Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Joe Lieberman Is Dead

 I know this happened a few days ago, but I've been traveling. 

There are a few people I hate. Most odious creatures of the Right like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Traitor Greene are more curiosities, oddities that you stop, look at mouth agape. Trump I hate.

One person I hated with such a crystalline passion was Joe Lieberman. He was the Senator from my state (not my Senator) from 2000 until Chris Murphy finally bounced his soggy ass from the Senate.

I was frustrated by Joe Manchin, but I get why he did what he did. Democrats have to be a big tent party and that includes fairly conservative guys from West Virginia. I disagree with his principles, but I believe he had them. (Sinema has no principles that I can discern.)

Joe Lieberman represented one of the strongest Democratic states in the country, and he represented it from about as far right in the Democratic Party as you can be. He was a sanctimonious prick who was deeply in love with himself. I've actively marched for very few candidates or done phone banking, because I'm not convinced of its efficacy and I'm an introvert, especially on the phone. I did both for Ned Lamont when he took on Lieberman. 

So far, the last six months have claimed Henry Kissinger and Joe Lieberman. Yes, it claimed Alexei Navalny, but he was dead the minute he entered that prison, it just took a long time for his heart to stop. Meanwhile Jimmy Carter hangs on while this fucker died.

Trump's hamburdler has the opportunity to do the funniest thing.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Don Poorleone Wriggles Free Once More

 Today was supposed to be the day that Donald Trump finally faced some form of concrete reckoning. Sure, he's been convicted of fraud three times now. Sure, he's been found guilty of defamation twice and liable for sexual assault. Sure, he's lost the popular vote twice and the Electoral College once.  Sure, he's been impeached twice.

Still.

Today was the day the law was finally going to hit him where it hurt and he got a reprieve. He is not out of the woods, certainly, as he will likely still struggle to find a bond, but by halving the needed funds necessary to secure the bond, he might wriggle free. And while Trump and his partisans have claimed that he is being treated to a double standard, this is a double standard. Few people would likely be extended this sort of consideration, having already been convicted of fraud three times.

There is outrage rippling through the online left of center, because this was going to be the day. And now it's not. Trump has escaped from normally crippling defeats so many times before - hell, the Access Hollywood tape or denigrating a Gold Star family should have been the end of him - that he feels invincible. But of course, he's not. He is racking up a string of legal defeats that would destroy most people, but since Trump is nothing if not fueled by petty grievance, large grievances just keep him going.

The hush money trial will now start in April 15th. I would wager that Trump will be found guilty, because he's fucking guilty, but you never know. However, a guilty finding might not send him to jail. He might get a suspended sentence while his appeal plays out. He might only get fined.

The sickening fact is that rich people rarely do time for their crimes. It's not unique to Trump.

For millions of us, we waited for anything to suggest that a moment of reckoning was finally at hand, and it feels like we were cheated of it.

Trump still has to find the money though. I'm not sure he can.

UPDATE: Jesus wept, the Times decides to run a column comparing Trump to Al Capone in a favorable way.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Tantrums

 Being an adult in many ways is accepting that you won't get everything you want all the time. At best, life is a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of endeavor.

The House GOP are children. The compromise bill to keep the government functioning has enraged all the usual howler monkeys in the Chaos Caucus and Marjorie Traitor Greene is looking to bring down Mike Johnson (R-Gilead) without, of course, a plan for what comes next. 

Keeping the government open would seem like the most basic function of members of Congress. Like the literal least they can do. With a Democratic Senate and White House, that will require some necessary tradeoffs and a GROWN UP WOULD UNDERSTAND THIS. As Scott Lemieux notes, the lunatics in the GOP have made Ken Buck look like the voice of reason. That's... something.

The other element to all this is the irresponsible rhetoric coming from irresponsible people. The Congress has passed a compromise bill to keep the government open and provide for some important policy goals to be fulfilled, like additional border patrol agents that Republicans say they want. Yes, sadly for them it means that fewer children will be in poverty, but beating up on immigrants means you have to feed some kids, sorry.

