PMC Commentary

My hope, as stated below, was something of a flop. I'm still working on overcoming this plague. When I'm back, I'm back. Let's just leave it at that. Many thanks.

 

You have probably deduced by now that I worked myself back into the hospital. But I just got sprung. My hope is that one more day of recovery should do it.

Happy discussions.

 

OK,  a review of tests this morning and possibly more tests. From the results of the last batch this week, I'd say more. But this should be the end it. Have a good discussion below. 

 

Incompetent, perhaps, but nicely coiffed

"[Trump] doesn't want someone telling him what to do," said a White House official to CNN. "He wants someone to make him look good doing it."

Thus Chief of Staff John Kelly is out, snd the scuttlebutt is that either OMB director Mick Mulvaney or the vice president's chief of staff, Nick Ayers, is in. Neither should be too competent. "In recent weeks, Trump has told confidants he misses the chaos of the early days of his administration." (The real news here is that WH chaos has … diminished?)

But we have yet to get to the high and mysterious level of presidential decision making. Only one man in America is burdened daily by the weight of deeply complex issues, and it's that man's ability to handle those burdens that makes him the president of the United States. Case in point: Of the two prospects for Kelly's job, "Mulvaney, whose sharp wit has impressed Trump, is seen as the strongest [sic] candidate..., though Trump has remarked that he likes Ayers’ hair."

Yes, just like that, Trump can indeed cope with presidential troubles of the highest order, which Obama had questioned and even ridiculed a few years ago at that infamous Correspondents Dinner. So we're not to worry. No, we're not to worry at all.

 

Believe it or not, Kim Jong Un may have lied

This report from Radio Free Asia (which is funded by the United States, but has "a legislative firewall that bars interference by U.S. government officials in [its] execution of … reliable journalism"), is touchingly comical in its innocence:

The Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party has decreed that North Korea will not relinquish its nuclear arsenal…, despite an earlier pledge by party chairman Kim Jong Un to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula….

A lack of any concrete agreement on steps to denuclearize and recent reports that progress on talks have slowed … have prompted questions over how sincere Pyongyang is about abandoning its weaponry.

A source from North Korea … recently told RFA’s Korean Service that the country’s leadership cabal has no intention of entirely ditching the nuclear program it had taken decades to build.

Well blow me away. Kim Jong Un might be violating a "pledge"? And now there are "questions over how sincere Pyongyang is about abandoning its weaponry"? And a "source" says Kim "has no intention of entirely ditching [his] nuclear program"?

Oh dear, my faith in humanity is suffering. Especially since the equally honest Donald promised us this, just a few weeks ago.

Of course it was only after Trump took office that people assumed we were "going to War with North Korea," as well as with the English language's rules of capitalization.

 

From (selective) right to (entire) left, a consensus of despair

Egads. Mein Gott. Oh Lord. The midterm verdicts on America's decadent leadership are coming in from all notches on the political spectrum, and they're strikingly akin to a white flag of surrender. We're in an ironic ditch of prosperity, says one observer, from the Wall Street Journal; we've become hopelessly indifferent to national decline, says another, from the Washington Post; and the third observer — a pole apart from the first; a NY Times pinko — sees not one but two Americas, in which one would defend virtually any corruption from the very highest decadence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"Many of Mr. Trump’s initiatives lack public support … [and his] disruptive efforts haven’t yielded notable success." So, what's saving him from universal disaffection? asks William Galston, a weekly columnist for the WSJ. He's ready with the answers. "The economy has kicked into higher gear," he notes, and Trump "has kept faith with the 46% of Americans who voted for him in 2016." Much like the old city machines, he has made sure the pilferage has been equitably distributed. "He gave economic conservatives the tax cuts and deregulatory policies" he pledged; he gave "social conservatives … the judicial nominees they were promised"; and he gave "populist conservatives … the nationalist policies — on trade, immigration and putting America first — that energized them during the campaign."

The last and third leg of Trump's enduring support "transcends policy," Galston observes — and without question, it's the most disconcerting. "In Donald Trump, dissatisfied Americans have found a man who resents cultural elites as much as they do, who is as dismissive of convention as they would like to be, and, above all, who fights constantly, retreats rarely, seldom apologizes, and takes every setback as an opportunity to renew the unending struggle." We have always had crackpot politicians such as Trump — the historical difference being that they never achieved more than minimal success. But in 2016, the luck of the deplorable draw triumphed.

