From an article in the New York Times magazine, we learn of a woman – uninsured, due to a complicated set of circumstances – who suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage (brain bleed) and spent time in the hospital, and later starting getting bills: $16,000 from the hospital, $50,000 for the air ambulance, $24,000 from a physicians’ group, $54,000 from the same group for additional charges and late fees, and then, another from the hospital for $356,884.42.
The article, which is about “the arcane, sprawling classification system that doctors and hospitals have learned to game” as one big reason for the high cost of health care, is definitely recommended reading. But even if we did nothing about this system or about the other major contributors to the problem – drug prices, too much testing, high price tags on basic procedures – even if the woman’s bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars were totally legitimate – there is something we could do: Chip in and help her pay the bills. If we did that, it would cost each of us a couple of bucks and save her a fortune – indeed, save her from total financial ruin. And if we chipped in to buy her insurance against those medical bills, as opposed to paying the bills themselves, it would cost not bucks but pennies.
This is something we already do with national defense, roads and bridges, schools, police protection, parks and libraries, sewers and sanitation, water treatment, air traffic control, and on and on -- things too numerous to mention. We chip in. We pay for them collectively. We pool our money to buy things we want and need but which it makes no sense to buy as individuals.
It’s called taxation.
(Also included in that list, by the way, is keeping old people out of penury by giving them money -- Social Security -- and by helping them pay for health care -- Medicare. The idea that people “pay into” these systems and are therefore merely retrieving the money they contributed and to which they are therefore entitled when they get old is a myth. In fact, people pay taxes to the federal treasury – it doesn’t matter what names those taxes are given – and part of that money is then paid out, from the federal budget, for social security and Medicare benefits, in exactly the same way that money comes out of the budget to pay for an aircraft carrier.)
But, I digress. The point here is this: People may kvetch about paying taxes and about government spending – something everyone is against in the abstract -- but they want the things that tax dollars buy. It’s that simple. The idea that one group of people is more “fiscally conservative” than another is fiction. The argument is never whether tax dollars are going to be collected and spent. The argument is always about how -- which of the things those dollars buy is more important to me as opposed to the ones that are more important to you.
The obvious question: What’s more important than health care? Needless to say, it is essential to our well-being. But more than that, its high cost is a terrible problem, and the two previous administrations were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undue influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. Given the demonstrated inability of the health industry or any outside actors to stabilize costs let alone bring them back to earth, the contention here is that including health insurance on the list of things we spend tax dollars on is therefore a not unreasonable idea. Why not “chip in” for health care?
Would that mean a tax increase? Sure, assuming we can’t find offsetting savings in other areas. (The betting here is we can’t, as those “other areas” tend to have powerful constituencies). But it’s important to understand this: We are already paying that “tax.” We may not call it a tax, but whether it’s in the form of health insurance we buy on our own or higher prices charged by employers that buy it for us, it’s money leaving our wallets. Just like the money we pay to the tax collector, it’s money we have no choice but to part with. Either way, we’re gonna pay. But there is considerable likelihood that we would pay less because of the preventive care that such a system would pick
up the tab for and because of the elimination of insurance company
overhead and hospital billing costs. So from a financial outlay standpoint, it appears it would be, at worst, a wash.
As for reducing medical costs within the existing system to any meaningful extent as a way to get this problem under control, it appears that for the time being at least, we will have to play it as it lays, so to speak – get people insured against costs as they now stand, and then take up the challenge of reducing costs. And a challenge it is, because the business of health care, for a variety of seemingly intractable reasons, has shown itself to be unresponsive to the normal pressures of a free market. Under the current system, in which there is zero price competition, costs are not going to go down and therefore the price of insurance isn’t going to go down, either. (Free market enthusiasts cite the example of Lasik surgery, the cost of which, due to competition, has come down considerably over the years. But Lasik is elective and people can shop around at their leisure for the low-cost provider. With things like cancer care, cardiac surgery, and organ transplants – well, not so much.)