The rhetoric that oozes from the fever swamp is that of apocalyptic collapse. About everything all the time. Now, yes, Democrats point to a potential Trump restoration as a potentially lethal threat to democratic governance in America. That is true, but then again...that is true. Dems say this, but only because that's exactly what Trump is promising he will do if re-elected. Meanwhile, the GOP thinks that earned income tax credits are the end of the republic. There's $300,000,000 for Ukraine - completely inadequate, but still something - that the howler monkeys will attack as being the end of America or something.

Some of this is simply the way that politics functions in an age of high negative partisanship. You see the other side as intrinsically alien. Social media makes it worse by amplifying the worst voices in any debate. Trump is our first social media president, and he's "good" at shouty ALL CAPS frothing madness that drives so much "engagement". Hell, I'm guilty of it, too, by responding rather than blocking the lunatics on Twitter. 

Why do people who are otherwise decent people support Trump? The man has been convicted of fraud three separate times; he has been found liable for sexual assault; he attempted to overturn the election; he has committed serial financial crimes. 

However, if you believe that $1billion for more Head Start programs and military day care centers are the "end of America" then this sputtering demagogue who threatens to wreck havoc on Washington DC seems less like the "Worst American Ever" and more like the champion of your bizarro cause.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Weird Times

 There are two stories that are not political that I think testify to the weirdness of the age we live in - where "information" is abundant but unreliable.

The first is the Kate Middleton saga. It is, of course, very sad when a young mother has to confront a cancer diagnosis. There is a superficial plausibility that they wanted to take time in order to tell their kids, in order not to upset them, though there is no good time for that conversation with young children. More astonishing is that "the Firm" so bungling the media approach to this. The photoshopped picture, the complete absence until yesterday...who thought that was a good idea? Into this void, every conspiracy theory expanded. 

The second is the Shohei Ohtani gambling story. Ohtani is one of the most bankable stars in all of sports and his interpreter (perhaps) racked up huge gambling debts and money from Ohtani's account was used to pay it off. At first, Ohtani said he was helping a dear friend out, then he switched his story to one where his friend stole from him, which strains credulity.

In both cases, we have a hamfisted series of public statements though for different reasons. Ohtani commented too soon and the Royal Family not soon enough. The absence of even a cursory statement from Middleton created a set of conditions where people could fill in their own plausible and implausible theories. Ohtani committed to one story (I paid my friends debts) which became a problem because he may have violated baseball's rules and California law in doing so, so he switched his story.

There is a particular type of moral scold who is wagging their censorious finger at everyone who advanced theories about Middleton, under the guise of "she deserves privacy". Does she? Isn't she a public servant employed at the taxpayer's expense? We freaked out when the Secretary of Defense was out of commission and incommunicado for a few days, and while the Princess of Wales is considerably less important than the SecDef, it's still a public position and there were months of this rather than days.

What's more, it's increasingly harder to understand what "deserves" or "should" means anymore. There are lots of things that "should" happen, but they simply won't.  Middleton should've been able to say that she had surgery and that complications ensued that will require more treatment until she had a chance to talk to her kids. She didn't do that and - as a public figure - speculation bloomed. Did she "deserve" that? No, probably not. Is anyone - and I mean ANYONE - surprised that it happened? Similarly, baseball's rules are VERY clear about gambling. Does Ohtani deserve to be suspended for helping a friend? No, but he likely broke a sacrosanct rule and what did he actually expect?

I hope Ms Middleton makes a full recovery and enjoys a long healthy life watching her children grow up. I hope Shohei Ohtani does not get the Pete Rose/Shoeless Joe treatment, even if he does get a lengthy suspension. I also hope that the people who are responsible for public relations can learn something from this ridiculousness. 

Friday, March 22, 2024

Tipping Their Hand

 Russia and China's veto of a ceasefire plan for Gaza pretty much gives the game away. It has been more than a little suspicious how young people in America have become frankly radicalized over Gaza. There's no doubt that it's a humanitarian nightmare and both Hamas and Israel are culpable for multiple war crimes. But horrible things happen in the world all the time. Myanmar, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Haiti...take you pick.