WaPo's Christine Emba is more specific, as well as more general. She zeroes in on comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s television series, "Who Is America?," and she despairs at what he finds. I've not seen the show (it runs on Showtime), but it seems the comedian "disguises himself as a variety of exaggerated figures" — one day he's "a right-wing conspiracy theorist," the next, "an absurdly far-left professor" — and then proceeds to prank deserving victims. For instance "in the first episode, Cohen persuades several current and former Republican lawmakers to endorse an initiative to train preschoolers in the use of military-grade weaponry to prevent school shootings. Current House members Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) mindlessly mouth endorsements." Are we surprised?

Concludes Emba: "We are uncomfortable with the direction in which our country is headed, but we also feel that it’s too far gone for us to do more than laugh, shrug and sigh…. In essence, we’ve given up…. We have decided that there is nothing to be done." One encounters such resignation daily, usually with no more than a shrug. What can we do? We voted against the demagogic dunce by a decisive majority, and yet, there he sits in the Oval Office, systematically destroying every institutional foundation that made America a model nation for the world. And speaking of irony, he is protected by the very constitution that he's trampling.

Last there is the Times' Frank Bruni, who sensibly broods over Republicans' nearly uniform forgiveness of all the above. "They simply notice that their man is under attack, and they rise to defend him…. It’s one of the most unjust, infuriating aspects of his endurance. His shamelessness is actually his saving grace."

As for those aforementioned two Americas, Bruni cites research that shows "Americans on one side of the political divide don’t just disagree with those on the other. They see them as threats to the country’s well-being…. Forget I’m O.K., you’re O.K. This is: I have problems, you’re repulsive."

All this raises a fascinating question, which political philosopher John Rawls, in his celebrated "veil of ignorance," attempted to answer (successfully, I would add).

This, I must stress, is a crude, personal rendering of Rawls' "theory of justice." Anyway, here it is. Let us posit that you will be dropped into one of two political systems. One is led by a coarse, mendacious, utterly ill-informed president who cares nothing for the rule of law, and he's backed by a political party that overtly favors the white and the wealthy. Minorities in this system are disrespected in both word and deed, as are women. Social programs for the poor are targeted for dismantlement, one way or the other. Reality and truth are disfavored for whatever the ruling regime says is real and truthful. Now, before you are dropped into such a society, you know nothing of yourself; you are oblivious of your color, your talents, your wealth (or lack of it), of your gender.

Would you choose Trump's society or one, for lack of a better term, designed by a center-left team of social engineers?

Forbes magazine's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry answered in this way: "Rawls, and Ralwsians, believe that the 'veil of ignorance' principle naturally leads us to broadly social-democratic, egalitarian, progressive policies, because once you're behind the veil of ignorance, you will want strong redistribution and generous social welfare policies just in case you end up as one of the poor people in your society."

I'd wager that 100 percent (or damn close to it) of those surveyed would choose the social-democratic, egalitarian, progressive society. And yet, here we are, stuck behind Trump's solid wall of ignorance, reactionaryism and bigotry. Have we surrendered to it as well? From all sides, the mainstream media's commentariat seems to believe we have. I despair a bit less. But theirs, I admit, is tempting.

 

Heroes shouldn't fade

This evening my prefrontal cortex became all aflutter when I opened Lee Siegel's titillatingly titled essay — "Whatever Happened to Moral Rigor?" — subtitled almost as enticingly, "James Baldwin understood the difference between empathy and approval. Today, we would rather condemn than understand." Siegel's essay also came with the iconic photo of Baldwin herein.

Excited I was indeed, for I love James Baldwin, I love his work, I love the way his mind rolled. By the essay's fourth paragraph I was inspired to comment on the essay's entirety, since the paragraph began: "Today we still revere Baldwin…." The passage startled me. I don't know who "we" are. I do know that Baldwin wrote for a general readership but today he's read, if he's read at all, by no one other than the intelligentsia and college students in Black Studies programs. Here is one of the 20th century's greatest writers — he gave us complexity through simplicity, which is the hardest kind of writing there is — and yet, essentially, he's been banished to used books stores.

Siegel introduces him as an intellectual renegade: "The stuff of his commitment was a moral clarity steeped in intellectual difficulties and ethical complications — a labyrinthine clarity that he refused to sacrifice to prescribed attitudes." Little has changed, I'd argue, although Siegel asserts "there is little patience now for such a rigorous yet receptive moral and intellectual style; these days we prefer ringing moral indictment, the hallmarks of which are absolute certainty, predetermined ideas and conformity to collective sentiments."

