Sunday, February 12, 2017
Again With the "Massive Voter Fraud" Thing
Now comes Steve Miller, the 31-year-old presidential advisor and a hot-eyed ideologue whose thinking on foreign policy is based not on what he knows but on what he believes – in charge of the handling of, and waving nukes at, North Korea. Horrifying. And this week he also jumped on the “massive voting fraud” bandwagon, citing -- just like Trump, Spicer, et.al. -- no evidence.
Imagine if Donald Trump had won the popular vote and “the media” then published stories – stories that included no evidence or sources or actual facts -- alleging that as many as 5-million fraudulent votes were cast in the election. No body copy to explain the story – just a headline: MILLIONS OF FRAUDULENT VOTES CAST, GIVING TRUMP POPULAR VOTE WIN.
“We have no evidence, no reporting, no examples,” said the editor of the Daily Planet. “It’s just something we believe.”
Of course, Trumpists and the Republicans would be strangling on their anger, raging about the corrupt and dishonest media, and demanding that multiple heads roll.
But that’s pretty much what Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary, cited as validation of the president’s contention that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for massive voter fraud. "The president does believe that,” Spicer said. “He has stated that before.”
That, then, would be their evidence -- that they believe it. If the inhabitants of Planet Trump believe something to be true, it is true. End of story.
Following that surreal declaration be Spicer -- and only after being challenged on the fact that they felt no compulsion to look further into the biggest electoral scandal in the country’s history -- the Trump team announced a “major investigation.” The betting out here in Flyoverland is that this is an investigation that will never happen.
But let’s save the White House the time, trouble, and expense. If it will simply point any one of a thousand news outlets, friendly or unfriendly, in the right direction on this, they will be more than happy to track this amazing story down and publish it; and, having uncovered the biggest voter fraud in history, collect their Pulitzer prize. Show us your evidence. Tell us where to look. Give us your sources. We will be all over this. And “we” absolutely includes GOP friendlies like the Wall Street Journal and (I may be going out on a limb here) Fox News. Both the honest and dishonest media want this story, Mr. President, and are eager to tell it. We have no interest in covering it up. Ready when you are.
More recently, Trump said he would have won in New Hampshire if not for voters bused in from out of state. Like so many other things he says, this is a lie. He simply made it up on the spot.
"There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of major voter fraud in New Hampshire's elections," Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said in a statement. "President Trump continues to spread a dangerous lie and it's long past time for Republican leadership in New Hampshire to stand up and defend our state's electoral system."
Ellen Weintraub of the Federal Election Commission called on Trump to "immediately share his evidence with the public and with the appropriate law-enforcement authorities so that his allegations may be investigated promptly and thoroughly."
"The president has issued an extraordinarily serious and specific charge," the commissioner said in a statement. "Allegations of this magnitude cannot be ignored."
Same with the Trumpian contention that terrorist attacks have been under-reported or not reported at all. If there have been terrorist attacks that he knows about but which have not been reported to the public by the media, then he absolutely owes it to us tell us where, when, and how these incidents occurred, how many people were killed/injured, and the identities of the victims.
Meanwhile, Trump true believers will just have to sit themselves down and come to grips with a few things: (1) Reporting what Donald Trump says and does is not “negative coverage;” (2) newspapers don’t make stuff up or cover stuff up; (3) three-million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Trump; (4) regarding massive voter fraud in the election: It. Didn’t. Happen.
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Eternal Vigilance
(Ed. note: In observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, and in light of the Trump administration's contention that the Third Reich's "final solution" was not overwhelmingly about the murder of Jewish people, Flyoverland is re-posting the following from December and adding a link to an article in the Washington Post that further examines anti-Semitism)
“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:
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.
“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;
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.
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.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Shooting on 5th Avenue
In his inaugural address to the nation, the newly-minted president of the United States said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” No, wait. He didn’t say that in his inaugural address. He said it a year ago in a campaign speech in Sioux City, Iowa.
But he might as well have. Nothing more accurately captures the contempt Trump has for his supporters – their gullibility, their unreasoning adoration of him, their willingness to accept words from his mouth that range from the inaccurate to the untrue to the utterly fantastical, than that sentence.
