Category: Domestic Politics

A week to remember

Tomorrow morning, congress will be back at work, with a dozen working days to knock off a list of tasks that would be daunting even without an infantile, grievance-besotted, Russia-crazed president throwing sand in the works, and even if its own managers didn’t have a Freedom Caucus of know-nothing ideologues hanging on its ankles, and even if Trump hadn’t just tossed it the anvil of immigration reform.  Wow.

But that’s not all; this month only (but continuing for weeks and months of political hassle), you also get Harvey recovery, and wait, if you order now, and also if you don’t, you get two or even three additional exciting climate/weather events !  “Disturbance 1” is chugging west from near Cabo Verde at 10 mph with (at this writing) an 80% chance of getting organized within five days; “Disturbance 2” is brewing up exactly where Harvey started as a little baby orange X in the southern Gulf.

Irma is shaping up to be a very interesting event, as it is now drawing a bead on the east coast of Florida, likely to sail over warm water south of the Bahamas, turn right, and run north along the coast as a 3 or a 4. Of course these projections have a wide error band, but for now, let us reflect on what Neil Frank, the former director of the National Hurricane Center spent his career warning us of about just this storm.

(1) Evacuation routes in this region mostly run north and south; roads going inland (and you have to go a ways inland to be ahead of the storm surge) are basically narrow streets that peter out quickly among the alligators.  If the storm is following the shore north from about Miami, driving along the coast is not going to help you much.

(2) Almost no-one living on this coast has ever experienced a major hurricane and has no idea what to expect. Since the last one, there’s been significant sea level rise, increased paved area, land subsidence, and lot more people. There is no real high ground in  south Florida. Whole streets in Miami flood now just from a high tide.

(3) From Boca Raton south is a miles-long row of high-rise condominium towers lined up along the beach like dominoes, many taller than the space between them.  They are built on sand under (i) Florida building codes and (ii) Florida local government administration. The former are not as insouciant and optimistic as the rules that put Houston under water last week, but close; the latter is not as corrupt as Louisiana’s, but, um…my father had an expression “as crooked as a dog’s hind leg” …

Frank used to predict that the storm surge will wash the sand out from under some or many of these buildings and they will tip over, perhaps into the condo tower next door. If evacuation doesn’t work, there will still be people in them.

(The governor overseeing this mess will be the deeply odious, reactionary, willfully ignorant, climate denier Rick Scott, who’s idea of Christian charity is drug tests for welfare recipients, and of responsive government is allowing Floridians to be sure their children don’t learn anything they don’t know, like evolution.)

Irma is due (according to current model runs) about next weekend; the other two, too early to tell. Oh yeah, Russiagate continues to slowly fulminate, and North Korea…oy.

The writer Saki, back at the beginning of the last century, said “the Balkans create more history than can be consumed locally.” I think current times create more news than society, or anyone in it, has the bandwidth to cope with. Or that the remaining adults in government can react to usefully.

Rebel Plinths

A proposal for Confederate statues: bring them down to street level.

You wouldn’t get a blog post about plinths anywhere else, would you?

Hear me out. Memorial statuary normally consists of (a) a statue and (b) a plinth. The plinth raises the statue above street level, making it more visible. It also triggers instinctive associations of height with power, dignity and respect. It works even better if you throw in a horse, as with Lee at Charlottesville and Peter the Great in St. Petersburg.

The problem with the Confederate memorials is that they make a racist statement that the Confederate rebellion should not just be remembered, but remembered with respect and admiration. The statement depends as much on the plinth as the statue itself.

So here is a suggestion for dealing with the statues of Confederate soldiers, mass-produced in Northern foundries, that dot hundreds of public spaces in the old Confederacy:

Bring them down to street level.

In the street, they become bronze fellow-citizens, and the gullibility and racism of the men they represent can become as much a part of the civic conversation as their bravery and sacrifice. If they are unpopular, they will be defaced. If they become objects of ridicule, they will sprout frat ties, silly hats and dildos. Them’s the breaks. Let’s see how it works out.

That leaves an empty plinth or two. Don’t spend a fortune taking them away. There’s an empty one in Trafalgar Square in London: it is used for temporary exhibition. Or you can hold a competition for a statue of something or somebody that everybody wants to honour. The Northern foundries will retool to supply as many versions of Martin Luther King as the South commissions.

