ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
Trumpia, that country the Psychopath is trying to create, shows signs already of coming apart as its perpetrators trek further into Nutland. Every day it’s a new outrage. Thursday’s shameful arrest of Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk comes right out of the Russian playbook. Bat-brained Kristi Noem uses human prisoners from El Salvador as props for her video. And of course Hegseth, whose head should roll soon, produced the most lethal shock of all.
It’s like Trump’s fiasco with the tariffs. And what a sick thrill it must be to dismantle a well-functioning government branch. Now he would abolish the Department of Education—created by an act of Congress so it’s likely that he will not succeed. Trump can’t order the Department out of existence but he can harass it and cut funds and people to destroy its good works and functions.
―We got to carve it up in such a way that it doesn’t start a war, Vlad. We cut off most of their weapons, but we got to give Z. something.
―Well, I know that. But, like you, I won’t permit that scumbag to join NATO. The threat to peace then blows up tenfold, and I won’t fight all of Europe. Continue reading “Trump and Putin Meet on Ukraine”
Mort Sahl was a great comic from the 1950s. He knew we can’t stop predicting the future. But we need to try understanding what lies ahead in the Trumpian chaos, how to oppose it, how to give it a context. We so-called elites are cowed and stymied. How can one possibly meet the threats? Continue reading “Mort Sahl: The Future Lies Ahead”
President Claudia Sheinbaum says she has a plan to retaliate if our idiot president really goes ahead with his threatened 25% tariffs and won’t negotiate. A few days ago she sent him a “fiery letter” demonstrating that she is not to be trifled with though she can take a light tone. You remember that she countered the “Gulf of America” idea with calling the U.S. “Mexican America.” Yet Google and others immediately changed their maps! Continue reading “Don’t Take No Crap from Him, Claudia”
“Good morning, Mr. Secretary.”
“Good morning, Melinda. What weak-kneed idiots do I have to see this morning?”
“General Flipper is coming to talk about the new Abrams tank budget. Then at 1500 hours Admiral Flopper from D-Ring has some thoughts about the USS Zumwalt and its littoral capabilities he wants to share with you.” Continue reading “Hegseth at the Pentagon”
Well, I’m giving you another reprise of my stuff, this one from 2017. It demonstrates how little has changed for the Democrats over these 7-plus years. Today these very same issues are being debated after a withering election. The years have brought us myopia, hibernation, and head in the sand denial of political realities. Sadly, the Dems are still fumbling with their insularity. What’s now emerging are the compromisers.
I should say it used to be my party. The Democrats lost me even before the [2017] election: I thought both Sanders and Clinton were bad candidates and said so here, among other places.
Elections in America are built on fraud in its various forms. People accept that they have to buy in because as both parties are structured voters have no truly democratic choices. Or a Hobson’s choice as in 2016 for the Democrats. With Clinton they have a candidate who has been on the wrong side (by my standards) of many issues. But her political life was enabled by the transformation of the Democratic party to one that cultivates money and elitism in its many forms. The party abandoned the working classes, its real constituency, many years ago—yes, even before Bill Clinton, who put the cap on it.
Bernie’s ideals would seem to be at great variance with those of the neoliberal Democrats. Yet he is now one of them. That in itself is a kind of hypocrisy. His calls for a revolution are ridiculous: this guy is no Che Guevara. If he truly wants a revolution, let him start speaking out to black people, the immigrants, and the white working (i.e., nonworking) classes who have been sold out of the action for years.
I spent years working for the party at the local, state and national level. In Washington I did a stint at the DNC working on the Clinton healthcare campaign in ’93-’94, producing a series of videoconferences for Hillary. You can read about that here. It was important, hard work even if we lost the battle.
Now we are getting a slew of articles with nostrums and correctives about the chaos in the Democratic party, and here am I adding to the clutter. Donna Brazile, who caused some of the problems, chimes in, telling how the DNC was in the tank for Hillary all along. Which was pretty obvious from the start.