Except for possibly this one, which was in the inaugural address: Washington. he said, has “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.” In fact, as the New York Times pointed out in an editorial entitled What Trump doesn’t get About America, the United States leads the world in military spending, allocating more than the next seven nations combined, including China and Russia. Current spending, in fact, is far higher than it was before the 9/11 attacks.” But the idea that the U.S. military is in disarray and needs to be rescued by him, though not true, plays better with his audience.
Or this, in which he used the quickly-becoming-immortalized phrase “American carnage” to perpetuate his characterization – always a crowd-pleaser at his rallies -- of U.S. cities as crime-ridden hellholes aching to be pulled back from the brink by him. In fact, crime is far lower than in past decades. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. But his followers believe otherwise because he tells them to and they want to. Of course crime is a problem. It’s always a problem. And now, more than ever, it’s related to the easy availability of guns which he and his folks are so fond of. But Trump’s depiction of U.S. cities as being on the verge of incineration and collapse because of crime is just theater.
But he might as well have. Nothing more accurately captures the contempt Trump has for his supporters – their gullibility, their unreasoning adoration of him, their willingness to accept words from his mouth that range from the inaccurate to the untrue to the utterly fantastical, than that sentence.
Except for possibly this one, which was in the inaugural address: Washington. he said, has “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.” In fact, as the New York Times pointed out in an editorial entitled What Trump doesn’t get About America, the United States leads the world in military spending, allocating more than the next seven nations combined, including China and Russia. Current spending, in fact, is far higher than it was before the 9/11 attacks.” But the idea that the U.S. military is in disarray and needs to be rescued by him, though not true, plays better with his audience.
Or this, in which he used the quickly-becoming-immortalized phrase “American carnage” to perpetuate his characterization – always a crowd-pleaser at his rallies -- of U.S. cities as crime-ridden hellholes aching to be pulled back from the brink by him. In fact, crime is far lower than in past decades. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. But his followers believe otherwise because he tells them to and they want to. Of course crime is a problem. It’s always a problem. And now, more than ever, it’s related to the easy availability of guns which he and his folks are so fond of. But Trump’s depiction of U.S. cities as being on the verge of incineration and collapse because of crime is just theater.
Or this, always a reliable entry in the Republican hit parade: that government spending is all about taking money away from the decent and hard-working and handing it over to the lazy and stupid. And so, in his address, he pandered to this mythology by identifying as a top priority his intention to “get our people off welfare and back to work.” This is exactly what his people want to hear – that their hard-earned dollars are being taken away from them by “big government” and handed over to losers, and that’s why they’re not as prosperous as they would otherwise be.
What they don’t want to hear, and what it’s therefore not in Trump’s interest to tell them, is that “welfare” is and always has been a miniscule part of government expenditures. “The number of people receiving federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits fell by more than 70 percent, to 1.2 million, between 1996 and 2016,” the Times editorial said. “As Mr. Trump spoke about the disappearance of jobs…the unemployment rate has fallen from 10 percent in 2009, the height of the recession, to less than 5 percent.” So getting people off welfare and back to work, though generally a laudable idea, is not a major priority because it’s not a major problem. But saying otherwise, in the certainty that his true believers will unquestioningly accept everything he says, is what works best for Mr. Trump.
Same with his “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” another fan favorite because they believe what he has told them – that thieving foreigners have stolen away our manufacturing jobs and that he intends to put a stop to that right now. What he doesn’t tell them, because it wouldn’t help him to do so and because they don’t want to hear it, is that he can’t put a stop to the real culprit in the loss of manufacturing jobs, automation. Nor does he mention the millions of American jobs that are dependent on commercial interaction with all these villainous countries.
The big question with regard to this speech is…why. It was, as many people have observed, much more like a campaign speech than an inaugural address. Our 5th Avenue shooter was still firing away even though there was no longer any reason to do so. Why waste time and energy, and political capital, in another sermon to the converted when he could have used it to bring at least a few members of the unconverted into the fold? Flyover’s opinion: Donald Trump’s run for the presidency was never about serving the people, improving their lot, striving for a more perfect union, or persuading people to embrace a vision of how things ought to be. This was Donald’s Excellent Adventure – his fun and exciting new career. It was another source of food for his insatiable ego, and the feeding required an endless supply of narratives, invented if necessary, for him to be the hero of, an endless supply of dragons of which he will be the slayer. Those narratives, and the ego gratification that goes with getting people to believe them, are the fun of it for him, and that’s why he pounded away at them again. He doesn’t give a hoot about converting the unconverted. He just wants to hear, again and again, the roar of the crowd And so he tells that crowd whatever will make the roaring happen. knowing they will believe whatever he says.