What’s being suggested here is not socialized medicine or a government takeover of health care, an accusation that critics draw like a gun whenever this subject comes up. The government would own no facilities or employ any medical personnel. It would simply pick up the tab for insurance – as it already does, efficiently and effectively, with Medicare. For people who object to Medicare on principle, the question is this: Would you like to be paying the medical bills of your elderly parents and having them live in your basement because they can’t afford their own housing? Medicare is a system that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in and view with gratitude and relief. Thank God for Medicare, is what just about everyone says as they approach old age.
We all chip in for insurance for seniors. Why not chip in for insurance for everyone?
(Note: For an in-depth discussion of why the American health care system is unresponsive to normal free market forces, Flyover can recommend the book “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back” by Elisabeth Rosenthal. Here is a review in the New York Times Book Review.)
Monday, April 10, 2017
Thursday, March 30, 2017
Kristallnacht
Anti-Semitism rears its ugly head with depressing regularity in this country and elsewhere, and we’re seeing a still relatively small but nevertheless ominous resurgence in 2017. Here’s a bit of history that shows how relatively isolated incidents can coalesce and lead to calamity in an atmosphere of tacit acceptance.
On November 9 and 10, 1938 a wave of violence aimed at Jewish people, institutions, and businesses took place in Germany, Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia. The events of those days and nights became known as Kristallnacht, a German word loosely translated as the night of broken glass because of the shards of glass in the streets from the broken windows of homes, hospitals, schools, Jewish-owned businesses, and synagogues destroyed by paramilitary forces and German civilians as German authorities looked on without intervening. Estimates vary, but it’s believed that hundreds of people were murdered and thousands arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Over 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 businesses were destroyed or damaged.
Kristallnacht is widely understood to be the event that signaled the beginning of overt anti-Semitism in pre-WWII Germany which evolved to the “final solution” and ended in the murder of 6-million people in what became known as the Holocaust. Full accounts of Kristallnacht and the events leading up to it and flowing out if it are here and here.
The Southern Poverty Law Center counts 917 hate groups currently operating in the United States. It defines them as groups having beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. Not all of them are specifically anti-Semitic but all have that potential. Of the 917, ten are specifically holocaust deniers, 99 are neo-Nazi, 79 are racist skinheads, and 100 are white nationalists. The SPLC, the Anti-Defamation League, and others report hundreds of anti-semitic incidents in the past few months and thousands in the past year or so, including vandalism in Jewish cemeteries, spray-painted swastikas in public spaces, slurs on social media, and so on. The AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitic incidents at American colleges and universities, reports 185 such incidents so far in 2017 and 430 in 2016. Are these incidents a collection of small Kristallnachts – precursors of a larger uprising of people and groups who are encouraged and emboldened by the current political climate?
We know this much: History tells us that anti-Semitism is always bubbling just below the surface and has been for centuries, and that it erupts and becomes virulent and toxic particularly when demagoguery and despotism give people license to blame a hated “other” for their own problems, failings, and disappointments or for a lack of general prosperity. We see a lot of that now, including the resurrection of ageless tropes having to do with Jews controlling the banks or the international financial system or the media.
During the debates, Donald Trump 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…” In addition to being another entry in the lengthy and ever-growing catalog of ludicrous Trumpian pronouncements, this statement, while not overtly anti-Semitic, has been very much a part of the anti-Semitism vocabulary over the decades.
Everyone knows about the Holocaust. But Kristallnacht, the event that foretold it, is not as well known. It seems important now, as anti-Semitic activity seems to be ramping up once again, that younger generations be made aware of it and of the ominous warning it carried.
Kristallnacht is widely understood to be the event that signaled the beginning of overt anti-Semitism in pre-WWII Germany which evolved to the “final solution” and ended in the murder of 6-million people in what became known as the Holocaust. Full accounts of Kristallnacht and the events leading up to it and flowing out if it are here and here.
