May 2017 Archives

Dear America,

I'm not one for pride, personal or national.  I was taught that pride is the worst of the seven deadly sins, and thus I eschew both pride and prideful action...in myself, my children or my country.  Pride has gotten me and this nation into a lot of trouble in the course of our respective histories from promises I made that I couldn't keep to promises we made as a nation, rightly or wrongly--like the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq for example--that in the end revealed themselves to be sheer folly.  Vietnam is now one of our prominent trading partners and an economic ally.  Afghanistan has not been subjugated by an alien power in its history, ultimately not even by Alexander the Great, and it is now abundantly clear that we won't be the first.  And Iraq...what more needs to be said.  Given that pride has been the father of such debacles, we should probably look at it more skeptically and critically than we--especially the Trump voters--do.  Thus, all these little indicia of Trump's pridefulness, from his incessant attempts to shame his adversaries to his own lack of self-criticism are alarms that should embarrass us, but more importantly make us wary.

There have been instances of his hubris, which will come back to haunt him when he fails, but there are also rash decisions he is making, like withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, that may well haunt not just him but us and the generations to come.  And then there are the trivialities, which really serve as emblems of the greater problem that Trump represents.  For example, while Trump was in Europe attending a NATO conference, he attended a photo event with the other leaders of the NATO countries, including the Prime Minister of Montenegro.  As the group formed up for the picture, Prime Minister Markovic wound up near the front of the group with Trump behind him.  Trump was then seen by the world to push the Prime Minister aside with a smile on his face that was replaced by his usual imperious scowl when he had succeeded in supplanting Markovic in the front row.  As he did so, you could see on the faces of the other world leaders in the frame the disdain with which they regard their new billionaire colleague for the crass bully that he is, crashing ahead like the high school quarterback on the lunch line.  Prime Minister Markovic dismissed the incident graciously, even attempting to vindicate Trump's decision to force his way to the foreground, but everyone saw what the man did, and whether the victim was forgiving or not, Trump personified the pride and arrogance that much of the world sees in our national presence on every world scene.   Trivial as the incident was, it was an augury of things to come.

Consider the more substantive matter of his remarks to the group ostensibly about participation in the funding of NATO.  The NATO states agreed to a guideline of 2% of GDP for funding of each nations own military forces, albeit only five of them have managed to meet that standard; it was not promulgated as a part of NATO's treaty.  But our president berated the underfunded countries as if it were even though in the end, it has nothing to do with funding NATO itself.  At the same time, Trump refused to agree to what is called article five of the NATO treaty, which requires each country to come to the aid of any NATO country that is attacked.  That provision of the treaty is the core of the alliance, and our refusal as a nation to be bound by it makes the other members that much more vulnerable.  Trump's thought in that regard is probably, so what.  They aren't paying their bills, so, as John Ehrlichman said when testifying about some of his cohorts during the Watergate hearings, leave them to "turn slowly, slowly in the wind."  That's where the danger of Trump's prideful arrogance lies.  If a European country--like say Latvia--is attacked it will be because it is perceived as vulnerable in light of the uncertainty of American participation in its defense.  That absence of the potential for American intervention was a large part of the Russian impunity that led to the annexation of Crimea and the sub-rosa invasion of Ukraine.  At first blush the prospect of invasion of Latvia seems remote, but consider this: it wasn't long ago that, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were satellite nations of the Soviet Union...which included Ukraine.

So, trivial as a rude shove seems from the perspective of issues that face the world, maybe I shouldn't be harping on it.  But if the incident is not just a function of a crude, seriously flawed character but rather is a function of a failure to understand that actions have consequences...even if you're Donald Trump...that's a different matter.     

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

When the worst thing our president can think to call murderers like the one who killed more than twenty people, including children, in Manchester, England is that he and his ilk are "losers," I am forced to question the caliber of his mind; there were so many other choices.  He could have said that they were the perpetrators of atrocities for which the world will never forgive them.  He could have said that they were monsters, if he had wanted to be simple and direct.  He could have described them as genocidal murderers, homicidal maniacs...he could even have used the term he is seeking to bring into vogue, Islamic terrorists, which would have lacked the mordancy he was probably trying to project, but at least would have demonstrated some depth of comprehension of the depth of the vileness he was trying to condemn.  He could have called them depraved fanatics or lunatics...assassins, perverts, amoral zealots or a host of other things we have come to identify with personal embodiment of evil, but no.  He chose "losers."  