The big question with regard to this speech is…why. It was, as many people have observed, much more like a campaign speech than an inaugural address. Our 5th Avenue shooter was still firing away even though there was no longer any reason to do so. Why waste time and energy, and political capital, in another sermon to the converted when he could have used it to bring at least a few members of the unconverted into the fold? Flyover’s opinion: Donald Trump’s run for the presidency was never about serving the people, improving their lot, striving for a more perfect union, or persuading people to embrace a vision of how things ought to be. This was Donald’s Excellent Adventure – his fun and exciting new career. It was another source of food for his insatiable ego, and the feeding required an endless supply of narratives, invented if necessary, for him to be the hero of, an endless supply of dragons of which he will be the slayer. Those narratives, and the ego gratification that goes with getting people to believe them, are the fun of it for him, and that’s why he pounded away at them again. He doesn’t give a hoot about converting the unconverted. He just wants to hear, again and again, the roar of the crowd And so he tells that crowd whatever will make the roaring happen. knowing they will believe whatever he says.
If he thinks so little of his followers, imagine what he thinks about the rest of us.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
From Russia Without Love
It was recently reported that Trump supporters, no longer able to logically deny that Russia launched a cyber attack against America, have switched their argument to this: Yeah, okay, Russia did it, but what’s the big deal? Russia’s okay, Putin’s okay, we just don’t see it as anything to get worked up about.
Well, anyone who thinks Russia’s meddling with our election -- and, by inference, our entire cyber infrastructure -- is not a big deal, simply doesn’t understand Russia – what its place in the world is and has been. So, a few facts of life regarding no-big-deal Russia: and its dictator Vladimir Putin:
The KGB
The KGB, in which Putin was a high-level player, was a Soviet secret police organization whose specialty was the suppression of internal dissent, in the service of which it imprisoned and/or exiled and/or murdered thousands and thousands of people within Russia itself and in the many “satellite” countries Russia had taken over by force after World War II. Internal dissent was defined by, among many other things, the practice of religion, which was forbidden in the Soviet Union and brutally suppressed, and by any criticism of communism or the government. The organization was the embodiment of Orwell’s “Big Brother,” with operatives and informants everywhere, in a closed-off, paranoid society in which the only “news” was government propaganda and in which it was necessary to be extremely careful about whom you were talking to and who might overhear, lest you be grabbed up in the night, held incommunicado, and sent to the Gulag for the rest of your life. The KGB was a merciless and brutal force, not unlike the reviled Gestapo and SS of Nazi Germany. No big deal if this former secret police operative directs a computer hack of U.S. elections?
The Cold War
After World War II, Russia joined the United States as a nuclear power, and the two countries developed and deployed enough nuclear firepower, targeted at each other, to destroy the world many times over. Over time, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat of a nuclear apocalypse under which people of my generation were brought up died back and much of the back-and-forth saber rattling ended. But Russia still has hundreds of missiles pointed at U.S. population centers, and the implicit threat of Armageddon remains. Russia may not be the enemy of the U.S. it once was, but it is no friend. The term “hostile power” pretty much captures it. No big deal if this nuclear-armed adversary attacks our cyber infrastructure?
No big deal to Europe?
U.S. allies in Europe, countries we have solemnly promised to defend and who have promised to defend us as members of NATO, are deathly afraid of Russia. And Russia gave a vivid and bloody demonstration of just how justified that fear is by its ruthless theft of Crimea from Ukraine, one of the former Soviet satellites ruled over by the Kremlin with an iron fist.
“…few stand to lose more than the pro-American leaders of countries in Central and Eastern Europe,” wrote Josh Rogin recently in the Washington Post. “Those leaders, fighting on the front line of the battle against Putin’s drive to upend the democratic world order, are asking Trump to think twice before choosing the wrong side.”