The Southern Poverty Law Center counts 917 hate groups currently operating in the United States. It defines them as groups having beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. Not all of them are specifically anti-Semitic but all have that potential. Of the 917, ten are specifically holocaust deniers, 99 are neo-Nazi, 79 are racist skinheads, and 100 are white nationalists. The SPLC, the Anti-Defamation League, and others report hundreds of anti-semitic incidents in the past few months and thousands in the past year or so, including vandalism in Jewish cemeteries, spray-painted swastikas in public spaces, slurs on social media, and so on. The AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitic incidents at American colleges and universities, reports 185 such incidents so far in 2017 and 430 in 2016. Are these incidents a collection of small Kristallnachts – precursors of a larger uprising of people and groups who are encouraged and emboldened by the current political climate?
We know this much: History tells us that anti-Semitism is always bubbling just below the surface and has been for centuries, and that it erupts and becomes virulent and toxic particularly when demagoguery and despotism give people license to blame a hated “other” for their own problems, failings, and disappointments or for a lack of general prosperity. We see a lot of that now, including the resurrection of ageless tropes having to do with Jews controlling the banks or the international financial system or the media.
During the debates, Donald Trump 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…” In addition to being another entry in the lengthy and ever-growing catalog of ludicrous Trumpian pronouncements, this statement, while not overtly anti-Semitic, has been very much a part of the anti-Semitism vocabulary over the decades.
Everyone knows about the Holocaust. But Kristallnacht, the event that foretold it, is not as well known. It seems important now, as anti-Semitic activity seems to be ramping up once again, that younger generations be made aware of it and of the ominous warning it carried.
If only people had listened.
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Chest Deep in the Big Muddy
There was a time when America was only hip deep in lies and misinformation about Obamacare and what it does and does not do. Now, because of the surreal Republican comedy act that masquerades as a search for something to replace it (or amend it or whatever) we’re chest deep and sinking fast. What Republicans should do, of course, is stick to their religion and advocate for not only the repeal of Obamacare but for a complete and total absence of government involvement in health care. That is GOP orthodoxy: Get medical insurance from your employer, buy it on the open market, get it from the man in the moon, don’t get it all; just keep the government out of it. You’re on your own.
Republicans should step up to that, own it, advocate openly and vigorously for it, and accept the electoral consequences. But they won’t because they know what those consequences would look like. That is most emphatically not what the American people want. What they want is help – help from the government, which is to say help from each other -- in dealing with the incredibly burdensome cost of health care in this country. (The U.S. health care sector is larger than all but five national economies in the world). So, for political survival, the GOP is left with cobbling together something that does what people want but which they can plausibly say is not Obamacare. But, of course, it will be Obamacare. Here is columnist George Will’s concise explanation of why that is:
“If you begin by accepting, as the country does, the Barack Obama premise that the chief metric of health care reform is universal access, and then if you add to that you’re going to have a system in which pre-existing health problems will not preclude you from purchasing insurance, and then you add to that you’re going to build this around a system in which 147-million Americans get their health insurance from their employer with special tax preferences for that…if you start like that you are bound to create a system of regulations and subsidies that’s very complicated; different regulations than Mr. Obama had and different subsidies, but the same basic kind of architecture.”
Noticeably absent from Republican deliberations on this matter, as they go about the business of assembling a program with the “same basic architecture” as Obamacare, are characterizations of it as “socialized medicine” and a government take-over of health care, both of which were flung around extravagantly during the original ACA debate. That debate, by the way, demonstrated that health care reform is not some pet cause of Democrats and lefties. Republicans and other conservatives were fully on board with the need for major changes in the way we provide and pay for health care. They – in the person of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and many, many others -- said so repeatedly during the legislative debate over the ACA and have said so many times since. Although those people enthusiastically endorsed the idea that something needed to be done, what they thought that might look like they didn’t say. They only said Obamacare wasn’t it. For eight years.
