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A Trumpian New Year's Eve, and his fans

 

Two lousy presidents, one unspeakably "Bad War"

The NY Times:

"Protesters broke into the heavily guarded compound of the United States Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday and lit fires inside to express their anger over American airstrikes that killed 24 members of an Iranian-backed militia over the weekend....

"Thousands of protesters and militia fighters outside … chanted 'Death to America,' threw rocks, covered the walls with graffiti and demanded that the United States withdraw its forces from Iraq."

Now that's participatory democracy, so W. — remember him? — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and all the other neocon nitwits finally got what they wanted. And all it cost was nearly 4,600 American deaths, 32,000 wounded, at least a couple trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.

But back to the present, show of hands: How many of you believe that the unworldly effete Donald Trump has even the faintest conception of what in hell has happened and is happening in Iraq?

The New Yorker's Borowitz rivals The Onion

The double-edged sword of cynicism, about Trump

The NY Times has an intensive spread this morning on the behind-the-scenes Ukraine shenanigans of this, the most incompetent, unaccountable, corrupt administration in U.S. political history.

That Trump is a reckless buffoon is no news to us, the helpless victims of his grindingly pitiable mentality. Yet there has been some question — not much, God knows, but some — of just how penetrating his Manhattan-borough grifting and almost childlike Dorian Grayness has been among the official minions of Trumpism.

By which I mean, the poor saps already so sadly soulless that they would have ever agreed to serve the reigning Prince of Bubbled Darkness. However the pertinent question, as referenced above, about these saps has now been answered. And true to Trumpian form, that answer will leave the profoundly cynical perfectly justified. Reports the Times:

"On Sept. 10, the day before Mr. Trump changed his mind, a political appointee at the budget office, Michael P. Duffey, wrote a lengthy email to the Pentagon’s top budget official…. He asserted that the Defense Department had the authority to do more to ensure that the aid could be released to Ukraine..., suggesting that responsibility for any failure should not rest with the White House.

"Forty-three minutes later, the Pentagon official, Elaine McCusker, hit send on a brief but stinging reply. 'You can’t be serious,' she wrote. 'I am speechless.'"

Aren't we all? — even in the ghastly, imminent fourth year of this unpresidential wackjob? Have we not all become as speechlessly cynical as Ms. McCusker? — and for damn good reason?

Yet aside from the laughable cretinism of Trump and his soulless little minions, there is, if I'm correct in my suggestion of nearly universal cynicism, a groin-gripping, deeply disconcerting point to be made: Cynicism poisons democracy.

Who would have thought this?

​​​​​An amusing orthographical curiosity from "comedian, actor, filmmaker, LGBTQ+ & women’s rights activist" Phaylen Fairchild, which I simply had to share:

Unwavering Trump supporters revel in his savagery and rejoice every time he thumps on his chest in baboon-like fashion as he discredits federal agencies, the media and hides behind his complicit senators in congress while he thumbs his nose at the law.

Jesus! No wonder they — led by that sexiest of men, Mr. Mitch — don't ever get anything done. They're not just screwing around; they're actually screwing around.

Neoliberalism: "The Invisible Fist"

While others have searched for the true meaning of Christmas, I, as you may know, have been searching for the true meaning of neoliberalism. It's a cheeky, full-bodied little term that nevertheless has always evaded my senses. But thanks to the New Republic's Ganesh Sitaraman, a Vanderbilt University law professor, the meaning of neoliberalism is no longer a mystery.

In brief, neoliberalism is the cause of everything that has gone wrong in the last few decades, writes Sitaraman, which also means that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Margaret Thatcher were neoliberals. You name it, from deregulation to W.'s neoconservatism to the Great Recession, it was neoliberalism at the helm — no doubt about it.

Happily for the virtuously progressive Sitaraman, such intellectual wackiness allows him to bundle President Obama with the right-wing loonies of the 1980s, thereby progressively denying that Obama ever did anything right, which seems a particularly appealing bugaboo among the self-righteous left.