Loser is the worst thing Trump can muster when searching for an epithet.  It's what he calls antagonists in politics, business--and probably his personal relationships as well--as opposed to "winner," which is what he thinks of himself as being.  That's what the world is to Trump: winners and losers, and that taxonomy of humanity trivializes everything we do as a species, either good or bad.  When Trump called the perpetrators of indiscriminate violence against innocents losers, he demonstrated the lack of substance in the man who presumes to lead not just our nation, but the world, and that is the underlying problem with a Trump presidency.  It raises the question, or at least should raise it, of what the world thinks of us when they see Donald Trump as the face of our nation, and I'm not just talking about our reputation.  I'm not talking about bruised pride or reification of the odious notion of American exceptionalism.  I'm talking about moral and spiritual vacuity.  I am talking about the projection onto the world political scene of the idea that America is a nation of materialistic, narcissistic, prideful bullies who want nothing more than to throw their weight around and thump their chests.  Donald Trump is undermining our status in the world as a nation that seeks to lead it in a valid and noble direction.  Donald Trump is bad for America...not just the nation, but the notion as well.

Since the turn of the twentieth century, this country has been the country to which the world turns when no one else can suffice, and make no mistake about it, that is a dubious honor.  We have spilled blood measured in millions of gallons, tossed into conflagration after conflagration fortune that could have fed the hungry and housed the homeless, cured the sick and provided for those in need both here and abroad.  We have bourn the burden of the mantle of nobility of purpose for more than a hundred years without question...until now.  We are not seeing America being made great again.  We are witness to the laying low of America, once a great nation, but no more.  We have become the mob led by a petty self-seeker, and our motives will be suspect in every instance of international interaction once Trump is through with us.

The fact that I have seized on one word may seem to be trivial in itself, but there is far more to it than Trump's lack of an adequate vocabulary to describe the world around him.  When these same villains struck our World Trade Center, George W. Bush characterized that attack as the beginning of a "War on Terror," thus legitimating as an entity Al Qaeda and its affiliates as if they constituted a nation, and their epigones have seized upon that conceit in the form of the ISIL "caliphate."  What was in reality a band of thugs and criminals who should have been hunted down like criminals was suddenly the subject not of international law enforcement but of primarily the American military as it would be marshaled against a country, largely because of the phrase War on Terror.  What we call things matters, and this kind of malapropism  changes history as well as our role in it.  When Ronald Reagan dubbed a guided missile system the "peacekeeper," he was using a word to attempt to mislead both the nation and the world, which has to undermine our credibility as a nation.  When the Korean War was referred to as a "police action," the true nature of the conflict was obscured and minimalized.  When World War I became "The Great War" in common parlance, we deluded ourselves that we would never inflict devastation of such magnitude on each other again, and we were wrong.  In reality, we do it with alarming frequency.

In my opinion, shallow minds like Donald Trump's are the reason.  

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

We were watching the news about a week ago when this most recent flurry of Trump miscues began, and I said to my wife that what was just starting out then was reminiscent of Watergate.  Sure enough, a few minutes later, and then every day thereafter, someone invoked Richard Nixon's downfall, saying that this whole Russia-Comey matter was running in an ominously parallel direction.  That night, I told my wife that Trump's mention of Comey's purported triple assurance that Trump wasn't under investigation was just the first domino.  It wasn't enough by itself, but it would be followed by others, and we would know that impeachment was coming when the first one fell.  Every day this past week, there has been a new domino to talk about, and I say to her that the dominos themselves are just the means of Trump's self-destruction, and they could stand there interminably--something like his presidency.  Their mere existence could come to nothing.  But when one or more dominos started teetering, that would be a sign of real, impending trouble, and then, the rattle snakes would start biting each other.  Well, more than one is teetering now, and I have a feeling that soon, even the Republicans will see Trump as a pariah...the poison pill that will bring their party down, and then the venom will start to flow.

