The Smell of Burning Cities in the Morning

Look, I know that President Trump has been a bit of a disappointment, but you have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  If you demand that the President pass all your purity tests, you'll never have a President at all.  Politics is a messy business, and you have to be realistic. Better let the grownups in the room handle this.

... I hope no one reading this will think that I'm being anything but bitterly sarcastic. The mainstream reaction to Trump's memorandum of understanding with Iran hasn't been surprising.  Many of the commentators, in government and in the punditocracy, don't seem to understand what a memorandum of understanding is, and like Schumer, they're lying wildly about the details that were leaked before the text was released. As far as I can tell, the $300 billion for reconstruction is supposed to come from a multinational group that doesn't include the US. Of course it's possible that, like many numbers Trump has talked about that supposedly won't cost US taxpayers anything, the multinational group is a mirage, but Schumer and his ilk seem so far to be misrepresenting it. It's hard to know, given a choice between Trump and the Congressional Democratic leadership, who is lying, but it would be foolish to trust Schumer.

For one thing, similar lies are flying about sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. None of that is taxpayers' money.  The frozen assets belong to Iran, and should have been released many years ago, but both US parties have refused to do it.  The same panicky yelling about Iran's "nuclear program," which is a dogwhistle for "nuclear weapons program," is false too. Iran has the right under international law and the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  So why believe these guys on the $300 billion?  One can't trust the Iranian government either, but so far they have been somewhat more truthful than the US and Israelis.

As numerous, mostly left-wing commentators have pointed out, the loser in a war normally does and should pay reparations.  Israel, as joint aggressor, should pay reparations to Iran too, but that's never going to happen, and the US should take responsibility for its criminal aggression for once. The words "lose" and "defeat" are, to my mind, not exact here. The US hasn't been defeated as I understand the word.  Our cities haven't been bombed, our leaders haven't been carted off to trial and imprisonment in Iran, and Iranian troops don't occupy American soil.  The same is true of Israel, where similar caterwauling is going on.  US jingoes will always refuse to admit that this country has ever been the aggressor, and if US critics mean by "lose" that the US failed to achieve its objectives, it's fair to rub the jingoes' noses in it.  There's a lot of squalling about Trump's "bad deal."  Maybe it is, but it could be so much worse.

I meant to write this post a couple of days ago, and worried that the situation would fall apart before I got started.  That it hasn't collapsed yet says something about Trump's determination to get out of the mess he's mired in, even as Israel continues killing Lebanese and undermining the ceasefire. On Thursday morning NPR had a fairly good interview with a former Lebanese ambassador to Jordan. For some reason, they didn't post a transcript, just a summary with a few quotations; it's worth listening to the whole thing. By contrast, a Friday morning interview with Richard Haass, a "veteran diplomat ...who served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations," and who criticized the memorandum from the right, got a full transcript.  Host Leila Fadel pushed back gently, but let him run on.

By Israeli standards, of course, "ceasefire" means only that the other guys have to stop shooting; Israel will continue its atrocities.  As Avedon Carol noted yesterday, "Not sure where we are in any given minute with the Iran ceasefire deal, during which, as usual, Israel has not done any ceasing to fire, and then complained that Lebanon broke the ceasefire by killing four IDF soldiers who were invading their country at the time. I'm reminded of all the definitions of chutzpah when Hezbollah is called 'terrorists' for defending their own country against invaders."

But our elites will never admit that the US is in the wrong, and Trump's fans are trying to pin the MoU on JD Vance -- anybody but Trump, who to be fair is mainly concerned with his optics rather than substance, as usual.  As I've indicated, the MoU looks much better than anything I'd have expected from this administration, and could be a reasonable beginning. For that reason, it will probably fail, because of Israel and the rest of our government.

The Mock President

What with numerous prominent Democrats attacking Trump from the right on Iran, I shouldn't have been surprised by NPR's commentary this morning.  The perky A Martinez had a nice chat with White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and then NPR's Token Hoosier Steve Inskeep spoke to a seeming AI chatbot who supposedly was an assistant secretary of state during the Biden administration.

GAVITO: I think on one hand, it indicates that progress is actually being made, and I tend to think that that is true here. The only way to end this conflict is through a diplomatic resolution, and those take time. I think it's important to remember that the JCPOA - the agreement over Iran's nuclear deal - took over two years to negotiate. I think at the same time, though, this may continue to suggest that there is within the Trump administration a fundamental misunderstanding of the Iranian regime and its adherence - continued adherence - to its ideological red lines because it doesn't believe it's lost this war and it doesn't think it has to compromise...

I think he's inching towards progress. I think it's important to note that. But those last 5% of the negotiations are always the hardest. And I think that that's the moment that we're in right now...

Long term, there is certainly something in it. The Abraham Accords were a very positive development. That being said, I think that this is somewhat of an own goal. Saudi Arabia has been crystal clear that absent a pathway to statehood for the Palestinians, it will not normalize. And so President Trump has essentially laid something on the table that has eroded his chance of success.

What really startled me, howver, was this incoherent question from Inskeep:

What does it do to the United States when Iranians are able to mock our president and accuse him of manipulating the stock market, which does, in fact, move up and down with everything he says?

Why shouldn't Iranians mock our president?  For those who care about ranking, Trump is probably the most mockable US president to date, and we've had some doozies. He freely mocks other heads of state, so why shouldn't he be fair game as well?  It's perhaps somewhat painful that Iranians were able to mock him so cleverly and effectively.  That surprised a lot of people, including me, and nobody can fairly say Trump doesn't have it coming.

I suppose it's some kind of progress that NPR can speak openly about Trump's "whiplash diplomacy," but in both of these segments it would easy to forget that Trump (and therefore the US) is, along with Israel, the aggressor in this war. They're very concerned that Iran should submit to Trump and Netanyahu, should maintain a ceasefire, and should compromise (read: surrender) with its attackers. The question for NPR, as for the rest of the corporate media, is whether Iran can be trusted to keep its commitments, while pretending that the US and Israel can be trusted to keep theirs. This isn't a new stance, of course, but it seems that they're sticking to it as it becomes increasingly obvious that it's untenable.

If You Come at the King, You'd Best Not Miss

I almost -- that's ALMOST -- felt a little sorry for Donald Trump after he was safely out of office in 2021.  One factor that hurt him seriously was not his doing and out of his control, namely the COVID pandemic.  This time around, he's done the things that have undercut his popularity, and he has no one to blame but himself.  If he hadn't started a war with Iran, his popularity would have sagged anyway, but the spreading effects of that war, from gas prices in particular to inflation in general, have made things worse for him.  Not, you understand, that I care, let alone sympathize; he should be in jail instead of the White House, and every reverse he suffers is fine with me.

I'm not optimistic, though. I think there's a good chance that the Republicans will lose control of Congress in November, and there is backlash evident at all levels of government.  But I don't expect that the Democrats will get the veto-proof supermajority they'd need to impeach and convict him. Even if he were removed from office, JD Vance would take his place, and the Democrats who've collaborated with Trump would be all too happy to work with Vance. Maybe a wave of Democratic insurgents could knock Chuck Schumer out of his leadership position, which could help, but it would depend on who replaced him. It will take an immense effort to undo the damage Trump and his gang have done, and there will be fierce opposition to any such effort from wealthy and powerful people who may not like Trump all that much but are happy to benefit from his policies, and will continue to back them and politicians who support them.  The non-elite people I know and talk to don't know much of what he's done, and aren't any more interested in informing themselves than they ever were. 