Go ahead. Read Sitarman's article for yourself. But I warn you, you'll be emotionally and intellectually exhausted before finishing it.

A most curious bit of philosophizing

In his Quillette piece, "Politics and Rationality," philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell has, for reasons unknown to me, taken the good time and trouble to issue a series of self-evident truisms, self-evidently embarrassing falsehoods, and one rather thundering, self-evident slap on his back.

To take the last first, he writes that "people who think their own politics are rational and those of their opponents irrational (that is, more or less everybody) are engaged in a self-congratulatory self-delusion."

Why a rational person's opponents would be "more or less everybody" is a nonsensical statement, especially since Sartwell later, and disapprovingly, refers to "tribalism," in which large groups of self-identifying rational people agree with one another. But the real silliness of his delusional observation is its self-congratulatory essence: Sartwell seems quite proud of himself for observing, in a vastly overgeneralized manner, a simple proposition that has been observed by many others for many decades.

He also unleashes a rather nasty misconception about the modern practice of "the dismal science," as labeled by Great Man theorist Thomas Carlyle. Economics, which Sartwell in turn labels an "alleged' science, "deploys a seemingly completely distinct conception of rationality," he writes. "Here, a rational person is one who pursues their own interests … by means that are most likely … to be helpful in achieving those interests."

In truth, economists have recognized for years upon years that models of "the rational consumer" are mythical. By and large, consumers are instead impulsive, self-rationalizing creatures who can be, and often are, as irrational in their spending as they are in their voting. Really, Prof. Sartwell, you should try to keep up.

In another realm of intellectual lag — or rather, a pitiable display of intellectual prestidigitation — the philosopher writes:

"It is sometimes said of working-class Republicans that they vote against their own interests, probably because their rationality has been distorted by manipulative politicians and media strategists. Sometimes this is conceived in sheer economic terms…. But whatever rationality of this sort may amount to, it cannot show that I ought to think of my interests exclusively in economic terms. Perhaps these allegedly irrational people are working for other interests, for example a picture of themselves as self-reliant or independent that they conceive as central to their self-respect."

Come, come, now, Professor. You know damn good and well that self-reliance and its concomitance of small government are virtually antediluvian Republican concepts; the "other interests" of this particularly ideological tribe are defined by racism, xenophobia, radicalism, and isolationism. These fundamental Republican traits have been confirmed by a host of "alleged" social scientists.

Sartwell ironically quotes David Hume: "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." The philosopher's article is meant to be a reasoned position on the irrationality of voters' behavior. To his credit, Sartwell concedes that his own political reasoning is as irrational as others ("when you’ve told me that I should select my political beliefs rationally, I still don’t know exactly what you mean, or how I possibly could"), yet his concession to Hume, and himself, reveals, at bottom, little more than a passionate, wrongheaded defense of Republican voters.

Thus Sartwell's reasoning affirms his irrational approach to politics — so why should we put any stock into what he says?

Trump, your helpful Tariff Man

I admit it. As a student of American political history, I always found domestic tariff battles to be of keen interest. That most others found them to be a somniferous bore was their business; I never proselytized. Perhaps I should have, though, since the history of U.S. tariffs is largely the history of American government, politics, economics, sociology and culture.

From the Tariff Act of 1789 and subsequent tariff legislation throughout the 19th century, the taxation of foreign imports provided the vast bulk of federal revenue; represented a fundamental schism between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian concepts of America's future, which in turn contributed to the rise of our two-party system; created sectional enmity betwixt the Northern manufacturing base and the South's agricultural rustics; and provided me, as a child, stories from my father's childhood about the decrepit old men, Democrats and Republicans, of his small Missouri town, raging at each other over politics — in which tariffs had to play a part — as would a sane person vs. a Trumper today.