A letter, quoted by Rogin, from 17 current and former officials of these countries, , said this: “Putin does not seek American greatness. As your allies, we do.” They went on to caution against any weakening of sanctions against Russia for its Ukraine adventure. “The rules-based international order on which Western security has depended for decades would be weakened. The alliances that are the true source of American greatness would erode: countries that have expended blood, treasure and political capital in support of transatlantic security will wonder if America is now no longer a dependable friend.” In short, millions of people in the vicinity of Russia are terrified that Russia will (again) take over their countries by force and subjugate them to the rule of the Kremlin. No big deal if our leadership defends Russia and its leadership and questions the viability of NATO?
Well, anyone who thinks Russia’s meddling with our election -- and, by inference, our entire cyber infrastructure -- is not a big deal, simply doesn’t understand Russia – what its place in the world is and has been. So, a few facts of life regarding no-big-deal Russia: and its dictator Vladimir Putin:
The KGB
The KGB, in which Putin was a high-level player, was a Soviet secret police organization whose specialty was the suppression of internal dissent, in the service of which it imprisoned and/or exiled and/or murdered thousands and thousands of people within Russia itself and in the many “satellite” countries Russia had taken over by force after World War II. Internal dissent was defined by, among many other things, the practice of religion, which was forbidden in the Soviet Union and brutally suppressed, and by any criticism of communism or the government. The organization was the embodiment of Orwell’s “Big Brother,” with operatives and informants everywhere, in a closed-off, paranoid society in which the only “news” was government propaganda and in which it was necessary to be extremely careful about whom you were talking to and who might overhear, lest you be grabbed up in the night, held incommunicado, and sent to the Gulag for the rest of your life. The KGB was a merciless and brutal force, not unlike the reviled Gestapo and SS of Nazi Germany. No big deal if this former secret police operative directs a computer hack of U.S. elections?
The Cold War
After World War II, Russia joined the United States as a nuclear power, and the two countries developed and deployed enough nuclear firepower, targeted at each other, to destroy the world many times over. Over time, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat of a nuclear apocalypse under which people of my generation were brought up died back and much of the back-and-forth saber rattling ended. But Russia still has hundreds of missiles pointed at U.S. population centers, and the implicit threat of Armageddon remains. Russia may not be the enemy of the U.S. it once was, but it is no friend. The term “hostile power” pretty much captures it. No big deal if this nuclear-armed adversary attacks our cyber infrastructure?
No big deal to Europe?
U.S. allies in Europe, countries we have solemnly promised to defend and who have promised to defend us as members of NATO, are deathly afraid of Russia. And Russia gave a vivid and bloody demonstration of just how justified that fear is by its ruthless theft of Crimea from Ukraine, one of the former Soviet satellites ruled over by the Kremlin with an iron fist.
“…few stand to lose more than the pro-American leaders of countries in Central and Eastern Europe,” wrote Josh Rogin recently in the Washington Post. “Those leaders, fighting on the front line of the battle against Putin’s drive to upend the democratic world order, are asking Trump to think twice before choosing the wrong side.”
A letter, quoted by Rogin, from 17 current and former officials of these countries, , said this: “Putin does not seek American greatness. As your allies, we do.” They went on to caution against any weakening of sanctions against Russia for its Ukraine adventure. “The rules-based international order on which Western security has depended for decades would be weakened. The alliances that are the true source of American greatness would erode: countries that have expended blood, treasure and political capital in support of transatlantic security will wonder if America is now no longer a dependable friend.” In short, millions of people in the vicinity of Russia are terrified that Russia will (again) take over their countries by force and subjugate them to the rule of the Kremlin. No big deal if our leadership defends Russia and its leadership and questions the viability of NATO?
Putin’s Leadership
Under Putin, so admired in certain quarters in the U.S., the Russian economy as measured by GDP is about 1/12th the size of America’s. America’s is the largest in the world; Russia’s is 13th. It has a robust and predatory mafia, endemic and rampant corruption at every level of government, and an oligarchy/kleptocracy that puts vast wealth in the hands of a miniscule minority, the connected, and precious little in the hands of everybody else. It produces little else but oil, military hardware, government bureaucrats, and spies. Putin’s leadership consists of persuading his countrymen that life would be good if they could only return to their chest-thumping ways of old when they strutted on the world stage and enslaved most of Eastern Europe. No big deal that this second-rate operation is so admired by some Americans?
Are we clear?