Hamas' primary source of support is Iran, who is allied with Russia and China. That Russia and China have scuttled this plan suggests that their primary goal is continue to hinder Biden's ability to reclaim his base and help elect Trump. You want "election interference" Donny? Here it is. 

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Trump's Impending Collapse

 That oily motherfucker has slithered out of so many traps that it's tempting to think that he was never have a reckoning. 

The caveat is that the perception that he is never held accountable isn't exactly true. Yes, like millions of Americans, I want his bloated, diapered ass behind bars, and that is unlikely to happen soon enough. However, there have been "accountability moments" for Trump: numerous court defeats for his policies, especially on immigration; the 2018 midterms; the 2020 election; the Trump University and Trump Foundation fraud decisions and now the E. Jean Carroll and NY fraud cases.

The latter two are important because they hit Trump's ego at its most vulnerable spot. Trump isn't "rich" in the way we would typically understand it. Trump is leverage to high hell to support a celebrity lifestyle. Trump isn't a "builder", he's a brand manager whose brand is "Donald Trump, NY Tycoon and Celebrity."

The impending margin call on that lifestyle on Monday is huge. It is not our preferred outcome of Trump being frogmarched into Danbury penitentiary in an orange jumpsuit, but it hits him where he lives. Literally. Trump pulled in all his markers to pay the Carroll bond. Now he faces a bond five times as large, and no one will loan money to a guy guilty of lying about his properties to secure loans. He's also leverage everything he owns. That's so critically important. Trump HAS to appear rich. The fragility of that position is what has him scrambling.

We have simply conceded that Trump has some sort of secret sauce for "winning, so much winning" because he managed to squeak out that catastrophic win in 2016, but he's been losing ever since, and hopefully Monday will see him lose bigly yet again.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

The Unprocessed Trauma Of It All

 Josh Marshall echoes what I've been saying for a couple of years now: we, as a society, underwent a shocking series of traumas from March of 2020-January of 2021, and we have never truly processed them in a way that has allowed us to move on. The great unspoken mover of politics right now is this lingering sense of doom and trauma. Incumbent governments everywhere are unpopular; in fact, Biden is reasonably popular on the global scale. The reason this is happening in contradiction of some pretty good objective metrics is because we have never been able to process the events of the annus horribilus.

It began four years ago this month. Things shut down ominously, I will not forget driving home from Georgia down the Jersey Turnpike and it was ghostly empty at 8:30 at night. We lived in fear of every delivery, every chance encounter. They were stacking bodies like cordwood in New York. 

Then we had the eruption of anger over George Floyd, which folded into the simmering anger over Trump's rank unfitness for office and the blind devotion of his cult. I remember getting a text from a wrestler who asked if anything ever got better. 

Then, of course, there was January 6th, an event whose only closest predecessor was secession in 1860. When Trump was not convicted in his second impeachment, we were faced with the very real possibility that we would be faced with the exact situation we are faced with today: a Trump re-election with dire consequences for America and the world.

Since then, we also had the Delta and Omicron waves. The Delta wave nearly killed me and during the Omicron wave, we made the decision to keep the school open without testing, risking the lives of the faculty in the process. The entire period from March of 2020 through roughly January of 2022 was a period that alternated between fear and anger. That's almost two years of living through a prism of trauma.

If the Biden team are not working to tie the worst of the pandemic to Trump, they are guilty of malpractice. However, the problem runs deeper, because Biden was president during the second half of the pandemic - the half where people began to resent the precautions being taken and the inflationary costs of the pandemic and then the war.

When it comes to inflation, there is no scenario where Trump becomes president and makes inflation better. His preferred policies - tariffs and deportations combined with deficit funded tax cuts - will increase inflation. This should not be a controversial opinion; it's economic fact. However, no one really cares about facts. Some of this is the pervasive effort of Republicans and Trump to destroy the idea of objective truth, but it's also a byproduct of the balkanized media landscape of social media.