Meanwhile, centrist news media are blundering along at their usual level of incompetence, even if you leave aside the overt and explicit moves by far-right billionaires to make them worse. NPR continues to waste time on "what we can expect" and false equivalence.  Today, for example, Morning Edition ran two items on Secretary of State Marco Rubio's mission to meet with Pope Leo. The reporter referred to a "spat" (twice!) between Trump and the Pope, as if it were personal on both sides instead of springing from Trump's usual fury at anyone who criticizes him; they even acknowledged that Popes have objected to wars before in the same terms without setting off an international crisis, if this is one instead of another Trump tantrum.  In the second, they talked to a former US Ambassador to the Holy See, who bloviated without saying anything of substance. That's the kind of commentator NPR likes.  (I'll add some details later, when the transcripts are posted.)

More liberal outlets have exaggerated how much Trump has been affected by the obstacles he has encountered.  Some like to say that he has been "humiliated," which to the extent that it's true means little.  He responds to "humilation" by lashing out, and as long as he's in office he has to power to do more than merely humiliate his enemies.  A popular question in these precincts is whether Trump's MAGA coalition is "starting to crack."  Maybe so, maybe not, but it is still holding together overall.  One or two Congressional Republicans have voted with Democrats against Trump's actions, but they've been balanced by Democrats who voted for Trump.  The resistance by some Indiana State senators to Trump's call for redistricting was brave and noble, but most of those Republicans were successfully primaried by MAGA agents this week.  So far the coalition is intact, and while Trump is behaving ridiculously in every public statement he makes, he hasn't suffered any real consequences yet.  Get back to me when that changes.

Yahweh Sabaoth Would Like a Word

While I was reading right-wing Christians fuming that the Pope should stay out of politics, it occurred to me that such people usually insist that separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and that we need more voices of faith in the public square.  It wouldn't be fair to say that they've changed their minds, exactly, because the inconsistency would never occur to them.  They want what they want, and that's all that matters.

Still, it's clear that Trump's antics have made them uneasy, especially the Catholics among them. I happened on a Facebook comment thread this afternoon where the contradictions were heightened: I've been a Catholic all my life, but Pope Leo isn't my Pope!  He's a Communist and should be minding his own business! ... and so on.  I don't know how representative these people are. It does seem that there are some deep divisions among Roman Catholics at all levels, from the laity up to reactionary clergy.  Some of the latter have been disciplined.  They forget that the Church is not a democracy, it's a hierarchy.

On the other hand, liberals and even leftists -- Catholic and non-Catholic, theist and non-theist -- are reveling in that hierarchy, though they're confused about it too. Celebrity right-wing Catholics like J.D. Vance are being mocked for daring to criticize the Pope, especially when they're recent converts like Vance.  And it is funny that Vance would be so unself-conscious about it.  Luckily for him, he's not likely to have a date with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and even if he does he's not going to be tortured or executed. As the 19th-centurhy composer Hector Berlioz wrote, "Now that She [i.e., the Church] has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, Her creeds are charming."  I suppose Vance is aware of this somewhere in what's left of his mind.  I suppose his liberal mockers are too, but it feels to me like they actually believe that a mere layman has no business disagreeing with the head of 1.2 billion Catholics.  It's nicely summed up in this meme:

(If you'd like to see a buttload of baboon screeching and feces-throwing, here's the thread where I found the meme.)  If you think that religion is just a matter of book-learning, this makes sense.  But it isn't, and believers will be the first to insist that it isn't when it suits them. Of course the Roman Catholic Church has a lot of intellectual capital built up over two thousand years, and as a subject of that church, who joined it as an adult, Vance know that and should at least pretend to respect it.  It's his problem, not mine.

Derek Guy, whose timeline inspired that meme and that screeching, had a much more measured take.

Truly remarkable how many people have told the Pope, in some way or another, to "shut up and dribble." Or corrected him on the Bible, despite their thin education on theology. Or told him to stay out of US affairs, despite him being a US citizen. The hubris is amazing.

It's not just the Pope. I would never dream of correcting an Imam or a Harvard law professor about their fields of study using some bullshit I read using ChatGPT. Some people lack an appreciation for the depth of their own ignorance because they don't have expertise in anything.

I agree to an extent; after all, the same people who are telling Leo to shut up are telling him to defer to the political wisdom of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio - a bunch of clowns who have no wisdom at all, whose incompetence is plain to see every day. Or they tell him to focus on morality instead of politics, as if they were mutually irrelevant spheres, as if an illegal war and terror against civilians had nothing to do with morality.  And, as Derek mentions, Leo is an American citizen, though he doesn't need to be one to criticize the US or any other country. He's also a head of state, of the Vatican City, and as such is a politician as well as a cleric.

I'm an atheist, though, and while I'll acknowledge Leo's learning, I'm not bound to defer to it.  His claims about his god and war are simply absurd.  The Bible contains many instances where Yahweh orders war, orders the massacre of entire populations and the enslavement of others.  But Leo doesn't care about that any more than Trump cares about his own falsehood.  He's laying down doctrine on his authority. (He's not declaring it ex cathedra, so he's not even claiming to be infallible - not that he would be.)  But only Catholics are bound by his authority.  Derek's reference to Harvard law professors is unfortunate too, since prominent Harvard law professors have made wildly false claims about the law.  I'm thinking, for example, of Obama's "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Nor do I feel any obligation, or even temptation, to defer to Leo's positions on homosexuality, abortion, contraception, women in the clergy, or other matters. I know that the Pope, or any other learned Catholic, can churn up a flurry of learned arguments to support those positions; I don't care.  These are not matters to be settled by scholastic discourse, and the justifications for them change as the church's positions change. Think of slavery, which the church not only used to justify but practiced.

Another response to Vance's insubordination has been some version of this:

QuoProQuid is a queer Catholic game designer whose posts I read regularly.  Mason Mennenga is a nice liberal Christian whose posts I see only intermittently.  His picture of lifelong Latin American Catholics is as much of a caricature as his picture of adult American converts. Most of not all of the worst right-wing Latin American dictators were lifelong Catholics; it didn't keep them from killing and raping and torturing - nor did it keep previous Popes (and American presidents) from being good buddies with them.  

I'm glad that Leo is opposing Trump and the war, but that means he's on my side (and the side of many other non-Catholics), not that I'm on his.  It's certainly a PR problem for Trump, and will further erode his already slipping support.  His base will stand fanatically firm, but not everyone who voted for him is in his base. I'm not indignant, as many atheists are, that Trump is attacking "an American Pope," as NPR's anchor people keep putting it - his nationality makes no more difference than his religion.  These details make it harder for Trump's insults to land. I don't mind Vance's insubordination against his religious superior, only that his criticisms are so inept; but who would expect any better from him?  Leo's low-key delivery of his criticism is pleasant too, but I don't make the liberal mistake of confusing moderation of tone with moderation of content.

The flip-flopping works both ways, as usual.  The same liberals who cheer Leo's denunciation of war were mostly silent when Obama bombed wedding parties and turned Libya into a slave market.  Many of them supported George W. Bush's wars too, and many embraced Israeli atrocities until they began to hurt their own chances of election or re-election.  The quality of mainstream discussion on these matters is, as usual, abysmal; and getting worse.

Theater of the Absurd

CECILY.
I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

[Enter Algernon, very gay and debonair.] He does!

[The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde] 

We live in interesting times, don't we?  It has been entertaining to watch the fuss over Pope Leo's opposition to war and the MAGA Right's fury over it, with JD Vance (a Roman Catholic convert) and other Trump toadies joining Trump in his outrage at Leo.  It's been less entertaining to see various non-MAGA non-Catholics cheering Leo on, expressing their outrage that anyone should dare to oppose the Holy Father.