Well, the teetering has begun, and it began when Trump embarked upon explaining his mental processes, something of an oxymoron in Trump's case, relative to firing Comey. First, he was the recipient of the Rosenstein memo, and the firing was a response to it.  Then, he was going to fire Comey no matter what and the Rosenstein memo was just the coup de grâce,  etcetera, etcetera, until now, a record of the conversation he had with the Russians at the White House has emerged, recounting how Trump told them that he had just fired Comey, which had released great pressure he was facing on account of the Russia investigation.  "That's taken off," he confided, which begs the question, what pressure if Comey said three times that Trump wasn't under investigation.  That's what I mean about Trump and thinking being mutually exclusive.  For a guy who thinks he is so clever, he is so obtuse, and it all could have been avoided if he had just left out that one sentence from his Comey termination letter thanking Comey for exonerating Trump on three separate occasions.  Without that sentence, none of this would be happening...except of course the Trump campaign-Russia investigation itself, and that wasn't going to go away whether Comey or Ish Kabbible was leading it. But that's where the other dominos come in: Trump's importunate conversation about loyalty with Comey at a private White House dinner; Trump's claim that Comey asked for it, or at least that someone else arranged it; Flynn's confession to Trump before his inauguration that Flynn was already under investigation for acting as a lobbyist for a foreign power and his other connections to Russia; the dilatory firing of Flynn, whom Trump continues to characterize as a nice guy; the expression to Comey by Trump of his hope that the Flynn investigation would just go away; Trump's threat to Comey about possible tape recordings of White House conversations, almost defying the American people not to think about Watergate.

The ineluctable question is, why did all this happen, and of course the answer is that Trump is not just foolish, he is totally without character.  For one thing, he is incapable of self-doubt because he assiduously eschews self-evaluation.  In case you haven't noticed, our president never considers the possibility that he has made a mistake, and therefore, he never tries to go back and fix it.  He just plows ahead in the direction he has chosen, doubling down every chance he gets, and even creating some chances of his own, like that now-infamous claim of exoneration in the Comey letter and the furious tweeting that has ensued.  Perhaps it is because he has become so rotund that he hasn't seen his shoes in a long time.  That would explain why he doesn't recognize them when his foot is entering his mouth.  Or perhaps it is because he is so vapid...so lacking in substance that he doesn't even know how to stop shooting himself in that foot.  Perhaps it is because he is just amoral, which would be slightly less despicable than if he is in fact immoral...also a possibility.  Who knows what goes on in his tiny little soul.

But one thing is sure.  The country is in for an ordeal, just like the one precipitated by the Watergate break-in.  The more scrambling Trump does to get out from under this allegation of collaboration with the Russians--something that may never even have occurred--the more Nixonian this all becomes.  Nixon's downfall wasn't the burglary; it was the connection of the burglary to his campaign and Nixon's own efforts to extricate himself from what was only a tenuous, and probably forgivable, connection to the whole amateurish enterprise.  It was the altered tapes, which congress only found out about by accident, mention of a slush fund or two on those tapes, John Dean's famous "cancer on the presidency" speech to Nixon in the Oval Office on those tapes.  It was Nixon's paranoia that brought him down along with his hatred of those who held him in low esteem.  It was using the IRS to harass them and his smirking public disdain that galvanized his enemies, and in that respect, Trump is just like Nixon.  I would be surprised if his fate is any different, except that he has made so many enemies so quickly that I would be shocked if Pence could get away with giving him a pardon in the aftermath.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Last night, I explained the "Saturday Night Massacre" to my wife, who was just nine years old in October 1973 when it occurred.  Those of you of less recent vintage might remember that Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was hot on Richard Nixon's trail at that time and had issued a subpoena for tapes of Oval Office conversations recently discovered to exist in the course of congressional testimony, and Nixon had refused to comply.  Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire Cox for his persistence and Attorney General Elliot Richardson, a long-time public servant with a patrician's bearing and impeccable credentials refused, which led to Nixon firing him and then his assistant for also refusing to do so.  Nixon ultimately charged the now infamous Robert Bork as acting Attorney General to fire Cox, and Bork did Nixon's bidding.  Ironically, Bork was forced to chose Leon Jaworski as Cox's successor, and Jaworski was as unrelenting as Cox had been, ultimately leading the investigation to such damning information that Nixon resigned two weeks after three articles of impeachment were approved by the House Judiciary Committee, at which time it became clear to Nixon that he would not only be impeached, but convicted by The Senate.  The firing of James Comey seems to auger Nixon's fate for Donald Trump, I told my wife, but as I said it, I thought that maybe it was just wishful thinking.