Have we in this civilized age not always lived, nonetheless, as a sanctimonious mob on the verge of crucifixions and bonfires? "Prescribed attitudes," "absolute certainty" and "predetermined ideas" are everywhere, especially on the internet. Christianity has become a code word for right-wing sharia law. Red staters are confined to their inviolable doctrines. The left is similarly imprisoned in preapproved LeftSpeak. Our major political parties are little more than billboarded talking points. The electorate is an echo chamber. (I can tell you first hand, as a leftie blogger who subscribes to no ideology, that independent thinking is the quickest route to internet obscurity.)

For those who haven't read Baldwin, I decided to offer them an example of his writing — chosen entirely at random (from The Fire Next Time). This choice was predicated on the idea that one can turn to any page of Baldwin's writing and be instantly consumed by a passion for more.

That powerful passage was nevertheless weakened and injured by the editors of The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities, from which I took the passage (because I didn't want to type it out myself). The injury came from the ellipsis; after "all the fear," what the editors cut was this: "… and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me — and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing."

I can't riff on the essay as a Baldwin essay, however, for it soon careened into a much broader discussion of our narrow condemnations of "moral" heathens, such as Harvey Weinstein. ("However justice is finally administered in his case," writes Siegel, "we should try to grasp what social and psychological forces made him what he is, without the distracting din of moral denunciation forbidding us from doing so.")

Of course I could have written a post dedicated to Baldwin without the aid of Siegel's essay, but that would have required some sifting around in literary research, and I hadn't the time. I'm writing even this on the fly — thus its inadequacies and probable lapses in flow. Just know that if you haven't read Baldwin, you should.

 

GOP elephants are actually pigs at the trough

The NY Times:

"In the first half of 2018, corporate tax collections dropped to historically low levels as a share of the economy, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That is pushing up the federal budget deficit much faster than economists had predicted….

"The United States’ annual budget deficit is expected to top $1 trillion as early as the 2019 fiscal year, with the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline forecasts showing the annual deficit rising to $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years…. Adding to the deficit are hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending increases, which [the Republican] Congress passed and Mr. Trump signed this year."

Five'll get you $1,000 that by February, 2021, Republicans will be screaming about the Democratic president's outrageous budget deficits.

When Obama entered office in 2009, on Day One he had a $1.4 trillion deficit, virtually every dime of it Republican-passed — two wars and two major tax cuts under his Republican predecessor, and all of it deficit-financed. And even though Obama brought deficits steadily down over eight years, he remained The Deficit President in Republican propaganda.

I can understand Republicans peddling fiscal lies, since they're the ones who have structurally butchered the budget since the 1980s. What I can't understand is why more voters haven't caught on to the GOP's extraordinary scam.

 

I have medical issues I must deal with this morning. Feel free to use the comment section for a general discussion. 

 

What winning looks like (according to Wonderland's Alice)

We've got them right where we want them.

The Trump administration on Tuesday announced up to $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers hurt by the president’s trade…. The move is an indication that Mr. Trump … plans to plow forward in escalating his tariff tit-for-tat around the world.

"The actions today are a firm statement that other nations cannot bully our agricultural producers to force the United States to cave in," said Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture [and minister of national insolvency].

Just one more year of this self-immolation and we'll really be winning.

 

The teachings of E.J. Dionne

Dionne packs several profound truths into an economical 117 words:

Trump’s long-standing Republican apologists have lost all credibility. The party needs to be rebuilt, and that task should fall to the handful of GOP dissenters who resolutely refuse to peddle Trump’s propaganda.

We should never again take seriously all those who tell us that paying attention to what a politician says and does blinds us to some deeper (and nonexistent) wisdom he is supposedly conveying … [and] we should develop a permanent immunity to a fake and manipulative populism that casts upholding standards and defending decency as the preoccupations of rarefied social and intellectual circles.

This is a condescending view because it underestimates the basic decency of the vast majority. It also gives license to the indecent.

As would any good teacher, Dionne inspires a mixture of questions and informed observations.

The GOP's loss of credibility has been a prolonged, chronic affair (at least since the 1980s, the party of Reagan has lied about supply-side economics being a boon to the middle class), although the party's unconscionable defense of Trump has rendered its credibility deficit both acute — and lethal. This self-defamation was predictable. Trump is a contagion, an indelible blight, and those who've ever joined with him have watched their reputations become as squalid as the Donald's. As for rebuilding the party either sans or post-Trump but most certainly with higher minds, one could stage a national convention of the "handful of GOP dissenters" — the NeverTrumpers — at your local DQ, and still have room for drop-ins.