Then, during the night, Trump posted another incoherent rant against Leo on his social media platform, adding an AI-generated image of himself in conventional Jesus robes, laying hands on a sick bedridden man who could be Uncle Sam or possibly Jeffrey Epstein.  Someone deleted the image soon afterward, but by then it had been copied and gone viral.  Trump later told reporters that he thought the image showed him as a doctor, and he was paying tribute to the Red Cross.

Naturally, many in Trump's base rallied to defend him, saying that obviously the image didn't depict him as Jesus, but it seems that he'd finally managed to upset a good number of his fans. The word "blasphemy" was flung around.  Trump's advisor Laura Loomer pointed out correctly that the US doesn't have blasphemy laws, advising Trump's critics to move to an Islamic country where the charge would have legal consequences. Nice try, but numerous Christian countries also have laws against blasphemy.

Still, it's been weird watching religious liberals and even atheists, like Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta, in a snit over Trump's "blasphemy."  It doesn't seem that they're just pointing out Trump's hypocrisy.  Many of them seem to be sincerely outraged by his cloaking himself in religious imagery, as they are by his daring to speak harshly to the leader of a billion Catholics.

I approve of Leo's stance in this case, but since he's still the head of an antigay hate group, it's not because I recognize his moral authority.  This declaration of his, for example, is as laughable as anything Trump has spewed online: 

Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood" (Is 1:15). 

(Offer not good during the Crusades, the Spanish Armada sailing to England, or the Spanish invasion of the New World.)

I also support Leo's refusal to be cowed by Trump's ranting against him.  He's one of the few European heads of state who hasn't tried to make nice with Trump, hasn't offered him a shiny gold trinket to appease him.

Anybody has the right to disagree with, criticize, or protest a Pope or a President.  It's depressing, indeed infuriating, to see so many people who aren't Catholic or even theists demanding that Trump respect the Pontiff's autoritah. I must say, though, I wonder what is going through Melania Trump's mind today. She's a Catholic, though she married Trump in an Episcopal ceremony. Coming so soon after her tirade against Jeffrey Epstein, today's circus must be putting some strain on her determination to stand by her man.

Peace In Our Time?

When I went to bed last night, the stories of the announced ceasefire with Iran were already starting to fray. By this morning, it was clear that Israel had not been consulted on the deal and was continuing to bomb Lebanon. US and Iranian media acknowledged conflicting understandings of the terms, with Trump claiming that the Strait of Hormuz had been opened and Iran saying that it wasn't, yet.  Trump thought that Iran would give up its missiles, Iran didn't agree.  And so on.  It was reported that JD Vance was going to participate in negotiations, but at one point the White House said he wasn't, for security reasons.  As with the war, disentangling the confusion and lies was an uphill struggle.

Today on NPR's Morning Edition, their White House Correspondent Franco Ordoñez told their resident Hoosier Steve Inskeep:

It's, of course, never a bad thing to kind of avoid the dire scenario that Trump was describing. But by backing down, Trump also, you know, risked damaging his own credibility. I mean, he's likely to face some criticism, even more so now that, you know, he has a reputation of backing down from some of his most flattening rhetoric.

Donald Trump has no credibility to begin with. Anyone who believes what he says (and NPR still gives him credence most of the time) discredits himself immediately.

Unfortunately, though, Ordoñez was correct that Trump is facing criticism.  Jon Schwarz wrote on Twitter that "There's a very real chance the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will attack Trump for the Iran war — from the right, because he didn't 'finish the job'". He linked to a Democratic Senator from New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen, who'd complained "Iran still has 50% of their missile capacity. They still have enriched uranium. And they still control the Strait of Hormuz. The President had no credible strategy going into this war, and it's clear he still doesn't have one to accomplish the goals he set out."

Senator Chris Murphy, D-CT, also was upset: 

It appears Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, a history-changing win for Iran. The level of incompetence is both stunning and heartbreaking. What on earth is happening?

Iran already had control of the Strait of Hormuz. The US has no claim on it. But Murphy, like some other Democrats, supports Trump's illegal war; he only wants it to be run "competently."  The most pressing need is not to prolong the war, but to end it. The US and Israel are the aggressors, and they have already done enormous harm to human lives, not to mention the world economy.

I have a special contempt for Murphy, since he posted in 2020 that Trump had interfered with his plan to overthrow the government of Venezuela and install a crooked US collaborator:

Then, it got real embarrassing. In April 2019, we tried to organize a kind of coup, but it became a debacle. Everyone who told us they’d rally to Guaido got cold feet and the plan failed publicly and spectacularly, making America look foolish and weak.

Notice the words I put in boldface: "a kind of coup."  Murphy bragged in public that he'd conspired to stage a coup in another nation, which has to be some kind of violation of international and other law.  He suffered no consequences for this, of course.  Now he wants to prolong a war that should, in a halfway sane world, put its perpetrators in the Hague for crimes against humanity.  The US isn't entitled to demand concessions from its victims. Yes, Trump is incompetent and stupid, but refraining from destroying another country, however clumsily he's doing it, should be supported rather than undermined.  Yes, the Iranian regime is evil, but so is Chris Murphy, and so are the other pols and pundits who like Trump's war but think they should be in charge of it.

P.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has weighed in, using talking points like Shaheen's:

"Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated…The nations at the world are furious at Trump: the Asians, the Europeans, even the Middle Eastern allies."

These people want Trump's war, and they want it to be more murderous and more destructive.

You Think I'm Joking?

A whole lot of people were outraged at Donald Trump's latest offense against civility, his posting of a video which included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama's faces superimposed on apes. The outrage seems to have died down a little, as Fox News has gratefully seized on the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie to occupy program time, and CNN on the Winter Olympics, but it's still active outside corporate media.  I started this post right away, but got sidetracked by personal commitments and general laziness.  It was easy, though, because I wasn't outraged.  Of course Donald Trump is a pig, but this sort of activity is typical of him; it's dog bites man.

First, the video didn't do the Obamas any harm. They're rich, they have Secret Service protection, they're safely insulated from any features of American life they don't want to know about.  Barry is rubbing elbows with billionaires and superannuated rock stars, posting his playlists and favorite books, they have their various mansions.  Michelle has her podcast and other projects. Every so often they stick their heads out to attend presidential funerals or make annoying statements about, like, stuff.  

I agree that public displays of gutter racism will bother and upset young people of color who don't have the Obamas' advantages, but there are far more immediate displays of gutter racism that also bother them: raids of their schools by masked goons, racist campaigns about immigrants supposedly eating pets, and the familiar grinding effects of poverty. I'm reminded of right-wing concern trolling in the 90s about how Bill Clinton's sex scandal would upset innocent children who were probably more worried about the effects of war and other political violence.

Second, when it comes to repugnant Presidential attempts at humor, Obama yields nothing to Trump.  Obama joked - in public, on camera - about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones if they looked askance at his daughters.  "You won't even see it coming. You think I'm joking?" It wouldn't have been funny even if Obama hadn't killed plenty of people with predator drones: American teenagers, wedding parties, hospital patients.  No big deal, all American presidents and their flunkies are blood-soaked butchers; nobody but the Professional Left cared, then or now.  ("Professional Left" was the Obama administration's version of Trump's "paid protesters," come to think of it.)

Obama also found it amusing that people in Latin America should care about US violence there, whether directly or merely funding, training, and protecting its perpetrators.  Early in his tenure he flailed inelegantly when asked about Israel-Palestine: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard."  I mean, he couldn't possibly have foreseen that a college student would ask him such a question; obviously the student was a Professional Leftist.  A few years later, he was better prepared.  Asked a hostile but not unreasonable question (which he didn't understand, since it was in Hebrew), Obama mocked the questioner, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa University, joking, "I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home ... I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler."  Remarks like these are, if not anticipations of Trump, at least retreads of Ronald Reagan, the Master from whom Obama learned how to make pithy quips.