I've struggled to understand why young people are so incredibly outraged by events in Gaza. It's not that events in Gaza aren't outrageous; they are. But why do they care? There are worse events happening right now in Myanmar and there are comparable events happening all the time in Africa. Haiti is on fire. This sort of human horror show happens all the time. Why Gaza?

Some of it is that anti-American elements in Russia, China, Iran and Iran's proxies see a perfect opportunity to exploit this very real tragedy to create a new fissure in America's culture wars. That wouldn't work, though, if there wasn't a real sense of displaced anger among America's youth that has no place to land. 

The fact that the Biden Administration is doing more than any other administration ever by a country mile on climate and pollution is objectively true. The vibes of climate doomerism are real, though.

If the vibes change, I think Biden wins Texas, Florida and North Carolina. If they don't, America could see a dictatorial strongman seize power - or not depending on distressingly thin margins.

Finding a peace solution in Gaza will only go so far to bring young voter back into Biden's column. I just don't know what else will.

UPDATE: I forgot about everyone freaking out about crime. Crime absolutely spiked and it has absolutely declined and we only feel the increase.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Fascism: I Was Only Joking

 There was a scholar of fascism that noted that in Weimar Germany, Nazis would say horrific things, they would be called out on it, and then they would say, "It's just a joke, of course we wouldn't round up all the Jews and kill them."

Marshall points out that Trump instinctively does this with his "bloodbath" language. For Trump, though, it's more that "logic" of dominance. He calls the tune, and everyone else has to dance to it. If we are debating whether he meant a metaphorical or literal bloodbath, we are dancing to his tune and profoundly missing the point, which is that he has already tried violence before.

What's going to be interesting is how he reacts to the impending fines in his fraud case. His mental breakdown about this is linked to the fact that he cannot make the judge dance to his tune. All his bullying and braggadocio not only doesn't work, but it backfires.

Trump always seems to slip through the nets of justice, but if he has to pay his fines next week...

Monday, March 18, 2024

Party-State

 A structure in nominally communist states like the Soviet Union and China is the creation of the party-state, whereby the party controls the apparatus of the state. For instance in China, Xi Xinping is the Party Chairman AND the President, because he is the head of the party and the head of state. For every entity of the state, like the People's Congress, there is a corresponding and controlling party entity like the Party Congress. This is done to retain all the levers of power within the party and render the state as a neutered tool to implement the party's will.

Anyway, Donald Trump's latest purge of the RNC sure shows all the signs of a similar dynamic, but in this case, he is subsuming the Republican Party to his cult of personality and, most likely, criminal enterprises. As Marshall notes, the nominee controls the Party. That's understood. Strategy is coordinated between the presidential candidate and the party committee. The only reason to purge the RNC and install unqualified family members is because you want to use the RNC as an ATM for your hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. 

So there's two ways to see this: the good news and the bad news.

The good news is that if he really follows through and turns the RNC into the ATM, then a few things will happen. First, big money donors will stop giving. They aren't fools. They will give to the RSCC and the RCCC and individual candidates, but many will simply despair and not give. What money does flow into the RNC is extremely unlikely to work well towards electing Republicans. If this fall is as close as it appears to be, that's good news.

The bad news is that the Republican Party is increasingly simply a cipher for Trumpism. At some point, the grip that this demagogic, authoritarian con-man has to be broken. We cannot continue to have every election be a contest between those who respect democracy and those who don't. Sure, at some point Trump will die and that cult of personality will die with him, but the degradation of one of the two parties is deeply troubling.  

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Despair And Authoritarianism

 I think I mentioned a discussion I had with a college friend in Argentina who welcomed Javier Milei because he felt the apple cart needed to be overturned and a chaos agent was required.  Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend who lamented the state of the world in so many ways. The thread that connected them was this sense of doom and futility. This is the first step towards abandoning democracy.

This Twitter thread lays out so many ways that the world is improving. The basic thesis is "Yes, the world isn't perfect and 'X' is bad, but we are making remarkable progress towards solution 'Y'." Take climate change. In the thread there are numerous examples of breakthroughs in energy storage, access to lithium and hydrogen and geothermal energy. However, even if we brought all of that online tomorrow, the world would still continue to get hotter for another decade or so, until existing carbon was removed from the atmosphere. The news on climate is promising, but not to the degree that the crisis has passed.