Moments later, there was a reference to the Saturday Night Massacre on the news, and this morning it became a persistent theme in reportage on the events of yesterday evening.  Even a Republican senator who has a history of toeing the party line was quoted as saying that he couldn't think of a rational justification for the firing at this moment in time.  The recurring theme of the interviewees' comments was that if Trump had advocated Comey's firing when Comey went before the media last July, Comey technically exonerate Hillary Clinton while condemning her conduct with withering criticism at the same time--instead of praising Comey's diligence and repeating his then already alt-right resonant chant of "lock her up," that would have been valid.  But firing him now after benefiting from Comey's contretemps was an obvious attempt to divert the investigation of the connection between Trump's campaign and Russian subversion of our election process.

When the email scandal was in its nascency, it seemed to me that the use of a private server was less than prudent, but that it wasn't criminal.  However, it was a demonstration of Clinton's poor judgment, which was a reason not to vote for her in itself.  But then Bernie Sanders came second among Democrat voters in the primaries and the choice was Clinton or Trump, and as between Clinton and Trump--a choice that a relative characterized as "corrupt or crazy," to which my wife replied, "you mean corrupt or corrupt and crazy"--there really was little to think about.  I was reminded of my feelings about Clinton's lack of judgment being disqualifying when I heard Lester Holt read out the gratuitous sentence in Trump's letter firing Comey in which Trump thanked Comey for telling him not once, but three times that Trump himself wasn't under investigation.  All that sentence did was underscore the dubiety and consternation-redolent motivation that almost everyone sees in this latest Trump debacle.  The man thinks like a high school sophomore.  Almost certainly, Trump fired Comey for getting too close to something inculpatory, which paradoxically raised to marquee prominence in our public consciousness the specter of  Richard Nixon boarding a helicopter while flashing a two fingered victory sign to a besieged cadre of supporters assembled on the White House lawn to see him off to political oblivion.  Gratuitous is insufficient to characterize Trump's intended exculpation.  It was so obviously self-serving that it not only shed suspicion on Trump's motives, it probably rendered the claim itself unbelievable.

Don't get me wrong.  Relative to that July news conference, Comey said to Jason Chaffetz of the House Oversight Committee that if Clinton's conduct had been committed by someone in the FBI, there would have been an inquiry, discipline, and he might have been "shown the door."  To Comey I say, you obviously know where the door is; don't let it hit you in the ass on the way out.  And we'll see what, if anything, Comey says in the days and weeks to come about his purported exoneration of our mendacious liar in chief, but one thing is certain.  These are strange times in Washington, D.C...the kind we haven't seen in forty five years.  I can't help but wonder if history is about to repeat itself, and I doubt very much that I am alone.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

One day after opining that the Democrats were in a lose-lose situation with regard to what the Republicans in The House of Representatives have demagogically called the "American Health Care Act," I have to give the Republicans in The House a compliment, albeit a back-handed one concomitant with a sigh of relief.  I didn't realize this yesterday, but in a move to put the burden for repealing and replacing "Obamacare" on the Republican controlled Senate, Republicans in The House designated their bill  "budgetary" by bringing the bill to the floor through their budget and finance committee.   The implication of that designation is that The Senate Republicans can pass it with just a majority vote if they desire to do so.  But that designation also means that The Senate can rework the bill--amend it, change it or scrap it altogether and replace it--and then send it back to The House.  The process as a whole is known as reconciliation.   If the Republicans in The House had just sent the bill over to The Senate in the regular course of business, it would have been subject to filibuster...in effect a veto by the minority.  In that circumstance, senate Democrats would have to have bourn the risk of alienating some segment of the electorate by either filibustering to prevent the bill from ever being voted on in their body on the one hand.  On the other hand, they could allow the Republicans to pass the bill with their 52-48 majority and face scorn from their base for not doing all they could to prevent what, to use Donald Trump's phraseology from his criticism of its predecessor, the ACA, will be "a disaster" if it passes: the horns of the dilemma I mentioned yesterday.