Confronted with such performances, Obama's fans may ask me where I was when Obama was president, they bet I liked him then.  No, I didn't.  This blog has too many of my attacks on him from the period to link here.  The best they have to offer is that he was a disappointment sometimes.  Yeah, I know that one too.  I did find it really depressing when the radical writer Marge Piercy, whose work I love and respect, posted the D-word about Obama ("a bit of a disappointment" was how she put it) while expressing her outrage on Facebook over Trump's video post.

So yeah, I take due notice of Trump's latest crime against propriety, good manners, presidential norms. But I won't join in outrage with people who'd be watching football, having brunch, or just having a nice nap if only Trump would disappear.  

Wooing Him From the Dark Side to the Dark Side

NPR's Steve Inskeep struck again this morning.  I was dawdling in bed, but I bounced even before this seven-minute absurdity was over.

INSKEEP: So I want people to know we talk from time to time. I don't really ask about your personal life, and I don't want to go too far here, but have you ever had a breakup like this?

SWISHER: Not like this. Not publicly like this. It's really quite strange, actually, but it's sort of in keeping with their relationship over the last year or so as Musk became very close to Donald Trump.

That's how it began, and it didn't get any better.

SWISHER: Well, I think they've had - you know, he sort of fell in love quickly, didn't he? He sort of went crazy, jumping up and down, doing the chainsaw thing, dedicating his life, moving into Mar-a-Lago, all this stuff, and shifted rather dramatically. Because he sort of was somewhat neutral in politics, had voted for Obama, you know, had a relationship with Trump in the first term, but certainly wasn't, you know, as deeply in love with him as he - and I hate to use these terms, but it's really been quite intense, calling himself BFF or best buddy or first buddy or whatever the heck they used.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

SWISHER: And Trump reciprocated, too.

If you have time and a strong stomach, click through and listen to the audio.  Later on, Swisher says of Trump and Musk that "they're not serious people"; neither are she and Inskeep.  Remember this the next time someone calls NPR a radical-left outlet.

Also, this is weird: NPR's Scott Horsley reported that according to the Congressional Budget Office, Trump's tariffs "could cut the federal debt by $2.8 trillion" in the next decade, while the Associated Press reported that the CBO forecast that Trump's budget bill would "spike deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade."  Horsley didn't mention the latter forecast, which seems to me a bit one-sided.  Horsley mentioned the effect of tariffs on wine prices, which inspired Inskeep to say:

INSKEEP: Hope you're able to pour yourself a glass, Scott. Thanks so much.

HORSLEY: You're welcome.

But back to the Musk-Trump clash.  Liberal and left commentators were very excited about it yesterday, and you'd have thought that the two titans were clashing in person, face-to-face, instead of remotely.  They were also excited by Musk's threat that Trump's relations with Jeffrey Epstein were going to be revealed, as if Musk weren't a recreational liar who's posted false predictions often before, and as if the Trump-Epstein connection weren't well-documented already. What happens when two habitual liars clash?  Do they cancel each other out, like matter and anti-matter?  None of this is really news anyway.  Many people had predicted that Musk would terminally piss off Trump, and vice versa; the only question was how long it would take.

Rumors are swirling like the dust from the Canadian wildfires that are making my eyes burn even as I write this.  First I read that Trump and Musk were going to meet to iron out their differences, then that the White House had denied it.  But it does seem that some highly placed Democratic centrists believe they see an opening to woo Musk to their side. May their memory be a curse.

Rejoice, For the 2028 Presidential Campaign Is About to Begin!

What more is there to say?  I don't think it's just my advancing age that has made this election cycle seem worse than its predecessors.  If so much weren't at stake, it could have been entertaining: the progressive deterioration of Biden and Trump on live television, the antics of party and personal loyalists as reality kept throwing banana peels in the path of their dreams, the incompetence of most of the Beltway news media, the fecklessness of administration spokespeople trying to defend the indefensible, and so on and on.  Watching State Department spokesperson Matt Miller smirk helplessly as he runs interference for Israeli atrocities, or White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre roll her eyes like a bored teenager at impertinent questions would strain credibility of satire, but it's all real, which makes it no fun at all.

Some Biden dead-enders are still fuming that "They stabbed that man in the forehead," though most quickly jumped on the Harris bandwagon.  I still see some complaining that Harris was 'forced' on the voters without a primary, though the immediate flood of support she received, both verbal and monetary, ought to be evidence enough that there was massive uneasiness about Biden at least among the Democratic rank and file before he was pried loose from his candidacy.  Some continued to lie for months that it was too late to replace Biden's name with Harris's on the ballots in various states, though this was propaganda from the Trump campaign.  Even funnier were MAGA complaints about all the campaign material with Biden's name on it that had become useless overnight - all that money wasted, so unfair!

Myself, I felt enormous relief when Biden finally abdicated.  I was not, and still am not, an enthusiast for Harris.  Her choice of Tim Walz as running mate was probably her best high-profile move.  I think it's fair to call her handling of opposition to US support of Israel a misstep, though it's impossible to say how it will affect the election, especially since Trump is even worse on Israel/Palestine than she and Biden have been. Among her supporters there's a tendency to talk as though criticism and opposition come only from Arab-Americans and Muslims, though that is certainly not true.

I think the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling, though again it's impossible to say by how much.  One thing that sticks with me is that, in the small town where I live, whose government is dominated by Republicans, the local GOP office did not have a Trump sign in its window until he secured the nomination: instead there was a De Santis sign, which was removed when he ended his campaign.  For several weeks, the only signs in the window were downticket candidates.  I saw fewer Trump-Vance signs than Harris-Walz signs around town until the past week or so.  This bespeaks a lack of enthusiasm for Trump in an area where I expected him to be much more popular.

The abortion issue is going to be important, and may bode well for Democrats at all levels. That's been clear since the 2022 midterms, and Republicans are running scared.  Even Trump is trying to distance himself from it, which isn't going to win over many voters and has alienated some forced-birther Republicans.

I wanted to write this before Election Day, just out of guilt for not having weighed in before.  One thing that reinforced my sloth was that when I looked at my posts during previous election cycles, I saw that I'd said before everything I wanted to say this time.  But I feel bad because in the future I won't be able to look at what I've written this year as a kind of journal, which I can do for campaigns in 2008 and later.  I won't be following Election Night coverage this time, any more than I have in years past.  One previous post I do want to refer to concerns the likelihood that we won't know who's won for several days.  I remember that this maddened many mainstream journalists in 2020, and it's likely to be true this time around as well.  But we'll see, and one lesson we all should have learned this year is that events can surprise us.  However, I don't think most people have learned that lesson at all; many are determined to know what will happen, what we can expect, in advance anyway.

One prediction I will make with some confidence, though: as they wait impatiently for the results to come in, commentators will be asking: What does this mean for 2028?

