the tender mercies of the insurance companies, and every year, you’ll have to go through the mind-numbing process of trying to figure out which policy works best for you. If any. Every year. Good luck with that!”

Or “What used to be Social Security where you could rely on a monthly check, is now going to be in the form of your own brokerage account. Just think, your very own account! Sure, it could lose half of its value in an hour (and, of course, cut your income by half), but, hey, it’s the stock market. It’ll recover. You’ve got plenty of time. You’re only 76 years old. Good luck with that!”

Then there’s The Donald’s far-flung business interests. He knew his constituency would buy his breezy assurances that those businesses wouldn’t interfere with his fun new career as president. Now it’s beginning to look like his fun new career as president won’t interfere with his far-flung business interests. Nobody on planet earth, with the possible exception of Kellyanne Conway, believes that turning things over to his children has any meaning whatsoever, and that he won’t run afoul of at least the emoluments clause of the constitution.

And the villainous Goldman-Sachs, which Trump repeatedly told the gullible that he was implacably against and which he cited as being in the forefront of everything that’s corrupt in the world of high finance – the very world that’s responsible for sticking it to decent hard-working Americans -- and the company he blasted Hillary Clinton for cozying up to. Well, avert your eyes, decent hard working Americans, as the president-elect names former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin to be his treasury secretary and Goldman’s second in command, Gary Cohn, to be his budget director. Oh, and there’s one other former Goldman-Sachs operative on board the Trump train – the redoubtable Stephen K. Bannon. cheerful defender of the swastika-happy alt-right.

And finally, there’s the fantasy that Trump would have won the popular vote had there not been millions of fraudulent voters. Even Kellyanne doesn’t believe that one. But Trump, who knows his followers well, was pretty sure they would. And, apparently, they do. 

Yikes.

That Lovable Scamp Says the Darndest Things

From The Wall Street Journal comes this remarkable take on the various pronouncements of Donald Trump: Hey, where’s our sense of humor? Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in his November 11 WSJ column, argues that many if not most of the things Donald Trump said during the campaign were basically jokes, or quips, or wisecracks that went over the heads of the too-serious media. He quotes venture capitalist Peter Thiel suggesting Trump should be taken “seriously, not literally.”

For example, Jenkins says this about the Billy Bush tape: ”Ninety-nine percent of America that doesn’t work in a media company in midtown recognized instantly that it wasn’t two rapists discussing the finer points of sexual assault. It was one guy clowning for another on the subject of celebrity sex appeal.”

Hmm. I wonder if Jenkins would have characterized it as harmless clowning if Barack Obama had said during his campaign…

"I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it…I did try and fuck her. She was married,…and I moved on her very heavily…I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married…then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look…I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her…you know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait…and when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything….grab them by the pussy…you can do anything.”

Probably not, I’m thinking. I think his reaction – and the reaction of fellow travelers in hypocrisy like Hannity, Giuliani, and Gingrich – would have been neck-bulging, vein-popping apoplexy, and I suspect their rage would have had racial overtones. For Trump, though, it’s just a joke the rest of us don’t quite get.

Or how about this? What if Obama said: “You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful piece of ass.”

Would Jenkins say the media failed to read between the lines and grasp the humor in what Obama was saying? Nah.

Here are just a few other things Trump has said that Jenkins might have failed to see the humor in if Obama or Clinton had said them:

"My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure; it’s not your fault.”

"I’m just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to [me], right?

“I could stand in the middles of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

An example Jenkins cited to illustrate his hypothesis was Trump’s remark about John McCain: “I like people who weren’t captured.” Jenkins writes: “It was disrespectful, yes. It was also a joke; a wisecrack, offered in response to Sen. McCain’s equally flippant dismissal of Trump supporters as ‘crazies.’

Maybe so. I doubt it, but maybe so. But imagine if Hillary Clinton had said that. My guess is that Jenkins et.al. would not have characterized it as a joke, a wisecrack, or even as merely disrespectful. I suspect they might have wrapped themselves in the nearest flag and gotten quite huffy about her disdain for a military hero. Just a guess.

How about if Hillary Clinton had said, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me.” What!? You!? You know more than the generals?! You, a girl?!” I don’t think Jenkins and the boys would have characterized that boast as harmless Clintonian japery.

I wonder if Jenkins considers the following an example of Trump’s jokey hyperbole: “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.” What would Jenkins have said if Clinton or Obama had resurrected this ancient anti-Semitic trope of the sort that was quite popular in 1930s Germany. Would he have called out the idea for the fantasy that it is and solemnly castigated the person who advanced it for being a Jew-baiting demagogue?

The point: Even if we give Jenkins the benefit of the doubt here and conclude that everyone should have done a better job of reading between Trump’s lines, the problem remains: He would not have chided us for failing to do the same for Clinton or Obama. He would have taken them absolutely literally.

The double standard applied to these candidates in this election, and not just by the right, was breathtaking. We had Trump the phony “university” swindler, Trump the deadbeat who put multiple businesses in bankruptcy and left investors and vendors holding the bag, Trump the playboy who went through glam wives and lived extravagantly large while pleading poverty to avoid paying federal taxes, Trump the admirer of the KGB operative whose country has nuclear missiles pointed at American cities, and so many others – things he said and did any one of which, if said/done by his opponent, would have buried her forever. Clinton’s sin was to use the wrong email server. Gasp, said the chorus of critics who didn’t really know what an email server was.

The media (and pollsters) did get one thing right, though. They predicted that Clinton would get slightly more votes than Trump, and that’s what happened. The great previously undetected uprising of the working class actually amounted to a bit less than half the electorate.

The Electorate Throws a Tantrum. The Establishment Abides.

If the idea was to blow up the Washington establishment and show its members who’s boss, it failed miserably, since just about everyone who was in power before the election, still is. The furious-with-the-power-structure faction of the electorate sent business-as-usual incumbents back to Washington in droves. In their only major trade-out, they put into office a fool who knows nothing of government, economics, or foreign affairs and who has great disdain for minority groups too numerous to mention. Of course, it never was about throwing the bums out. It was about making America great again; and by “great again” they seem to be referring to a time when women knew their place and blacks, gays, and other minorities didn’t compete with decent white folks for the good jobs.

There is always a segment of the population that has an unspecific sense of malaise -- who yearn for change of some kind, no matter how unfocused -- and national elections are just the thing for that, since they are, by definition, about change. It doesn’t seem to matter that times are pretty good, as they are now – general prosperity in the form of full employment or close to it, savings accounts thriving in financial markets, negligible inflation, low-interest debt. There remains a free-floating hostility for a variety of bogeymen, and you can round up the usual suspects – the establishment, Wall Street, the wealthy, big government, lawmakers that don’t “get anything done,” and various minority groups. These folks are encouraged to see themselves as victims of “the system,” and that, apparently is more appealing to them than enjoying their prosperity and general good fortune. And so, change. It’s so desperately needed as to warrant the selection of a knowledge-free blowhard as its agent.

The selection was made that much easier, that much more justifiable, by the dark reputation of his opponent – a reputation that was created largely out of thin air through the invention of a series of fictitious “scandals” ginned up by people who definitely had skin in the game – namely, unrepentant political opponents who coveted the power she and her party had and would say and do anything to get it

And so, Donald Trump. If any actual change is in the offing because of all this, it surely will be for the worse, particularly for this constituency, since the most likely results of Trump’s economic ideas, insofar as they can be deciphered, will be recession and job loss. But, no matter. That constituency was able to get its rocks off, as it were, and that, apparently, is what counts. Results? We don’t care about no stinkin’ results.

Meanwhile, returning to haunt our dreams are the acolytes of Saint Bernie Sanders, insisting, incredibly, that Donald Trump is the fault of Hillary Clinton and her adherents, because they renounced Sanders who would have been the more effective Trump opponent. The polls showed that, they say; but Sanders was deprived of the nomination by shenanigans within the Democratic National Committee.