"We should never again take seriously all those who tell us that paying attention to what a politician says and does," notes Dionne, "blinds us to some deeper (and nonexistent) wisdom he is supposedly conveying." A professor of political rhetoric once told me that in the study of the field, "what a politician says" is all we should — all we can — go by. Mind-readers we are not. When Trump said we should have "taken the oil" in Iraq and left the devastated nation without its own resources or hope, that wasn't a cunningly insincere statement designed to indicate to potential foes what a tough belligerent he would be in any international conflict. It was, rather, precisely what it seemed: the sentiment of a small mind in a little man who understands nothing of war and the complexities of its aftermath.

Finally, as for anti-intellectual populists' fear and loathing of "rarefied social and intellectual circles" — i.e., the oft-pilloried elite — their dread is more than condescending, fake or manipulative. It's a defensive inferiority complex that inflates its battered ego by belittling those who have lived a life of the mind. Trumpeteering populists are ignorant and they know it, hence they audibly monopolize conversations and rhetorically outgun their opponents by disparaging knowledge as nothing more than pretentiousness, as arrogance, as sniveling elitism. Bullies-cum-populists thrived in the preceding eras of brawn over brains, but the modern world and it priorities have flipped; now it's brains over brawn. They feel cornered and helpless, so they lash out — they give themselves license to be indecent, as Dionne observes.

It's all quite fascinating.

 

I, too, would take Paris

We're not the only ones. Even Trump's allies are occasionally dumbfounded. "Sometimes we wonder what kind of discussions take place inside the Trump White House," writes the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, in "Dumb Idea of the Week."

For instance, "On Monday press secretary Sarah Sanders disclosed that President Trump may revoke the security clearances of six former officials [John Brennan, Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Susan Rice, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, although the last two are already 'uncleared'] who have criticized him…. Someone should have said, 'That’s a dumb idea. It will make us look petty, and it won’t accomplish anything.'"

The Journal's alternative advice is nearly as petty. "If Mr. Trump wants to do something more consequential, and in the public interest, he’ll ask his Administration to find the person who leaked in early 2017 that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been wiretapped by U.S. spooks as he talked with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. That was a truly nasty leak given that Mr. Flynn was probably 'unmasked,' in spy parlance, by Obama officials."

The Journal just couldn't resist: Given the choice between condemning Trump's threat to revoke clearances and condemning Trump's threat while also blaming the Obama administration for something "truly nasty," the editors found the latter irresistible.

Bogie and Bergman may always have Paris, but Trump's media allies will, almost as entertainingly, always have Obama, Hillary, and emails.

 

Of Trump, trumpery, and tariffs

From management to factory floor, employee opinions on Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs at Banner Metals, a metal stamping company in Columbus, Ohio, can be explained, it would seem, only by fierce partisanship. They voted for him and they're sticking with him, no matter the pain.

"I’m not looking at what’s best for Banner right now," said the company's chief executive to the NY Times. "I’m looking at what’s best for the national economy." (If Banner were publicly owned, that's one chief executive who'd be fired by the board in a Columbus minute.) "The U.S. has been taken advantage of for too long," he added. The firm's vice president for engineering agreed. "I never cared much for the way Trump does it, but he’s doing O.K. as far as I’m concerned."

Banner's factory-floor workers also agreed, which, notes the Times, "underscore[d Trump's] reservoir of blue-collar support — even as he pursues a trade conflict in which key American industrial sectors could be hit. For them, there is still a larger wrong that must be righted." Said a maintenance technician at Banner: "If it comes out of my paycheck, so be it. You got to look at the big picture. That tiny bit of sacrifice we make will create jobs. I know the tariffs have an impact on us, but I don’t think it was a mistake."

Perhaps it wasn't a mistake for the maintenance tech, who still has a job. But the tariffs' effects — higher steel prices for domestic manufacturers — were of major consequence for two new employees Banner had planned to hire but now can't. Nor can the company any longer afford to buy a new $1 million cutting machine; it, too, is on hold, as Trump's tariffs "have pushed raw-material prices up and margins down."

Nevertheless, it's complicated, as they say. "Despite the perception of an uneven playing field in trade," continues the Times, "Banner has been thriving." Before the tariffs hit, "the company [had] added eight workers," and "demand from customers like Boeing, Airbus and United Technologies has been strong."