What We Can Expect

I began mulling over this post on March 19, when Donald Trump announced that he would be arrested (or indicted) the following Tuesday.  The corporate media went wild with speculation pretending to be analysis, as anyone might have expected.  Trump was not indicted that Tuesday, but that didn't stop the buzzing of the pundits.  He was indicted a week later, which led to more gleeful buzzing although the charges were sealed until his arraignment on March 30. The MAGA Right was furious, while liberals were mostly uninterested in the substance of the matter, preferring to dwell on the fact that no president or ex-president had ever been indicted before, and speculating about what effect we could expect the indictment to have on Trump's candidacy for the 2024 presidential election.  NPR's Morning Edition relied on the usual gang of inarticulate academics, Republican "consultants," and right-wing media commentators.  Television news offered up prolonged coverage of Trump's motorcade to the airport, his plane idling on the tarmac before takeoff, and again, his return to Mar-a-Lago. Gag-making, but only to be expected.  (If you think this is just an American media failure, try this BBC story, complete with a flowchart.)

True, no US president or ex-president has been held accountable for his crimes before, but that's an indictment of our political and justice system.  It obsessed the media because it could pass as an "objective" fact so no one could accuse them of bias, because it fit with the media's fondness for collecting firsts, and it also let responsible pundits express their shock that a rich and powerful person was being held accountable as if he were poor and black, which is so unfair.

Trump and his toadies have denounced the indictment as "political," which is true but unimportant.  It's also political that Trump has escaped prosecution for as long as he has. If prosecutor Alvin Bragg previously declined to prosecute him, that was also a political decision. Trump's impeachments were political, and it was political that Senate Republicans refused to vote for conviction. Bill Clinton's impeachment was political, as was Richard Nixon's resignation to escape removal, and Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon so that he wouldn't face prosecution after he left office.  The same is true every time a political official is removed (or not) from office.  I'm not saying, of course, that there are no actual legal issues involved in any of these cases, but as the mainstream coverage of Trump shows, they get lost in the flurry of distraction and propaganda.

I was mildly surprised when some leftists, such as the journalist Doug Henwood, objected to Trump's indictment.  On March 30 Henwood tweeted, "This case against Trump seems flimsy and he can work his martyr role. I could see him gaining from it."  Of course he'll work his martyr role, and he's done that.  It's quite possible he'll gain from it, even if he's convicted. But he'll also gain if he's not indicted; that's how he became president in the first place.  I don't know how flimsy the case against him is, and I don't believe Henwood really does either.  That will be up to the jury.

Henwood also agreed "100" percent with a tweet that read "This is a huge mistake but whatever / The frivolity of this particular charge diminishes the actual serious crimes Trump has committed. It also opens the door for frivolous charges on every Democratic former president forever".  Again, this is trivially true, but it was also true of Nixon's downfall. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was GOP payback for Nixon, and it failed, nor was it followed up. I believe I also saw similar objections to both impeachments of Trump.  Yes, it's a risk, but there's also a risk of not prosecuting Trump. He'll work his martyr role no matter what he's accused of, and even if he's convicted of anything, he'll be appealing for the rest of his life; he'll never pay any other penalty.  But there are other, cleverer GOP / MAGA pols waiting to take his place.  Convicting Trump might be a tiny deterrent.

The political cartoonist and writer Ted Rall posted on Facebook at around the same time that Trump was only indicted because he had proven to be a "class traitor" so the elites were ready to toss him overboard.  Also trivially true; I remember leftists such as Noam Chomsky saying the same about Nixon, that he only got into real trouble because he clashed with his peers, attacking the Washington Post and so on.  But that was not a reason to give him impunity, nor to leave him in office.  I'm not sure Rall intended to imply that, but it was a stupid post anyway.  Anyone who wants Trump to be punished should bear those considerations in mind, but the precedent against indicting ex-Presidents has already fallen; it's time to break the precedent on convicting one.

There's a lot more going on politically than Trump right now -- the removal of two Democratic state legislators in Tennessee, action by the MAGA right against libraries, against drag performance and transgender people, against abortion drugs, revelations about Clarence Thomas's corruption, need I go on? For now I would rather let the wheels of justice grind and let a jury decide about Trump.  He's under investigation elsewhere, though, and I fully expect that our media will do their best to exploit any outcomes that may emerge while obfuscating their significance.

The Neverending Story

 

I've been seeing a lot of postmortems on Trump's acquittal, and they don't seem to have anything to offer, so I'll just go with this evergreen tweet.

I'm Gonna Have to Potty-Train the Chairman Mao

(This 1984 [1985?] song is a prophecy.  The Butthole Surfers were in tune with the universe in a way that no other band has ever been.)

A quickie: Just as a matter of tactics, I don't think we should accept any Trump supporter's claim that Trump got 74 million votes in the election.  Trump was an unpopular president even before his coup attempt, and when you think about it, is it really plausible that he got as many votes as that?  And isn't the only evidence for that number the same electoral system that Trump and his supporters say was crooked, rigged, fake?  We've seen numerous Republican attempts to disenfranchise Democratic voters, so it's reasonable to suppose that the results in the states they control would have been manipulated to give Trump the victory.

It might seem that this is not really an issue now, on the eve of Joe Biden's inauguration, but remember that though Trump is resentfully moving out of the White House, he has still not conceded to Biden, nor has he admitted that the election was not stolen from him.  Trump's fans have backed off slightly, but they haven't changed their minds.  Debating them is hopeless, but I want to hear them try to prove that Trump didn't win more than, say, 30 million votes.

I'm With Stupid

There's so much going on, so quickly, that I can't decide where to begin, so here are a couple of quick takes.

Although Donald Trump is obviously a clear and present danger to the Republic, many high-placed people are trying to block his removal.  Mike Pence, for one, by refusing to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment;  but also those in both parties who are whining that there isn't time to impeach Trump.  I looked it up to be sure, and the United States declared war on Japan one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  That's at least as large and weighty an action as impeaching a would-be tyrant before he can do any more damage.  Where there's a political will, there's a way.  Those who pretend there isn't time are trying to obstruct justice, and should be regarded in that light.

Then there are the people arguing that Trump should just go to Mar-a-Lago, do nothing, and wait out the time until Biden is inaugurated.  That assumes that Trump would go in the first place, and that he would do nothing for two weeks.  Or that Trump should just "be shunned."  It would be hard for me to believe that anyone could seriously make such idiotic suggestions if I hadn't seen it so many times before.  In order for shunning to work, you need a cohesive community united in the resolution to shun, and the US is not such a community, to put it gently.  Aside from Trump's millions of supporters, there are many rich corporatists, national GOP politicians, and others just waiting for the dust to settle so they can meet with him privately and conspire some more.  Nothing improper, you understand, just a friendly discussion.  Remember how many vehement Never-Trump Republicans quietly went to work for him after he took office?  

And then there's the media, who'll be champing at the bit to get just one more little interview with him: "Mr. Trump, do you have any regrets?  What do you think you might have done differently?"  (They'd probably even call him "Mr. President" -- decorum is such a vital norm, especially in these troubled times.)  That wouldn't be a break in the shunning, it would be journalism!  The American people have a right to know these things!  They deserve answers to these questions!

On the question of failed security at the Capitol, here's a good beginning.  But someone posted this, "Cipolli's Fifth Law," as a comment.  I'm not going to bother finding out who Cipolli is or what his other laws are, because I don't give a damn:

Jeez, only a really stupid person would come up with that.  People who like to think they aren't stupid do tend to underestimate the danger from people they think are stupid, but that is because they are stupid.  One easy example: gay people and allies who were shocked by the virulence of antigay bigots in the antigay initiatives of the 70s through the 90s: they had no idea that people could be so awful! This was echoed by the Obama administration's shock that the GOP weren't going to play nice, despite ample evidence and overt declarations. These people aren't smart. Mostly they're privileged twits who've led very sheltered lives.  As in Obama's case, their stupidity does most harm to other people, the people at the bottom, whom they despise, while they coast serenely along in their $14M Martha's Vineyard mansions.