This is truly delusional, First, do we need to talk about what polling tells us? Second, the actual numbers, as opposed to poll results, are implacable: Clinton got 3.6 million more primary votes than Sanders. You can’t rig that. It tells us she was a more broadly supported candidate in the general election than Sanders would have been. In this election, rationality and decency lost to irrationality, ignorance, and hatred, and the loss would have been just as bad with Sanders if not worse. Also, not helpful: obsession with the "establishment" (whatever that is) and continually characterizing Clinton as being part of it and therefore undesirable; naively swallowing, hook, line, and sinker the phony Clinton "scandals" ginned up by Republicans; and pointlessly switching a vote that would have gone to the Democrat to one of the off-party candidates.

The guess here is that Trump never really wanted or expected to be president – that it was just another ego trip, a place from which he could spout his half-basked theories about everything while his toadies nodded enthusiastically, and he could bellow orders at them to get me this and go fetch that. Now, however, he’s like the dog that caught the garbage truck. OMG, what now? Same with his constituents.

Voodoo Economics Again

The alt-right folks, the white supremacists, the swastika lovers are all obviously a lost cause when it comes to dissuading people from supporting Donald Trump, but what about the more rational people in the Trump camp? If they can’t be moved by the fact that their guy boasted about, and may well have committed, sexual assault, withheld payment from family-business contractors who did work for him, then dared them to sue him, ran several businesses into bankruptcy and left investors holding the bag, ran a fraudulent “university” that did nothing but separate people from their money, never stops whining that the system is stacked against him and his troubles are everybody else’s fault, has refused to disclose his tax returns – documents that may well show that he salutes the flag of an adversary because of his business ties to it, mounted a blatantly racist and totally false “birther” campaign targeting the President of the United States, and has demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the competing interests at play in the Middle East and made a fool of himself advocating military tactics he knows nothing about…

…if they can’t be persuaded by all of that (and so much more) – if their weird man crush remains intact – then maybe a discussion of money – their money – will do the trick

I assume that pro-Trump financial advisors are telling their clients what’s about to happen to them if Trump wins the election. Which is, they’re going to lose a lot of their money. As Heather Long of CNN Money put it: “Trump is the king of unpredictability (something Wall Street hates), and he's campaigned on an anti-trade agenda, which wouldn't be good for big business.”

It may be that markets are already pricing in the possibility of a Trump win – as of this writing, the Dow has lost ground for nine straight days, the longest decline since the 2008 crisis – but still, most Wall Streeters predict a sell-off in the event of a Trump victory. Their predictions range from a low of 8-percent to 15-percent or more. The reason, and it’s a pretty straightforward one: Clinton, no matter how loudly Republicans howl about what they perceive as her anti-business bent, represents the continuation of a business and economic environment in which the Dow has more than doubled in value, inflation has remained negligible, and bellwether industries – e.g., automotive – have prospered as never before. In other words, she represents business as usual. Investors like that.

Trump represents who knows what. And investors don’t like that. Besides his general criticism of the regulatory environment in the U.S., and of the way trade deals have been negotiated, he hasn’t said much. One thing he has said, in keeping with the tough-buy, us-against-them stance his followers find so appealing, is that he’d impose a 45-percent tariff on Chinese imports. That’s an idea that Michael Schuman, in an article in the New York Times, argued, “would set off a cascade of global economic consequences, mostly negative.” Consequences that could well include a trade war and a recession, neither of which would be good for American business and job prospects.

Another thing Trump has said is that the numbers are “phony.” Because a large part of his pitch to his followers is that the economy is in terrible shape – still in the recession that started in 2007 -- and that he alone can fix it, he simply denies reality. The reality is that over 15-million jobs have been added since 2010, the unemployment rate is half of what it was in 2009, and average hourly wages jumped 2.8 percent, to $25.92, in October from a year earlier, the biggest such increase since 2008. He has also repeated the wild fiction that the unemployment rate is higher than what the Labor Department says it is; much higher, he tells people – more like 40-percent. If that were actually the case, we would probably have noticed it, since during the Great Depression unemployment peaked at just under 25-percent, and their were bread lines, soup kitchens, Hoovervilles, people selling apples on street corners, and caravans of “Oakies” headed west in search of economic salvation. There were no automobile manufacturers setting sales records as they are now. (It must be all those unemployed folks who are buying all those cars and pick-ups.)

It’s not surprising that 370 economists, including eight Nobel Prize winners, have signed a letter denouncing him for peddling “magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.”

In the years since the recession ended and the recovery began, investors – including millions of Trump supporters whose life savings are in stock-market-heavy 401K accounts -- have seen their investments grow and have prospered greatly. Now, apparently, they’re about to vote to bring that to end and get things headed in the opposite direction.

Lock Who Up?

Lock her up!

• Had problems with the way she used email. 

Lock him up!

• Boasted about, and may well have committed, sexual assault.
• Withheld payment from family-business contractors who did work for him, then dared them to sue him. 
• Ran several businesses into bankruptcy and left investors holding the bag. 
• Ran a totally bogus “university” – currently the target of lawsuits by people who were taken in by the scam – that had on its faculty and staff people with personal bankruptcies, foreclosures, credit card defaults, and/or tax liens in their past, as well as “teachers” who did not have college degrees and were not licensed to broker real estate.
• Has filed over 4,000 lawsuits in three decades. 
• Has tried to subvert the American democracy by claiming the electoral system that has served the country for over 200 years is “rigged” and therefore invalid. 
• Has refused to disclose his tax returns – documents that may well show business ties to Russia, a country whose leadership he has expressed admiration for and a country that has thousands of warheads trained on U.S. cities. 
• Mounted a blatantly racist and totally false “birther” campaign targeting the President of the United States 
• Counts among his most ardent supporters members of the Alt-Right, white supremacists, and people who brandish swastikas. 
• And on… 
• And on… 
• And on.

Donald Trump. Real Estate Man and Failed Casino Operator,, Sets the Generals Straight

The pentagon tells us that more than 50,000 bombs have been dropped on ISIS targets by U.S-led coalition drones and warplanes in Iraq and Syria in the last two and a half years or so, killing some 25,000 ISIS militants and causing ISIS to relinquish massive chunks of its self-declared caliphate. The announcement that the fight to take back Mosul was beginning came just hours after ISIS lost Dabiq, a village in Syria they had said was where Armageddon would play out in an apocalyptic battle with infidel forces from the West. (It was reported that ISIS forces fled Dabiq when Syrian rebels, backed by Turkey and reportedly advised by U.S. Special Forces, pushed into the town.)

In recent months, ISIS has lost a number of top leaders in U.S. airstrikes, including its chief of external operations, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, in and Wa’il Adil Hasan Salman al-Fayad, the minister of information and a member of the ruling Shura Council. One administration official reportedly described the situation as “a rapidly crumbling caliphate… under more pressure than ever before.”

So goes the administration’s “feckless” – Mike Pence’s favorite new word – foreign policy generally and its program for squashing ISIS in particular, as the coalition moves on the last ISIS stronghold of Mosul. As for the attack on Mosul, the United States, it is reported, has played a key role in coordinating rival Iraqi forces for the operation, and with the recent addition of another six hundred troops, the U.S. now has more than five thousand personnel deployed in Iraq and another few hundred Special Forces in Syria.

Meanwhile, as Josh Rogin wrote in The Washigton Post: “For months, Donald Trump has been promising to be tough on the Islamic State and has criticized the Obama administration for not taking the fight to the terrorists. Now that the battle of Mosul is underway, Trump has become a cheerleader for the failure of the mission while promoting a conspiracy theory that it’s all about him.”

Trump’s conspiracy theory: The Obama administration began the assault on Mosul “because Obama wanted to show what a tough guy he is before the election.”

Trump has already declared the Mosul operation a failure – a “disaster” in fact -- but still has not said what he would do to combat ISIS that has not been done, other than he would “knock the hell out of” them. (So much more sophisticated than the planning of the senior military advisors that has eviscerated ISIS over the past couple of years.)

Josh Rogin: ‘Trump’s statements on how he would combat the Islamic State have been all over the map. At various times he has said his plans are ‘secret,’ endorsed the torture of suspected terrorists, pledged to kill their families and promised to 'take the oil,' which makes no sense at all.”