No matter how many hairs Obamacare opponents try to split, Mitt Romney’s program in Massachusetts was, and is, essentially the same thing. So, they were for Obamacare before they were against it. The individual mandate was part of the Massachusetts program and was an idea that was strongly backed by conservatives whose position was that people who didn’t buy in would essentially be freeloaders. People who think the mandate can be cherry-picked out because it’s the one provision of Obamacare that everyone hates, don’t understand how insurance works. Paul Waldman of the Wasgibngton Post explains it this way:
“The ACA’s individual mandate wasn’t popular, but it was necessary to solve a key problem, which is that if you want to guarantee coverage for those with preexisting conditions, you need to spread costs as widely as possible. Get everyone into the risk pool, and you can do it. So the law required people to carry insurance, fining them if they don’t. The GOP plan says that if you maintain ‘continuous coverage’ then you’ll still be insured despite your preexisting condition. If you go without insurance for two months, then you’ll have to pay a penalty once you start getting coverage again. But you’ll pay it to the insurance company, not to the federal treasury.
“Here’s the thing, though. If you’re healthy, and especially if you’re young and healthy, this system actually incentivizes you to wait until you get sick before getting insurance. You can say, why bother with insurance now? Sure, I’ll have to pay a 30 percent penalty on my premiums when I buy coverage again, but only for the first year. If I can get away with 10 years of having no insurance, and only get it when I’m faced with high expenses, I’ll still come out ahead. If young people make that calculation en masse, the risk pool winds up confined to people who are older and sicker, premiums skyrocket, insurers flee and the whole thing collapses.”
The high cost of health care is a terrible problem, and the Obama administration, and before that the Clinton administration, were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undo influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. The ACA doesn’t directly address all of that, but can be seen as a start. Whatever else happens, the creation, passage, and implementation of it guaranteed continued and intensifying focus on this huge national problem. Obsessing over Obamacare, and distorting what it is and isn’t, is politically driven and does nothing to solve a problem many millions of Americans share.
Whatever the Republicans cook up, it will be Obamacare -- just a less effective version of it – one that many believe will lead to large numbers of people losing their health coverage and to increases in premiums and out-of-pocket costs. (There is speculation that House Republican are afraid the Congressional Budget Office will “score” it exactly that way, which is why they’re hustling the bill along so quickly, hoping for passage before the CBO can give them and the American people the bad news, and why they’re making remarks aimed at de-legitimizing the CBO and its work.)
Trump supporters: This will be the “something terrific” with which your man said he would replace Obamacare. He said, you’ll recall: “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
Hmm.
Republicans should step up to that, own it, advocate openly and vigorously for it, and accept the electoral consequences. But they won’t because they know what those consequences would look like. That is most emphatically not what the American people want. What they want is help – help from the government, which is to say help from each other -- in dealing with the incredibly burdensome cost of health care in this country. (The U.S. health care sector is larger than all but five national economies in the world). So, for political survival, the GOP is left with cobbling together something that does what people want but which they can plausibly say is not Obamacare. But, of course, it will be Obamacare. Here is columnist George Will’s concise explanation of why that is:
“If you begin by accepting, as the country does, the Barack Obama premise that the chief metric of health care reform is universal access, and then if you add to that you’re going to have a system in which pre-existing health problems will not preclude you from purchasing insurance, and then you add to that you’re going to build this around a system in which 147-million Americans get their health insurance from their employer with special tax preferences for that…if you start like that you are bound to create a system of regulations and subsidies that’s very complicated; different regulations than Mr. Obama had and different subsidies, but the same basic kind of architecture.”
Noticeably absent from Republican deliberations on this matter, as they go about the business of assembling a program with the “same basic architecture” as Obamacare, are characterizations of it as “socialized medicine” and a government take-over of health care, both of which were flung around extravagantly during the original ACA debate. That debate, by the way, demonstrated that health care reform is not some pet cause of Democrats and lefties. Republicans and other conservatives were fully on board with the need for major changes in the way we provide and pay for health care. They – in the person of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and many, many others -- said so repeatedly during the legislative debate over the ACA and have said so many times since. Although those people enthusiastically endorsed the idea that something needed to be done, what they thought that might look like they didn’t say. They only said Obamacare wasn’t it. For eight years.