That said, it's fun to see reports of members of the Capitol mob who took selfies and videos of their antics and posted them to social media, confident of their impunity -- only to find themselves greeted by police when they returned home.  Several have lost their jobs.  Schadenfreude is a dangerous drug, but I'm in complete control!  I can quit anytime!

More to come, but meanwhile remember: it isn't over yet.  

Higgledy Piggledy, Radical Liberals

Today the Washington Post published a piece by its media columnist Margaret Sullivan, setting forth a case that no matter what you may think, Donald Trump and his "enablers" are not conservatives.  They are, she declares fiercely, "members of the radical right."  She lists the bad guys by name with the bad things they're doing (and they are bad), and sums up: 

The radicalism of the right has been normalized. It’s been going on, and building, for decades. Don’t worry, this mind-set reassures, it’s all fine. There are different ways of looking at the world, liberal and conservative, and they are about equal. ... Too much of the reality-based media has gone along for the ride, worried about accusations of leftist bias, wanting desperately to be seen as neutral, unwilling to be clear about how lopsided these sides are.

Sullivan goes all vague here, naming no names, so let me help: Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley ... pretty much every well-known "conservative" since the middle of the last century.  I wonder if Sullivan would want to recognize that, since such figures have a lot of prestige even among liberals.  The Post, like the Times, largely went along with their normalization.

In the mid-1950s the historian Richard Hofstadter called such people "pseudo-conservatives": he recognized that real conservatism, in the sense of hanging on to good things from the past, was represented by New Deal Democrats.

The change did not escape [Adlai] Stevenson himself. “The strange alchemy of time,” he said in a speech at Columbus, “has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country—the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations.” What most liberals now hope for is not to carry on with some ambitious new program, but simply to defend as much as possible of the old achievements and to try to keep traditional liberties of expression that are threatened. *

It's important to remember that "conservative," like "skeptic," "agnostic," and similar words, has no real content.  It refers to a person's relation to the passage of time, and it doesn't even require that what they want to hang on to is good.  In the US, conservatism has meant preserving class distinctions and privilege, white supremacy, male supremacy, and the like. And in that regard, liberals have hidden behind the far Right at least since Ronald Reagan: you know, he has a point (about crime, about women, about race, about the homosexuals, about big-spending government, about regulating business).  As the Republican Party moved farther and farther right, liberals followed discreetly, always insisting that they were much better than those awful right-wingers.

This tendency reached its summit with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom admired Reagan and continued his assault on the New Deal.  By then the New Deal was so old hat, and Democratic loyalists, still posing as liberals.  I recall one columnist, either Ellen Goodman or another liberal woman writer (there were only a couple with a national platform back then), exulting that the New Deal had finally been laid to rest by the latest (1996? 2000?) Democratic National Convention, while the minions of the far left raged impotently in the streets.  Neither Clinton nor Obama was able to get rid of Social Security, but they tried. 

At least Sullivan seems not to buy into the popular myth that the GOP was still reasonable before Trump came along and made it crazy.  But the admission comes late in her column, and barely nods at what happened.  Could be worse, could definitely be better.  I'm not sure she realizes just how bad the GOP was before Trump.

Long before Trump.  One minor point: Sullivan gently mocks "Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the Georgia Republican, [who] rarely utters her challenger’s name without branding him as 'radical liberal Raphael Warnock.'”  I was suddenly struck by a memory of Martha Mitchell, the wife of First Criminal Richard Nixon's criminal Attorney General John Mitchell, who as the Watergate scandal came to a boil in 1972, made late-night phone calls to various reporters to vent her discontents.  Among the people she couldn't stand were "those radical liberals."  That's the first time I recall seeing that weird combination of epithets.  This 1998 New York Daily News article quotes a line I recall -- "Some of the liberals in this country, [her husband would] like to take them and exchange them for the Russian Communists" -- that I remember as "radical liberals."  Maybe I'm wrong, I'm going by memory after half a century, but that's how it stuck in my mind.  I'm pretty sure that oral tradition preserved the phrase over generations and implanted it in the empty head of Kelly Loeffler.

-------------------------------------------------------------

*  "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt - 1954", reprinted in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Knopf, 1965), p. 42-3.

What's in a Name?

I feel for writers and journalists who cover politics, because they have to attend to the corporate news media: Fox, CNN, the corporate broadcast networks, public broadcasting, and a range of print media.  Just listening to NPR for an hour or two each morning makes me climb the walls: how much worse would it be if it were my job to follow it and all the others?

Last Sunday, for example, NPR's Weekend Edition gave airtime to an instructor in government at Dartmouth College, to opine on Donald Trump's refusal to concede the election to Joe Biden.  Host Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Brendan Nyhan "Why is he doing this? Is this a soft coup? And what I'm hearing you say is that this misses the larger picture of what's happening to democracy itself."

NYHAN: That's right. I think coup is the wrong way to think about this. We're not seeing an attempted military takeover. What we're seeing instead is a violation of the norms of democracy that we depend on to make the peaceful transfer of power possible. And as those norms get called into question, we start to see more of what political scientists call democratic erosion, where a system of government remains a democracy, but the norms and values that make democracy work start to be called into question.

Most of this is unexceptionable, a string of the buzzwords you'll hear on any network.  I do take serious exception to Nyhan's claim that "coup is he wrong way to think about this."  While most Americans probably do think that "coup" (short for "coup d'état") refers to a military takeover, it actually means any sudden and extralegal seizure of power in an institution.  Violence is optional, the icing on the cake.  An academic should know better, and clarify the issue rather than obscuring it.  Instead the one substantive assertion Nyhan made was false.  But this is NPR we're dealing with.

Later in the week, on Friday, Morning Edition brought in a heavy-hitter, an intelligence officer in the Trump regime until 2019.  Host Steve Inskeep asked Sue Gordon, "I'm thinking about the fact that you have briefed presidents. If this event were happening in a different country and you were briefing the president about it, what would you call it?"

Gordon worded her response with some care:

SUE GORDON: We would talk about it as basically - if it were a purported democracy, I think we would say the democracy's teetering on the edge. If I were briefing the president on this at this moment in time, and this White House were doing what this is doing and I happen to be in the Oval, I would say stop it.

"If it were a purported democracy"?  This is hard to take seriously.  Whether a country is a "purported democracy" has little to do with its political institutions and practices and a lot to do with how the US views it.  During the Trump years the US has backed and even participated in at least two coups against elected governments, in Venezuela and Bolivia.  Harking back to Brendan Nyhan, in Venezuela the military didn't back the coup, much to the indignation of US commentators, so by his standards it may not count.  In Bolivia the military carried out the coup with considerable violence, so Nyhan would presumably be satisfied.  Mainstream US and UK commentators and political authorities were reluctant to label either action a coup, partly for reasons I'll into presently, but for now the fact that two democratically elected governments were overthrown, with various degrees of violence, didn't concern the media or the US government: they denied the legitimacy of the elections instead.  (Does that sound familiar?)  Contrary to Sue Gordon, in such cases US intelligence would not say to "stop it."  Nor would NPR or other mainstream news media.

We all know that Trump is a very bad man, though.  President Obama was good, right?  Actually, no: he supported numerous oppressive dictatorships and backed the far right-wing Venezuelan opposition with millions of taxpayer dollars.  He hedged a bit when the Honduran military overthrew an elected President, fiddling with aid payments for a little while, but eventually gave in.  