As for Trump’s talk – well-known military tactician that he is, due, presumably, to his attendance at a military prep school -- about famous WWII generals turning over in their graves at the failure of the U.S. military to make the attack on Mosul a surprise, there’s this from the news/opinion site Vox:

Preparing to launch a massive military operation to retake Iraq’s second-largest city is not the kind of thing that can be done stealthily. It’s literally not possible to move tens of thousands of troops, heavy artillery, and other equipment to the outskirts of the city a couple of hours before the attack is supposed to begin. Making matters even harder, the 20,000 to 30,000 troops that will take part in the offensive aren’t part of a central, unified command. Moving fighters from so many different groups — some members of a formal army, some just tribal fighters with minimal training — and all of their weapons and equipment into place around a city as big as Mosul takes a while. And the idea that all that activity would go unnoticed by ISIS fighters in Mosul and the surrounding areas beggars belief.”

(In this connection, there have been a good many comparisons to the invasion of Europe on D-Day, which, critics point out, was kept a secret by the allies as to where and when it would occur. If that could be done with an operation as massive as D-Day, why not Mosul? Well, the “where” part of the secret-keeping is going to be a problem for this line of argument, since any attack on Mosul would take place at…well, Mosul. [Where else? Cincinnati?] As for the when, see the above paragraph.)

Trumps posturing on this subject has been nothing short of buffoonish. He has no clue what he’s talking about, and makes it up as he goes along. He has no experience in this area, no knowledge, no expertise. But, of course, that doesn’t stop him from offering up his ridiculous opinions on the matter, and it doesn’t stop his followers from siding with him on this as opposed to the dozens-to-hundreds of senior military staff who actually know what they’re doing. ("Doh! Why didn't we think of that?" they prob ably said when told about the sneak-attack stratagem.)

As all of this is going on in the Middle East – that is, as dreams of an Islamic State, or
Caliphate, are being relegated to the dustbin of history – efforts to inflict damage and casualties in western countries by people affiliated with ISIS or inspired by it, and by jihadists and assorted other members of the lunatic fringe, will doubtless continue. But that’s not about battalions deployed in the Middle East and the taking of territory by way of large military operations. It’s about hard and smart work by the intelligence communities and police in the targeted countries, including the U.S. Stamping out ISIS on the other side of the world will not stop these attacks. Perhaps nothing will stop all of them. But police and intelligence work, not tough-guy promises to “knock the hell out of them,” are our best hope.

Separate but Equal?

It’s remarkable how some people sigh over the condition of the election as a whole every time Donald Trump says or does something off-the-wall, which he does daily; as if Clinton were somehow equally responsible for Trump’s irresponsibility. I can’t imagine the fictions people tell themselves about Clinton to create this false equivalence. The idea that Trump and Clinton are somehow equally reprehensible is itself reprehensible and completely at odds with the facts. The overwrought hatred of Clinton that would lead even otherwise reasonable people to prefer the worst candidate in the history of American politics is not rational. Once again, then, a listing (doubtless incomplete) of things that Clinton has not said or done…

...claimed without evidence that the election is rigged; accused his opponent of being on drugs; refuses to show his tax returns but apparently didn’t pay any federal taxes for many years; called for negotiating with mom and pop on the redemption of their U.S. savings bonds; imagines that he saw thousands of people on TV celebrating 9/11; characterized Ferguson as one of the most dangerous places on earth; made weirdo phone calls bragging about himself while pretending to be someone else; married and discarded glamour models and made sexually suggestive remarks about his offspring; favors starting a trade war and a worldwide recession by slapping an astronomical tariff on Chinese goods; calls for the creation of a Gestapo-like government force to undertake a massive, years-long round-up and deportation of undocumented families; believes members of one religion should be put under surveillance and possibly put in camps; thinks Mexican people are rapists and wants to build a staggeringly expensive 2,000-mile wall that would be the largest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system; believes that illegal immigrants are pouring over the borders to vote in the November election; believes American soldiers should kill the innocent children of suspected terrorists; ran a fake “university”; drove five businesses into bankruptcy leaving investors and creditors with nothing, and routinely stiffed contractors; mocked a war hero who was shot down and imprisoned for five years and callously dissed the parents of a fallen American army officer; ridiculed a person with a severe disability; threatened to crush anyone who criticizes him in print through libel lawsuits; questioned Barack Obama’s country of birth and lied about his birth certificate; acquired his foreign policy expertise by “watching the shows;” accused Ted Cruz’ father of complicity in the murder of JFK; implied the Clintons murdered Vince Foster; counts among his most ardent supporters members of the Alt-Right, white supremacists, and people who brandish swastikas; referred to disliked members of the opposite sex as fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals, inferred that Megyn Kelley asked about those characterizations only because she was menstruating; bragged about grabbing women’s crotches and trying to seduce married women, and stands accused by multiple women of uninvited and unwanted spontaneous touching/kissing/grabbing.

Remember now: Hillary Clinton didn’t say these things. The mainstream media didn’t say these things. The "rigged system" didn't say these things. Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump, said these things.

Donald Exposes the Banks

Hillary Clinton, we learned this week from Donald Trump “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty, in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.”

Whoa! Did you, his supporters, know about this? How about, you, surrogates – yeah, you, Giuliani, Christie, Gingrich, Spence, et. al. Since you support Mr. Trump, can we assume that you agree with him on the existence of this international cabal? And if you agree with him, you must have known about it all along. Right?

Well, you should have told the rest of us, because this is serious business, this secret society that controls the universe and is out to get your guy because he’s on to them. And where is Fox News when you need them? Why haven’t they reported this? And the Wall Street Journal! Especially WSJ, which is supposed to be good at ferreting out stories about banks planning to destroy the sovereignty of the United States. Or maybe he’s just springing this news on y’all, too. In any event, the United States of America will soon be no more, if Clinton and the banks have their way. Yikes. And make no mistake: The lamestream media didn’t say this. Mr. Trump did. (By the way, don’t you just love the term “lamestream media”? Super clever play on words. I know a guy who always refers to the Clintons as “The Hillbillary.” So funny.)

Anywho…I guess we can all be grateful that Mr. Trump has turned his attention to these grave matters – viz., the end of days for America at the hands of Ms. Clinton and her banks -- because not so long ago he had other things on his mind, as recounted in the Washington Post:

“One of the other allegations this week comes from Tasha Dixon, a former Miss Arizona, who has said in multiple interviews that Trump strolled into the contestant's dressing area even when they were naked — a claim echoed to BuzzFeed by contestants in the Miss Teen USA competition, where competitors are younger than 18 years old. Trump's own comments on Stern's show, as reported by CNN over the weekend, show him copping to that very same type of behavior at his beauty pageants.

“’I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else,’ he said, per CNN. ‘And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore I’m inspecting it. ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.’”

Hmm. Nothing creepy about any of that, right? It hasn’t gotten as much attention as the pussy-grabbing thing, but, well, there it is.

Speaking of the pussy-grabbing thing, some of Mr. Trump’s folks have said, hey, he’s running for president, not husband of the year. Or words to that effect. What an excellent point! I’m certain they would have made the exact same point about Barack Obama when he was running for president, if Obama had said this…

“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it…I did try and fuck her. She was married…and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’…I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married…Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look…You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait…and when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want…grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

He’s running for president, not husband of the year. That’s what Republicans, the religious right, and evangelicals would’ve said about Obama. I’m sure of it. It’s just locker room talk, after all. I’m sure Sean Hannity would have said, in Obama’s defense, “King David had 500 concubines, for crying out loud!” Which is what he said about Mr. Trump’s sexual escapades. So let’s don’t get all bent out of shape over Obama, I think Sean would’ve cautioned. For crying out loud.

By the way, I don’t know if my bank is in on this international conspiracy thing, but if it is, it can kiss my checking account goodbye. This I can tell you. Believe me.

(This just in: Carlos Slim, the Mexican – Mexican! – billionaire is behind the New York Times part in the Great Conspiracy to bring down Mr.Trump.)

Just Before the Second Debate

This from a previous TVFF posting:

“This is a good time to ask Trump supporters, who hold their hands over their ears and hum loudly when confronted with the litany of blockheaded ideas and outright lies their hero is guilty of, what their reaction would be if, say, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were found to be in business with Russia, had expressed admiration for former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, and encouraged Russia to spy on America. Or if they had called the American military a disaster, mocked an American flyer who was a prisoner of war for five years, and belittled the parents of a dead soldier. Answer: Spitting, fuming apoplexy. Hannity et. al would be shouting the T word – as in treason – from the rooftops.”