So for now, Banner's 38 employees are safe. However as market pressures persist, firms that buy steel and aluminum will face sustained higher costs. Both management and hourly workers at Banner know this, and yet they persist in their support of the man who has destabilized their market.

What they don't seem to know is that their Trump-supportive sentiments are based on administration-huckstered falsehoods. As most any economist would tell them, tariffs are "[not] what’s best for the national economy"; "the U.S. has [not] been taken advantage of for too long"; and "that tiny bit of sacrifice" one worker is willing to sustain "will [not] create jobs."

The power of partisanship, however, is stronger than their urge to know.

 

FDR as a Trumpian nationalist?

Some of you will recognize the inquirer merely by virtue of, in the comment section, the inquirer's manner: "I would be very interested in your thoughts on this article [link provided in his comment] which concentrates on the political philosophy of FDR. Alas, you may need to don your bio-chem suit to read it because it is over at The National Review - I know, I know, 'the horror, oh, the horror'! Even so, I really would be interested in your response to it given your 'yuuuuuuuge' admiration for the man."

The article to which he refers is titled "The First Nationalist," by the besieged, controversial "conservative" writer Kevin Williamson. Its thesis? The first presidential nationalist was Franklin D. Roosevelt, argues Williamson, which is meant to hurl the liberal reader into a resentful fury, since "nationalism" is now so closely identified with the degenerate Donald J. Trump.

One should instantly be wary of all that follows, since America's first presidential nationalist — as defined by Williamson himself: "a redistribution[ist] of power … with the national government guiding the nation in an unprecedentedly direct manner … by the president" — preceded FDR by 104 years: Andrew Jackson — although strangely, we never encounter King Andrew in the article.

Which is a clustered blur of anachronistic terminology, questionable history, disorienting "presentism" and diaphanous political labels. What Williamson misses about FDR — intentionally or not, I've no idea — is what actually defined his political thinking: his intellectual marriage of Burkean conservatism and 20th-century progressivism, later but most recently adopted by Barack Obama. (For instance, almost single-handedly FDR caused, in the late 1930s, a minor depression within the Great Depression because he detested deficit spending — half of that newfangled Keynesian economics. Roosevelt's budget cuts thus launched a backward slide in what had been economic progress under Keynesian stimuli.)

But let us worry not about the factual history of FDR's presidential tenure. Williamson's cardinal goal was his article's splashy crescendo: "That conservatives in pursuit of 'American greatness' have found hope and comfort in President Trump’s strong-arm economic nationalism testifies that the Right has finally made its peace with the New Deal after all, under the most unlikely of circumstances."

And that passage, naturally, was meant to hurl the conservative reader into a resentful fury. Williamson had used all those words to closely identify "nationalism" with a truly great president and that founder of modern progressivism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To any student of history, that's laughable, not infuriating.

As far as the Right having finally made its peace with the New Deal? One too many glasses of wine, Kevin. Just one too many.

 

Speaking of frauds and hoaxes

You'll recall the indignation, the outrage, the sainted exasperation spewed last winter by the Trump administration, its congressional allies and righteous media buddies over the Carter Page FISA warrants. Here was a scandal to top all government scandals — a deep-state cauldron of bubbling malice, a left-wing conspiracy of monstrous intent, a sinister plot orchestrated by those who would thwart the president's divine plan to shake things up, drain the swamp and all that.

So out went the conservatives' demand: that "the government [release] the court documents in which the F.B.I. made its case for conducting the surveillance" on Mr. Page. All would be exposed, Trump would be vindicated, the evil of Hillary would …

You get the drift, which never changes.

Hence, this weekend, the documents were released — accordingly, Trump has been moved to "declare victory" (another of his characteristics that never changes):

There was, however, just one little problem — nowhere even mildly suggested in Trump's morning tweets: The released documents "plainly demonstrated that key elements of Republicans’ claims about the [F.B.I.'s] actions were misleading or false…. In respect after respect, the newly disclosed documents … corroborated rebuttals by Democrats."

The administration's undisguised lying will of course not be a problem for his followers. They're more than OK with the president of the United States habitually molesting the truth and otherwise manifesting all the fine qualities of a gaudily bemedaled dictator.

As for the rest of us — about two-thirds of us — who still believe this country's chief executive should (with the usual exceptions for national security), plainly put, tell the truth?

The fact is, it should make no difference what we — the decent majority — believe. The fact is, polling should not determine whether a POTUS should be honest or not. Indeed the overriding fact is that a president of the United States should, whether eloquent or not, be a person of honor. It's that simple.

And Trump fails every single time.