It seems we are wired to need the instant gratification of immediate results. The internet has its plusses and minuses, but few can argue that it has not completely reshaped the world. It was basically invented in 1983, yet it really didn't start to enter our lives until the late 1990s. It feels like we are in a similar pattern with technology now.

Additionally, we are so much richer today than we were 40 years ago. Global inequality has shrunk dramatically, even if we have the troubling concentration of wealth in a super-class of billionaires. My friend yesterday said that we managed to grow up, sitting in the back of a station wagon with no seatbelts while our parents chain smoked in the front and we didn't die. True, but plenty of people did. Today, the stench of cigarette smoke is a jarring exception rather than the miasma through which we move. We have cars that can seat 6 and get 35MPG with crazy amounts of user friendly tech. Go back and drive that 1986 Honda Civic; your preference for it is nostalgia, not fact.

Of course there are problems. Big problems, but we tend to blow them up into catastrophes. Take Gaza. That is a wrenching humanitarian crisis brought about by two awful entities - Netanyahu's right wing government and Hamas' theocratic terrorism - but calling it "genocide" is intended to elevate it to the levels of the Holocaust or Cambodia. It simply...isn't. It's awful, and we should be doing everything we can to end it and bring lasting peace through a two state solution. But it simply isn't genocide, and calling it that is designed to create this sense of catastrophe that extremists need to justify eroding democracy.

Joe Biden ran on getting things back to normal. Sadly, that proved beyond his reach. Not because he didn't try, but because we have become addicted to the doom spiral.

We have met the cognitive enemy and he is us.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Endorsements

 I'm reading a book on the Republican Party of the 1960s and '70s, called Rule and Ruin. In it, the prominence of newspaper endorsements is the most "foreign" thing. The dynamics of a Republican Party fighting between its moderate and ultra conservative wings is slightly different from today, if only in the sense that the ultra conservative, actually reactionary, forces have so thoroughly won.

Given the widespread collapse in trust in empirical authority of any kind, the idea that an endorsement from the Times or the Detroit Free Press would matter seems silly and largely is. However, there is a new trend in endorsements that's very real: Astonishing numbers of people who worked with Trump refuse to endorse him. That number now includes Mike Pence, but it also includes almost all of his national security team and most of his Cabinet.

This ought to be the lead story in every newspaper in America. A significant number of people who worked most closely with Trump feel he should not be president. Both Dick and Liz Cheney - about the apotheosis of American conservatism - refuse to endorse him, with Dick calling him the greatest threat to American democracy in his lifetime.

And yet...

While you have to admire the actual courage that it takes to endure the inevitable death threats from MAGAts and the end of your political career that refusing to endorse Trump entails, almost none of them will endorse Joe Biden. Sure, the Cheneys and Pence and John Kelly have almost nothing in common politically with Biden, except their abhorrence of what Trump is and stands for. I get that a second Biden term could - gasp - lead to higher taxes on the rich and more regulations on business and maybe some more assistance for the poor and middle class. It could lead to a reversal of Dobbs, which would matter to someone like Pence, I guess, though that would require an unlikely number of Democrats in the Senate. 

If Trump is who you say he is, then you have to endorse Biden. Simply withholding your endorsement is words without deeds.

In 1864, the future of the American Experiment was in grave doubt. In response, War Democrats - those who supported a victory over secession and disunion - joined with Republicans to create the Union Party. The young Republican Party temporarily ceased to exist. Something like that needs to happen this fall. Hell, call it the Union Party. It's that important. 

A Defense Of Liberalism

 As someone over 30, I admit to struggling at least a little with the increase in Trans rights activism. As a liberal, I believe in freedom and debate. As we saw on numerous yard signs and bumper stickers: We believe in science here.

Jon Chait has been a consistent critic of extremism, which is a characteristic of liberals. He has taken a position on Trans Rights that are broadly liberal: We should be cautious about transitioning children until we have more evidence. We should also be worried about how activists on either extreme hijack the debate.