No matter how many hairs Obamacare opponents try to split, Mitt Romney’s program in Massachusetts was, and is, essentially the same thing. So, they were for Obamacare before they were against it. The individual mandate was part of the Massachusetts program and was an idea that was strongly backed by conservatives whose position was that people who didn’t buy in would essentially be freeloaders. People who think the mandate can be cherry-picked out because it’s the one provision of Obamacare that everyone hates, don’t understand how insurance works. Paul Waldman of the Wasgibngton Post explains it this way:
“The ACA’s individual mandate wasn’t popular, but it was necessary to solve a key problem, which is that if you want to guarantee coverage for those with preexisting conditions, you need to spread costs as widely as possible. Get everyone into the risk pool, and you can do it. So the law required people to carry insurance, fining them if they don’t. The GOP plan says that if you maintain ‘continuous coverage’ then you’ll still be insured despite your preexisting condition. If you go without insurance for two months, then you’ll have to pay a penalty once you start getting coverage again. But you’ll pay it to the insurance company, not to the federal treasury.
“Here’s the thing, though. If you’re healthy, and especially if you’re young and healthy, this system actually incentivizes you to wait until you get sick before getting insurance. You can say, why bother with insurance now? Sure, I’ll have to pay a 30 percent penalty on my premiums when I buy coverage again, but only for the first year. If I can get away with 10 years of having no insurance, and only get it when I’m faced with high expenses, I’ll still come out ahead. If young people make that calculation en masse, the risk pool winds up confined to people who are older and sicker, premiums skyrocket, insurers flee and the whole thing collapses.”
The high cost of health care is a terrible problem, and the Obama administration, and before that the Clinton administration, were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undo influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. The ACA doesn’t directly address all of that, but can be seen as a start. Whatever else happens, the creation, passage, and implementation of it guaranteed continued and intensifying focus on this huge national problem. Obsessing over Obamacare, and distorting what it is and isn’t, is politically driven and does nothing to solve a problem many millions of Americans share.
Whatever the Republicans cook up, it will be Obamacare -- just a less effective version of it – one that many believe will lead to large numbers of people losing their health coverage and to increases in premiums and out-of-pocket costs. (There is speculation that House Republican are afraid the Congressional Budget Office will “score” it exactly that way, which is why they’re hustling the bill along so quickly, hoping for passage before the CBO can give them and the American people the bad news, and why they’re making remarks aimed at de-legitimizing the CBO and its work.)
Trump supporters: This will be the “something terrific” with which your man said he would replace Obamacare. He said, you’ll recall: “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
Hmm.
Saturday, March 4, 2017
Another Shooting on 5th Avenue?
Donald Trump’s assertion of a year or so ago that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose voters was an eloquent articulation of the total contempt he has for the intelligence of his followers. So slavish are they in their adoration of him, he believes, that nothing he says or does, no matter how ludicrous or contemptible, will turn them away. And that has proven to be the case.
These ideas are, to use the vernacular, crazy. And the fear is that he’s saying these things not because he thinks his followers will buy them, but because he actually believes them. This is dangerous territory -- ominous because of what it could mean should he have similar paranoid fantasies about, say, N. Korea or China.
For the record, let’s take a look at the idea that pictures of Schumer and Pelosi in the company of Russian officials could mean they have any ties to Russia, let alone ties that are comparable to Trump’s. In Trump’s view, if an investigation of him is warranted, and investigation of them is warranted. The evidence against them: public widely circulated and utterly inconsequential one-off publicity photographs. The evidence against him: For that, we turn to a recent column by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post…
Having trouble following the fast-moving developments about the Trump team’s ties to Russia? Here’s a primer to get you up to speed:
President Trump got to know Russian President Vladimir Putin "very well," but he doesn’t “know Putin.” Putin sent Trump “a present” and they spoke, but Trump has “no relationship with him.”
Trump has “nothing to do with Russia,” but his son has said “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Russia definitely hacked the Democratic National Committee, unless it was a 400-pound man in his bedroom or a guy in a van down by the river.
U.S. intelligence agencies allege that Putin meddled in the election to try to get Trump elected, but this was all a “ruse”and a “fake news fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats.”