Now imagine what their reaction would be -- and what would be the reaction of evangelicals who make the unimaginably ludicrous excuse that Trump isn’t running for pastor, he’s running for president -- if Obama were caught out, on video and audio recordings, saying incredibly coarse and demeaning things about women and advocating, or possibly even admitting to, sexual assault. One cringes at the thought of the public crucifixion that would follow. And yet we hear Trump's cowardly enablers acknowledging this latest chapter of the freak show that is the Trump campaign, but arguing that we should forgive and forget; as if this were some isolated aberration where their guy merely went off the rails a little bit, as opposed to what it actually is: The latest in a long and depressing string of ideas and statements that range from the ugly to the nonsensical and which add up to a degenerate, narcissistic, uninformed blowhard who should not be allowed anywhere near our White House.

The cowardly enablers are many but the reference here is specifically to Christie, Giuliani, Ryan, and now Pence, all of whom, to save and advance their own political prospects, have consistently offered up loud and ridiculous-on-their-face excuses for Trump’s pratfalls; or like the pathetic Ryan, acknowledge the abject horrendousness of the various incidents but kiss them off by expressing the forlorn hope that Trump will do better later. This, instead of doing what they’d be doing if they had any spine and were less willing to sell out the country for their own political fortunes: Withdraw their support and tell the guy to take a hike.

It is as if they are saying the following: “Here’s a guy who refuses to show his tax returns but apparently didn’t pay any federal taxes for many years; called for negotiating with mom and pop on the redemption of their U.S. savings bonds; imagines that he saw thousands of people on TV celebrating 9/11; characterized Ferguson as one of the most dangerous places on earth; made weirdo phone calls bragging about himself while pretending to be someone else; married and discarded glamour models and made sexually suggestive remarks about his offspring; favors starting a trade war and a worldwide recession by slapping an astronomical tariff on Chinese goods; calls for the creation of a Gestapo-like government force to undertake a massive, years-long round-up and deportation of undocumented families; believes members of one religion should be put under surveillance and possibly put in camps; thinks Mexican people are rapists and wants to build a staggeringly expensive 2,000-mile wall that would be the largest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system; believes that illegal immigrants are pouring over the borders to vote in the November elction; believes American soldiers should kill the innocent children of suspected terrorists; ran a fake “university”; mocked a war hero who was shot down and imprisoned for five years; ridiculed the disability of a newspaper reporter; threatened to crush anyone who criticizes him in print through libel lawsuits; questioned Barack Obama’s country of birth and lied about his birth certificate; acquired his foreign policy expertise by “watching the shows;” accused Ted Cruz’ father of complicity in the murder of JFK; mplied the Clintons murdered Vince Foster; believes the American electoral process is rigged; counts among his most ardent supporters members of the Alt-Right, white supremacists, and people who brandish swastikas; referred to disliked members of the opposite sex as fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals, inferred that Megyn Kelley asked about those characterizations only because she was menstruating, and bragged about grabbing women’s crotches and trying to seduce married women…

…and he's the guy we want to be president of the United States!”

No rational person would vote for a person like that. But support for Trump has never been about rationality. It has always been about middle-finger, take-this-job-and-shove-it, you’re-not-the-boss-of-me, you-think-you’re-so-smart resentment.  His hard-core supporters simply don't care what he says or what he stands for, as long as he seems to be sticking it to the various forces they believe are out to get them; even though, as Senator Paul Sarbanes once said about Ronald Reagan, a working man voting for him is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders. The same can certainly now be said about a woman, working or not.

Donald Trump, Tax Genius

Good morning Trumpkins. Today’s discussion is about your man as a “genius” for navigating tax law in such a way as to avoid paying up for a couple of decades. First of all, of course, he isn’t one. His accountants and lawyers did all the heavy lifting here and Trump himself had nothing to do with it, His battalions of little people take care of matters like that. In fact, one of the accountants said he had a hard time getting the boss to pay attention as he explained what he was up to tax-wise. A lawyer, Jack Mitnick, who oversaw Trump's income tax returns in the mid-1990s, said he, Trump, had little interest in the tax code and didn’t understand it. So much for the genius theory. And neither are the accountants and lawyers geniuses. They’re tax experts who are paid to know the ins and outs of tax law. Nothing genius about it. It’s their job.

Meanwhile, as your favorite billionaire was ingeniously using these laws to avoid paying any taxes, I paid taxes to the tune of many thousands of dollars. I’ll bet you did, too, as we struggled to make ends meet, raise children and pay for their schooling, and all the rest. That’s the system your guy (obviously) favors and wishes to continue and strengthen: He pays nothing, you pay a lot. I guess if he can get you to vote for him under those circumstances, he is a genius of sorts. What working class people see in him, except for maybe authoritarianism, is beyond understanding.

Trump said in the debate that his not paying taxes makes him smart and that even if he did, the money would be squandered. Which brings us to a discussion of the bigger picture when it comes to taxes.

Taxation is not a commie plot. We citizens pool our money in the form of taxes to buy for ourselves collectively things we want and need but which would be impractical to buy individually: Roads and bridges, police protection, schools, national defense, and so on. No question, some tax dollars are not well spent; there is graft, corruption, and mismanagement. And lots of pork (with every bit as much of it going to Republican districts as Democratic ones.)

But that doesn’t translate into tax revenue as a whole being “squandered” thereby making it smart to not pay. The things mentioned above and countless others are things we wish to have, and they do not come from our fairy godmother. We have to buy them. That’s why good citizens – citizens with a mature sense of perspective and a sense of gratitude for the blessings of this country and its civilizing institutions, look past the inevitable mis-spendings and pay their fair share willingly.

Without a doubt, a major component of anti-tax orthodoxy – of the squander theory – is the idea of “welfare.” When Tea Party types carp about big government and high taxes, their most favorite shibboleth, they’re really talking about government taking money away from them and handing it over to their less responsible fellow citizens. Big government is code for what they like to call income redistribution -- a process by which money is snatched from the hard-working and given to the lazy and stupid. For many, that process, fictional though it may be, characterizes the government’s tax-and-spend activities in their entirety.

There are unquestionably some lazy/stupid/corrupt people getting government money in this fashion. But all of the government’s so-called “safety net” programs add up to less than 10-percent of the federal budget. Of that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these programs include: The refundable portions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, which assist low- and moderate-income working families; programs that provide cash payments to eligible individuals or households, including Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or disabled poor and unemployment insurance; various forms of in-kind assistance for low-income people, including SNAP (food stamps), school meals, low-income housing assistance, child care assistance, and help meeting home energy bills; and various other programs such as those that aid abused and neglected children.

So, yes, some of our federal tax dollars go to “welfare.” Ninety-percent of them do not. Most of those go to national defense (16%) and social security/medicare-medicaid (49%). (If you are against these programs, social security and medicare, because you believe them to be “socialistic” then you should step up to that and call openly and vigorously for their repeal, and not hide behind the specious “I paid into it” argument.)

In normal times. Trump’s that-makes-me-smart remark is one that would echo down the corridors of time and be cited in the history books as the thing that ended the candidacy of a major political party’s nominee for president. But that hasn’t happened and probably won’t, simply because Trump’s irresponsible and ignorant ideas and statements tumble forth daily, so that any one ridiculousness tends to not get the attention it deserves. Today’s cancels out yesterday’s.

Trump surrogate – i.e. shameless toady -- Newt Gingrich says if Trump wants to win this thing he has to get a different song, other than "I gotta be me." But it will never happen. After all, where's the fun in that? The idea that he wants to serve the people as president of the United States is laughable. That’s not what this is about. What it’s about is ego feedback. What he wants is to bellow orders and spout off his ridiculous ideas and opinions while his acolytes vigorously nod their heads – “You’re absolutely right about that, Donald,” they say as he opines that the earth is flat and the moon is made of green cheese -- and as his hot-eyed rally people, which, as Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, includes “his accumulation of Alt-Right cheerleaders, white supremacists and swastika devotees” -- scream their adoration.