Obama's initial response to the 2013 military overthrow of the elected president of Egypt was somewhat firmer.  Obama wasn't pleased, but many in his regime were.  President Morsi was unpopular in US government circles because he was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his incompetent governance seems to have turned the populace against him.  There were street demonstrations demanding that Morsi step down, much like those that had led to the removal of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011.  Back then Obama had been

naturally inclined to side with young, Internet-savvy protesters against an 82-year-old dictator who ran a cruel police state. But Mubarak was also a longtime U.S. ally who opposed Islamic radicals, honored a peace treaty with Israel and gave the Pentagon vital access to the Suez Canal. Younger aides like Rhodes, Power and Antony Blinken, then Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, urged Obama to get “on the right side of history” and give Mubarak a decisive push. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would later describe them, in her memoir, as being “swept up in the drama and idealism of the moment.” 

I wonder, though: if Morsi hadn't inspired such intense personal dislike in US rulers and their clients, couldn't they have cut him some slack, as they would for any struggling new leader?  Morsi "spent much of his energy struggling against resistance from an entrenched establishment — the soldiers, spies, police, judges and bureaucrats left in place from six decades of autocracy."  If he failed "to fulfill the promises of the Tahrir Square uprising" that removed Mubarak, shouldn't wiser heads have urged that Morsi be given more time?  Two years in office against six decades of dictatorship isn't that long.  I can't help thinking that our champions of democracy were relieved to have a "strongman" in charge again - the kind of person US elites and their cronies are accustomed to doing business with.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose rulers feared elections and dreaded them even more if they were presented as Islamic, lobbied hard to convince Washington that Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were a threat to American interests. And American officials later concluded that the United Arab Emirates were also providing covert financial support for protests against Mr. Morsi.

Wait a minute - Saudi Arabia is afraid of Islamism?  That does not compute: the Kingdom is a notorious Islamist regime.  And the UAE were undermining Morsi?  Who's at fault here, really?

When a murderous autocrat is a longtime ally to the US and a friend to Israel, his country becomes an honorary "purported democracy."  Democracy is all very well until the wrong people win an election, and then "drama and idealism" must be set aside.  Obama wasn't exactly pleased, we're told, when General Sisi massacred at least a thousand pro-Morsi demonstrators, but what can you do?

Supporting a military coup would hardly send a positive message about democracy. But declaring Sisi’s power grab a coup would, by law, cut off all U.S. military aid to Cairo. So be it, argued Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who wrote in the Washington Post: “we may pay a short-term price by standing up for our democratic values, but it is in our long-term national interest to do so.” Obama wasn’t prepared to go that far. The administration publicly danced around the word “coup” for weeks until, at an August 6, 2013, briefing, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki memorably announced: “We have determined that we do not have to make a determination.” (“What is a coup?” Wael Haddara, a senior adviser to Morsi, asked the New York Times. “We’re going to get into some really Orwellian stuff here.”)

At first Obama dug in his heels, freezing military aid, cancelling joint military exercises, demanding "credible progress" toward a "democratically elected civilian government."  John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and Kerry

declared a few weeks after the coup that Egypt’s generals were “restoring democracy” to the country and quickly worked to reverse the aid freeze. Kerry had an ally in Hagel, who had developed a relationship with Egypt’s top general. Both men believed they could moderate Sisi’s behavior. “Kerry thinks he can get guys to do things because they trust him, even if it’s not necessarily in their interest,” says one former State Department official. Hagel sent Sisi Ron Chernow’s 904-page biography of George Washington, urging him to read a chapter about Washington peacefully relinquishing the presidency.

(I love that last bit - it reminds me of Ronald Reagan sending a copy of the Christian Bible to Iranian leaders in 1986.)

As it turned out, Kerry was wrong: he couldn't get Sisi to "do things."  He announced after a 2014 meeting that Sisi  'gave me a very strong sense of his commitment' to human rights issues."  The very next day, Sisi cracked down violently on dissent, but it all turned out okay: he "was officially 'elected' Egypt’s president with a reported 96.1 percent of the vote."  So Egypt was officially a "purported democracy" again.  In 2015 Obama restored military aid to Sisi's regime, personally calling the General to pledge his fealty.  As Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time,

Obama’s move is as unsurprising as it is noxious, as American political elites — from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright — along with the Israeli Right have been heaping praise on Sisi the way they did for decades on Mubarak. (“I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,” said Hillary Clinton in 2009. “So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”)

Two things to notice here.  One is that the wise adults running US foreign policy, who sneer at youthful idealism, have a vastly overrated estimation of their competence.  That's familiar from more than a century of American imperialism and support for repressive dictators, aka "the Free World."  There's something about swarthy men in uniform forcibly holding down the primitive brown-skinned masses, who just don't know what's good for them, that makes our leaders go all moist.

The other is that the word "coup" isn't just a word: using it has legal consequences.  If a coup overthrows a government you dislike, for whatever reasons, then you simply don't call it a coup, because then you'd have to take action against it.  And that wouldn't do.  Maybe the remedy is to stop pretending that the US cares about human rights; our historical practice down to the present proves otherwise.  The law clearly doesn't place any constraint on our government, let alone others.

It's pointless to fret about how the US media, intelligence agencies, and government officials would react to Trump's current efforts to overturn the 2020 election, because we know how they feel about coups.  If it were happening in a different country, there might be some division in their ranks -- some unrealistic idealists -- but the sensible, responsible, realistic ones would hail Trump for "restoring democracy," and Trump as the savior of freedom.  Hillary Clinton would remind us that she considers Mr. and Mrs. Trump to be friends of her family, as indeed they are.  John Kerry would send Trump a copy of Barack Obama's new thousand-page memoir.  Obama himself would order idealistic young people to stop complaining and learn to work within the system.  We wouldn't want to alienate our good allies by stirring up trouble.

Naptime with Joe and Kammy

I'm anticipating the upcoming election with dread, partly because there's a real danger that Donald Trump will be re-elected and partly because the alternative is that Obama's hand-picked candidate Joe Biden will be elected.  Apart from Biden's own liabilities, I'm concerned about the class of Democrats who are rapidly becoming known as Brunch Liberals.

For me it began when I saw this tweet:

See that?  335,400 likes, 58,400 shares.  The replies were a mix of agreement from people who wanted to be able to sleep at night, to be bored, instead of "doomscrolling" constantly for fear of "missing something," and disagreement from people like me who remember eight years of Obama bombing wedding parties and hospitals, deporting refugees by the millions, offering Social Security and Medicare as hostages to the GOP, trampling on civil liberties, blocking equal rights for LGBTQ people until the courts took that one out of his hands, and so on.  There's no reason I can see to believe that Biden will be any better, but these people will be able to sleep at night, which is all that matters.

Actually such tweets have been around for some time, but they hadn't crossed my path.  And I think they've been getting more common in the past few weeks.

And:

Some people whined that they weren't saying they wanted to tune out, it wasn't so bad to want like an hour of peace now and then after four years of Drumpf, what's wrong with that?  But they made it clear that they did want to tune out, and not for an hour but for a lifetime.

It went on, getting worse.

When was this, exactly?  Lurie didn't reply, but several commenters chimed in; it was apparently during the Obama years, and one person was more specific: "I totally checked out from 2013 till the 2015 primary-it was bliss."  Not for people being shot in the back by cops, or children being shredded by US bombs we'd thoughtfully supplied to Saudi Arabia, or kids being poisoned by lead in their drinking water; but who cares about them?

And so on, right down to the past week:

It takes some serious stupidity to believe that your crazy Trump-loving aunt and uncle will suddenly shut up if Biden becomes President.  Did they hold their tongues while Obama was in office?