America can live in the same world as Russia – interact with it, trade with it, have economic ties to it, and, hopefully, avoid ever going to war with it But that doesn’t mean that Russia is just some big, friendly bear on the other side of the world – a country whose leader is worthy of our admiration because of his decisiveness and whose intentions are nothing but benign. Russia is large and dangerous and not a friend of America, This is the country your leader apparently wishes to make nice with, and who either denies or sees nothing untoward in its vigorous attempts to attack the core of our democracy, the electoral process. He is wrong. Russia and its cyber attacks are a very big deal. Those who kiss them off as a minor distraction are flirting with the end of democracy in the United States.
Or worse. If Russia, or anyone else, should hack its way into our power grid and/or our financial system? Well, good night and good luck. And let’s be clear: This is not theoretical. It happened. Russia hacked its way into the computer network of the Democratic National Committee. So it has the intention and it has the means.
It’s a very big deal. Trump, as president, needs to stand up like a man, and like a commander-in-chief, and defend his country against the depredations of this aggressor, instead of defending the aggressor.
Wednesday, January 4, 2017
Ordinary People
When I was a copy boy at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a thousand years ago, the reporters and editors I worked around were definitely a mixed bag – old and young, grouchy and cheerful, industrious and lazy, zealous and jaded, introverted and loud – but they were for the most part ordinary folk. Newspaper pay was poor then, so they were firmly ensconced in the middle class, if that. They had spouses, they raised children and doted on grandchildren, they went to church, they kvetched about low pay and high taxes, they barbecued in the back yard, and some of them sometimes drank too much.
Editorially, the P-D had a liberal tilt, characterized in the main by the belief that government could be a force for good – could improve people’s lives and serve the common weal – and also by skepticism about the motives of the financially and politically powerful. Most of the staffers at the paper were probably on board with this in a general sort of way, but they were nothing like evangelists for it. I think many were not all that opinionated or political; they did their job of reporting on fires and crimes, of editing wire copy, of covering sports and city hall, of chasing commas, and didn’t worry too much about what the big bosses or the editorial page philosophers thought. If pressed, most of them, but by no means all, would probably come down very slightly to the left of center politically. There are idealogues in every group, but the idea that this motley collection of the good, bad, and ugly was ideologically hawkish or inclined to see themselves as intellectually superior to the working classes is laughable. They were the working classes.
My father, Dickson Terry, was a P-D features writer there for many years, and I knew him to be a liberal thinker in that he deplored racism and believed government could and should play a role in helping the downtrodden. But he was pretty conservative in his general deportment, the sort of person who believes a real man supports his family and his community, pays his taxes and his debts, wears a necktie to the office, and is loyal to the United States of America. I know that he – and I assume the great majority of his co-workers – took some pride in their craft, wished to do it right and well, and believed that accuracy – the facts, zealously pursued, carefully verified, and devoid of supposition or opinion – was a newspaperman’s highest calling. They liked the idea of a free press playing a role in making democracy work by holding politicians accountable, but didn’t take themselves too seriously
It is these people, in a thousand newsrooms in a thousand cities and towns across America, that Donald Trump, with the enthusiastic approval of his worshipers, characterizes as crooked, dishonest, and the lowest form of life. I offer the above actual description of them by way of reassuring the delusional – or the merely lazy who casually and without a moment’s reflection accept stereotyping -- that they were not, and are not, engaged in a grand conspiracy to conceal the truth and advance an agenda. The ordinary folk who populate the country’s newsrooms are not members of a secret cabal that has clandestine meetings to plot out how to slant the news and suppress stories about political murders, child sex slavery, or contacts with alien life forms, nor are they forced by their bosses to do these things. Try to imagine a scenario in which a reporter digs up evidence of massive voter fraud or the existence of a child sex ring in a pizza parlor, and having the story buried by the boss for political or ideological reasons, and all of his co-workers, hundreds of ordinary citizens – like my father, for example --, keeping quiet about it.