Oh dear, I see I have referenced Trump, that malevolent blight of "A Tariff Man" who, along with his benighted followers, knows as much about U.S. tariff history and the effects of contemporary tariffs as does a one-cell organism. Yet as luck would have it, for those of us who actually care about this country and its economic place in the world, the Federal Reserve has issued a precise study about the effects of Tariff Man's blundering. I give you its key findings:

* We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices. For manufacturing employment, a small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs.

* While one may view the negative welfare effects of tariffs found by other researchers to be an acceptable cost for a more robust manufacturing sector, our results suggest that the tariffs have not boosted manufacturing employment or output, even as they increased producer prices. [Simply put, the Trumpian premise of acceptable gain/loss is as valid as was Republicans' promise of a deficit-neutral tax cut.]

* In addition, our results suggest that the traditional use of trade policy as a tool for the protection and promotion of domestic manufacturing is complicated by the presence of globally interconnnected supply chains…. We find the impact from the traditional import protection channel is completely offset in the short-run by reduced competitiveness from retaliation and higher costs in downstream industries.

In other words, Trump's tariff policies have been not only a bust; they have effectively reduced employment in the manufacturing sector — i.e., they've screwed the very blue-collar workers who recklessly threw the dice in 2016 — and have cost innocent consumers more.

The Tariff Man. What a guy.

A hilarious, must-read grave disappointment in Pete Buttigieg

A sophomoric clown by the name of Matteo Bautista, whose sign-off motto is "The most heroic word in all languages is 'Revolution'" — just ask Cambodians — has debuted, for Medium, perhaps the most naive, multi-ringed circus of a progressive op-ed ever penned: "Pete Buttigieg Is Real-Life Frank Underwood."

No one could embarrass Mr. Bautista as grotesquely albeit amusingly as he does himself, hence I shall swiftly turn the floor over to this mastermind of anti-"neoliberal," pragmatism-hating gibberish, with, perhaps, an intervening comment or two from moi:

"According to revelations from a longtime classmate, Mayor Pete harbored blunt and calculated ambitions for the Presidency since his elementary school days." !!!!

"[At Harvard] he scoffed at the leftist loonies of the day in favor of a more practical, politically solvent centrism. While his progressive classmates would chase their dreams, Pete would craft his own reality." ????

"Pete … [has] a naked ambition for glory cloaked in the ideological wrappings of neoliberalism, 'pragmatism', and elitist lecturing masquerading as rural rabblerousing."

I happen to like intellectually elitist lectures, since I generally learn something from them. I have yet to learn, however, what "neoliberalism" is. Oh, strike that, maybe it's this:

"Like a Frank Underwood-style Tidewater soliloquy, Pete sows fanciful stories of empty factories and desolate streets that only his brand of practical policy concoctions can cure, ignoring how active he is in promoting those problems; he crusades for free trade agreements that empty factories and anti-homelessness policies that empty the streets" [are they not meant to?].

Never mind that, according to Trade Partnership Worldwide (and many other analysts), "in 2016, trade with Canada supported, on net, 6.5 million [U.S.] jobs; Mexico, 4.5 million jobs; European Union, 5.2 million jobs; China, 6.9 million jobs; Japan, 1.3 million jobs; and Korea, nearly 1 million jobs" (my emphasis) — and never mind, as well, that you can read for yourself, in the South Bend Tribune, Buttigieg's mayoral activism on homelessness.

"His flagship policy is Medicare 'for all who want it', assuming Americans who don’t have insurance should choose between between free or expensive healthcare. Pete’s proposal [means] ... choosing between a private plan or a Medicare plan rightfully keeps big insurance companies alive to extort people for basic health needs, while steering the seemingly undeserving masses away from the taxpayer-paid, less funded Medicare option they so dearly need."

And if you understand that paragraph, please explain it in the comment section.

Bautista's occasionally incoherent rant seems to be mostly frustration. Not once does he explain, for instance, how a $30-trillion+, Medicare-for-All budget is serviceable; he just derides Buttigieg for acknowledging that some progressive proposals are a wee-bit problematic, both fiscally and electorally. We are not to concede such animadversions, you see.