Footnote for art wonks

There is one striking exception to the plinth norm. When Auguste Rodin cast the famous group of the Burghers of Calais, he lost a battle with the city fathers to install them at ground level. What Rodin wanted was to replace the usual historical distancing from a tragic and violent event with immediacy, shock and empathy. He was rightly confident that the quality of his work would still make the sculpture effective. There is little risk that the mediocre Confederate statuary will compensate in the same way for being brought down to earth. The Burghers have now been brought back down, and stand on a compromise mini-plinth.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The zombie 25th Amendment shambles forward

The 25th Amendment is far from dead.

Some time ago I made a speculative case that if and when the Republicans in Congress decide to ditch Trump as a fatal political liability, the 25th Amendment is a more attractive route than impeachment: it’s much quicker, and insulates the GOP more from its golem master. A lot of dirty linen on Russia would be aired in the long-drawn-out impeachment process, possibly implicating Republicans not part of Trump’s campaign.

The suggestion fell on deaf ears. Mark’s reaction was typical. But Trump’s behaviour keeps raising doubts over his mental capacity. For three:

    • In the recently leaked transcript of Trump’s conversation over the Nauru refugees with the Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull in January, Trump seemed simply not to understand Turnbull’s simple and repeated position.
    • In his famous sabre-rattling tweet, Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” if it persisted with threats to the United States. Pyongyang promptly called his bluff, leading to a massive loss to American face. Tillerson and Mattis had to walk the tweet back, restating longstanding American policy that retaliation would follow actual attacks on US allies, which Kim is no more likely to engage in than his predecessors in the dynasty. But Trump repeated the language about retaliating to threats. The latest tweet includes:

      If he utters one threat, in the form of an overt threat . . . or if he does anything with respect to Guam or anyplace else that is an American territory or an American ally, he will truly regret it, and he will regret it fast.”

      • Trump’s media staff are required to present him daily with a folder of press cuttings and media screenshots with only positive coverage of him personally. This is on a par with Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdesses with her ladies-in-waiting at the Trianon. Contrast the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, who is said to have walked the streets of Baghdad in disguise at night to hear what his subjects were really saying about him: a legend that conveys the truth that autocrats, as much as democratic politicians, must keep an accurate watch on the real currents of popular sentiment. See also Kipling on the more impressive Akbar and a real bridge he built.

Are you still comfortable with dismissing the 25th Amendment out of hand? Continue reading “The zombie 25th Amendment shambles forward”

So much winning!

Remember that Trump promise?  Notice any winning happening?

Me neither, but I think I see the problem. It’s a typo: should be whining.  Now everything makes sense, because whining is the pervasive, universal quality of all the discourse of Trump and his mouthpieces, reaching some sort of high point in today’s Sanders briefing , though Spicer almost pegged the meter in his very first briefing.  Fake news, lying press, I can’t get a break, Joe and Mika are so mean to me, it’s all Obama’s fault, why aren’t you writing about my historic electoral victory, Russia hoax…so much whining! Including rallies that are a new type of collective mass unison whining: all together now, China! Coal! We don’t get no respect!

It does suck to be Donald, but not for the reasons he’d like to think. Anyway, the press is beginning to realize it has to call a lie a lie to properly present the story: I propose that reporters and commentators reflect on whine as the other word most underused, in proportion to its relevance and accuracy, in discourse about our current presidential farrago. Try it: easy to say, it’s a verb, everyone knows what it means, and it has the perfectly apropos connotations of infantile affect and ineffectuality.

Whiner, that’s our Donald all over.

Montana mess

The compounded misbehavior in Bozeman yesterday has to appall any decent observer, a complete breakdown of order and decency.  We should note first the only participant who comes out of it with his reputation intact, Greg Gianforte, a Trump soldier who knows how to stay on message and follow his orders both specific (“Beat the s__t out of them!”) and general: hurt the weak [GG appears to have about a foot and twenty pounds on Jacobs], beat the press, and so on. If he gets to Washington he can surely be trusted to bravely smite the sick and the poor when the time comes.

Everything goes to pieces after that, though. A Fox News crew was present and truculently went completely insubordinate, telling the truth both in their dispatches and to the authorities with no consideration of the damage it would do to a notable Republican. With minions like this, Fox’s whole mission is at risk.

Then there’s the sheriff, who had everything he needed to arrest Jacobs for armed [a recording device attested by all witnesses, and a direct question to a candidate] assault with intent to cause great political harm.  Gianforte’s flack Scanlon spelled it out for him right away, with the magic words “liberal reporter.” But does he? He does not; he treacherously cites Gianforte, to whose campaign he had donated! No, it doesn’t redeem him that he smoothed out felony assault and battery into a misdemeanor.