Bottom line: What these people do is find and report news as accurately and thoroughly as they are able. They don’t withhold or slant what they find in the service of a political position or ideology. They just don’t. It doesn’t work that way. Reporting facts that are contrary to someone’s beliefs or expectations is not slanting the news. Reporting what Donald Trump says – his actual words – is not negative coverage. That these parents and grandparents, these little league coaches and bake-sale organizers, these charity volunteers and football fans, these friends and neighbors are sitting on information that Sandy Hook was a government conspiracy, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that plans are afoot to take away people’s guns and imprison them in closed Wal-Marts is beyond ludicrous
All of the above is really about daily newspapers, which, for purposes of this discussion, are not the same thing as that which has come to be known as “the media,” a term without any actual meaning. Media is the plural form of medium, a word which when paired with the word “news” refers to a way by which news is disseminated. So, daily newspapers are a news medium. Magazines are another. So are radio, television; and now, the Internet. Within each of these there are multiple distinctions having to do with political viewpoint, size and resources, talent/knowledge/experience, and commitment to thoroughness and accuracy. They are not interchangeable. There is no “the media,” notwithstanding the vilification heaped upon “it” by Trump and his hot-eyed devotees.
No question, though, there is a widespread willingness, among people in general, and among people in “the media” who should know better, to lump them all together. Broadcast news – television, in particular – has brought much of this on itself (and, unfortunately, on everyone else) by relentlessly intermixing news and entertainment and by making matinee idols of its news readers. By making a Kardashian divorce or a network sitcom plot development part of the news, they inevitably make all their news suspect, and no amount of news spending and staffing or solemn intonations about what serious and professional journalists they all are can fix that. And, sure, journalists in even the most sophisticated outlets come up short occasionally with regard to the accuracy and thoroughness of their reporting.
But to be absolutely clear: None of that is the same thing as fake news, which is “news” that is literally made up – invented out of thin air – for fun and profit. Fake news is not new; Enquirer-like publications running stories about Elvis sightings, UFO encounters, and women giving birth to bowling balls have been around for a long time. But because they were tinged with humor by their very ridiculousness, they were taken seriously by a tiny minority of mouth-breathers.
Now, because of the internet and cable television, there’s much more of it, it has largely lost its comedic edge even though the stories are no less silly than they’ve always been, and many more people take it seriously; which is to say, they take it as seriously as carefully sourced, fact-checked, and provable stories in real news outlets. The unfortunate and potentially calamitous result of this mélange of real news, fake news, opinion-based news, and plain gossip: In the eyes of a sizeable segment of the American public, news reporting is one big mish-mash of interchangeable parts, all saying whatever they need to say to make money and none saying anything true. Or, worse, real news consists only of content that confirms one’s pre-conceived ideas and prejudices. That’s not reality – there is a real and true distinction to be made between those organizations that take the work of news reporting seriously and those that do not, but it’s how many people see it.
This is dangerous territory. When people generally disregard what is true in favor of what they wish to be true, they are easy prey for cynical politicians, purveyors of rumor and innuendo, and conspiracy theorists. When that takes hold, democracy ends and chaos follows.
Editorially, the P-D had a liberal tilt, characterized in the main by the belief that government could be a force for good – could improve people’s lives and serve the common weal – and also by skepticism about the motives of the financially and politically powerful. Most of the staffers at the paper were probably on board with this in a general sort of way, but they were nothing like evangelists for it. I think many were not all that opinionated or political; they did their job of reporting on fires and crimes, of editing wire copy, of covering sports and city hall, of chasing commas, and didn’t worry too much about what the big bosses or the editorial page philosophers thought. If pressed, most of them, but by no means all, would probably come down very slightly to the left of center politically. There are idealogues in every group, but the idea that this motley collection of the good, bad, and ugly was ideologically hawkish or inclined to see themselves as intellectually superior to the working classes is laughable. They were the working classes.