In her WSJ editorial, entitled “Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome,” Rabinowitz concluded with this thought: “It will be either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton—experienced, forward-looking, indomitably determined and eminently sane. Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.”

Perspective

When you hear the words “Well, I just think…” in response to a query about what someone has against Hillary Clinton, you can be sure you’re about to enter a fact-free zone presided over by vague generalities and rootless, disconnected ideas that don’t describe any reality.  As in, “I just think she can’t be trusted” the most frequently cited objection to her by the I-just-think people.  What that actually means is anyone’s guess.  My guess: It means nothing at all.  She can’t be trusted to do what, exactly -- refrain from stealing your money?  Propose legislation that pleases you? Come back from the grocery store with the right change?  What?  Be specific.

It’s important to understand that Hillary Clinton is not running to be your banker, your lawyer, or your doctor.  Or your mom.  Or the dictator of America, as her opponent, Donald Trump, clearly thinks he is doing.  She’s running to be the chief administrative officer of the United States – the person who executes, but does not make, the laws of the land; who proposes, but does not pass, legislation that comports with and advances her view of how our world ought to work’ who uses her bully pulpit to try to persuade the people of the rightness of her vision for the country; and who presides over the conduct of our relationships with other countries. Neither she nor anyone else is going to “run the country,” in the phraseology of the ill-informed.  In our system, as the saying goes, the president proposes and the congress disposes.

So the question isn’t the vague, can she be trusted.  The question is, can she be expected to discharge her duties and responsibilities competently. As for her policy ideas – her view of the world – she has shown herself consistently to be a generally non-controversial, middle of the road candidate, very much in the mainstream of traditional American politics, and not an extremist or a radical.  It is certainly reasonable – at least, under normal circumstances – to not want to vote for a candidate of that description; but anyone who would thus turn their vote over to Donald Trump -- who is an extremist and a radical, not to mention a racist and a preening, egocentric fool, and who surely sets a record for untrustwothiness by way of his astonishing lies and reversals -- has lost all perspective. (How, according to the polling, more people see Trump as trustworthy and Clinton as untrustworthy, is one of the great mysteries of the universe.)

A generous interpretation of this “I don’t trust her” phenomenon is that what these people are really saying is that they don’t “like” her, in the same emotional but irrational way we like or dislike movies stars – that there’s just something about her looks or bearing or presentation or overall aspect that rubs them the wrong way, and that’s all they need to know.  A darker interpretation is that these people don’t trust her because she’s a woman, whose pretty little head can’t be expected to deal competently with the complexities of political leadership and who is, in any case, flouting the proper role and place of women.  As in, who does she think she is?

These things can explain the antipathy of Clinton’s political opponents, but less so the visceral anger and irrational hatred directed at her from some sectors, including, obviously, many Republicans but even some Democrats, primarily the Bernie Sanders obsessed. Oft-cited here are matters like Whitewater, the Clinton Foundation, email problems and, especially, Benghazi – words which they draw like a gun as though their meanings were self-evident and the proof they offer indisputable. In fact, they are ginned up controversies, one and all. Whitewater was an investment in a proposed Arkansas resort on which the Clinton’s lost money; the Clinton Foundation has not been shown to have been involved in any serious improprieties; the email “scandal” is one in which two-thirds (just a guess) of the people who recoil in horror at the very mention of it and cite it as proof positive of Clinton’s unworthiness, aren’t exactly sure what a server is; and Benghazi, the subject of multiple investigations at multiple levels over years and costing tens of millions, proved only that a bunch of thugs attacked a U.S. diplomatic facility while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

None of this is to be understood as a ringing endorsement of Hillary Clinton.  My impression of her before the wretched alternative appeared on the scene was of an ambitious politician with no particularly interesting or inventive policy ideas who wanted to be president not because she had a sense of mission but because she wanted to be president.  That may or may not be a valid description of her now, but it doesn’t matter. If nothing else, her election needs to be seen as preventative.  And there is urgency to that need.

That’s what the importance of perspective in this matter is all about. Hillary Clinton may not be perfect and may not be one’s beau-ideal as a presidential candidate, but neither is she a know-nothing crackpot who understands nothing about our democracy and who would ban a religion, bomb children, kiss up to a Russian dictator, refuse to disclose tax and health information after explicitly promising to do so, subscribe to cockamamie conspiracy theories including the reprehensible “birther” thing, and…well, on and on.  Still, we continue to be subjected to ludicrously false parallels in the news media, in a bizarre effort to not appear one-sided, as in “Sure, candidate A murdered 15,000 people with a machine gun, but, hey, candidate B neglected to disclose a bout with the flu in 1986.” 

Remember this, as the campaign winds down: Donald Trump – dangerously ignorant, bigoted man-child -- is the person who will be your president if, to indulge your irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton or your over-inflated sense of moral superiority, you vote for the Green Party candidate or the Libertarian Party candidate, or for nobody at all, 

Two Ships

The Kaepernick kerfuffle is a great example of the mistake people in the media and elsewhere make over and over again in talking about 1st Amendment freedom of speech rights: Conflating freedom of speech with freedom from criticism of one's speech. The first amendment right to free speech insulates us from government interference with our right to say what we want – government being the key word here. Government, under the constitution, cannot use its power to either prohibit or punish speech. In other words, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking or saying.

It absolutely does not insulate us from the consequences of what we say, or render us immune from criticism for it. It doesn’t insulate us from being told by our fellow citizens that we’re full of you-know-what when we flap our gums about this or that. If it did, then calling Donald Trump a jackass for the things he says (as just one example) would be a violation of his constitutional right to free speech. Freedom of speech says you can stand on a street corner and rail for the deportation of all left-handed people, but it does not protect you from being booed off your soapbox or pelted with rotten tomatoes for doing it. You can advocate for a whites-only policy at your workplace and not be put in jail for it. But you will be fired for it, and that’s not a violation of your free speech rights under the constitution.

Yet we see this scenario played out repeatedly in the Kaepernick Caper: One guy says he thinks Kaepernick is dead wrong; the other guy comes to his defense by citing his free speech rights. Two ships passing the night. No one -- except perhaps the wingnuts who see lack of sufficient devotion to mom and apple pie as treasonous -- questions Kaepernick’s right to do and say what he did. But that doesn’t mean he can’t or shouldn’t be criticized for it. It doesn’t mean that the content of his free speech can’t be disagreed with. And it certainly doesn't mean that criticizing him or disagreeing with his content or tactics equates to questioning or attempting to abrogate his rights.

As for the substance of his complaint: Although I assume his intent is to do his bit to keep the spotlight on the problems/conditions he is concerned about, I think his criticisms would be better directed at the individuals who perpetrate the conditions he deplores, as opposed to “the country” which, by way of its constitution and its ideals, is on his side in this issue. It’s not a country that does the things he rightly deplores. It’s people.  Kaepernick might avoid being accused of grandstanding and of calling attention to his moral superiority if his criticisms were more carefully targeted.  The notion that all of this is more about calling attention to himself than it is about expressing anguish over a serious social ill was reinforced when he showed up in public wearing clothing that seemed to pay homage to Fidel Castro, whose regime routinely murders political opponents and would not hesitate to throw Kaepernick in jail if it did not like the content of any public stance he might care to take.

Which brings us to the larger, and somewhat touchier, question of why it’s felt necessary to even have these displays of patriotism before sporting events – why sports at this level are so tied up with patriotic sentimentality. There’s nothing wrong with it, I suppose, but there’s nothing particularly right with it, either. There’s no natural connection between patriotic theater and large sporting events. We don’t do these things – wave the flag, play the national anthem, put color guards on parade – before movies or church or kids soccer games or algebra class. Why big-time sports? It’s a mystery. For more on this subject, here’s a link to an article by Sam Borden in the New York Times…

Senator McCain?

Donald Trump has now said he will not support Senator John McCain's re-election campaign in Arizona. And Senator McCain has not said, as of this writing, he does not support Trump's candidacy for president.

Wow.  What's it going to take?