It is possible that the House Republicans rose to nobility by taking full responsibility for their own idea...possible.  That's the back-handed compliment.  House Republicans may have stood on principle for once rather than on partisan opportunism.  More likely however, they just re-aimed their foot-shooting pistol at the chests of their Republican Senate colleagues.  More likely, they just didn't want the bill to become law and this is all just a gambit to prevent it without taking the blame.  By passing the bill they did--indubitably bad news for tens of millions of people who benefited from the ACA--they satisfied their base's demand to repeal and replace Obamacare.  But the risk they would be taking if it ever became law is that those who now approve of Obamacare, a majority of voters these days, would then blame them for any losses--and there would be many if it passed--that they suffered in consequence of the Republicans' callousness toward their needs.  It's a no lose strategy to send a bad bill that most Republican voters want to The Senate for revision so that they get the blame no matter what; it's a little pusillanimous, but shrewd...just not so smart.  Those are the two choices for how to view the Republicans in The House of Representatives now: shrewd or not so smart, and neither is particularly flattering, especially in light of the fact that they could have nailed the Democrats' hide to the barn door with this one.

The Republicans could have hung this thing around the collective neck of the Democrats so that they couldn't possibly get out of it unscathed, but they didn't.  All they had to do was be straightforward and send a healthcare bill to The Senate as a plain piece of legislation,  but they decided to lay the onus off on their Senate Republican colleagues instead.  Good for them.  Good for us too.  The bull's eye was hanging on every Democrat in both houses of congress until the Republicans decided on this strategy.  Now, they have to wear it themselves.  Let's give 'em a hand, shall we?

Your friend,

Dear America,

Congressional Democrats will soon likely be on the horns of a dilemma.  It appears as of today that the Republicans in The House have finally understood their situation and, after making a minor adjustment to their repeal of Obamacare and replace it with Trumpcare bill relative to insurance for pre-existing conditions, are on the brink of passing their own healthcare legislation.  The bill will then go to the Senate, which will produce its own version of the bill--or not--and then into consideration by a conference of Congressmen and Senators.  It's the "or not" part that constitutes the dilemma.

For a bill to pass in The Senate, the Democrats have to refrain from filibustering, which they need only 40 of their 48 Senators to do.  They could thus kill the bill and preserve the ACA...Obamacare, but if they do, the Republicans will capitalize on the filibuster and blame the Democrats for preserving what they have characterized as economically deleterious and violative of individual rights for the past seven years.    Thus, a Democratic filibuster would afford the Republicans an opportunity to satisfy the remainder of their base that objects to the ACA while risking no consequences from passing a bill that threatens to deprive 24 million Americans of health insurance.  The Russians call this trying to get out of the water dry.  If they filibuster to protect the American people from a deleterious outcome on healthcare, they will be labeled obstructive by the Republicans.  But if they don't, their own base will say that while the Democrats could have done something, they chose not to.  The Democrats are going to get wet whether they go in the water or not.  But there is one way out.

The Democrats have to convince 9 conservative Democratic senators to vote with the Republicans when the Democrats try to filibuster.  Their attempt to do so will then be blocked, but all of the Democrats will have satisfied their constituents.  The conservatives might even bolster their reelection prospects by joining the Republicans while at the same time, the liberals in the party will bolster theirs by standing for the principle that the plan that gives the most benefits to the most people is the one that should endure.  And they could facilitate that tactic by getting just one thing struck from the bill: the provision that will allow states to take on the problem of insuring those with pre-existing conditions themselves.  Under that provision, states could establish risk pools to subsidize the elevated premiums that insurers would be permitted to charge under the bill, but in almost half the states, they can't even get Medicaid expansion passed, so what's the likelihood of subsidies for those in need.  If that provision were struck from the Senate version, even though the other objectionable provisions--subsidies for older people rather than needier people and repeal of minimum coverage requirements for all health insurance policies to name just two--the bill would go back to The House and face the "Freedom Caucus" all over again because if changes are made in conference, a new vote has to be taken in The House.  Then, the Republicans could either pass a bill that would alienate those 24 million people, or they could scrap the whole thing and go back to square one.