My father, Dickson Terry, was a P-D features writer there for many years, and I knew him to be a liberal thinker in that he deplored racism and believed government could and should play a role in helping the downtrodden. But he was pretty conservative in his general deportment, the sort of person who believes a real man supports his family and his community, pays his taxes and his debts, wears a necktie to the office, and is loyal to the United States of America. I know that he – and I assume the great majority of his co-workers – took some pride in their craft, wished to do it right and well, and believed that accuracy – the facts, zealously pursued, carefully verified, and devoid of supposition or opinion – was a newspaperman’s highest calling. They liked the idea of a free press playing a role in making democracy work by holding politicians accountable, but didn’t take themselves too seriously
It is these people, in a thousand newsrooms in a thousand cities and towns across America, that Donald Trump, with the enthusiastic approval of his worshipers, characterizes as crooked, dishonest, and the lowest form of life. I offer the above actual description of them by way of reassuring the delusional – or the merely lazy who casually and without a moment’s reflection accept stereotyping -- that they were not, and are not, engaged in a grand conspiracy to conceal the truth and advance an agenda. The ordinary folk who populate the country’s newsrooms are not members of a secret cabal that has clandestine meetings to plot out how to slant the news and suppress stories about political murders, child sex slavery, or contacts with alien life forms, nor are they forced by their bosses to do these things. Try to imagine a scenario in which a reporter digs up evidence of massive voter fraud or the existence of a child sex ring in a pizza parlor, and having the story buried by the boss for political or ideological reasons, and all of his co-workers, hundreds of ordinary citizens – like my father, for example --, keeping quiet about it.
Bottom line: What these people do is find and report news as accurately and thoroughly as they are able. They don’t withhold or slant what they find in the service of a political position or ideology. They just don’t. It doesn’t work that way. Reporting facts that are contrary to someone’s beliefs or expectations is not slanting the news. Reporting what Donald Trump says – his actual words – is not negative coverage. That these parents and grandparents, these little league coaches and bake-sale organizers, these charity volunteers and football fans, these friends and neighbors are sitting on information that Sandy Hook was a government conspiracy, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or that plans are afoot to take away people’s guns and imprison them in closed Wal-Marts is beyond ludicrous
All of the above is really about daily newspapers, which, for purposes of this discussion, are not the same thing as that which has come to be known as “the media,” a term without any actual meaning. Media is the plural form of medium, a word which when paired with the word “news” refers to a way by which news is disseminated. So, daily newspapers are a news medium. Magazines are another. So are radio, television; and now, the Internet. Within each of these there are multiple distinctions having to do with political viewpoint, size and resources, talent/knowledge/experience, and commitment to thoroughness and accuracy. They are not interchangeable. There is no “the media,” notwithstanding the vilification heaped upon “it” by Trump and his hot-eyed devotees.
No question, though, there is a widespread willingness, among people in general, and among people in “the media” who should know better, to lump them all together. Broadcast news – television, in particular – has brought much of this on itself (and, unfortunately, on everyone else) by relentlessly intermixing news and entertainment and by making matinee idols of its news readers. By making a Kardashian divorce or a network sitcom plot development part of the news, they inevitably make all their news suspect, and no amount of news spending and staffing or solemn intonations about what serious and professional journalists they all are can fix that. And, sure, journalists in even the most sophisticated outlets come up short occasionally with regard to the accuracy and thoroughness of their reporting.
But to be absolutely clear: None of that is the same thing as fake news, which is “news” that is literally made up – invented out of thin air – for fun and profit. Fake news is not new; Enquirer-like publications running stories about Elvis sightings, UFO encounters, and women giving birth to bowling balls have been around for a long time. But because they were tinged with humor by their very ridiculousness, they were taken seriously by a tiny minority of mouth-breathers.
Now, because of the internet and cable television, there’s much more of it, it has largely lost its comedic edge even though the stories are no less silly than they’ve always been, and many more people take it seriously; which is to say, they take it as seriously as carefully sourced, fact-checked, and provable stories in real news outlets. The unfortunate and potentially calamitous result of this mélange of real news, fake news, opinion-based news, and plain gossip: In the eyes of a sizeable segment of the American public, news reporting is one big mish-mash of interchangeable parts, all saying whatever they need to say to make money and none saying anything true. Or, worse, real news consists only of content that confirms one’s pre-conceived ideas and prejudices. That’s not reality – there is a real and true distinction to be made between those organizations that take the work of news reporting seriously and those that do not, but it’s how many people see it.
This is dangerous territory. When people generally disregard what is true in favor of what they wish to be true, they are easy prey for cynical politicians, purveyors of rumor and innuendo, and conspiracy theorists. When that takes hold, democracy ends and chaos follows.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
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:
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.
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;
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.
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.
Friday, December 2, 2016
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.
“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.
Friday, November 11, 2016
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
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.
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.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
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.
…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.
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Lock Who Up?
Lock her up!
Lock him 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.
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
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.
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.
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