By now, we are all drearily familiar with the spinelessness of figures like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, both of whom, in the service of their own political survival, have said in effect, “I consider Donald Trump an ignorant fool and I want him to be president of the United States.” One is tempted to again quote Joseph Welch who inquired of demagogue Joseph McCarthy back in the 50’s if, at long last, he had any sense of decency. But that would be of little use because they have clearly demonstrated -- by their continued support of a man they consider to be a danger to our democracy -- that they do not, and that their allegiance is to their political careers.

If this pair have set some kind of record for profiles in cowardice, what to make of John McCain, who has said essentially the same thing and more about Trump, and, in addition, has been personally insulted and mocked in the most egregiously cruel and supercilious manner by him and yet continues to lay supine before him and urge the voters to make him president.

McCain was an American flyer on a combat mission over North Vietnam in 1967 when his plane was brought down by enemy gunfire, a surface-to-air missile. He came down in a lake in the middle of Hanoi, breaking both arms and one leg. When he was pulled from the lake, his left shoulder was broken by a gun butt and he was bayoneted in the foot. Unspeakable horrors followed over the next five years in Hoa Lo prison including beatings, disease, and solitary confinement. He was repeatedly offered his freedom in exchange for saying positive things about his captors and their cause but refused unless the other American POWs were also freed.

Donald Trump, who dodged the draft during that era with student deferments and one medical deferment for bone spurs on his heel, who did not serve in the armed forces let alone in combat, and who claimed the expensive military-themed high school he attended gave him more training than many people who served in the actual armed services, called McCain a loser, and said, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

McCain’s response: Trump should retract statements about preferring military veterans who weren’t captured. “What he said about me, John McCain, that’s fine. I don’t require any repair of that.”

That’s fine?

More recently, of course came the Khizr Khan business in which McCain was again personally if indirectly insulted and belittled by Trump, by way of Trump’s dismissal of another casualty of war, Khan’s son Humayun

But instead of withdrawing his endorsement of Trump and/or demanding he withdraw from the race for this seeming last straw and for the vast and growing collection of other lies and stupidities of which he is guilty, including the recent suggestion that a foreign power spy on the U.S., McCain paid homage to Humayun Khan’s sacrifice, and said Trump ought to set a better example.

“It is time for Donald Trump to set the example for our country and the future of the Republican Party,” he said. “While our Party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us.”

He should set a better example?

"I claim no moral superiority over Donald Trump,” McCain went on. “I have a long and well-known public and private record for which I will have to answer at the Final Judgment, and I repose my hope in the promise of mercy and the moderation of age.”

Well, if John McCain thinks the pearly gates are going to open wide for him because he supported for president a person whose ideas and policies he despises and who he knows would be bad if not disastrous for America, all in the service of his own re-election in Arizona…well, I can’t speak for St. Peter, but I don’t see it happening. Nor is this the first time McCain has put his own electoral interests ahead of those of the country. Remember, it was McCain who would have put the airhead Sarah Palin a heartbeat away -- not because he thought she would make a good vice-president or president, but because he thought her presence on the ticket would help him get elected.

The ultimate irony and insult: Trump's announcement that he will not back McCain in Arizona. So the question is: At long last, Senator McCain, what’s it going to take?

Who knows? Maybe the people of Arizona will show more courage in this election than their senior senator has, and do the right thing.

 

Trump Supporters: What's it Going to Take?

This is a good time to ask Trump supporters, who hold their hands over their ears and hum loudly when confronted with the litany of blockheaded ideas and outright lies their hero is guilty of, what their reaction would be if, say, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were found to be in business with Russia, had expressed admiration for former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, and encouraged Russia to spy on America.  Or if they had called the American military a disaster, mocked an American flyer who was a prisoner of war for five years, and belittled the parents of a dead soldier, as Trump has now done to Khizr and Ghazala Khan. Answer: Apoplexy. They would be shouting the T word – as in treason – from the rooftops.

And let’s be crystal clear with regard to whether he is lying about this Russia question. Donald Trump Jr. said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.“  Donald Trump Sr. said, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

So, that’s a lie.

Here’s another one: On national television he said, speaking of Putin, “I got to know him very well.” A week or so ago, he said, “I never met Putin.”

So, that’s a lie.

Conservative columnist George Will said this: “Speculation about the nature and scale of Trump’s financial entanglements with Putin and his associates is justified by Trump’s refusal to release his personal and business tax information. Obviously he is hiding something.”

The list of Trump “ideas” that are foolish, uninformed, bigoted, dangerous, and just plain goofy is a long one and gets longer every day.  And now this: Trafficking with an adversary of the United States – an adversary that has nuclear weaponry trained on American cities and that for decades has repudiated America and our way of life -- in a way that would send Trump’s  acolytes into orbit if it were done by a Democrat; and, now disparaging the father and mother of an army officer who was killed in combat.

So the question at long last for Trump believers;  What’s it going to take?

Bernie or Bust

The speech given by Michelle Obama at the Democratic convention was much praised and rightly so.  But the three most on-point words spoken during the first day of the event were these:  “You’re being ridiculous.”  As is now well known, they were said by comedian/actor Sarah Silverman to Bernie Sanders obsessives who were being, in fact, ridiculous – and, as is their wont, childish, boorish, and self-indulgent.  Their threat – in keeping with their insufferable self-righteousness and moral superiority -- to hand over their vote to the ignoramus Donald Trump in order to indulge their irrational, over-the-top hatred of Hillary Clinton, is truly astonishing.  A few points for them to consider:

1.Hillary Clinton is the nominee, not Bernie Sanders. That’s over with, and no amount of acting out will change it.

2. The overwhelming majority of Democratic voters – and for that matter, the overwhelming majority of the American people – do not know what the Democratic National Committee is or what it does or why it exists or if it exists, and are not influenced in any way by its internal machinations, including snarky email traffic among its functionaries about Bernie Sanders.  Sanders lost by millions of votes and that had nothing to do with the DNC or any election shenanigans of any kind by anyone else.  It had to do with the will of the voters. Period.  The nomination was not stolen from Sanders.  It was lost by him.

3. The jeering and the booing and the weeping and the long-suffering eyes-to-the-sky gazes betray a remarkably juvenile understanding of how the electoral process is supposed to work in a democracy, and how the two-party system is supposed to work within that process. The idea here is to  select a person whose view of the world is most like ours to run for office against the person whose view of the world is least like ours.   It’s not a team sport where we root-root-root for our side in the service of an uncritical emotional attachment to it and fall desperately in love with its star player.

4. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are politically much more alike than they are different, and they are both vastly different from Trump.  That’s what this election is about.  What it’s not about: Your failure to get every single thing you want, exactly as you want it, or you will stomp out of the room in a fit of pique.  The big picture here is that the Sanders-Clinton side is about inclusiveness and a reverence for the democratic process, and the Trump side is about divisiveness and authoritarianism, even fascism.  Get over yourselves and your petty disappointments and your haughtily judgmental verdicts regarding the sins of Hillary Clinton and get some perspective about who and what she is and is not.

Here is what the history books will say about fascist America: It came about because a group of disgruntled Democrats swung the election to Donald Trump by voting for him to show their anger over the failure of their candidate, Bernie Sanders, to win their party’s nomination.

Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

In the aftermath of Donald Trump's odious remarks about a "Mexican" federal judge, House Speaker Paul Ryan can circumlocute until the cows come home but what he has said amounts to this: “Donald Trump is a racist ignoramus.  I think he should be president of the United States.”  How’s that for a profile in courage? If Trump were not the GOP nominee, Ryan and other prominent Republicans – John McCain, Marco Rubio, Bob Corker, et. al. -- would think of him, if they gave him any thought at all, as an aging crackpot, a sort of Scrooge McDuck, harmlessly tweeting racist rants and cuckoo ideas from his Trump Tower aerie. As it is, however, they see the enacting of the GOP agenda, not to mention the preservation of their own jobs, as important enough to back for president a person they would otherwise see as a card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe.  Particularly pathetic in all of this is McCain, who has declared his support for a man who mocked his 5 and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

Meanwhile, in the rich and varied menu of misstatements, lies, and delusional assertions that have come out of the mouth of Mr. Trump, it’s easy for any one of them to more or less disappear into the gloaming – to get lost in the crowd, as it were. But one of the assertions he has made -- one that his followers presumably accept and that generated some pushback but not the gasps of incredulity it should have – is surely among his most demented. That would be the one that claims unemployment in the U.S. is currently in the vicinity of 20-percent. In the great scheme of things, acceptance of this idea by Trump folks is in keeping with the overarching belief on their part that everyone but their man is lying and only he sees through the lies.  But good grief, Trumpalators, when it comes to unemployment in America, do you not believe your own eyes?  Where are the bread lines and soup kitchens?  Where are the Hoovervilles?  Why is no one selling apples on street corners?  Where are the caravans of Okies headed west in a desperate search for economic salvation?  Because I assume you’re aware (aren’t you?) that in the worst year of the Great Depression, 1933, unemployment was about 24-percent. Trump’s assessment (which, of course, is based on nothing whatsoever), puts us right there, right now.