The issues for advocacy facing the Democrats are both social and economic in the broad perspective of electoral politics. Yet they seem to prefer debating issues of ideal politics and identity politics. They still don’t understand how to deal with the kind of economic populism that got Trump elected. Nancy Pelosi and the old guard have not yet proposed any kind of message that might conceivably attract voters of all stripes. It would be trite but true to say that the party needs to rebrand. But so far the best message they have come up with is “A Better Deal”—like something you’d get from Walmart.
Practical (not ideal) politics is about winning elections, and the Democrats need younger candidates who focus on issues that are real and vital to a majority of people. A number of fresh-faced challengers, like Kelly Mazeski in Chicago, are in the field but they need a driving message and the backing that only the national party can provide. Healthcare, which affects everybody, is the obvious issue for the party in 2018—that is, a fiscally sound universal program perhaps like the German system, not the unaffordable Medicare for All that has been proposed.
In other words, the best hope for Democrats is to speak intelligently to a real and comprehensive need.
The only path to success for the Dems is to offer up a vision of the future that will include, well, everybody—as Pope Francis said in his recent TED talk. There are two proposals that have been in the air for years that would be key not to just winning the next election but to serving the wants and needs of all the people. (Which in fact should be the key to winning elections—the reverse of identity politics.)
One idea is to develop a viable scheme to provide universal basic income (UBI) and make it available to everyone who votes. The other is universal health care. Before you laugh me out of the room, consider that the major controversy over both these ideas is not over whether they are needed but how to implement them.
The party has also failed to explain just what and whom it stands for. And they have called for litmus tests on things like abortion, opening up an old wound. There are too many whiners and not enough killers, according to David Krone, Harry Reid’s ex chief of staff. The Dems have few trained attack dogs or counter-punchers. . . .
I didn’t watch the Harris Town Hall on CNN. My friends and I were busy laughing to old George Carlin and Lenny Bruce records that likely proved much more enlightening. We heard George’s monologue about farting in school on Class Clown, which brought to mind Donald Trump’s farting in the courtroom.
Readers know I have gotten really worked up over President Biden’s consistent refusal to cut off arms sales to Israel. So have a lot of people—and not just progressives.
In April of this year I stressed the political consequences:
If Biden doesn’t come to his senses about the rearming, he will turn off a great many voters in November. The growing protests, particularly among younger people, show that many will sit out the election if the president doesn’t change course. AIPAC’s [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] talking points in fact support exactly what many Republicans are saying about the conflict.
One month later I wrote:
As of now, 57 Democrats in Congress have signed a letter urging Biden to withdraw the billions in aid and arms he still quietly permits to flow to Israel. Some 66 percent of the “41 million eligible ‘Gen Z’ voters in 2024 have opposed aid to Israel.”
Now Kamala Harris is apparently following the same policy, which seems discordant with the values she otherwise proclaims. To be charitable, I think she is in a bind. Right now she can’t afford to alienate the Jewish vote because the election is so close. If she wins in November, I have a strong hunch her administration will stop these terrible arms sales. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
American Jews constitute some 2.4% of the U.S. population, and these 7.5 million people are quite a diverse group. Many identify with no religion. Many feel as I do that Israel’s present government is committing atrocities in Gaza using our weaponry. And it’s not just the bombs. Per Reuters today, “Israel has stopped processing requests from traders to import food to Gaza, according to 12 people involved in the trade.” Such things go on with apparent impunity.
A few days ago, top administration officials “warned they would resort to punitive measures, potentially including a suspension of military aid, if humanitarian aid flows are not increased within a month.” I am assuming that would only happen after the election.
Feelings about what Israel is doing in Gaza run high, particularly among younger voters: “Of those under 40 years old, 33 percent believed that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. These numbers were collated two years before the current genocide.” And now the numbers are growing.
Our group affiliations and history largely determine how we think about Israel. I spoke last year about my anti-Zionist youth and the feelings it engendered. See “Down the Rabbit Hole in Gaza.” There is wide agreement on the stark immorality of what the Israeli regime is doing. They have received billions of dollars of U.S. aid and weapons since the October 7 massacre. No one talks about the millions of dollars AIPAC spends on lobbying for Israel each year.
One may blame Harris for being responsible, in part, for what this administration has done. One can also hope she will have the courage, if she wins, to bring this sickening boondoggle to an end.