As a liberal, I fully support gender affirming care for children, but care that stops short of easy transitioning. I arrive at this position after 30 years of working with adolescents. Gender affirming care that entails counseling and therapy to help someone with gender dysphoria through adolescence can then become sex reassignment when they become adults. We don't let teenagers rent a car, why should we allow them to make a potentially permanent decision? Put biologically, their prefrontal cortexes are not fully developed and they are poor judges of future consequences.

However, I do not in any way deny the right of young people with gender dysphoria to define their gender in however they wish. I admit that I don't understand it; it's completely alien to my own lived existence. But I am empathetic to the need to define one's identity for oneself. 

The extraordinary gains that Trans Rights have made have allowed more people to question gender roles and define themselves as they see fit. The idea that waiting until your 18 to transition represents an assault on their human rights is not "following the science."

Chait's crusade against activist extremism was tiresome at first. How can you complain about campus leftists when Trump and the Trumpenproletariat exist? However, he's absolutely right that extremism - which is to say positions far outside the mainstream - do tend to engender their own backlash. As I've argued before: Revolutions always fail; they snap back into the forms that existed before in slightly altered forms. 

Sensible moderation does not let you fundraise off outrage. It tends to reject outrage as emotive and unreasoned decision making. Yet sensible moderation - Let kids define their gender as they see fit and if they ultimately define themselves in a way that requires transition, they can do so as adults - is a position that makes the most sense, given what we know today.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Drivers, Start Your Engines

 It's time for Alvin Bragg and now Fani Willis to bring legal accountability to Donald Trump. Ideally two convictions in NY and GA will finally move the needle away from "Biden is old" to "Trump is a criminal".

I saw a video of a social scientist arguing that the most important person of 2023 was Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. His argument was that he was able to quell inflation without triggering a recession. He further argued that "inflation causes revolutions" which is a provocative but compelling argument.

Yet low levels of inflation remain problematic at over 3%. The best case for Biden was that inflation was under control and people begin to see real wages turn into greater economic security. That does not seem to be happening, even accounting for the lag between good economic news and people's gut level understanding of that good news.

So...yeah...jail.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Hey, Anarchists?

 Do you want to know what happens when your vision of a stateless society comes to fruition?

Haiti.

The Slow Drumbeat Of Doom

 Obviously, one of the drumbeats of doom is for Democrats with a lot of early public polling showing a dead heat with a slight Trump edge. However, the predictive power of polls this far out is historically weak. There's also the trend for shitty GOP pollsters like Rasmussen to flood the zone and warp the polling averages. Lots of polls have Biden losing huge amounts of ground to Black and Gen Z voters that seems...dubious. 

Still, it remains sadly possible that Trump wins in November. I can't believe that's true, but the data suggests it is. I don't think it will happen, but it could.

One other thing that looks very likely is that Democrats should gain control of the House. In fact, that could happen sooner than you think. Ken Buck's retirement next week was done for two reasons. The first was that this will lead to a special election in his district that a Republican will likely win, but that will create an incumbency advantage for whomever wins over feral howler monkey, Lauren Boebert who is switching to his district. Basically, he's retiring to fuck over Boebert, who he understandably loathes as an avatar of the chaos and idiocy of the Republican House. 

TL;DR: Everyone in the House GOP hates each other and doesn't even want to be around each other.

Buck's retirement also further reduces the razor thin margins in the House. Right now, there are 218 GOP members and 213 Democrats. There is a special election coming up that could boost Democrats to 214. Still, the House GOP caucus is a Covid outbreak from losing their majority. As Chip Roy (R-TX) put is, there is no reason to reward the GOP with control of the House

If there was some way for the Democrats to have control of the House for a few weeks this spring you could get the Ukraine package passed, a new budget and maybe a Roe bill (which would die in the Senate, but whatever, it would lay clear stakes for November).

The topline story of Trump possibly being reelected is depressing as hell. It's depressing because of how manifestly unfit he is for dogcatcher, much less president. However, the GOP itself is pretty toxic, too. Hopefully, that will seep in before the real polls open.