Poor Gianforte; three Montana papers have unendorsed him. He followed the code of the West (“do unto others before they can do unto you“) and everyone walked away from him, just like the  craven citizens in High Noon. 

Trump and Russia

It will not be possible to tell, or even firmly conjecture, what is really going on with Trump and the Russians for months. Pieces of the puzzle are raining down, faster than any can be carefully examined, each one a shocker that would have triggered incredulity in a sane age, not to mention Republican self-preservation distancing.  It beggars belief that within six months of a historic electoral victory, the GOP’s “Si, se puede!” has already turned into “Sal si puedes!” with sharks circling the foundering ship.  But here’s what makes sense to me tonight.

Trump is Putin’s stooge, end of story. It’s the only way to understand the consistency and doggedness of his self-destructive behavior in all things Russian or Russian-tainted. He’s handcuffed on a long-term and a more recent chain that he cannot break.  He’s not an ideal stooge, because of his own ignorance and lack of self-control, but he’s what Putin has.

The first chain is a set of financial obligations going back to the time when no-one with a desk and a window would do business with him or lend him money because of his colossal business failures.  The Russians, in various assortments and, it now appears, using the very pliant Deutsche Bank among other pipelines, loansharked him to get back in the game; they own him through their ability to ruin him, and his complete inability to think of himself as anything but a great tycoon. His tax returns will go a long way to confirming or refuting this. Maybe he just owes them money he can’t pay, maybe the actual financing was criminal and he can’t reveal the details, maybe both. Remember Chili Palmer’s précis of the loan shark’s method: “in those cases, I’m the one inflicting the pain.”

The second leash on which Putin has Trump, snapped on over the last year, is that Trump knows that Putin knows everything the congressional investigators, Mueller, and the press want to know, and all of it is arrows aimed at Trump’s heart. If Trump doesn’t behave, Putin can save the gumshoes a lot of time by simply sharing some documents, memos, and audio, from the campaign and more recently, that will at least put Trump out of office and may well put him in jail. It is interesting to speculate how much of all this Trump has shared with his toadies, including his kids, and what nightmares they have about being disgraced and poor when it hits the fan; Madoff kept it all a secret from his family until the end.

It must be infuriating to Putin that when he has finally ensnared a conscience-free American president, his tool turns out to be such a tool. It’s not so easy to weaponize a loose cannon with radiantly incompetent lieutenants who can’t even fold their own parachutes,  the attention span of a gnat, and a memory that can’t retain anything but the odd slight-a lame Trojan horse with glanders and bloat, who believes himself to be Pegasus. But I guess you go to war with the stooge you can capture.

 

The Counterfactual

Consider where we’d be if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency. Benghazi would be resurrected; the email scandal would have been the subject of at least two congressional investigations; any progress in terms of the policies she and the Democratic Party had espoused would not only have been ignored, but would have been scathingly addressed – and the Donald would have been shouting “Fraud!” from the hilltops.

True, we’re in a parlous situation with our current administration, but look at what has been taking place throughout the country. If anything, the republic is in better shape for having this cartoon character “running” the country. The Republican Party is in a real quandary, with essentially every one of its priorities (the wall, immigration, health care, Social Security, tax “reform”) unable to get any traction. With a Clinton administration in power, they would probably have been able to pass their legislative agenda, but it would have been subject to veto after veto, hardly endearing Clinton to the country. As it now stands, we will have to suffer through a crazy time, at least until November 2018, at which time (from my lips …) the Democrats will take back at least the Senate, and Trump will throw in the towel.

A long-overdue letter to the editors of the New York Times

I wrote this today in response to an editorial decrying “Two Presidential Candidates Stuck in the Past.”

Thank you so much for continuing the Times’s pattern of false equivalence between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton which did so much to elect the former and besmirch the latter. Trump’s pathological need to tell whoppers at campaign rallies instead of governing is not at all the same as Clinton’s factual answers to a reporter’s questions. There is no doubt that James Comey’s October surprise re-opening of the e-mail investigation damaged her election prospects, nor is there any doubt that Russia interfered on her opponent’s behalf, though direct complicity by the Trump campaign has yet to be proven.

The editors’ instruction to Clinton to stop talking about the election sounds a lot like, “Women should be seen and not heard.” I look forward to your issuing a similarly stern warning to Bernie Sanders, who continues to peddle his fraudulent claim that Clinton “stole” the primaries by defeating him. Until you do, I’d be grateful if you’d stop pretending that Clinton’s telling the truth is somehow the same as Trump’s lying.