Holy smokes! If we are to take your guy at his word – that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been compiling data on employment and calculating the unemployment rate the same way for over 100 years and through twenty-plus Democratic and Republican administrations, is now lying – we have to conclude that unemployment is at Great-Depression levels.  This despite any tangible evidence in the world around us of mass unemployment; despite the fact that consumer spending recently hit a six-year high; despite more than 30 consecutive quarters of economic growth; despite the fact nobody you know is involuntarily unemployed; and despite the fact that the automotive industry is enjoying its best years ever – ever – in no small part because of robust sales of the vehicles of choice for many of those supposedly out-of-work Trumpistas: pick-up trucks.

And where the heck is the Wall Street Journal when you need it? I know, I know, WSJ is part of the mass media establishment; but it is no fan of the Obama administration or of Democrats in general or, especially, of the party’s economic agenda and overall philosophy.  One would think it would be indefatigable in its quest to dig out the truth if it suspected that unemployment was four times higher than that which is being reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  But no!  Not a peep out if it, or out of any of the other right-leaning media outlets.  Or for that matter, any other media outlets at all.  Not one of them is onto this. Not one of them has reported what would be the story of the century – that unemployment is at depression levels and nobody knows it.  Except, of course, his Donaldness.

No, wait. Actually, thousands of people know it.  They would be the green-eye-shade types who work at the BLS and assembled the employment numbers.  They know the facts, but were sworn to secrecy at a mass meeting in a cave somewhere.  “I know you all know the truth – that unemployment is at about 20-percent,” President Obama said to the assemblage, “but I’m asking you to tell everyone that it’s 5-percent.  Okay?  And don’t tell anyone I said this.  Mum’s the word.”

In Trump fantasyland, Fergusom is among the world’s most dangerous places; muslims  danced on TV to celebrate 9/11; a giant wall is going to be built; millions of people are going to be rounded up and deported, the Clintons killed Vince Foster and Ted  Cruz’s father killed JFK; the government is going to “negotiate” the redemption of U.S. Savings Bonds; and there will be a 45-percent tariff on Chinese goods. And unemployment is at 20-percent.  However, here on planet earth, the U.S. unemployment rate is at 4.7-percent.  Just like the labor department says.  You could look it up.

Clinton Haters

Leaving aside for the moment the relative merits of the candidates, I would submit that there’s a special place in hell reserved for Bernie Sanders obsessives who would switch their vote to Donald Trump rather than give it to Hillary Clinton, the candidate whose real and imagined shortcomings they are so fixated on (like most Republicans are) as to have elevated her to comic book arch-villain status. Voting for Trump instead of Clinton would be beyond irrational – an act of petulance that would betray a stunningly juvenile willingness to abdicate responsible citizenship in favor of self-indulgence. It is akin to a suicidal 14-year-old envisioning, with a delicious mixture of self-pity and glee, how sorry all of his tormentors are going to be when he’s gone.

For all I-didn’t-get-my-way stompers out of the room as Sanders withdraws, a few important points…

• Clinton didn’t win this thing because of voter suppression or voter manipulation or a rigged system, or other sorts of skullduggery, or because various media players conspired to help her. She won because more people voted for her than for her opponent, by multiple millions. 
• Like all candidates for public office – like all people -- Clinton has pluses and minuses. But she is not corrupt, at least no more so than politicians generally are, and she is not the horror show some people have convinced themselves she is. She is a middle-of-the-road politician who, yes, has some mistakes to answer for but who is more like Bernie Sanders than unlike him. It’s one thing to disagree with her policy ideas and to not vote for her on that basis. But this over-the-top anger and hatred is bizarre. And inexplicable, except on some dark and deep-seated psychological level that has nothing to do with her qualifications or her ability to operate effectively as head of the executive branch of our government. Turning this irrational anger into a vote for the buffoon Donald Trump is unpardonable. Elections are not about which candidates are more or less deserving, and only people with an over-inflated sense of moral superiority think otherwise.  Elections -- and this one more than most -- are about which candidate is right for the job.  Period. 
• Sanders himself has said this: “I will do everything in my power to make sure that no Republican gets into the White House in this election cycle.” In other words, the man for whom some would commit harikari is vowing not to abandon Clinton for Trump, or anybody else, and to support her in the general election, just as Clinton enthusiastically and very publicly supported Barack Obama after losing to him in a bitter primary fight. Sanders, an intelligent man and a serious public servant, would never, ever align himself with Donald Trump nor place Hillary Clinton in the same category as him
• Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, Clinton has not said/done the following: Characterized Ferguson as one of the most dangerous places on earth; called for negotiating with mom and pop on the repayment of their U.S. savings bonds; said her tax returns are none of our business; imagined that she saw thousands people on TV celebrating 9/11; made weirdo phone calls bragging about herself while pretending to be someone else; married and discarded glamour models and made sexually suggestive remarks about her offspring; favored starting a trade war and a worldwide recession by slapping an astronomical tariff on Chinese goods; called for the creation of a Gestapo-like government force to undertake a massive, years-long round-up and deportation of undocumented families; believes members of one religion should be put under surveillance and possibly put in camps; thinks Mexican people are rapists and wants to build a staggeringly expensive 2,000-mile wall that would be the largest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system; believes American soldiers should kill the  innocent children of suspected terrorists; run a fake “university”; mocked a war hero who was shot down and imprisoned for five years; ridiculed the disability of a newspaper reporter; referred to disliked members of the opposite sex as fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animal and inferred that Megyn Kelley asked about those characterizations only because she was menstruating; threatened to crush anyone who criticizes her in print through libel lawsuits; questioned Barack Obama’s country of birth and lied about his birth certificate; acquired her foreign policy expertise by “watching the shows;” accused Ted Cruz’ father of complicity in the murder of JFK; mplied the Clintons murdered Vince Foster And on an on.

This is a person you would rather elect to office than Hillary Clinton?  Can you possibly be serious?The numbers are implacable: Trump cannot win this election without help from Democrats. That some Democrats would give him that help in a fit of pique over not getting their way is repugnant. Get over yourselves and lose your insufferable moral superiority.

True Believers

I read recently about a pro-Trump person who said this: “There is nothing you can say that will make me not vote for Trump.” That was her cheerful response when she was presented with a litany of the candidate’s misstatements, lies, and assorted idiocies She was doing what Trumpists do: Putting her hands over her ears and humming loudly when confronted with the facts. What these folks are hearing from Trump has nothing to do with facts and is coming to them over a different frequency, like a dog whistle. It has everything to do with the none-too-subtle permission he grants them to blame their problems and failures on others and to see themselves as victims. It also has to do with a you’re-not-the-boss-of-me streak of childish resentment and stubbornness which essentially says this: I’m doing what I’m doing not because I think it’s right but precisely because you don’t want me to. This is what we’re up against as we try to stop this man who would be king from smashing our democracy.