I've been trying to look on the bright side: If Biden tucks these people into bed, gently puts a teddy bear into their chubby little arms, and tenderly sniffs their hair before he tiptoes away, maybe they'll stay out of the way while good people hold his feet to the fire, and yell bloody murder when he does wrong.  But I doubt it: they'll wake up, furious at being disturbed, and curse us out for ruining their peace.  Think of the midterms!  You're just helping the Rethugs!  Think of 2024!  Surely, comrades, you do not wish Trump back?

He's Not the Boss of Me

It's a venerable political tradition by now:

I can remember seeing people -- not only celebrities -- saying that they'd move to Canada or Australia or the UK if they didn't like who was elected president, since 2004 at least.  They always pick the wrong countries, too: Australia's current Prime Minister is a Christian fascist, and Republicans wanting to flee Obama's socialist Obamacare chose Australia (which has universal healthcare, like most developed countries) or Canada (Obama's bugbear too).  Or they threaten to shut down their businesses, like the Atlas Shrugged Guy of blessed memory.

As some people pointed out, moving to another country doesn't fit very well with Springsteen's blue-collar persona; nice for the rich, not really an option for real working-class paycheck-to-paycheck shlubs.  It's all just talk, like a child threatening to run away from home.  They never actually make the move; I don't expect Springsteen to be an exception.

Nor will this guy, at least not voluntarily.  He might need to flee to someplace like Riyadh; they owe him.

Hell Yeah I Have Schadenfreude, and I'm Not Afraid to Use It!

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, Donald and Melania Trump have both tested positive for COVID-19, along with Trump's assistant Hope Hicks, Notre Dame University president (and Trump booster) John I. Jenkins, Utah Senator Mike Lee, and probably others.  Initially it was claimed that the Trumps are asymptomatic, but there have been reports that Trump had been tired-looking and unsteady a few days ago, and now that they're both at least mildly symptomatic.  We'll see; it's too early to say much for certain, but it looks like last week's meet-and-greet announcing Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court may have been the spreader.  None of these people wore masks at the event.  Nor, it appears, did the Trump family at this week's debate.

I was a bit hesitant to check social media this morning after I heard the news, anticipating a flood of sanctimonious drivel from Democratic liberals and centrists.  I needn't have worried.  Most of the people I follow are hard-hearted leftists and satirists; Trump and his toadies got no sympathy from us.  The only outpourings of hopes and prayer I saw were quotations from the predictable suspects: right-wing Trump supporters demanding that "the radical left" (liberals and centrists) behave better than the Right, and liberals either virtue-signalling or motivated by childish, superstitious fear that they'll be punished for having hated Trump so vehemently.  They compared him to Hitler, now they wish Hitler a speedy recovery.

It's mildly surprising: I'm a guilt junkie since childhood, probably thanks to my Catholic mother, but I feel no qualms about saying that I don't care what happens to the Trumps or his followers, especially the highly-educated elites.  I still feel guilty for many things I've done in my life, but withholding good wishes from Trump isn't going to hurt him or anyone else.  He'll have the best treatment available if he gets sick, as will his wife and Jenkins and the rest.  If he dies, so have 200,000 other Americans (along with even more people around the world), and so have adults, children and babies in his concentration camps who didn't get any medical treatment at all.  As various people have said, if you want to pray, pray for the White House and Capitol staff, or for people in prison or concentration camps or cramped workplaces who can't keep a safe difference from each other.  After eight years each of Dubya and Obama followed by four years of Trump, I don't have any guilt left where the troubles of the mighty are concerned.

One presumable Christian quoted Galatians 6:7, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.”  This is false, of course, like all invocations of judgment and karma, and a Christian of all people should be wary about wishing judgment on others.  On the other hand, I've read the gospels, and I know how callous and delighted Jesus was about the suffering of the damned.  I'm not a Christian and I don't believe in Hell.  If Trump dies, he dies; but so do we all eventually.  I wouldn't have wished for Trump to catch the virus, but I won't pretend to care that he has.  If I myself catch the virus, get sick, even die, it won't be because I didn't pray for Trump.

This clip from exactly four years ago is entertaining: Trump mocking Hillary Clinton for her bout of pneumonia.  Pneumonia isn't COVID-19, but it does kill old people (and Clinton, like Trump, is an old person; on the other hand, it must be balanced against Clinton's obscene gloating over the lynching of Muammar Qadafy: "We came, we saw, he died!" If it will make liberals feel any better, I'd have the same reaction if Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or Joe Biden caught COVID.  Or Jeff Bezos for that matter.  They are all murderous elites who, as Susan of Texas always says, kill us for money, and the virus is no respecter of persons.  Meanwhile, it's fun to think of the Trumps quarantined together (though the White House is big enough to give them plenty of space), with Melania blaming Donald for giving her the virus.  And you know he'll be trying to find a way to sneak out of Walter Reed and play golf.

But, as some are already protesting, isn't that just sinking to their level?  I don't really think so, but I can't say I care.  But if we're going to worry about such things, let's talk about double standards.  It's fascinating how selective liberals and centrists are in these matters.  Someone pointed out: "Bernie Sanders had a heart attack and Dems were questioning his fitness to serve. Trump gets coronavirus and Dems pray for a speedy recovery."  When the left historian Howard Zinn died, National Public Radio ran a scurrilous obituary that quoted the odious right-winger David Horowitz attacking Zinn with his usual disregard for facts. It's hard to imagine them, or any other respectable media outlet, doing the same for the most depraved right-wingers.  Remember the outpouring of dishonest eulogies for John McCain? Or Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan?   By contrast there wasn't much empathy on display for Hugo Chavez, the legally-elected president of Venezuela, when he died of cancer at a relatively young age.  I'm all for critical evaluations of the prominent dead, but they should be honest, and that seldom happens regardless of the politics of the deceased.

So far I've seen one remarkably good report from corporate media on the Trumps' status, this factual and unsensational NBC story. NPR, which I woke to this morning, didn't do nearly as well: they did their typical personality-driven, faux-predictive coverage, including a bizarre segment on what "Trump's Coronavirus Means for National Security."  "The president, of course, is the commander in chief of our nation's armed forces. So what could this development mean for the military?" anchor David Greene asked. Correspondent Tom Bowman reassured him:

Well, we've heard nothing from the Pentagon at this point or the White House about the continuation of, you know, the military. Defense Secretary Mark Esper is traveling overseas. I reached out to his spokesman; no word from him yet. But it's important to note, David, that the president is still carrying out his duties as commander in chief.

And more of the same, for anyone who might fear that Communist Venezuela or China might be poised to take advantage of our Commander-in-Chief's potential incapacity and pour across our undefended borders.  This is, among other things, the result of seeing politics as the domain of One Man, the Head of the Nation, instead of a vast hydra-headed network of experienced people both civilian and military, who can carry on even if the Head is struck off.  I was only twelve when John Kennedy was assassinated, but I remember the same kind of inane fuss at the time and thinking that it was ridiculous, as it is now: the country isn't going to fall if the President gets sick or dies - something which has happened numerous times in our history and, for better or worse, here we still be.  The mainstream media love to stroke this kind of genteel panic.  The New Yorker, for another example, is hoping for chaos.  And the liberal rehabilitation of Donald Trump, which leftists have been warning about, has already begun.

The liberal muckymuck Jeff Greenfield, Fox News and seemingly some commentators on CNN have called for Joe Biden to suspend his campaign while Our President fights for his life.  Ah, what would we do without Rachel Maddow?  I expect nothing from far right-wing media, of course, but it's going to be an education to see our responsible mainstream media showing their mettle (or rather, their asses) as this story plays out.  Meanwhile, I'm grateful to the commentators of Left Twitter for their savage and on-target mockery of Trump and his liberal apologists.  You can have my Schadenfreude when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.