So, in the end, this bill that we might as well call Trumpcare will be either one more tactical victory for the Republican Party or it will be the petard by which they hoist themselves, as Shakespeare would put it.  Which it becomes will depend on the ability of the Democrats to find a way to escape the trap that is now being laid by the Republicans, and to be blunt about it, the Democrats have been tactically outmaneuvered by the Republicans over and over again since the 2016 election.  What are the odds? 

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Yesterday it was announced that President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has been invited to the White House to meet with  our President Trump.  Duterte has precipitated a campaign of extra-judicial punishment of drug users and dealers in the form of murders committed by the police and their surrogates in the province of Davao, of which he was Mayor before being elected president.  During his campaign, Duterte even admitted having participated in kidnappings and murders as an affiliate of the organization that contracts with the police to commit, the DDS or Davao Death Squad.  And now that he has assumed office, he has enlisted the national police, an organization renowned for its corruption and violence, to continue the old DDS campaign against drug users and dealers resulting in the murders of more than 3,000 people in the Philippines over the course of his first hundred days in office.  Duterte is described as a "tough guy" and on that basis, he was elected by a majority similar in its political constitution to that which elected Donald Trump: fiercely nationalistic, unconcerned about the facts and socially conservative to the point that Duterte's campaign of extra-judicial killings has been implicitly endorsed by that constituency in the form of an 86% approval rating.  He is narcissistic, foul-mouthed, disdainful of anyone who criticizes him, a womanizer.  He is oriented toward business despite claiming to be a populist...even a socialist...and apparently feels that he is above the law because in his eyes, what he does is righteous by definition.  Does any of that sound familiar?

Even down to the percentage of popular approval that both enjoy, Duterte in Davao and Trump among Republicans, they seem like they are cut from the same cloth.  Duterte's father was a warlord-type politician in Davao while Trump's father was only a real estate tycoon, but both were described as aggressively self-seeking...what the rest of us might call bullies...and their sons have followed in their footsteps in that respect, though as far as we know, Donald Trump has never murdered anyone or ordered such a killing.  But just as Duterte admitted to having participated in kidnappings and killings during his campaign, Trump admitted being the "king of debt" when he was running for president, implicitly confirming that he had used his bankruptcies to make money for himself at the expense of others.  Without anymore in the way of detail, it seems like Duterte's visit to the Oval Office will be a meting of birds of a single feather, which explains the invitation in the first place.  But what does that say about this country and our president?

The fact that someone with a proudly confessed criminal history merit's a phone call from our chief executive is deprecatory of our national character to say the least.  But the fact that the call was made to invite that criminal to enjoy some American hospitality is odious.  It can't be demonstrated that Trump is as nefarious as Duterte has been, but the fact that Trump admires the man enough to invite him to the American people's house does demonstrate that Mr. Trump's values leave a great deal to be desired, to be euphemistic about it.  The question is, to what lengths is Donald Trump willing to go to get what he thinks is right, which as a phrase is almost an oxymoron in the lexicons of most Americans today--Trump's approval rating in the population at large is 41% according to the Gallop organization, down from the 45% he started his term with--despite his standing among his supporters.  Coupled with Trump's waffling on the subject of both North Korea and Kim Jong-Un, whom Trump called a "smart cookie" last Sunday in an interview with CBS, and then added to Trump's overt admiration for Vladimir Putin, the continuing admiration of Trump by his loyalists defies reason.  If Trump's xenophobia, his hypocrisy on the subject of healthcare and his overt desire to advance his own fortunes with a tax code revision that will enrich him and his fellow billionaires while it further burdens the working class aren't enough, this Duterte invitation surely should be if rationality has anything to do with Trump's popularity.

There is something akin to a herd mentality that keeps Trump afloat, albeit his clever acolytes in his cabinet and on his staff have a lot to do with it.  Somehow, Trump is a preferred alternative to everyone else among them just because he isn't one of the other guys.  Democrats continue to pule about changing their politics so as to make themselves more appealing to rural America and the pundits reinforce that misguided hand-wringing.  But the question remains, what do we do about a country that supports a man like Trump who admires a man like Duterte.  The professed rationalization for the invitation is to lure Duterte away from China, but it seems to me that if China wants him, we should let them have him.    

Your friend,

Mike