And then we have the Bernie Sanders true-believers, with their loose talk about “revolution” and their adolescent demonization of Hillary Clinton. It is not unreasonable to support the political candidacy of Sanders, an intelligent and experienced politician with a good heart, while still having reservations about the wisdom and/or viability of some of the things he advocates. It’s another thing entirely to obsess over him – to worship at his altar to the point of believing that his candidacy will save the country and another’s destroy it. Some Sanders supporters who express rabid antagonism for Clinton – a middle of the road, not-insane politician who comes from pretty much the same place on the political spectrum as Sanders – are now making noises about voting for Donald Trump if they don’t get their way. Down this path lies a what-was-I-thinking moment, as President Trump attempts to make good on his bizarre promises and nonsensical ideas 

For now, though, we have the empty-headed musings of the actress Susan Sarandon, in which she suggested that a lot of Sanders people would be unable to bring themselves to vote for Clinton and would vote for Trump instead, because Trump “will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in then things will really, you know, explode.” Here is New York Times columnist Charles Blow:

“What was Sarandon talking about with her coy language? ‘Bring the revolution’? Exactly what kind of revolution? ‘Explode’? Was the purpose to present this as a difficult but ultimately positive development? The comments smacked of petulance and privilege. No member of an American minority group — whether ethnic, racial, queer-identified, immigrant, refugee or poor — would (or should) assume the luxury of uttering such a imbecilic phrase, filled with lust for doom. Be absolutely clear: While there are meaningful differences between Clinton and Sanders, either would be a far better choice for president than any of the remaining Republican contenders, especially the demagogic real estate developer. Assisting or allowing his ascendance by electoral abstinence in order to force a ‘revolution’ is heretical. This position is dangerous, shortsighted and self-immolating. This is not a game. The presidency, particularly the next one, matters, and elections can be decided by relatively small margins. No president has won the popular vote by more than 10 percentage points since Ronald Reagan in 1984. There is no true equivalency between either of the Democratic candidates and this man, and anyone who make such a claim is engaging in a repugnant, dishonorable scare tactic not worth our respect.”

Note to Sanders fanatics/Clinton demonizers: You are way too far down in the weeds here. Take a breath and see the bigger picture.  You know the idea that Donald Trump would be better for the country than Hillary Clinton -- something a good many Republicans inexplicably continue to believe, or at least say they believe -- is ludicrous.  Shake it off.

At Long Last

It was during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 that the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, rebuked unrepentant demagogue and relentless smear artist Joe McCarthy with these words: “Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” There has been no shortage of information on the foolishness and demagoguery of Donald Trump. He has been fully exposed, and we know that he has no sense of decency. But what about his followers? What do they see in him? Who are these people who have so much admiration for this uninformed egotistical blowhard who trades in hatred, resentment, and fear. We’re a ways into this political season and the Trumpists have been steadfast and growing in number. At long last, have they no sense of decency?

An important clue is in the free-floating hostility they proudly harbor (and angrily express) toward everything and everybody they perceive as being aligned against them; which, apparently, is everything and everybody. It is to Mr. Trump they look to vanquish these ghostly tormentors, and their faith in his ability to do it appears to be based entirely on his swaggering, kick-ass attitude and carriage. It certainly can’t be based on anything he actually says because every word that has come out of his mouth so far has been either impenetrably vague, completely incomprehensible, or simply wrong. They live in a fantasyland of imagined enemies and armchair pugnacity.

A characteristic that true believers of every political persuasion have in common is the tendency (need?) to sanctify their candidate and demonize their candidate’s opponents. Their guy, they believe, will make everything all right. The other guy will make everything all wrong. They are, they seem to think, electing a king or a dictator, and not merely the head of the executive branch within a representative democracy in which making good on the wild promises one makes in a campaign setting is extremely (and deliberately) difficult. In fact, it is now clear that Trump and his people are quite impatient with democracy and its processes, and would prefer an office-holder who can make everything right for them by executive decree. Government by and for the people? Nah. We just want our daddy to tell us what to do, and make it all better.

Whatever “it all” is. In some quarters, followers of Trump are characterized as being perhaps wrong-headed in their embrace of Trump but having grievances that are legitimate, involving the changing economic and employment landscape of recent years. If that’s the case, there is an exquisite irony here, as these folks – staunch advocates of small government, free markets, individual responsibility, and rugged independence – whine about everything government hasn’t done for them lately.

You would think that they’re an army of the unemployed. In fact, these people are not, for the most part, unemployed. As for the economy in general, it has created 14-million private-sector jobs since 2010, dropping unemployment to under 5 percent. Housing and construction are strong, the auto industry is thriving, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled in the last eight or so years. So things are actually pretty good and the problems and conditions that have steam coming out of these folks’ ears are largely illusory.

No, chalking up their anger and frustration to economic dislocation gives them far too much credit. Because what they’re really about is bigotry, The message they get from Trump comes in the form of permission to hate – to believe in the existence of, and to blame their problems on, the hated “other.” Trump legitimizes the antipathy, the latent distrust, that this largely white, male, blue-collar constituency has for various groups – blacks, religious minorities, women, etc. They pine for the good old days when you could put these groups down without fear of violating “political correctness.” And, like the acolytes of demagogues everywhere, they are certain that whatever is missing from their lives is somebody else’s fault.

Whiner Leader

The people who revere Donald Trump are routinely characterized as “angry,”and their anger is often characterized  -- even by those who think Trump a buffoon – as justifiable or at least understandable.  An editorial in the Washington Post put it this way: “The grievances they speak to are real: a sense that the economy has left too many people behind, that globalization and technological change are helping the few while stranding the many.”

Please.  Or to put it another way, globalization-schmobilazation.

These people are not angry.  What they are is whiny. If there is a whinier, more put-upon group of people than Donald Trump’s followers I don’t know who it would be.  They hold these two ideas to be sacred and self-evident: (1) They are unhappy; (2) It’s somebody else’s fault that they are unhappy.  They love their victimhood, and they relish the prospect of Trump vanquishing their tormentors.  They do this even as unemployment is at historical lows, interest rates are miniscule, inflation is non-existent, and more of the vehicles of choice for these folks, pickup trucks, are being sold than have ever been sold in the history of the world.

And yet, they say they are angry. Foot-stompingly, sneeringly, smoke-coming-out-of-their-ears angry. What is their problem?

In a previous post, I wrote: “Normal people are mystified by the way Donald Trump can repeatedly say bizarre, even irrational things – he witnessed something that didn’t happen, he thinks members of one religion should be kept out of the country -- and his poll numbers go up. It’s as if a light bulb goes on over the heads of these newest Trump converts: ‘Wow. I knew he was a blowhard and a bigot, but now I see he’s also delusional. I’m voting for him!’ Unexplainable, seemingly. But, of course, what his people see in him isn’t about any of that. It’s about his promise to ‘make America great again.’ And by ‘great’ what his mostly white male followers understand him to mean is a time when people who looked like them had all the good jobs; when there weren’t all these weird non-Christian religions around; when blacks, Hispanics, and women knew their place; when political correctness didn’t prohibit decent white folks from putting down racial and ethnic minorities.“

Meanwhile, if you needed further proof of how utterly clueless the Donald Trump true believers are – proof that includes all of the above plus his belief in a mythical giant wall, his affinity for throwing tens of thousands of people out of the country, his call for the murder of women and children in the Middle East, his calling an opponent a pussy for not embracing water boarding, and on and on -- his remark about shooting people provided it. This is a perfect double whammy: (1) When he said “I could shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” he was absolutely right. His followers wouldn’t care if he committed such an act because they are oblivious to everything he says and everything he does, and respond only to the persona he projects, the one that does such a good job of playing to and nurturing their many resentments and imagined grievances; (2) They don’t get that when he said that, he was making fun of them. He was telling the world that his posse is so dense, so zombie-like in their adoration of him that he could do anything and they wouldn’t care. To be a blind follower of an intellectual and moral lightweight, and to not understand that you are being told by that person how blind you are and being ridiculed for it – that’s clueless.

Dear Trump peeps: If you are unhappy with the circumstances of your life you are absolutely free to improve on them. Nothing the government is doing or not doing is stopping you. Same with Wall Street big shots, the mainstream media, Muslims, immigrants, the Chinese, minorities, and so on. Your problems are of your own making, and so are the solutions. Electing your man to the presidency (or congress or the governorship or the school board) won’t make it all better. You won’t all of a sudden get the job of your dreams or get along better with your spouse. Your guy keeps telling you you’re being “ripped off,” something you clearly love to hear because you’re so fond of seeing yourselves as victims. Perhaps you can explain how you’re being ripped off. He can’t. Please be specific. Otherwise, you’ll just have to accept the New York Daily News’ characterization of Trump’s win in New Hampshire: “Dawn of the Brain Dead”.