The mealymouthed madness of progressive purity

Ted Rall's mind has taken a temporary leave of absence. The Washington Post cartoonist is scrawling death comics for the presidential primary pol he dislikes, and, on the helpful Wall Street Journal's op-ed pages, he's scribbling plaudits for the one he loves.

"Many on the left are coming home to Mr. Sanders," says Rall, because "there’s no doubt what he stands for…. He’s as close to a pure progressive as one is likely to find. No one knows exactly what Mr. Biden, Mr. Buttigieg or Cory Booker believes." (Such ambiguity being precisely what they're aiming for.)

Interesting it is — for compare-and-contrast reasons too obvious, however, for any serious student of politics to explore — that Rall chooses the modifier pure to describe only Bernie Sanders and his brand of progressivism. I should think Elizabeth Warren has also met and conquered the progressive purity test, and is thus worthy of praise. Rall thinks not: "[She] came off as weak and condescending — as she often does — in her 'wine cave' exchange with Mr. Buttigieg," he writes.

But it's the former vice president for whom Rall wheels out the big guns, as the accompanying "cartoon," published in Rall.com, also demonstrates. In the Journal he oleaginously writes that Joe Biden "has doddered in debates and been stained by corruption due to his role in the events leading to President Trump’s impeachment."

That Biden has contributed more than his fair share of debate-doddering is itself beyond debate. But Rall's suggestive, skulking, underhanded description of Biden as "stained by corruption" is beyond decency. He chooses, of course, not to accuse the former vice president of corruption, since there is none; he just drops in the phrase, using the passive voice to evade the totally discredited stainer's identification — that being the eternally mendacious Donald Trump.

Rall's Gothic, star-chamber humor turns, in the end, to that most characteristic progressive trait, triumphalism. "Is [Sanders] electable?" You bet. For he has had "strong debate performances." Is his nomination a "sure thing"? Well, not really, "but if he makes it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise."

To this reader it would come as a cardiac "event," as they now say of the heart-attacking, near-death experience. But in healthy lieu of that, I shall instead await Ted Rall's return to sanity.

Hie thee to "Children’s Holiday Letters to Satan" ...

… Just scroll down a bit.

You can then enjoy hearing a few letters to Satan — played by actress Kathleen Turner — written by dyslexic children, or at the least, those who are very poor spellers. (You may pick up the relevant audio at 02:15.)

Of the left's right-winglike ideological certainties

While despairing of Elizabeth Warren et al.'s unworkably costly and fantastically simplistic Medicare-for-All plan, George Will cites his cherished remembrance of Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "warning" from 1993:

"Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance. The great strength of political conservatives at this time (and for a generation) is that they are open to the thought that matters are complex. Liberals have got into a reflexive pattern of denying this."

Other than referencing the degree of Warren and Bernie Sanders' unconditional support, I can't sensibly stab at a guess as to what degree liberals, as a whole, have got into a pattern of denying complexity. What I can say with the ideological certainty that Moynihan so correctly reproached — on most matters — is that he was dead wrong in seeing, at the time, political conservatives' "great strength" in being open to matters of complexity.

In his 1993 Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy (from which Will quotes), the New York senator somehow overlooked conservatives' recent brutalization of George H.W. Bush's reelection campaign — merely because of the Republican president's recent, responsible rejection of his own deficit-ballooning vow, "Read my lips: No new taxes."

Notwithstanding how necessarily prudent was George H.W.'s 1990 fiscal apostasy, political conservatives had, by then, been altogether brainwashed by Grover Norquist et al.'s ideological imbecilities about no new taxes, ever, for any reason.

From there, nearly all contemporaneous conservatives ideologically joined in President Bill Clinton's politically motivated, welfare-reform predations on the poor, which, however, even ultraconservative columnist George Will found objectionable:

"The place to begin is with an elemental fact: No child in America asked to be here. No child is going to be spiritually improved by being collateral damage in a bombardment of severities targeted at adults who may or may not deserve more severe treatment from the welfare system."