There was “no communication” between Trump’s team and Russia during the campaign and transition, except for communication with Russia by Trump’s future national security adviser, his future attorney general and his son-in-law and two others.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions “did not have communications with the Russians,” except for the two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak he neglected to mention under oath. Sessions then said he never discussed the campaign with Russians, which is not what was alleged. Sessions had “no idea what this allegation is about” regarding his Russian contacts but had enough of an idea what it was about to declare “it is false.”
Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, but this decision is unrelated to the discovery that he spoke twice with the Russian ambassador despite his claims that he had no such meetings. Sessions cannot confirm the investigation he recused himself from exists or will exist in the future.
Sessions believes that perjury is one of the constitutional “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “goes to the heart of the judicial system,” except his false testimony under oath to Congress was not a false statement but a case of speaking too quickly.
Sessions met with the Russian ambassador during the time Sessions was serving as a surrogate for the Trump campaign, but not in his capacity as a surrogate for the Trump campaign.
Sessions remembers nothing of his meetings with the Russian ambassador, except that he remembers clarly talking about terrorism and religion and Ukraine and he’s sure they didn’t talk about the campaign. It was a total coincidence that around the same time Sessions was meeting with the Russian ambassador, Trump gave an interview that ended up on Russian state-owned TV saying he didn’t believe reports of Russian influence in the U.S. election.
Trump, Trump’s press secretary and a broad swath of Republican members of Congress said there is no reason for Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation from which Sessions recused himself.
The incendiary and salacious “dossier” by a former British intelligence official on Trump’s involvement with Russia was completely unverified, but U.S. authorities were prepared to pay the man who wrote it.
Carter Page, who has extensive ties to Moscow, had “no role” in the Trump campaign, except that Trump, meeting with The Post’s editorial board, listed Page as an adviser.
Reports of the Trump team’s ties to Russia are “fake news,” yet those who leaked the information for those articles need to be found and punished.
Trump ousted Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, who Trump says did nothing wrong. Flynn, who spoke several times with Kislyak on the day President Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia, told Vice President Pence and the FBI that the discussion that intelligence officials heard them having about sanctions was not a discussion about sanctions. The sanctions that Flynn reportedly discussed with Kislyak, in the conversation he can’t entirely remember, were not really sanctions.
Former Trump campaign manager Paul manafort had “absolutely nothing to do and never has with Russia,” except for his extensive work for Russian oligarchs and pro-Russia forces in Ukraine. Manafort declared in the fall that “there’s no investigation going on by the FBI that I’m aware of” into his contacts with Russia, months after that investigation began.
Sessions previously asserted that “no one is above the law” and that failure to punish people for being untruthful under oath “will weaken the legal system,” and he proclaimed that “I’m very careful about how I conduct myself in these matters.” Except when he isn’t.
Manafort is a close Trump associate whose background is of particular interest when it comes to discussions of Trump and Russia, as explained in this article in Slate Magazine.
Another phenomenon at work here is that even the more reasonable people among the Trump coterie don’t know about those ludicrous and contemptible things because, in their paranoid distrust of the press, they don’t read about them. They hold their hands over their ears and hum loudly when Trump is spoken of critically, lest their comfort bubble be penetrated. Or, inexplicably, they are so convinced of the blessings he will cast upon the land that they’re willing to ignore daily displays of his wrong-headedness. What great changes they think he will bring to their lives -- changes worth embracing such a fool as their leader -- is anybody’s guess.
But there is a more ominous explanation – other than his contempt for his followers’ brainpower -- for two recent assertions by Trump: That Obama wiretapped Trump Tower and that long-ago public photo-ops of Schumer and Pelosi warrant investigations of ties they may have to Russia. That explanation: That he is becoming untethered from reality.
But there is a more ominous explanation – other than his contempt for his followers’ brainpower -- for two recent assertions by Trump: That Obama wiretapped Trump Tower and that long-ago public photo-ops of Schumer and Pelosi warrant investigations of ties they may have to Russia. That explanation: That he is becoming untethered from reality.
These ideas are, to use the vernacular, crazy. And the fear is that he’s saying these things not because he thinks his followers will buy them, but because he actually believes them. This is dangerous territory -- ominous because of what it could mean should he have similar paranoid fantasies about, say, N. Korea or China.