Well, why not? They are bombarded with constant negative scrutiny: that the race is too close to call, that the Harris campaign has screwed up royally, that the pollsters are all over the lot, that the choice of Tim Walz was a disaster.
Zak Cheney-Rice, a sharp writer for New York Magazine, tells us some of the things that have made for this “autumn chill” on the campaign. The joyous liberal response after the demise of Biden has given way to anxiety and jitters. I think the biggest problem is that Harris looks unsettled and has pivoted to the center. Per Zak, she “has betrayed [the campaign’s] original promise of unbridled possibility, the consequences of which will reverberate beyond November 5 regardless of who wins.”
Walz successfully went after Vance before their debate, then played nice during their encounter. Worse, from my point of view, is Harris’s failure to move off the Biden stance on Gaza and Israel. Young voters are particularly turned off by this. Zak says:
Israel’s brinkmanship is an issue in which Harris has failed to create meaningful daylight not only between herself and Trump but between herself and the unpopular Biden. The result will be her co-ownership of atrocities against Gazan civilians as well as further confirmation that, for all the history-making potential of her candidacy, we have seen these politics before.
Harris wants voters to embrace change but she is not giving them a real roadmap of how to get there. For many, I believe, it looks like more of the same, and they have clearly repudiated Biden. Trump will wave his magic wand and all will be well. In his rallies, he pledges to end the war in Ukraine “in twenty-four hours.”
Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before.
Maybe MAGA means “Magic AGAin.” When these people have lost power over things they value, magical thinking gives them a sense of control. Obviously, this notion is fundamental to Trump’s appeal. For such voters, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. From that point of view, as many have pointed out, Harris is really the unknown quantity. She is offering them what they perceive as more of the same policies that have made their lives dismal.
Since I wrote this piece in 2018 the situation hasn’t really changed. The major mania for the Trump camp is still immigration and exclusion. Now it’s the Hatians who have displaced Latinos at the bottom of the immigrant barrel.
My great-grandfathers on both sides were German immigrants who came to America in the mid-late 19th century. You can be sure they were not as reviled as the Irish and Italians who came a bit later. Yet Trump and his father long denied their German ancestry, buying into the tradition of hate and exclusion that now extends to Latinos, the new vassals for the GOP.
Prejudice to me is the flip side of identity politics. And drawing immigration lines in the sand is like pulling up the drawbridge after the last good guys are inside. I’ve generally been thought of as one of the good guys (despite being Jewish) because of family, social class, education, and skin color. See Jive-Colored Glasses.
But you soon come to understand if you’re at all aware that the deck is unfairly stacked—even though (to mix the metaphor) you paid to sit in first class. Looking at the lives of the poor and the excluded, it’s hard to feel real empathy unless you have been there yourself. Sympathy is easier and more socially acceptable. Ultimately, I don’t aim to feel either: I want to change the politics of exclusion to one of inclusion.
Trump of course was the perfect GOP candidate to exploit fears of immigration, just as Stephen Miller became the perfect guy to push the policy of zero tolerance. Now Miller and his cohorts want to reduce the “refugee cap” to as low as 15,000 in 2019.
The recent separation of parents and children, and the chaos it caused, is in my view the most inhumane (if not the most politically stupid) thing that Trump has done. Now the administration compounds its culpability by telling the ACLU it should be the responsible agency for finding the separated and deported parents. One might call this wagging the dog or, better, weaseling out.
The White House thinks its stance will play well with the base because they will stick with anything. It will not play well with Hispanics, suburban women, resettlement groups, and the two-thirds of the country that opposes Trump’s immigration policy.
Separating kids from their parents is what the Nazis did. The consequence is trauma and severe long-term consequences for the kids. And what is to be done for those 463 parents already deported without their children? This sick series of government-provoked horrors ought to be the number-one focus for Democrats in November.
But immigration is surely the knottiest issue—politically and policy-wise—of all. Trump’s approach does violence to everyone. And so far, Democrats are all over the map on the issue. The one thing I can think of is to increase the number of judges so that the asylum seekers can be processed with some fairness and dispatch. This is more than a crisis in border security; it’s an ongoing political crisis.