In that assessment, it must be acknowledged that Will — no matter how much he otherwise remains in the hardhearted School of Reactionaryism — demonstrated the admirable characteristic of independent thought against reigning, ideological certainties.

To which I must add that 'tis a pity that so many progressive public intellectuals cannot find the courage to break with their political leaders' ideologically simple certainties about such complex matters as Medicare for All.

Trump and Trumper trouble on the Rio Grande

There's no post-Christmas gift quite like an above-the-fold gift that further exposes the cruelty, stupidity, and pseudoconservative heterodoxy of the authoritarian Trump regime — especially when the regime's miasmic perversity settles at the unwelcome feet of its supporters.

"The list of challenges still facing Mr. Trump’s 'big, beautiful' wall include an investigation into construction contracts" — shocking, no? — "funding delays and a recent legal decision blocking emergency access to Defense Department funds to build it," reports the NY Times. "But access to private land … may be the tallest barrier standing between the president and his wall."

Along the Texas-Rio Grande border, nearly all of that private land belongs to diehard Trumpers, who nevertheless find the president's pointless theft of their property a trifle unsettling. As expressed in White House meetings, Trump's sophisticated understanding of eminent domain is simply to "take the land" from its owners, for purely political reasons.

To his hapless supporters nationwide he has promised 450 miles of new wall, and by God, useless as the wall may be, he's going to have it.

Or is he? To date, only 93 miles of it have been built, and most of that has been on federal land that Trump needn't have bothered to steal. Of the total miles — again, 450 — required, 162 of them are to pass through Southern Texas Trump Country, of which 144 miles are owned by said diehard, yet unsettled, Trumpers.

And of the already utterly obsolete shebang of a new wall spanning all that privately owned land? "The Trump administration," writes the Times, "has acquired just three miles since 2017."

That means not, however, that the regime has in any way slowed the rapacious pace of its courtroom exercise of eminent domain — that once perfectly execrable abuse of government power, according to old-school luminaries of the conservative faith.

A mere three miles it may be for now; yet throughout the election year, many more will be confiscated from Trumpers by Trump himself. In court, landowners possess the right to squeal and whine, but virtually nothing more than that.

Here's the real kicker, though: Even after successfully stealing X amount of privately owned land, Trump will still be stymied in his political obsession by bleedingly obviously corrupt construction-contract investigations as well as legal and congressional delays in wall funding.

In brief, Trump's farthest down-South supporters are being slapped in the face for much ado about nothing.

A special Christmas message

Yesterday I received this update from commenter "ren," who runs the Borjan Children's Fund (see sidebar for link), which many of you contributed to a while back to help a young Filipino girl in desperate need — and young Filipinos in general. You should take pride in your activism and generosity. Writes ren:

Thanks again to everyone on the blog who pitched in for Kyla. Her mom says it's because of the generosity of Americans that she has her daughter this Christmas. Here's a photo of Christmas in Borjan last year.

I'm not there right now but my helper there is doling out sacks of rice and flip flops again this year. The kids bore through flip flops because it's not the kind of thing even they hand down and the quality of what you get there is always about 3 grades below Wal-Mart rejects. And of course, food is always a big hit.

It was right when things were touch and go with Kyla that the Carpentariat crew threw down. We were able to get 2 sisters and a brother down to Davao (where she was hospitalized) in case of the worst and that meant, well, you can imagine how much that meant.

I too wish to thank you again, on the Borjan Children's Fund, Kyla and ren's behalf, for all you've done. So Merry Christmas, which you have made merry for many others as well. —PM

Hold that recipe

The Crimbo dinner. A video suggesting it'll never be the same again. 🐓 pic.twitter.com/C1Kwn55x0L

— Prof Chris Elliott esq OBE (@QUBFoodProf) December 14, 2019