For the record, let’s take a look at the idea that pictures of Schumer and Pelosi in the company of Russian officials could mean they have any ties to Russia, let alone ties that are comparable to Trump’s. In Trump’s view, if an investigation of him is warranted, and investigation of them is warranted. The evidence against them: public widely circulated and utterly inconsequential one-off publicity photographs. The evidence against him: For that, we turn to a recent column by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post…
Having trouble following the fast-moving developments about the Trump team’s ties to Russia? Here’s a primer to get you up to speed:
President Trump got to know Russian President Vladimir Putin "very well," but he doesn’t “know Putin.” Putin sent Trump “a present” and they spoke, but Trump has “no relationship with him.”
Trump has “nothing to do with Russia,” but his son has said “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Russia definitely hacked the Democratic National Committee, unless it was a 400-pound man in his bedroom or a guy in a van down by the river.
U.S. intelligence agencies allege that Putin meddled in the election to try to get Trump elected, but this was all a “ruse”and a “fake news fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats.”
There was “no communication” between Trump’s team and Russia during the campaign and transition, except for communication with Russia by Trump’s future national security adviser, his future attorney general and his son-in-law and two others.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions “did not have communications with the Russians,” except for the two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak he neglected to mention under oath. Sessions then said he never discussed the campaign with Russians, which is not what was alleged. Sessions had “no idea what this allegation is about” regarding his Russian contacts but had enough of an idea what it was about to declare “it is false.”
Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, but this decision is unrelated to the discovery that he spoke twice with the Russian ambassador despite his claims that he had no such meetings. Sessions cannot confirm the investigation he recused himself from exists or will exist in the future.
Sessions believes that perjury is one of the constitutional “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “goes to the heart of the judicial system,” except his false testimony under oath to Congress was not a false statement but a case of speaking too quickly.
Sessions met with the Russian ambassador during the time Sessions was serving as a surrogate for the Trump campaign, but not in his capacity as a surrogate for the Trump campaign.
Sessions remembers nothing of his meetings with the Russian ambassador, except that he remembers clarly talking about terrorism and religion and Ukraine and he’s sure they didn’t talk about the campaign. It was a total coincidence that around the same time Sessions was meeting with the Russian ambassador, Trump gave an interview that ended up on Russian state-owned TV saying he didn’t believe reports of Russian influence in the U.S. election.
Trump, Trump’s press secretary and a broad swath of Republican members of Congress said there is no reason for Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation from which Sessions recused himself.
The incendiary and salacious “dossier” by a former British intelligence official on Trump’s involvement with Russia was completely unverified, but U.S. authorities were prepared to pay the man who wrote it.
Carter Page, who has extensive ties to Moscow, had “no role” in the Trump campaign, except that Trump, meeting with The Post’s editorial board, listed Page as an adviser.
Reports of the Trump team’s ties to Russia are “fake news,” yet those who leaked the information for those articles need to be found and punished.
Trump ousted Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, who Trump says did nothing wrong. Flynn, who spoke several times with Kislyak on the day President Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia, told Vice President Pence and the FBI that the discussion that intelligence officials heard them having about sanctions was not a discussion about sanctions. The sanctions that Flynn reportedly discussed with Kislyak, in the conversation he can’t entirely remember, were not really sanctions.
Former Trump campaign manager Paul manafort had “absolutely nothing to do and never has with Russia,” except for his extensive work for Russian oligarchs and pro-Russia forces in Ukraine. Manafort declared in the fall that “there’s no investigation going on by the FBI that I’m aware of” into his contacts with Russia, months after that investigation began.
Sessions previously asserted that “no one is above the law” and that failure to punish people for being untruthful under oath “will weaken the legal system,” and he proclaimed that “I’m very careful about how I conduct myself in these matters.” Except when he isn’t.
Manafort is a close Trump associate whose background is of particular interest when it comes to discussions of Trump and Russia, as explained in this article in Slate Magazine.
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.
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